Pio Loco: Is Anyone in the Kitchen?

Pio Loco first opened in 1986 in a former pizzeria on Lake Boulevard as a non-traditional Mexican restaurant; when the old gymnasium at the Pine Street School became available in the mid-1990’s, Chef Jeff Cerasaro upped sticks and moved to…

Review: Priya Indian Cuisine

It’s Saturday night in Redding and you are sweating bullets: Tonight you have a date with the object of your desires. You’ve done the meet-for-coffee and the safe lunch, caught a matinee showing of Pirates of the Caribbean, Part 16:…

Good News, Bad News at Some Redding Restaurants

Two of Redding’s top restaurants have taken turns serving good news and bad.

The bad news last year was when Maritime quit serving lunch.

The good news was Maritime made some drastic menu changes, including the addition of what I think might be Redding’s best…

Restaurant Review: Pho Saigon

When you travel to other countries, you find that foods that seem completely bizarre to you are just ordinary, everyday dishes to the people of that culture. In Malaysia, for example, curried hard-boiled eggs are a very common Muslim street…

Snack Shack

Some places have been around forever, so long that you don’t even notice them any more. They’re just part of the landscape of daily life, like the stop sign, the broken sidewalk, your Uncle Fred. That’s probably why it took…

Trader Joe’s Sunflower Seed Butter

Amico del Signore bought a jar of Trader Joe’s Sunflower Seed Butter. It’s a delicious alternative to peanut butter on a cracker with a little honey, on a stick of celery, or as a filling in a PB&J for those…

5 Thais - The Best Little Restaurant You Haven’t Tried

Even a dedicated consumer of double cheeseburgers needs a break now and then. On a recent drab and drizzly day, M. De Joie was in the mood for a bowl of pho, that Vietnamese soup/meal-in-a-bowl with the healing powers normally…

Gene’s Drive-in

Femme de Joie has found people tend to either love Gene’s with a passion or despise it with the hatred usually reserved for memories of high-school-cafeteria tuna-on-a-shingle. She recalls one person who described the onion rings as “made from turnips.”…

Not a Grand Buffet

Despite what some people may think, it does not give Femme de Joie pleasure to write negative things about restaurants. Well, perhaps that should come with a qualification: it does not bother her to write negative things about restaurants she…

Mmmm… Mincemeat

Femme de Joie has not done any scientific polling, but she suspects the most-hated pie in America is mincemeat. Perhaps it’s partly the name - there’s something sinister going on with that - perhaps its unyielding dense stickiness, perhaps the…