I was first introduced to the bento box concept by an emoji of all things. It’s in an instant messaging app called Slack, though not in my phone for some reason.

But, I found out what a bento box was the delicious way when I went to visit my mom who moved to the Clearwater FL area after her retirement and we went out to the Umai Cafe along with my uncle.

I wanted to treat my mom for lunch for Mother’s Day and this was one of her favorite Japanese restaurants. She raved about Umai Cafe’s bento boxes, so I decided to get one since I wanted to eat the emoji. Hey, at least it’s not the poop emoji… or the eggplant emoji.

But getting back to the meal, I enjoyed the bento box experience. For those who don’t know (like me until this meal), it’s a combination of a protein with rice, sushi & more. The one I ordered came with:

• Shrimp & vegetable tempura
• Shumai
• White rice
• California roll (imitation crab, cucumber & avocado)
• Miso soup

The food overall was delicious, though I found the rice portion to be a lot more than I normally eat since I’m on a low-carb diet. I didn’t know what shumai was, but learned that it was a scrumptious dumpling. And I also learned how to spell scrumptious since I never write it out.

My mom also gave me some of her pork katsu from her bento box and that tasted delightful as well. My experience at Umai Cafe was a pleasant one and made my trip to Clearwater, Florida better.

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Cinco de Mayo is one of those holidays that I never really got into all that much since I’m not the biggest drinker in the world and it seems like an excuse to drink. Much like St. Patrick’s Day.

But, this year was different since me and my significant other went to the Salted Lime Bar & Kitchen in Somerville NJ with another couple we know. It was a rainy Sunday afternoon, so the weather was not festive but we decided to party it up a bit.

Of course, we had drinks and the ones I had tasted good to me. They had $5 margaritas and I chose to get a couple of melon-flavored ones and a pomegranate-flavored one which I preferred. I also got a mojito that was very well made.

I tried to enter a taco-eating contest, but was not picked from the raffle. However, I did enjoy some food off of the Salted Lime’s special Cinco de Mayo Menu in addition to my drinks including:

• Pork torta with citrus mojo braised pork, local ham, melted cheddar, jalapeño & guajillo cabbage slaw
• Mushroom quesadilla with melted leeks, grilled portobello mushrooms, queso & grilled corn salsa
• Empanadas with John’s Meat Market ground beef, spices, potato & chimichurri salsa
• Yuca fries with house-made tuca root & sea salt
• Guacamole with Hass avocado, jalapeño, onion, cumin, lime & fresh cilantro

Everything was flavored very deliciously, but my favorites had to be the mushroom quesdailla and the chimichurri salsa. I did enjoy the guacamole’s freshness but it was my dessert and put me over the top.

I think the one flaw the food had was the empanada containing too much potato. But I would definitely eat at the Salted Lime Bar & Kitchen again.

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It’s a common enough practice for business owners to move from their native area with a piece of their local culture to an area that doesn’t have it in order to meet demand. And that’s how Saverio’s Pizzeria came to be in Anchorage.

At least that’s the story I was told by the owner of this Alaskan pizza place. He was in the pizza business for 20+ years in Hackettstown NJ before moving to Anchorage, where he’s been for the past 20 years.

I was definitely curious to try the pizza and since I was with a group getting a larger order, we got plain and pepperoni pies. The consistency of the pizza was definitely different in Alaska compared to New Jersey since the bread in the NYC metro area is unique.

So distinct that it makes for the best pizza in many people’s eyes. But the bread in Alaska had more of a stiff feeling, kind of what you would get from a Dominos or Pizza Hut. The ingredients did taste like authentic pizza from New Jersey, which was prepared very well.

Is it better than New Jersey pizza? I’ll have to say it wasn’t since I’m so used to how my area’s pizza feels and tastes. It’s not a knock on it since it was better than the chains I’ve gone to and much better than I expected when traveling to Alaska.

