Posts Written OnMay 01, 2006

Where are the Long Island BYOB restaurants? I never really thought much about this until Nena and I visited our friends Paul and Sara in Philly, the land of BYO resturants. We had a great dinner at Azafran and what a joy it was to bring our own wine. I know of only two. Kitchen - A Bistro (St. James) Thai Gourmet (Port Jefferson Station) Both are awesome, by the way. Great food. And not corkage fee at all. Do any of my local readers know of any? Please share. I’m particularly interested because, as you all know, I love…

As you may or may not have noticed, April was an extremely busy month here at LENNDEVOURS. Beyond the home rennovations and busy day job, I was also working on an exciting wine/writing project…one that I still can’t talk about. The combination led to far too few New York wines being tasted and reviewed and far too few posts about the happenings and trends in the local wine industry. But, the final deadline for the big project was yesterday, and I look forward to getting back to my usual at-least-once-a-day posting schedule. I’ve got a lot of wines to tell…

Saturday, I fired up my smoker for the very first time. Her maiden voyage if you will. Around noon, with my spare ribs trimmed, slathered and rubbed, I fired up the chimney starter and got the charcoal and wood chunks (hickory) ready in the bottom of the Weber. I’ll tell you what, I obviously don’t have a lot of experience with different smokers, but this thing is almost fool-proof. Once I had everything set up (talk about mise en place…lots to do preparing for a smoking session), it was largely mindless. With the water pan (which holds a gallon of…