The Freshest Takes
There’s nothing unfamiliar about our five favorites, but all take a spin on the usual to make for superior eating. Far superior.
Spiced Dried Squid
Don’t know much about the slices of cephalopods that are dried and served as snacks in Asia? Grab and go with a brew, and be delighted. Be just as delighted to make a sauce for them and turn nibble into dinner.
Saturday Breakfast Trout
Once or twice a year, on a Saturday morning, we’d head out to the back of our yard where the roar of the Musconetcong could be heard clearly, catch trout, then fry them up with wine and butter. Cereal was for another kind of day. Ed Sherry’s story hits spring’s perfect pitch.
A2B Indian Vegetarian Restaurant
The scope is vast, the selections myriad and many at this popularity contest winner that springs from a many-branched family tree in India. The reigning caliber of its dishes? Roundly good, but rarely great.
Ciao Poke & Mango Mango
Fast-casual gets a couple more entries, these both at the uber-busy Festival Plaza in Edison anchored by Hmart. One’s got its pluses; the other’s a lot of noise.
Tasty Moment
Decidedly superior soup dumplings and quite a bit more headline the menu at an expansive and chronically crowded Chinese spot in the eye of a storm of eateries in a plaza anchored by Hmart.
Peas Please in Pesto
Morphing spring’s first peas into pesto shows just how creamy this common vegetable can become after a whirl in a food processor with the right companions. Though its parts may be humble, the result is anything but.
Grasp the Nettles
Protect yourself from the sting of the wild herbaceous perennial when picking its leaves, but then let it protect you through its valuable nutrients and anti-allergen properties. Kate Munning explores the generous benefits of a plant too many fear.
Destination Mexican
If you’re celebrating Cinco de Mayo, go not where the vapid guac is flowing, but where highly skilled chefs do for their food what Mother Nature did to make Playa del Carmen.
Shopping Right
Three, two, one – head to a farmers’ market! Buy fresh-as-it-gets directly from the grower, producer, maker. It’s the most gloriously abundant time of the year, and it’s just beginning.
Finnbar
The setting’s been brushed up and the menu’s gone fully day-by-day seasonal. A landmark has been reborn, and now needs to dig a little deeper into its sourcing and fine-tune its preparations to better suit place and time.
Free-wheeling Range
A soda and a gravy, a burrito and a love child of a cross-cultural rice dish. Throw in a groovy green and you’ve got quite the spectrum of top eats of past two weeks.