Cuisine

Chic Vietnamese cuisine The no-frills image of South Philly's growing Vietnamese corridor along Washington Avenue has gotten a sleek update at Le Viet, a stylish two-month-old newcomer on 11th Street wrapped in contemporary glass and stone walls. The cuisine is rooted in traditional flavors, with a northern accent from owner Bruce Cao's village, Domb Bang. But it's also cast in modern presentations, from the flavorful minced clams and herbs served in an edible bowl of deep-fried rice cracker (hen xuc banh da)

In style if not cuisine, Max's New York Grill lives up to its name. While the ultramodern decor is as chic as you will find in many New York places, the modest cuisine is not New York-style, but Philadelphia-Italian that includes several grilled dishes. Decoratively speaking, the restaurant at Five Points in the Burholme section of Northeast Philadelphia is a symphony in white. A foyer in white marble leads to an attractive room with white fieldstone walls, white quarry- tile floor, summer-white bent-metal chairs with white-on-white seat covers, and wall panels with gathered-curtain inserts and white-enamel molding.

Rosa Ritter, 80, whose Southern-style cooking filled the stomachs and warmed the hearts of Philadelphians for more than 30 years, died Aug. 28 of renal failure at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. She had been a resident of the Spring Garden section of Philadelphia. Known around the city as Mama Rosa, Mrs. Ritter, through Mama Rosa's Restaurant and Caterers, was considered Philadelphia's queen of Southern cuisine. Some well-known personalities, including actor Denzel Washington and lawyer Johnnie Cochran, sampled Mrs. Ritter's cooking over the years.

Having recently experienced Hispanic Heritage Month, this seems like an ideal time to point out that the hour of Latin American Eats will soon be upon us. Foods from the lands to the south are about to become hot items, and I'm not talking about tacos. Not that there's anything wrong with tacos - or enchiladas or burritos or guacamole or even good old tortilla chips, one of the finest deep-fried crispies known to humankind. It's just that these Tex-Mex snacks are only a tiny suggestion of the culinary riches of Mexico.

The letter from the head of one of the region's most prominent families touted the new House of Ho, a little shopping-center restaurant in Lansdale run by a Taiwan family that had "kept home" for him for eight years, as "an excellent" new Chinese restaurant. Alas, even after two visits four months apart, the cuisine was modest, offering little to get excited about. My first visit occurred when the restaurant was two months old. While there were some pleasant culinary accomplishments, for the most part the meal was unexceptional.

Despite its improbable name, Chez Lou Lou is a splendid West Chester restaurant serving excellent country French cuisine. The restaurant, which takes its frivolous name from a previous owner's nickname, was opened in November in a small house along Gay Street. Each of the three dining rooms is small, and the lack of air conditioning can make for hot times this summer, especially if the person at the next table is puffing on a cigarette. Although service is not at a high level, owner-chef Elizabeth Thomas' cuisine reaches for the stars.

LEAVE IT to Jose Garces to capture the crazy, wonderful, delicious world of Mexico City's cuisine under one roof. He's done exactly that at Distrito, the energetic two-story space he recently opened at 3945 Chestnut St. in West Philadelphia. "What I love about Mexico City is how it can be so urban, with street food everywhere, and so sophisticated at the same time. There's two different spectrums in terms of food," said Garces, who, along with his culinary and design team, spent eight days chowing his way through the city in February.

Lucy loves rice and beans. At least she might have, although we don't remember any episode of "I Love Lucy" dealing with the gastronomical culture shock that accompanies ethnically-mixed marriages like Lucy and Ricky Ricardo's. Fifteen years ago, when the English Woodcock family and the Puerto Rican Rivera family blessed our union, we gave no thought to what we would be having for dinner "as long as we both shall live. " We avoided the food issue during our dating years because we lived on Midwestern college dining hall food, notoriously bland and designed to cater to no one in particular.

If you believe that garlic wards off vampires, a dish of Korean kimchi would do wonders to ensure your safety. If you don't believe in vampires but simply enjoy garlic, kimchi can be eaten for the pleasure of its delicious, crunchy self. For the uninitiated, kimchi is a pickled cabbage dish tastefully ripened with cayenne pepper, scallions, chilies, ginger and garlic - lots and lots of garlic. You may not know it, but this dish, as well as the entire spectrum of Korean cuisine, is alive and well in Philadelphia and environs.