I was told by a store owner in the same plaza as Saverio’s that the clams casino pizza was worth tasting. They didn’t have any slices of that on hand, but I guess there’s always the next trip to Anchorage.

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It only took 3 years and new management for Il Pomodoro, my favorite pizza joint, to get a business card. A menu is great and all, especially since theirs contains coupons, but it doesn’t help my collection.

Even with the management change, their pizza is delightful, as is the rest of their menu of typical Italian fare: hot subs, pastas, salads & more. I haven’t tried their whole menu, but I’ve eaten a decent portion of Il Pomodoro over the past 3 years.

Here are some of the top items I’ve eaten at the pizzeria:

• Chicken broccoli alfredo pizza
• Roman stuffed pizza (potatoes, ham, pepperoni, sausage & mozzarella
• Chicken vodka parm hero
• Fresh garlic & sausage pizza, which has the sausage diced
• Fettuccine alfredo
• Spinach & artichoke pizza
• Grilled chicken caesar salad when I’m in a healthy mood

It’s my favorite pizzeria I’ve ever eaten at, so I would wholeheartedly recommend this place to anybody. In fact, we steer people who stay at our house for the day or overnight towards getting food at Il Pomodoro.

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You can tell by the numerous blog posts I write about the topic that I eat a lot of pizza. But this is probably the first time I’ve had pizza out in Pennsylvania farm country.

But I did when I visited a couple of my good friends over the weekend. We played games, talked and just enjoyed each other’s company. We also enjoyed one of their favorite pizzerias: Venice Pizza & Restaurant located in their hometown of Manchester PA.

I’m a little bit of a pizza snob since I come from the NYC metro area that’s chock full of really good family-owned pizzerias. But I truly liked the food at Venice.

Their specialty pizza is called the Venice Special Pizza (how appropriate) and it consists of pepperoni, ham, Italian sausage, ground beef and bacon on top. It was a lot of meat, but I had a couple of slices along with the rest of the meal.

The other highlight of our order was the garlic alfredo chicken wings since they were spiced just right and the creaminess was truly a different way to enjoy wings. Other food we got included:

• Plain pizza, which is never a wrong choice
• BBQ ranch chicken wings, which I was nervous about the ranch but it mellowed the barbecue flavor
• Linguini in creamy pesto sauce with shrimp, which I wound up finishing and dipping my pizza crust into
• Penne in rose sauce that was pretty good, but not as good as everything else
• Garlic bread made in a similar style to the pizza dough
• Side salads that were fine, but pale in comparison to everything else.

I wound up in a carb coma and because we were enjoying some alcoholic beverages, I felt dehydrated the next day. Totally worth it and I’ll probably be requesting Venice Pizza the next time I go out there.

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Picture it: Brooklyn, St. Patrick’s Day, 2019. A young peasant boy… okay, I won’t go all Golden Girls, but I did an Irish tradition on the holiday: eating Italian food.

And what better way to do it than eating at an pizza joint in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn? I couldn’t considering I dined at L&B Spumoni Gardens with my family after we took a trip to the New York Aquarium and took in some sea life, a sea otter show & a 4D shark movie. I thought about ironically eating fish, but it was not to be.

And neither was my comedic thought of having corned beef & cabbage pizza. But I wanted the real deal since I was told that L&B Spumoni Gardens was featured on the Travel Channel’s The Zimmern List. And their specialty is a Sicilian pizza.

But the L&B Spumoni Gardens is different from the norm since it puts the sauce on top of the cheese. And it was very uniquely made with some char on the crust, yet the pizza itself was quite doughy.

I personally prefer more of a hard crust for my Sicilian slices, but it was well cooked and I ate 3 slices. The pizza baby & carb coma was well worth it.

That coma wasn’t helped by the bread with butter (typical), fried calamari (very well done, but hey I did have seafood after the aquarium) and mozzarella in carrozza (much better done at other places I’ve eaten like Cafe Picasso). I would probably not dedicate time to travel there, but would go again if I was in the area to try the spumoni.

