Nashville Food Blog

The schedule is a little light this week, but now that it's Friday I can reveal the truth: Your Wino has been Wandering around Las Vegas all week celebrating spring break, St. Patty's and the holiest of holidays around the Wino household, the first round of the NCAA hoops tournament. Since I'm actually writing this a week in advance, let's just pretend I won a lot of money.

Sample wine and spirits with the Preds and benefit a good cause, too.

​But quality over quantity is always a good thing and one of the beiggest and best wine events in town is coming up at the end of this month. The Predators Foundation Wine Festival and Tasting will be held 6 to 10 p.m. Wednesday, March 31, at the newly named Bridgestone Arena. The cost is $75 per person and benefits a whole host of charities supported by the Predators Foundation.

This year's event features a tasting over 150 wines, spirits tasting, Budweiser beer, heavy hors d'oeuvres, a cocktail bar and an extensive silent auction.

There will also be an optional VIP Dinner and Tasting hosted by Stags' Leap Winery. A limited number of spaces are available for the Five-Course Wine Dinner in the Patron Platinum Club, featuring hand-crafted Stags' Leap wines. The dinner starts at 7:30 p.m. Price: $200 per person, all inclusive.

Tickets are available online here, or call 770-2331 for reservations.

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​New Orleans is one of the great eating cities in America. It's also a cheap Southwest flight and a little over an hour away. That's barely enough time to use one of your Southwest drink coupons. Jane and Michael Stern are holding their annual Road Food Festival in the Big Easy next week from Friday, March 26, to Sunday March 28, and they'd love to see you there.

They will transform five blocks of Royal Street in the heart of the French Quarter into the world's greatest and funkiest food court, welcoming vendors from all over the country serving their specialties. For some local flavor, Franklin's own Henpeck Market will be dishing out their legendary pimento cheese to the appreciative masses.

Of special note to long-time NOLA lovers, Anthony and Gail Ugliesich are coming out of retirement to make their "Shrimp Uggie" and to be recognized at the opening night recption with the Roadfood Blue Plate Award, which honors the men and women who embody the best of America's regional cuisine.

Ugliesich's Restaurant was a rundown shack of a seafood joint in a pretty sketchy neighborhood of New Orleans where I used to arrive at 10:30 a.m. to ensure a spot at a plastic table for some of the best lunches I have ever enjoyed. Nicki Wood and I shared a particularly wonderful meal with our better halves years ago, which I will never forget.

If you get a wild hair, tickets are still on sale. You won't regret it.

​In restaurants, my order is based on how hungry I am and how the wallet is feeling on that day. Ordering in Japanese restaurants is almost always tricky -- you don't know how big the bowl of noodles is, how large the salmon fillet is, how many pieces of sushi are in an order, or how much chicken is on the yakitori skewer.

At Zumi Sushi, the table next to ours -- casual acquaintances from the past -- have busy lives and a generous dining out budget. They skimp on eating during the day, and that, combined with a teenage son, results in enormous orders.

Here's what arrived from the kitchen. Edamame, chicken yakitori, salmon salad, sesame ginger feast, soup, Rich Heat sushi, a chicken bowl. The meal covered the table, and though it looked like a lot of food, they ate it all. They were Zumi regulars, it turns out, and had their order-size titration just right.

What's your formula for how much food to order in a Japanese restaurant? Or any restaurant where there are unknown quantities?

In this clip, chef Jason McConnell, whose new Franklin eatery 55 South is the subject of this week's dining review, talks about his new venture and some of the inspiration behind it.

​As I plug my way through meatless Lent, I'm gaining great respect for folks who choose to live this lifestyle year round. Restaurant owners are also paying attention and offering special vegetarian and vegan menus, although sometimes you have to ask for them. Taco Mamacita has recently rolled out a fairly extensive list of vegan options and added it to their website.

A little more research revealed a whole list of secret menus at many popular restarants which include everything from meatless options to decadent off-the-menu combinations of traditional menu items, including McDonald's "Monster Mac" made from eight patties with a side order of angioplasty.

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If you find a KFC that's actually serving poutine, let me know because I might want to steer clear of that one...

In a coffee emergency last week a quick stop was necessary to halt rapid decaffeination.

Picture shot by an overcaffeinated photographer.

​The first choice is home-brewed coffee, pressed in a French press. Or, in a leisurely situation, Fido or Crema. In a pinch, Starbucks will have to do, but a glass of water is a must for washing away the burned taste of the coffee. Bread & Company if a meal is involved, Drink Haus when in Germantown. The wonderful Perch when in Brentwood (or in need of fresh crepes.)

At the bottom of the list is office coffee. Industrial sludge made from the lowest grade beans, hacked with dull blades into a rough, utilitarian, workmanlike grind that brews up weak and tepid and with the overtones of the hard water residue. Even in an emergency, it's not coffee that you'd want to resort to.

