Foodle

In today’s @detroitnews, a #restaurantreview of @gao.vietcuisine.mi. This colorful, comfortable and flavorful new spot opened in January in Madison Heights 🍜 😋 If you miss Thang Long, you gotta try this out! #iykyk Link in bio for all recent restaurant coverage 📸 David Guralnick / The Detroit News Less

Before the first bite at @vea_hk , there are warnings.

Dinner will take three hours, there will be coriander, and raw shellfish will appear. A server works through these disclaimers and asides, landing somewhere between hospitality and a preflight announcement, as Charles Trenet’s “La Mer” drifts through the room and cooks move through the open kitchen. Then comes the treasure box: fish maw as broad as a small stingray and a 28-head abalone, brandished as supplements at prices (breathtakingly) commensurate with their rarity. By then, the point has more or less been made, even if very little food has arrived.

For nearly a decade, the chef Vicky Cheng has given ingredients prized in Chinese cooking the treatment French kitchens reserve for their own trophies. At Wing, one floor below, he begins with Chinese cooking and opens outward. At VEA, the direction is reversed. Here is caviar and truffle, certainly, along with Périgueux, bisque, velouté and beurre blanc; there’s also preserved turnip, sea cucumber, fish maw, angelica root.

VEA is best when there’s a bit of discord; when luxury, as in caviar, is paired with vegetal accents like Taiwanese water bamboo, lily bulb and coconut; or when the sauce that gilds Pyrenees lamb is tinctured with just enough angelica root that it stops short of Auntie’s dispensary. Better still was crisp-skinned, mi-cuit flounder with a broth approaching velouté — and, crucially, bitterness. Then came the vaunted sea cucumber, slippery and gelatinous — a texture that French haute cuisine might ordinarily seek in a quenelle — over a sauce that follows the logic of an Américaine, whatever crab or lobster is best that day reduced into something indecently rich. A steamed bun follows for a scarpetta that felt deeply satisfying.

Missteps are rare. Kombu-aging intensified a prawn’s sweetness but left it mealy, while the kiwi pushed its sweetness too far. A bok-choy beignet arrived lukewarm and oily. And two pastries — one carrying asparagus, another carrots — were soggy. VEA has become extraordinarily good at making potentially difficult things easy to love. I occasionally wished it made me work a little harder. Less

Bertolozi's Pizzeria in Chastain is my new favorite spot for Chicago-style Italian beef in Atlanta.

We already liked them for the tavern-style, cracker-thin Chicago pizza, back when owner Danny Huber had a cup of coffee as a vendor at Roswell Junction. He's since moved out to the Buckhead/Sandy Springs area — a loss for that side of town, but a net gain overall, since that's when the Italian beef showed up on the menu.

And it's legit. I've had Mr. Beef and Portillo's in Chitown, plus one more spot I'm blanking on the name of, and another Portillo's location out in Carbondale — so this isn't a casual comparison.

I ended up taking a second photo a few bites in because there was way more meat in that sandwich than it looked like at first glance. Danny makes the round in-house — no shortcuts — and the roll holds up. Any displaced Chicagoland folks living around Atlanta need this on their radar.

I always say the fastest way to start a food fight is to bring up pizza or barbecue, because everybody's married to a style. But I'll say it anyway: this beef is a notch better than Bobby G's. Now I just need to get back to AJ’s Pizza in Roswell.

Mrs. and Middle Grubber already said they're happy to go back for more 'za, and I'm eyeing the meatball sandwich next. I love pizza in every style, but Italian beef might be what I cherish most these days, mostly because it's so hard to find done right around here. Atlanta finally has a real, legit one.