I always associate spumoni fondlywith my grandmother since I would often eat it at her house. For those who don’t know what spumoni is, it’s a mixture of cherry, chocolate & pistacho ice creams with some nuts & candied fruits inside. I’ve heard of variants replacing chocolate with vanilla.

When Googling for more information, some morbid news pieces came up about the former owners, and I only say former since one got killed during a botched robbery in 2016 & another passed away just a couple of weeks ago after succumbing to ALS, aka Lou Gehrig’s disease. My condolences go out to the L&B Spumoni Gardens family.

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I don’t even remember when I first discovered Mediterranean food, but it was probably when I was studying abroad. But, I eventually took a big liking to some of it, hummus & falafel in particular though I have the former more than the latter.

That’s one factor that drew me to Papa Kebab as I walking around Chelsea in NYC while it was pouring rain looking for a place to eat as I was running an errand. I entered the restaurant right as it was opening and was seating by a nice young lady who I thought ran the place.

Turns out, she did not though I did learn the place opened up 6 years ago and that she commutes to the restaurant from Staten Island. That’s a long ride to Chelsea I can imagine.

But let’s talk about the food. They offered a “build your own platter” option that lets you get the most of all worlds you want to try. I decided to get the following:

• Adana chicken: a hand-minced, fire-grilled chicken kebab mildly spiced with red pepper flakes
• Joojeh chicken: tender medallions of grilled chicken breast marinated in saffron, yogurt & onion
• Falfafel with hummus
• Salad (mixed greens, tomatoes, cucumbers), pita bread & sumac red onion on the side

The waitress told me the food would take 13 minutes to be cooked because of the Joojeh chicken. That was so precise in my mind, I chuckled. But that’s when my food showed up looking like a feast.

And it turned out to be very well cooked food and quite the tasty meal at Papa Kebab. They put a spicy red sauce and tzatziki sauce on the side, but I didn’t partake in it. The only critique I would have is that they put the salad on the same plate as everything else, so the vinegar mixed with the food and threw the flavor off a bit.

I’d go back to Papa Kebab again, especially since they let me in before they opened. I thought I was special when they did that, but apparently the waitress told me her boss says to do that for everybody.

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Years ago, I’ve seen and heard of a phenomenon of having a meal while completely blindfolded. And as a Valentine’s experience, I wanted to find a place that offered dinners in the dark.

The closest place to me that does this is Camaje Bistro, located in Greenwich Village in NYC. And I tried to make reservations on Valentine’s Day weekend, but failed since it was booked for a couple of weeks out. But I did manage to get a reservation and off we went on a romantic adventure.

We arrived at orientation outside of the restaurant after passing a place with a special for artichoke pizza and then another pizzeria called Artichoke Pizza down the block. But let me digress to us in front of a shaded-down Camaje where we were handed out blindfolds and led inside.

I’m not going to spoil the menu for the dinner in the dark, but I can say everything was cooked delightfully. Camaje is described as a laid-back bistro with Franco-American dishes, but I was unable to tell what culture the food came from.

In fact, that was half the fun of being blindfolded. My significant other and I had fun guessing what food we were eating and discovering other elements of the dish as we tasted them. We also talked about memories of the foods that we tasted… or thought we tasted.

I followed the dinner in the dark concept with my blindfold on the whole time… except when I had to use the bathroom. But our other senses were heightened the whole evening, specifically our hearing of each other and the taste & texture of the food.

Once we took the blindfolds off at the end of the meal to see our environment and learn what we ate & drank. Some of the results we knew and others surprised us because we were convinced we were tasting other things. It’s intriguing how sight effects the flavors we taste and the influence of others’ thoughts.

To end my Camaje dinner in the dark review, I would highly recommend this blindfolded dining experience. I certainly check something off of my bucket list.

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