The topic of food challenges came up in lunch conversation this week.
I suggested to friends, including the esteemed Toph Whisnant, that WacoFork should stage some sort of "Burger Wars." Maybe it was because this discussion took place the day that Whisnant and Jose Zuniga engaged in gorging themselves with multiple double-double burgers. Whisnant countered that I should take a Waco burger challenge of eating a different Waco restaurant burger every hour on the hour from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
It seems to me when I mention Waco to new friends in other Texas cities one of the first points of reference for them is George's.
Certainly when people come in to Waco, whether they're returning Baylor students or first time tourists, they make drinking a Big O at George's one of, if not the top priority.
Someone is going to have to explain to me why a bagel would ever be preferable to a donut.
As of right now, no restaurant in town prominently features the bagel. Oh sure, there are plenty of places where a bagel could be obtained, I suppose. But as of right now there's not an Einstein Bros. Bagels, nor is there any longer a New York Bagel, which used to be located in the Toys R Us shopping center on Waco Drive, nor is there any Bob's Bagels or anything like that.
Double-double times two, times two.
Somehow lunch today with my usual Tuesday summertime lunch bunch spiraled out of control to the point where a burger-eating challenge entered the picture.
Mr. Jose Zuniga began pondering the possibility of consuming a second double-double burger at Bill & Bob's. At that point, Mr. Toph Whisnant claimed that he would tackle another double-double if Zuniga wasn't man enough to re-up.
If I were taking summer school right now, and it kind of feels like I am, I would be engaged in a mix of business classes along with some sort of "world foods" elective.
I'm enjoying both, really, but especially learning about different food from different places. I think I might write my thesis on Puerto Rican cuisine. The title of my paper could be "Yipee Ki-yay, Mofongo!"
I've spent the last five-and-a-half years discovering the answer to this question. I have two kids: a five-and-a-half year old daughter and a two year old son. Dining out with them can be an adventure, to say the least. As a parent, I want to take my kids to places that they enjoy, but I also want to be able to take them to places that my wife and I enjoy. My kids love places like Chuck-e-Cheese and fast-food restaurants with play areas, but let's be honest. Those aren't entirely grown-up-friendly.
Over the past few years, I've discovered there are a few key elements that make a grown-up-friendly restaurant kid-friendly. Let me know if you agree or disagree, or have some to add to this list.
For me, ordering a chicken fried steak is the dining equivalent of picking a fight.
You see, like many of you out there, I've already eaten as good a chicken fried steak as I'm ever going to eat. Those past steaks of lasting glory were prepared by my mother and my grandmother. They were perfect in that the breading perfectly combined with the steak. There was absolutely no negotiating in order to keep the entree in one piece. That's the whole trick, but it seems to be a difficult one.
If nothing else, the future of Sebas' Cocina is in doubt.
However, Sebas' Cocina owner Sebastian Garduno told me directly on Thursday afternoon that the rumors about the restaurant's imminent closing were false.
Once upon a time, I wrote something.
It appeared in the newspaper that employed me, but it wasn't really an assignment from that newspaper. It was part of a series that I invented for myself to work on. And I did work pretty diligently on it.
I must be a glass half full type of person because right now, the day after Independence Day, I'm thinking the summer is only half over and I still have a vacation ahead of me and pretty soon after that it will be football season I'm even optimistic enough to think the NFL labor situation will be resolved in time to begin the regular season as scheduled.
Just in case you were wondering, the glass half empty perspective would be that we're less than halfway through the Central Texas summer heat, there's quite a few people taking vacations or at least vacating town for a while so things are slow, and there's a distinct possibility we don't even have Dallas Cowboys football to look forward to until mid-October, if then.
