I've always been majorly inspired by Eloise and wished that I lived in a hotel. But now I've adapted my dream, and not just because the recently-reopened-as-condos Plaza, Eloise's home, is out of my price range. It's just that I've found a whole bunch of Manhattan restaurants that I'd rather live in. There's the obvious benefit of having great food whenever I want. And there's also the groovy environment that so many new places have that makes you feel like you're at the coolest party. First off is the Lower East Side's Allen & Delancey, with its little connecting rooms that mix exposed brick, dark wood, old books and low lighting (The New Yorker's review called it one of the loveliest rooms in town). Second is Elettaria—even though the fake staircase at the entrance isn't very functional, I absolutely love it, and ditto for the cut-off mirrors and paintings and the bright red door at the entrance. But the hands-down winner of my new relocation plan is Bobo. It's set in a sweet West Village town house, and I love everything about the two-story restaurant: the hundreds of photos that decorate the walls, the multiple fireplaces, the huge drapes on the windows. I love the owner, Carlos Suarez, who also acts as maître d’/best party host ever (he comes from a very cool family—his cousin Dolores designed the space). I've also come to love the food, which started off rocky but has gotten really good under new chef Jared Stafford-Hill, who makes excellent ricotta-stuffed ravioli and pork (Berkshire, of course) with sausage and shell beans. It's also eco-friendly—they were very early to the purified (flat and sparkling) water game and charge $1 for all the water you drink all night (that $1 goes to water-related charities). Bobo even has a celebrity clientele (Demi Moore sat at the opposite table last time I ate there) which would definitely raise the profile of parties I'd throw, after I moved in.

Two things I've recently learned about Allan Benton's pork-tastic products from Madisonville, Tennessee:

1. When a bunch of 2008 F&W Best New Chefs get together to eat Momofuku Ssam Bar's country ham tasting—various hams from different producers sliced paper thin accompanied by bread and chunky apple butter (both extraneous in my opinion)—the Allan Benton plate is the first to clear.

2. When a bunch of F&W staffers mill around plates of Benton country ham and lusciously thick-cut, fatty, smoky bacon, they find all sorts of ways to eat the pork, including with their fingers and ingeniously wrapping the bacon around chunks of peanut brittle (a crunchy, more decadent version of the bacon-wrapped prunes at the Spotted Pig in Manhattan). And yes, the plates clear up superfast, too.

I just returned from a trip to the fabulous Ventana Inn and Spa in Big Sur, California. Its restaurant, Cielo, has a great cocktail list that included a few drinks I had never seen before. Listed under the category Fantastic Floats were three made with beer and sorbet. The best was called Belgian Delight, a pint of Hoegaarden topped with a scoop of homemade orange sorbet. Simple, refreshing and original, it will be my go-to cocktail this summer.

In the May issue of Food & Wine, Rob Evans, an F&W Best New Chef 2004, shared highlights from his honeymoon—a 25-state motorcycle trip (he rides a 2000 Triumph Tiger, and his wife, a BMW GS650).

Over the course of a month, Evans and his wife covered 7,000 miles of national parks, eating in small towns throughout the West and Midwest. Experiences at places like the North Fork Brewery, a brewery, beer shrine, pizzeria and wedding chapel on Mt. Baker Highway in Deming, Washington, and Binkley’s, a fine-dining restaurant with a shockingly good tasting menu in Cave Creek, Arizona (“I would fly from Maine just to eat there!” says Evans), inspired him to reinvent Hugo’s, his fine-dining restaurant in Portland, Maine, to reflect the direction he feels American dining is headed. “The trip didn’t influence my food, but it did influence my perception of the dining experience,” says Evans.

The new Hugo’s opens its doors tomorrow. Evans tossed the table linens in an effort to lose the “poshness” and create a more comfortable atmosphere. He’s also added a snack menu to the prix fixe format that was previously offered.

Evans is particularly excited about the new bar area. A silent, flat viewing screen hangs behind the bar, allowing customers to watch as chefs prepare their food in the kitchen. “We’re combining the two hottest concepts, the feel of an open kitchen and the visual pleasure of watching food being created, without the negative aspect of a loud dining room. It’s the open kitchen of the new millennium,” says Evans.

Newish Seattle resident and restaurateur Michael Hebb (formerly Hebberoy) has struck again: Last Friday, he quietly—for him, anyway—opened up Fish Fry, a tiny fish shack on Pike Street in Seattle. 

