Photo by Hana Urank, courtesy of Tio Moncho’s

LA Taco • 11th July 2024

His Taquería Is Almost At The North Pole, But He Gets His Tortillas From L.A.

We found birria at Tio Moncho’s, the world’s northernmost taquería, on a recent spring day, while seeking warmth deep in the Arctic Circle. Life here is pretty normal—people go to work, get drunk, fall in love, and long for tacos.

Financial Times • 20th April 2024

Dining in the Dark

Svalbard’s polar night can be endured — if you know the right crowd.

Ambrook • 28th March 2024

The World’s Fattest Deer Are Doing Just Fine

Svalbard reindeer, the northernmost subspecies of Rangifer tarandus, has flesh so richly striated with fat that it forms a sheen around the mouths of those who eat it, leaving visible kisses on the rims of glasses. When fried in a pan, it browns like bacon in its own rendered grease. Stews made with Svalbard reindeer form a thick seal of fat as they cool, as cream rises to the top of fresh milk.

Atlas Obscura • 15th March 2024

The World's Northernmost Town Toasts the Sun With Mangosteens

The sun rose in Longyearbyen, Norway—the world’s northernmost town—for the first time on March 8, after more than four months below the horizon. Meanwhile, at Svalbardbutikken, the local supermarket, another long-awaited sight returned: the annual Solfestuka Fruktfest, or “Sun Week Fruit Party.”

Esquire magazine • 23rd February 2024

Filipinos Run the World’s Northernmost Sushi Restaurant

Some days, there is no tuna at Nuga, the world’s northernmost sushi restaurant. Restaurants in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago just 400 miles from the North Pole, depend on air deliveries for fresh fish and other perishables; the weather is occasionally so rough that no planes can land.

Comstock's magazine • 8th October 2023

A Piece of the Pie

Over the course of summer and the first weeks of fall, over 60 varieties of peaches and nectarines pass through The Fruit Bowl, a 76-year-old produce stand on the rural outskirts of Stockton. At the peak of the season in August, when afternoon temperatures reach the triple digits, their aroma is enough to inebriate.

Comstock's magazine • 17th August 2023

The Kava Capital

The first sip of Pila Kava hits like a low dose of novocaine, numbness spreading across the surface of the tongue. This soon fades into a background hum as the flavors bloom. The first note is the earth and spice of the kava itself — the root of a pepper variety native to the South Pacific.

Comstock's magazine • 24th May 2023

Neighborhood Favorite: Stand Up Kabob

“This is critical for the revolution,” says Stand Up Kabob owner Karan Khoshcar to a young activist as he threads chicken and halved tomatoes onto swordlike skewers. “This is going to make the revolution fruit by November.” It’s one of many clues that Stand Up Kabob, a Persian restaurant literally welded onto the side of a used car dealership on the outskirts of Davis, is no ordinary kebab shop.

Comstock's magazine • 10th May 2023

The Next Best Thing

After months sitting vacant, Jim-Denny’s coveted 10 bar seats will soon be full again. On the Formica countertop — worn by countless coffee cups to its red-brown core — expect a traffic jam of hamburgers, hot dogs and fries, a familiar lunch-rush sight at the downtown Sacramento diner, now approaching its 90th birthday. But some things have changed since Chef N’Gina Guyton took the helm.

Comstock's magazine • 1st May 2023

Neighborhood Favorite: Kind Bean Cafe and Ethiopian Cuisine

The coffee ceremony at Kind Bean Cafe and Ethiopian Cuisine unfolds like a sacrament, each tool imbued with significance like objects on an altar.

Comstock's magazine • 1st March 2023

Neighborhood Favorite: For the Love of Malta

Maltese pastizzi comes in two classical forms, delineated by how the finely fissile pastry — laminated with both butter and lard — folds around its savory filling. Shell-shaped pastizzi, clamped tight like clams at low tide, conceal peas cooked to their melting point and spiced with a subtle curry that’s more English (Malta’s most recent colonizers) than Indian. Those with the seam down the middle, winking coyly open, usually bear ricotta flecked with herbs.