So on a day with time running short, a quick stop somewhere on the way to work was the only solution. Gas station coffee: there were two choices. Bengal Trader and Daily's. Invoking Carrington's "no left turn" policy, Daily's won out.

As emergency coffees go it could have been worse. It wasn't burned like the coffee at work, and didn't have the dirtlike overtones of cheap coffee. A success but not enough so for an encore. In an emergent situation what is the best alternative for coffee? Is it possibly a non-coffee option?

The Belcourt's tapped into a grapevine goldmine with its monthly "Wine, Food & Film" events, which pair food-themed films with a pre-screening reception of wines from Village Wines and heavy snacks from Whole Foods. At $25 a ticket, the screenings tend to sell out well in advance of show time.

Here's Emily Bartlett Hines in this week's Scene discussing tonight's entry, the documentary Blood into Wine:

Metal fans and wine snobs have reputations as self-important, humorless demographics. So when a documentary follows Tool / A Perfect Circle frontman Maynard James Keenan on his Arizona winemaking venture, you might expect a perfect storm of self-indulgent hubris. On the contrary: the trailer for Blood into Wine makes it look like the Spinal Tap of chardonnay. Directed by Ryan Page and Christopher Pomerenke, it makes good use of Keenan's friends in the comedy world by casting them as absurd fictional characters -- Bob Odenkirk, Patton Oswalt, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim (of Awesome Show, Great Job fame), and Keenan's sometime Puscifer bandmate Milla Jovovich. The trailer is hilarious, but Wine also has a real story to tell about Keenan's decision to abandon his music career in order to play head winemaker, and his struggle to get some respect for his small desert vineyard. Recommended even if you don't like Tool. See www.belcourt.org to buy tickets. 7 p.m. at The Belcourt.

When a kind co-worker brought in bagels this morning, we had no idea that a special March 17 experience was in the offing.

We're not naming the bagel bakery because our photo makes perfectly good bagels look like Frankenstein's colonoscopy.

​Then we opened the paper bag and saw circlets of baked dough of a shocking emerald green. That's right: Add another nugget to the marketing pot of gold represented by green beer, Shamrock Shakes and all the other viridian versions of popular food products created in honor of St. Patrick's Day.

The green flash inside the bag was a momentary red alert that interrupted our rush to stuff our faces with bagels and cream cheese. Then the boldest nosher among us delivered the good news: Green bagels taste just as good as any other plain bagel of a plainer hue.

So like any herd of journalists roaming the less-than-verdant prairie of newsroom life, we gobbled the green bagels up. Even a couple of small doggies belonging to our bagel-bringing colleague found the bagels worth dragging away to be licked and gnawed into bright green crumbs.

So how's your St. Patty's Day going? Seen any green foods or beverages that seem particularly egregious? Or delicious? Please share with Bites.

A recent dining column features Diana's Sweet Shoppe, where Gibson Guitar Co. transplanted a historic Michigan candy store and

For illustration purposes only; the real Carrington is blond and slimmer.

​cafe to Lower Broad. The no-muss-no-fuss menu of sandwiches and soups is well-priced by LoBro standards, but it's the roster of ice cream confections that will lure us back to the wood-panelled and candy-filled time capsule.

None other than Jenny Piper from Pied Piper Creamery in East Nashville provides the excellent raw material for the sundaes and shakes, which include a "Diana," blended with Music City's staple GooGoo Clusters.

With spring on the way and ice cream season close behind, you can almost hear the humming of the churns. Despite the gray skies, I took a trip to Savarino's for gelato this week and am looking for an excuse to get back to East Nashville to check out the creative flavors at Pied Piper and The Silly Goose (Beet, sorghum, lemon-and-cracked pepper, anyone?).

While some might call it bathing suit season, we call it that time of year to slip into a butter pecan milkshake with two shots of espresso at Sip Cafe in at Riverside Village, where owner Mike Duguay brokers the marriage of coffee and ice cream. Duguay, another Michigan import, also owns Mike's Ice Cream Fountain at 208 Lower Broad, which makes that stretch of sidewalk a shakin' place to get a cool treat. Let the ice cream wars begin.

​Some people think that food-blogging should be a competitive process where writers scramble to scoop each other on restaurant openings and (sadly) closings. Sure it's always good to be the first to the punch, but there's plenty of room at the buffet table for more local bloggers. Especially when they're sharing information about where to find great dining deals.

Occasional Bites commenter Matthew King and his friend Alex Wendkos have recently started a great site called, ahem, "Eat Me, Nashville." While I'm not sure our benevolent corporate overlords here at the Scene would let me get away with a blog title like that, it really is chock-full of daily specials and menu offerings at restaurants all over town. They are also working at creating a comprehensive happy hour listing which should be helpful as you make your party plans.

I know from experience how much work it is to keep up with the various meal deals and publish on a daily basis. Matthew and Alex seem committed to keeping the site updated and informative. Go ahead and add them to your feed reader or your list of bookmarks and support their efforts.

Keep it up, kids!