Where it is "The same spot as the beloved Frites, in between the rock club Neumos and the bar Moe, on Pike Street on Capitol Hill."

The concept "I did some One Pot dinners there and got inspired. Mike McConnell (of Caffe Vita and Via Tribunali) and I decided that what was missing in Seattle was perfectly fried fish. So Fish Fry is fresh fish primarily from local fishermen fried in a simple, light batter, served with handmade sauces based on pickles and preserves."

The space "It's mostly a stand-and-eat place. One whole wall of the establishment is covered with pickled cabbage, carrots, asparagus, and chile peppers."

The chef "Monica Dimas, formerly of Le Pichet and Campagne."

How it's involved with its neighbors "The whole menu, like battered and fried oysters and Pacific snapper, is also available next door at Moe."

What happens when Hebb, former Best New Chef Matt Dillon and rocker Jack White get together "We just had a Fish Fry One Pot meal in the basement of Neumos prepared by Matt Dillon and Monica Dimas for Jack White and the Raconteurs and Birds of Avalon. Matt cooked battered and fried whole radishes, handmade cous cous and a fish stew with blackened capers and nettle salsa verde. Jack White was a bit wary of the nettles. He asked for a steak."

Almost exactly 30 years ago the very first issue of F&W—then called The International Review of Food & Wine—hit the newsstands, loaded with pictures of aspic-suspended vegetables and wicker ducks resting atop a nest of dried spaghetti (what?), essays by George Plimpton (yes, the Paper Lion himself) and a guy named Wilfrid Sheed.  

This fall we’ll be celebrating our 30th anniversary (a.k.a. the pearl anniversary, if anyone plans on buying a gift). To prepare for this occasion I’m looking through issues of F&W from 1978 (when I was a zygote) and realizing that, yes, as much as our tastes have changed, things have more or less stayed the same. I offer a few examples, gleaned entirely from our inaugural issue:

Then: Food writer Gael Greene swoons over a dinner in Lyons, France (“I remember feeling wonderfully soft walking down the road afterwards.”).
Now: G.G.’s still gushing, only now via high speed DSL.

Then: A new, unforgiving era of restaurant criticism is dawning. Thanks to the “savvy, cynical Seventies,” says the launch issue’s editorial, “exposés and public putdowns have become chic, on the order of such other painful fads as jogging, sadomasochism, and pierced ears.”
Now: Thanks to web-savvy, cynical bloggers, restaurants are hyped, dismissed and put to pasture before they even get out of previews.

Then: Three-martini lunchers rail against President Carter for threatening to abolish tax deductions on business meals (“Mark these words,” an essay on the topic concludes. “The elimination of the business-entertainment deduction would be the end of the restaurant as we have known it.”).
Now: Places like Kobe Club subsist on expense-account meals, seeing more platinum than Jay-Z’s jewelry box.

Then: The practitioners of nouvelle cuisine are obsessed with vegetables. In a colorful, oh-so-70s photo spread, the Countess Marine de Brantes demonstrates how to make an 8-inch-tall “bouquet” of spring vegetables that can be served hot or cold.
Now: The lords of molecular gastronomy are obsessed with vegetables and hot/cold preparations.

Then: Roundtrip air to the Bali, “a sequence of visual desserts and constantly unexpected events,” according to our first ever travel story, is about $750.
Now: Still exotic, still about $750.

I'm well aware of how good Jim Meehan's drinks are—the guy who created the drinks at everyone's favorite walk-through-the-phone-booth-into-the-bar bar, PDT in Manhattan's East Village, is also the editor of F&W's awesome new indispensable resource Cocktails 2008 (just out! order your copy now!). He's responsible for more of my hangover headaches than I care to talk about. Well, it turns out Mr. Meehan, or at least his acolytes, score well among a jury of his peers, too. At Tuesday's 3rd Annual Rhum Clement New York Cocktail Challenge, which took place at the Astor Center, PDT bartenders swept the top three awards. First place went to Daniel Eun's Bitches Brew (a mix of white rum, dark rum and lime juice, and then some secret ingredients). The Sargasso cocktail from Don Lee took second place (aged rum, sherry, aperol and bitters). Third place had my favorite name of the night, Sweetie Pie (aged rum, allspice liqueur, apple juice, pinch of sea salt): It was created by Lydia Reissmueller, who moonlights at PDT even though she serves Sweetie Pie at Elettaria in the West Village. So it was a very good night for Jim Meehan, who (coincidentally I'm sure) was one of the event's judges, and who had a huge major headache the next day. Which seems only fair to me.

