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Menu Please: Palo Cedro’s California Brewing Company is Worth the Drive

Anyone who has lived in the Redding area more than a few years knows that until quite recently live music was as rare as jackalopes. Oh, sure, if you were over 21 you might have gone into Ricardo’s to hear… Continue Reading

9

Menu Please: Fusion Lounge Breaks New Ground with Original Cuisine

A show of hands, please: Who remembers where all the old local taverns/bars/dives were? Better yet, who actually patronized them? Anyone? Possibly the most infamous was the Oak Grove, which one night became an ungodly flaming cocktail and is now… Continue Reading

8

Menu Please: Local Pizza Makes Good at Redding’s Ultimate Pizza

Back before Mary Lake was just a lake and not a subdivision, when Buenaventura was a city in Colombia, when the Benton landfill was a landfill and not a rolling landscape, there was a laundromat and little store at Placer… Continue Reading

9

Menu Please: Lao Meets Thai at Kanya Market

Until very recently, Femme de Joie’s only visit to 970 Hartnell was about seven years ago when a vintage furniture store was there; she and  Amico del Signore picked out a leather couch which went from “this great oxblood sofa”… Continue Reading

3

Menu Please: Rita’s Kitchen Does Diner Food Right

If you’re whipping along Hartnell Avenue, perhaps heading west toward Four Corners and planning your congested intersection strategy (You think it’s bad now? You should have tried navigating it before traffic lights were installed), or traveling east to pick up… Continue Reading

8

Menu Please: The Flavors of the Middle East at Anthony’s Mediterranean Cuisine

It has long been the fervent wish of Femme de Joie that some enterprising soul would open up a Middle Eastern/Greek/Turkish restaurant in the Redding area. She vaguely recalls a short-lived one in a food court somewhere in Enterprise back… Continue Reading

5

Menu Please: Becca’s Cafe in Anderson is a Local Favorite

Redding and Anderson have their share of what Maman de Joie called “hard-luck spots” – places where businesses opened optimistically, closed quietly, and another business moved in rapidly – lather, rinse, repeat. For whatever reason, those locations seemed almost cursed,… Continue Reading

14

Menu Please: Jaimitos Tacos – Where’s the Zsa Zsa Zsu?

It might surprise some folks to learn that the Redding strip mall known as Cypress Colony was once a Southern Baptist Church. When that congregation upped sticks and moved elsewhere, developers turned the Sunday school classrooms into shops and offices;… Continue Reading

9

Menu Please: Start the Day at Arcata’s Golden Harvest Cafe

Even the most dyed-in-the-wool ardent Reddingites have to admit that it gets intolerably hot here in the summer. (You think it’s bad now? Imagine what it must have been like for the early settlers, clad in voluminous layers of heavy… Continue Reading

7

Menu Please: Sauce Is King at Fat Daddy’s Gourmet Bbq

What defines barbecue? And what is the difference between barbecue and grilling? Though the terms are frequently used interchangeably and the results (usually) delectable, they mean very different procedures and end results. As Chris Schlesinger explains in his 1990 book… Continue Reading