When you eat for a living, a year can be measured in many ways. I could count the number of restaurants reviewed - 43 formally rated, plus at least 20 more mentioned in passing - and see it was a busy year. I have dining notes on 60 other spots that never made it into print. Or I could tally the number of dishes I tasted at those meals - roughly 2,500 - and marvel at the variety, not to mention my Olympian digestive powers. I could also gasp at my dry-cleaning bills (errant sauce is an occupational hazard)

GUILLERMO Pernot may be Argentinean by birth, but his heart and palate belong to Cuba. It's not just that Pernot's wife, Lucia, is a native Cuban whose family escaped Fidel Castro's communist regime in 1959 when she was just 9 months old. The Caribbean island-nation is also home to cuisine that, as far as the 55-year-old chef-partner at Old City's Cuba Libre Restaurant & Rum Bar is concerned, is second-to-none. "It's a basic style of food," Pernot (pronounced per- NO )

Julia McMurray Dannenbaum, 89, the grande dame of Philadelphia cuisine, died of an apparent heart attack Thursday, Dec. 15, at her home on Delancey Street near Rittenhouse Square. Mrs. Dannenbaum headed a cooking school in Philadelphia for 20 years, authored five cookbooks, wrote the monthly "Dining In" column for Philadelphia Magazine for eight years, and contributed to many other magazines. Although she closed her Creative Cooking School and published her last cookbook in 1984, she told The Inquirer in 2006 that she watched "Anything on the Food Channel, because I'm still learning new things.

For Drexel University culinary students, this was an exam of sorts: Dressed in chef whites, they were in the kitchen last week turning out banchan and kimchi courses, showcasing their expertise, from ingredient pronunciations to cooking techniques. For the 35 or so dinner guests, the event was an opportunity to sample refined Korean flavors. Alumni, school administrators, and a Korean food critic were all in attendance, metal chopsticks poised to dig in. Jeehyun "Jee" Lee was flitting around the dining room of Drexel's Academic Bistro, comfortably playing hostess at the Korean dinner prepared and served by her students, the culmination of the 10-week Korean cuisine course she teaches there.

There were 25,000 copies initially printed, but Marc Vetri's new cookbook, Rustic Italian Food , went into its second printing before the Nov. 1 release date. Compare that to Il Viaggio Di Vetri , his first book, which sold 25,000 copies after three years. "I just got a $420 royalty check. . . . my first one, three years later," says the chef, sitting on a broken-in brown leather sofa in his newly renovated home kitchen. After two years of recipe testing, writing, and waiting, Vetri is ready to show the world his latest collection.

A new breed of food truck is giving the ubiquitous cheesesteak a run for its money as the city's preferred curbside delight. The inaugural Philadelphia Vendy Awards, a culinary showdown among eight of the city's elite mobile food vendors Saturday in Northern Liberties, sought to identify and reward the leaders of that breed. And nary a steak was in sight. "It's been a long hard day, but it's been a beautiful day," Thomas Bacon, also known as Gigi, of Gigi & Big R Caribbean/American Soul Food, the victor of the event, said as he clutched a gleaming trophy.

SEATTLE - Nathan Myhrvold didn't just go to school; he worked on the quantum theory of gravity with Stephen Hawking. He didn't just get a job; he became Microsoft's first chief technology officer. As a hobbyist, he didn't just get into grilling; he copped several top prizes in the World Championship of Barbecue. So it's unsurprising that when Myhrvold decided to write a cookbook, he didn't just write a cookbook. He outfitted his kitchen laboratory in Bellevue, Wash., with hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of whiz-bang equipment, including a centrifuge, freeze-driers, humidity-controlled smokers, and special evaporators.

Downtown Wayne is getting a burst of Latin excitement from the new Matador (110 N. Wayne Ave., 610-688-6282). Matt Pressler, a Culinary Institute of America grad who worked in Scottsdale, Ariz. (La Hacienda, Marquesa) before coming home to open La Taverna and Crazy Cactus in Phoenixville, is pairing Spanish and Mexican cuisines at the former Freehouse. There are street-level and upper-level bars, and its low-lit, wood-and-wrought-iron environs have more bullfighting paintings than you can shake a red cape at. Pressler says he became enthralled with "earthy" Spanish cuisine at CIA. He decided to offer Mexican dishes (quesadillas and carne asada, for example)

Thanksgiving is the moment we offer thanks for all our blessings by ingesting too much food, most of which we rarely eat and don't particularly like. On this day, we sit down at an hour well past lunch but not quite dinner, often in the company of relatives we haven't seen for months and sometimes for good reason. The large amount of carbs consumed, coupled with the company, guarantees that we will be sleepy sooner rather than later, especially with the hapless Cowboys and Lions dominating the airwaves.

'Can I get a real couscous around here?" It was a good question, posed to me recently by a French expat hankering for a bowl of North African soul food. The mere suggestion, of course, kick-started my own craving - with savory flashbacks to a Morocco trip and the rustic little couscouserie I lived over during my student days in Paris. And that query was also the main reason I ended up below ground near Rittenhouse Square, waiting hopefully on the elaborately tufted couches of the quirky subterranean nook called Argan Moroccan Cuisine.

HE HAD ME at, "It's Le Bec Mex. " That's how Chef Adan Saavedra describes his "Mexican haute cuisine," a melding of French cooking technique with Mexican ingredients. He says its origins are as old as the Franco-Mexican War in the 1860s and can be traced to Maximilian I. After a 10-year run in the Northeast, Chef Adan Saavedra has moved his restaurant, Paloma, south to 8th Street in the Italian Market, which is also becoming its own cultural fusion. At first glance this "Le Bec Mex" seems an improbable blending of styles that could lead to fusion confusion on the plate.