Docsconz - Musings on Food & Life

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Docsconz - Musings on Food & Life

A blog mostly about food with a few other things occasionally thrown in for good measure.

02/09/2026

Mushrooms can be absolutely beautiful even when they cannot or should not be consumed, like this toxic North American Fly Agaric (amanita muscaria). Even though I don’t touch these, I do enjoy finding and seeing them.

31/08/2026

August turned into a month of beautiful surf side visits with close family and great friends.

First up was my first ever visit to the - specifically the town of Bay Head, where we had a family event…

To celebrate a milestone birthday for my lovely sister!

It was supposed to rain all weekend, but we got lucky. Even better was that it rained at home, where we desperately needed it!

The flowery landscape was gorgeous…

…as were the sunsets.

We ate well, of course…

The Grey Owl, a stellar goats milk cheese from Quebec, CA!

Sunrise was kinda pretty too. Sadly, it was time to leave our family…

Happily, we got to visit with our great friends, Joe & Donna…

…where we once again, enjoyed weather far better than the forecasts predicted…

A much welcomed opportunity to step away for a moment from the sad realities raining down all over the world.

Old school, freshly fried, Chinese- American egg roll from Best Taste made a great pre-beach snack.

Serenity

Joe is the best non-professional cook that I know.

Young chickens from Iacono Poultry Farms are just off the charts delicious!

Sadly, our shore excursions, August and the summer are mostly behind us. What is to come?

30/08/2026

NY and Mexico Cities are two places that I don’t get to enough as it is, and the idea of putting even more restaurants on my for those cities is laughable, but now, thanks to the one night residence of Mexico City’s Plonk from Chef Flor Camorlinga atNYC’s new Cafe Bar J.F. from Chef Francisco Castillo A. and partner Juan Correa, I have done just that!

Cafe Bar JF is the successor to the critically acclaimed Williamsburg restaurant Llama Inn, exchanging its clearly defined Peruvian cuisine for a South American taverna vibe. The two principals are originally from Chile and Peru, respectively.

A lovely, open space.

Tasty Pet-Nat from NYS offered as a welcome beverage.

To ignore their cocktail list is to miss a valuable part of their offering. The same is true for their w**e list.

The cocktails we had were beautifully balanced and delicious. The Pisco Sour was a good as any that I have had, and the Martini and Gimlet were also superb.

I typically prefer raw oysters with just a squeeze of lemon, rather than composed presentations or fancier toppings, but this one was truly terrific and stunningly delicious! It was as delicious a composed oyster as any that I have ever had!

A worthy signature from JF.

Arturo is the somm at Plonk and Flor’s partner. The Arno Roberts was a perfect bottle for the entire menu.

Flor’s cooking is Mexican, but with a lot of international influences taken from her time working and traveling around the globe, including Chile, where she met Pancho (Francisco) while working together Boragó , Japan, Korea and India.

Such a fabulous dish! I have never had star fruit presented in a better way. It was an ideal complement for the pristine scallops.

The main protagonists of the kitchen.

Dynamite Mexican/Middle Eastern combination! Every facet of this dish marvelous, but the salsa matcha with the hummus was swoon worthy.

Delightful throughout, the chopped cashews were a lovely surprise.

Great head-on prawns and an unintuitive, but brilliant treatment of the udon made for a wonderfully memorable dish.

On the surface this looked like a tasty, but relatively mundane steak dish, but the inclusion of sichuan peppercorns to th

25/08/2026

It had been 8 and a half years since my wife, our son and myself traveled to Montreal, where we visited the restaurants of including, on March 7, on their first day open, . was, as he is now, the chef and .filipovic was the w**e director of the entire restaurant group. Fast forward to 2026 and we returned to celebrate our son’s birthday at the very same restaurant. Mon Lapin is now owned by the husband and wife team of Marc and Vanya, with the restaurant having doubled in size and accolades piling up over the years including having been ranked as the No. 2 restaurant in North America by in 2025 and No. 5 in 2026.

The food is grounded in French technique, but adventurously creative, beautifully constructed and delicious! The w**e program is absolutely top notch and as creatively skillful as the kitchen. This is one of those rare restaurants where one can go to have food to go with the w**e just as much as w**e to go with the food. All of that is coupled with a tremendous energy, fabulous vibe and wonderful hospitality!

24/08/2026

Finally!

It has so far been a horrible summer for mushroom foraging in the southeastern Adirondacks of New York. It has simply been too hot and too dry. I hadn’t found anything that I would dare eat since some morels in May. I wasn’t even finding much of anything else, but thanks to recent rains and cooler temps, the tide has started to turn.!

This golden chanterelle was the first “choice” mushroom that I found since the aforementioned morels. It was gorgeous and so were a couple others that I harvested. I left a few small ones unbothered.

Black trumpets may be my favorites to forage. They are very difficult to confuse with anything bad. These were the first that I spotted. I ultimately found a number of others starting to grow in my favorite black trumpet spots, but most were still too small to pick.

Another first of the season, the hedgehog, also difficult to confuse thanks to its distinctive gill pattern that gives the mushroom its moniker.

13/08/2026

It was 10 years ago today, that I arrived for the last time at the legendary “Woodstock for Chefs” annual multiday food celebration thrown by Craig Rogers at his southwest Virginia sheep farm, Craig Rogers . It was an event filled with great individual and communal live fire cooking, copious quantities of a wide range of beverages and a bountiful supply of bonhomie. Easily the most delicious camping experiences of my life, they left me with so many great memories!

This is my first of what will be occasional looks back at some personal highlights, especially of favorite events or restaurants that either no longer exist or were particular milestones for me.

The food and people (mostly, but not exclusively from the southeastern USA) the draw, but camping in the gorgeous expanse of the farm’s rolling hills was a big part of the fun!

Jitti Chaithiraphant was my first foraging mentor and it began here.

Chanterelles!

04/08/2026

As promised, here is a post of the plates from my most recent meal Restaurant Pearl Morissette by Chefs Daniel Hadida and Eric Robertson .

This was a tasting menu that hit my sweet spot with outstanding seafood, gorgeous, seasonal produce and meats that still have me drooling!

While the entire menu was extraordinary, I would like to highlight three dishes in particular.

The opening Dungeness Crab from British Columbia set the bar ridiculously high. It was an extremely generous portion of crab topped with seafood garum pearls, greens and a layer of heavily extracted mussel stock. A fabulous play on flavor and texture, I would happily eat this anywhere at anytime.

The vegetable Terrine was so delicate, delicious and delightful that it is a serious candidate for my “dish of the year!” This layered composition consisted of a variety of vegetables from their garden over a crisp focaccia painted with a tomato lacquer that managed to preserve the individuality of each component within a harmonious whole. This dish contained the essence of summer within it as well as just about dish that I have ever had. The shocker though, is that my wife and I were actually the first customers to whom this had been served!

The Gargouillou from Michel Bras remains one of the greatest and most influential dishes from the latter part of the 20th Century. While I have been fortunate to enjoy a number of stellar versions, none were more delightful than the Crudités served here. The sheer visual beauty was spectacular on its own, but the playful deliciousness of each bite being unique, put this over the top.

Somehow, RPM keeps getting better and better! I can’t wait until my next visit, which can’t come soon enough!

01/08/2026

With some to kill, we did some new-to-us touristy things in NYC, visiting both Vessel and the 100 story high, open viewing platform known as The Edge. Both were actually pretty cool and worthwhile, but The Edge, despite being a bit hokey before getting outside, was actually the finest high building viewing spot that I have experienced in NYC! If only time or budget for one, this would be my choice.

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