Comstock's magazine • 15th February 2023

Trust the Sushi Chef

Chef Tim Wong’s omakase begins with a tartare of toro, the fat-marbled belly of bluefin tuna, crowned with opalescent globes of osetra caviar. It is served in an antique sherry glass beside a soldier of grilled milk bread. Guests spread the tartare and caviar on the toast with slim wooden spoons like breakfasting oligarchs.

Comstock's magazine • 2nd February 2023

Neighborhood Favorite: Good Things to Eat

A light appeared in the window of a long-empty storefront in Sacramento’s Curtis Park neighborhood last summer. In front of the curtains, a hand-drawn notice about the size of a bumper sticker beckoned passersby to check Instagram for the menu. No sign hung above the door, but a sandwich board stood on the sidewalk some evenings, with “Open” painted in bright yellow letters.

rootsandwingsmag • 25th January 2023

Manila in Milan

Milan’s Filipino food map ranges from high-end spots like Yum to hip takes on street food like Lomilan. It’s no wonder that Milan is home to so many Filipino restaurants — the city is home to about 40,000 Filipinos, making them the largest immigrant population in the city and one of the largest Filipino communities in Europe. Here are a few spots to get a taste of Manila in Milano.

Comstock's magazine • 5th December 2022

A Sea of Hope

At Johnson-Neles Dairy in Sonoma, 380 acres of undulating green hills under desktop background-blue skies, a farm worker mixes a wheelbarrow of feed for eager cows. On top of the usual blend of hay and grasses, the worker sprinkles a purplish-red powder, like a chef adding a pinch of seasoning to finish a dish. But this powder is no pepper: It’s pulverized Asparagopsis taxiformis, a red seaweed that can dramatically reduce the methane cows emit in their burps, according to studies by UC Davis scientists.

San Francisco Chronicle • 18th October 2022

There’s a whole world of Filipino vinegars. Will they finally go mainstream?

At modern Filipino restaurant Abaca, the longanisa skewers come with a glass dish of vinegar, an egg yolk floating on the surface like a rising moon. The vinegar, sepia-toned and turbid, is a reduction of sukang iloko, a speciality of the Ilocos region in northern Luzon that’s fermented from sugarcane wine. Breaking the yolk sends Van Gogh swirls into the dark.

Comstock's magazine • 17th October 2022

A Delta Legacy

Over 100 years ago, Chicago native Roscoe Zuckerman first saw the labyrinthine waterways and windswept fields of the California Delta.

ABS-CBN News • 4th October 2022

This charming Filipino restaurant in Berlin has gained local fans and even television fame

Berlin dresses monochrome in the winter. Crows roost in the leafless trees, gray post-war buildings cast long shadows, the people swath themselves in black — and indulge in the blunt, testy attitude known as “Berliner Schnauze” (Berlin snout). On brief December days, the door to Pinoy, a Filipino restaurant in the quiet Charlottenburg neighborhood, feels like a portal to a warmer, softer world.

Comstock's magazine • 30th September 2022

Tastes of the Past

“We thought we could find a throughline with food, and use that as a vehicle to tell this very important story that has intersections of race, class and displacement,” says Ryan Royster, co-founder of the Last Supper Society, the “culinary collective” that organized the event.

Comstock's magazine • 27th September 2022

Neighborhood Favorite: Caravan Uzbek Cuisine

Every morning, Caravan Uzbek Cuisine co-owner Farkhod Soatov wakes up early to make plov. It’s a two- to three-hour process centered around a kazan, a cauldron-like vessel that nomadic Turkic people once carried on their long journeys across the steppes of Central Asia. The rice and meat dish, with roots in Persian pilaf, has changed little since the days of the Silk Road.