Have you tried the Italian beef at @bertolozi_pizzeria yet? And where else are you all finding solid Chicago-style food around Atlanta — beef, dogs, or otherwise? Drop your spots below. 👇

#AtlantaEats #AtlantaFoodie #ItalianBeef #ChicagoStyleItalianBeef #TavernStylePizza #ChastainPark #BuckheadEats #SandySpringsGA #AtlantaPizza #AtlantaGrubber Less

Looking for a night out in Morristown and need a new restaurant to try? Town Bar + Kitchen is the perfect spot 🔥 So many courses here with great food and drinks and the vibes are even better 🤤🍹😎 Bookmark this place and save it for the next time you’re in Morristown and click the bio link for more on Town Bar + Kitchen‼️

#morristownnj #townbarandkitchen #morristowneats #foodreview #foodcontent Less

🥷🏻 Behind the scenes of my review at Mister Tiger, a Korean restaurant that opened as an ode to a grandmother’s home cooking in West Town

🐅 But structural engineer turned chef Min Lee is not making your grandma’s galbi

🙏 Photos by Chris Sweda. Edited by Kayla Samoy. Photo edited by Marianne Mather. Copy edited by Robert Loerzel. Print design by Aly Morris.

📰 Link to the full review at Chicago Tribune Food at link in my profile @louisachu1

🎁 And free here!
chicagotribune.com/2026/08/18/restaurant-review-mister-tiger/?share=gstweraitirior2ggggt

1 ) sizzling uni albap
2 ) kimchi/jeon
3 ) boiling sundubu-jjigae
4 ) Home Remedy NA drink
5 ) banchan
6 ) kimchi fried rice
7 ) woodae galbi 8 oz
8 ) bibim-naengmyeon
9 ) sundubu-jjigae
10 ) banana milk chocolate cannoli
11 ) Kōl Chu and I arriving for our patio reservation
12 ) bubbling cheese deung galbi
13 ) Faithful Sue cocktail
14 ) cheese deung galbi
15 ) Korean fried chicken with tteokbokki
16 ) dolsot bibimbap with tofu
17 ) woodae galbi 14 oz with dino rib
18 ) yuja tiramisu
19 ) sweet corn ice cream
20) Kōl side eyes delivery robot after dinner 🐺😒🤖 Less

Dubai froths over the splashy new openings. A table perched on the 60, 70, 80-something floor overlooking other glass edifices once prized as the shiny new thing. Inside there is low lighting as a superfluous DJ presses play on a pre-recorded innocuous dance track while diners are presented with dry ice-frothing towers laden with fish that come from the same part of Turkey where these beautiful people got their teeth and fillers. Smile. Get a picture.

These restaurants, fuelled by private equity, whether by capital or patronage, come and they go. And so much of the conversation about Dubai’s dining scene, its awards, its (paid for) “power lists” orbits this world.

Praise and enthusiasm for those understated places, bastions of community still trading five, ten, fifteen years later, rarely rise above a whisper, if they get a mention at all.

Yet they exist miles beyond the reach of those towers, in a part of the city their shadows never reach.

This dining scene feeds a community that forged it over years of repeated custom. And it’s not less competitive or accomplished. Here, three generations of families mill, chatter and order the same plates, as if by ritual.

A crimson vindaloo of beef, not pork, its heat knocking and making clear it intends to come in. A meaty, cricket-ball-sized mutton potato chop, soft enough to eat with a spoon. There’s an assertive sol kadi and a thirst-quenching lime soda, sweet or salty, as you prefer.

There’s more: momos and seekh kebabs, butter chicken and paneer jalfrezi, a pivot away from a solely Goan menu, reflecting the palate of the community it now feeds.

Eric’s, a lacy, sea blue restaurant in Al Karama, is homely, almost grandmotherly in its design and pacing. And while I see my beard regrow in the time between dishes leaving the kitchen during a relaxed Saturday lunch, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

There’s a sincerity here that captivates me more than any sparkler-clad matcha fondant ever could. Eric’s is a capsule of Goa that belongs entirely to Karama, and should still belong to it in twenty years’ time.

Read more on Substack or EatGoSee. Link in my bio.
Have you been to Eric’s? Less