After the recent Pinkberry scandal, where should fans  turn for a froyo that’s truly au natural? Look no further than our upcoming June issue, which features extraordinary frozen yogurt recipes (as well as ice creams and sorbets) from the ice cream maverick, Jeni Britton of Jeni Britton’s Splendid Ice Creams in Columbus, Ohio.

When we asked Jeni to give us recipes for her incredibly creamy, cult-worthy  ice creams, she started from scratch. Apparently, ice creams made in professional machines and kept frozen at sub-Arctic temperatures don’t translate easily to equipment available to the home cook.

Jeni’s food science professor friend at Ohio State University told her that a great homemade ice cream with a shelf life beyond a few hours was impossible--he said they all inevitably become icy. Jeni, however, ignored him and set about revolutionizing homemade ice cream with nothing more than a $250 Cuisinart ICE-50BC machine (in our test kitchen--the simpler $50 model worked equally well), Organic Valley dairy and a lot of gumption.

To develop her vanilla ice cream recipe, she slung her adorable then two-month-old daughter on her back and over a solid month, tested 75 batches before feeling satisfied. She started with recipes from cookbooks, most which call for egg yolks, all which ended up with ice crystals. Since she doesn’t use eggs at her shops, she ideally wanted an eggless home recipe.

In the end, she developed several tricks to make perfect homemade vanilla ice cream:

• Using sugar and corn syrup, which help “tie up” the loose water molecules that cause iciness.
• Boiling the cream and milk with the sugar helps thoroughly incorporate the sugar and evaporate some of the excess water.
• Adding cornstarch to thicken the cream and absorb water.
• Whisking in cream cheese to help improve the final body of the ice cream.

The result: the best homemade ice creams to ever hit your spoon. And if the DIY approach to ice cream isn't your thing, Jeni's does offer mail order.

We’re moving on, people: Last month we featured restaurant wine bars, but if I have my druthers, the next trend will be restaurant wine clubs. We just need more restaurants like Luke Mangan's South Food + Wine Bar in San Francisco, brave enough to tackle labyrinthian wine-shipping laws. But what a cool idea:  South's club has two tiers: the $69 South Splurge and the $39 Steal; for each subscribers receive two bottles of Mangan's favorite southern-hemisphere wines, along with tasting notes and a recipe for a suggested pairing. It would be nice if South also sent someone to make the recipe, but you can’t have everything. If you sign up now, you might still get the May shipment, called Russell’s Reds—which a press release describes as “A nod to Aussie’s favorite bad-boy actor, featuring superbly crafted wines that pack a punch (hotel phone not included).”

Every year I live out my Blue Crush fantasies by spending one week on the North Shore of Oahu—arguably the surf mecca of the world. The surfer-girl chick flick was based on an article by one of my favorite authors, Susan Orlean.

In Orlean’s portrayal of the life of real surf girls, she gets one detail absolutely correct when she reports, “Surfers are always starving. They had eaten breakfast before they surfed; it was now only an hour or two later, and they were hungry again.”

When I spend the week at Kelea Surf Spa, my schedule is usually as follows: eat, surf, eat, nap, surf, eat, yoga, surf, eat. I’m always hungry! Here’s my insider’s guide to some of the best food spots on the North Shore.

* North Shore locals wake up early for two things: waves, and the just-out-of-the-oven malasadas (sugar-dusted Portuguese doughnuts) from Ted’s Bakery. I usually make a second stop in the afternoon for a slice of the dangerously decadent chocolate haupia pie.

* Sharks Cove Grill sells healthy post-surf snacks like banana–peanut butter protein smoothies and fresh ahi kebabs out of a panel truck parked across from Pupukea Beach Park.

* The excellent fiery curries and spicy noodle dishes at Haleiwa Eats are worth the nearly guaranteed wait. The owners of the supertiny restaurant previously owned a Thai restaurant in Manhattan.

* I never quite understood the obsession with shave ice until I ordered it from Matsumoto in Hale’iwa. The snowflake-thin shavings are beyond refreshing after they've been doused in flavored syrups like lilikoi and coconut. Those with a sweet tooth can ask for theirs to be topped with condensed milk or ice cream. The shave-ice craze seems to slowly be making its way to the mainland. Maybe it will reach Hawaii-level proportions now that chef Laurent Gras has ordered a real-deal shave ice machine from Hawaii for his new restaurant, L20.