Grandma Lola’s Old Fashioned Recipe – Still The Best

It seems the Sazerac and Old Fashioned are the Gamera and Godzilla, respectively, of the cocktail Monster Island, locking horns in a duel for supremacy while Godzuki, the lowly Manhattan, looks on (although it’s on my go to list). There is lively debate about which came first and who reigns as the oldest and classic […]

Frank Panza – Last Of The Great SoCal Bartenders

Waxing sentimental is definitely my default setting and Santa Anita plays to it in spades. It’s not the chandeliers upstairs, the dusting of new snow on the backdrop on the San Gabriels opening day or even the fact I grew up nearby on a street named after Johnny Longden, the jockey who wrecked his horse […]

The Why

“Because to each one of us is given just so many years, and hence just so many opportunities to enjoy just so many meals, a poor meal is an opportunity lost forever” – Neill Beck, The Farmers Market Cookbook, 1951 I talk about it all the time in the kitchen and it drives people nuts. […]