Jonathan Gold

Gagnier's Creole Kitchen Gagnier's chicken creole is a spicy, long-cooked stew imbued with the creole trinity of onions, garlic and sautéed bell peppers, and dominated by the high, sweet note of tomatoes cooked down almost to caramel. The jambalaya, just moistened with tomato, comes ladled over rice and shot through......

Photo by Anne FishbeinAS MUCH AS I LIKE THE MORE REFINED SORT OF Indian cuisine, I find myself drawn these days to the brute glory of Pakistani cooking instead. Where some Indian curries can be as delicate as butterfly wings, Pakistani curries practically scream with flavor, not just chiles but......

Photo by Anne Fishbein 888 This terrifically elegant restaurant specializes in Chiu Chow seafood, the cooking of the ethnic Chinese who migrated from China to Southeast Asia dozens of generations ago: crunchy "crab balls," i.e. tofu-skin-wrapped dumplings of fresh crabmeat and taro, and fish noodles, lumpish strands of homemade chewy......

Photo by Cynthia Wiggins The first few times I ate at Chasen’s, as a culture brat weaned on punk rock and California cuisine, I felt so smugly toward the restaurant that, looking back on myself from a distance of 15 years and perhaps 5,000 serious restaurant meals, I can barely......

Benita's Fritas Benita's, a small takeout stand in the true American tradition of overspecialization, serves Belgian fries and only Belgian fries -- no mussels, no burgers, no shakes. Benita's fries them twice, the first time in coolish oil, which cooks them through; the second time sizzles the fries to a......

Golden Triangle The national dish of Burma is a garbanzo-flour-thickened fish chowder called moh hin gha, shot through with noodles, and Golden Triangle does a fantastic catfish version. There is also lap pad thoke, which has a dollop of chewy dried shrimp, a handful of toasted legumes and a base......

Curry House Japanese curry tastes more like the sort of "African" gravies you find in the Portuguese colony Macao than like anything you might run across in Britain -- or, for that matter, India. At the same time, it's characteristically Japanese: sweet, thick, homogenized, and powered by a multilayered pepper......

Photo by Anne FishbeinFALAFEL IS OFTEN TASTIER. BABA GHANOUSH IS EASIER to get at Trader Joe's. Most Arabic-speaking people would rather have a kebab or three. But foul, the dried-fava stew variously transliterated as ful, f'ul or fool, is the basic unit of nutrition in great swaths of the Middle......

Caroussel At Caroussel, eggplant salad is extremely simple, chopped with onion, tomato and green pepper, doused with lemon, garlic and olive oil, but delicious, the sort of earthy dish you might expect to be served in a country restaurant somewhere in Eastern Europe. Tabbouleh, chopped parsley salad brightly flavored with......

Café Brasil Mostly, you'll find grilled animals at Café Brasil: pork chops, lamb chops, steak, shrimp and fish, all profoundly salty and resonant with garlic, charred at the edges, fragrant with citrus and a little overcooked. Even the vegetarian plate, which consists mostly of various slivered squashes sautéed with vast......