Welcome to part four on my coverage of the 2rd Annual Weekend of Fire. In our last edition we left off with me leaving the final day of the event. After a good nights sleep at Joe and Linda’s place (thanks guys!) I was off to CaJohn’s open house tour of his factory in Columbus, Ohio!

His factory was just up the street when I got distracted by a very large nursery for plants called Oakland Nurseries (1156 Oakland Park Ave, Columbus, OH). Something there was calling out to me so I pulled in and saw it. They had lined their front with Black Pearl Peppers! What a find. I snatched one or two ripe pods and munched on them while I walked around what one would call a haven for plants. I later found out that the owner is Max Reiner’s (from Sauce Cartel) uncle. What a small world (especially when compared to the size of our universe).

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We don’t normally post restaurant reviews of places where we have yet to try the food ourselves, but we couldn’t resist with this one. Almost makes us wish we lived in or near New York. Almost. Check this place out featured in a recent edition of the online Gothamist:

Rhong-Tiam Asks, “Can You Take the Heat?”

When a restaurant throws down a chili-laced gauntlet with the title, “Can you take the heat?” most people expect to be crying by the end of the meal. Andy Yang, Rhong-Tiam’s executive chef, has issued just such a challenge.

Yang’s three-month old West Village Thai spot is offering a special tasting menu, which gets progressively hotter, through April 15. The prize for eating every last spicy morsel is dinner for two at his upcoming East Village eatery, Kurve. Yang provides diners with “Just a small glass of water. Otherwise it would be too easy.”

To prove he’s not a sadistic chef he quickly adds, “At the end I’ll give you one beer to drink. This will kill all the spices.”

Click here to read the rest of the source article in the Gothamist online zine

Fiesta Jalisco is a place that CaJohn turned us on to after the Fiery Foods Festival last month. We all went as a group after the show and had a blast. Aside from the good company, this place was an amazing find. The atmosphere is great. The food is great. The people are great. And we have been back several times since. » Continue Reading

In a world of Hooter’s, BW3, and other underwhelming choices for dine-in options for chicken wings, it’s nice to see that there’s a place that at least seems to promulgate both concern for the biosphere/environment AND quality food that’s not so full of crappy ingredients that you’re well on your way to your first heart attack before you even get up to leave. Well, Hurricane Grill & Wings promises to be one of those places. While mostly in Florida, it looks like they are franchising their way to the rest of the country as soon as they can. Heck, we’d eat there…so build one up here in Ohio, OK?!

Hmmm…the franchise possibilities are tickling our imagination! Here’s a snippet of the good article from the Broward New Times out of Palm Beach, FL:

It’s the Sauce, Stupid!

Hurricane takes the wing world by storm
By Gail Shepherd
Published: December 27, 2007

What I didn’t know about chicken wings when I first set foot in Hurricane Grill and Wings would fill the corporate libraries of Tyson and Perdue.

I didn’t know the things we eat today by the basket-load, a deep-fried finger-food that has conquered corner bars and corporate franchises, the dripping mouthfuls of heat served with a tub of blue cheese dip and celery sticks for tailgate parties up and down the East Coast, came into being just 40 years ago. The Bellissimo family served the original hot-sauce-drenched wing at its Italian eatery the Anchor Bar to take the edge off late-night drinking. Or else the chicken wing was pioneered at Young’s Wings ‘n’ Things, where John Young drew on the history of African-American chicken recipes to come up with his special Mambo sauce, creating from a not-so-appetizing poultry part (only a neck or tail could be less edible) a snack to turn otherwise reasonable people into Mambo-smeared zombies. Here’s what we know for sure: The greasy trail from today’s Hooters or Wing Hut leads back to Buffalo, New York, in the mid-1960s.

I also didn’t know that Americans eat 90 pounds of chicken per person a year. Chicken wings are the fastest-growing segment of the “casual dining” market, according to Nation’s Restaurant News, soaring high through war and recession. And I didn’t realize that the boneless chicken wings advertised on sports-bar backboards aren’t wings at all. They’re pieces of deep-fried chicken breast if you’re lucky; they’re unidentified chicken scraps pressed together and laden with chemicals if you’re not. (A truly boneless chicken wing, achieved by painstaking kitchen surgery, is another story.)

Click here to read the rest of the source article

Details:
Hurricane Grill and Wings
1905 Pine Island Blvd.
Plantation, FL
Sunday through Thursday 11 a.m. till 10 p.m.
Friday and Saturday till 11 p.m.
Call 954-475-8815.
http://www.hurricanewings.com/

While we don’t frequently offer restaurant reviews to places we’ve not visited ourselves, we occasionally run across descriptions of ones that may need a little chilehead attention. Such is the case with California Tortilla, a Williamsburg, VA eatery offering a little more than just the usual fajita and burrito fare. A review done in the online dailypress.com out of Hampton Roads, VA had this snippet:

Killer prices not even best thing on the menu
By Shelley Rauch
Daily Press
July 4, 2007

WILLIAMSBURG — Walking into Williamsburg’s California Tortilla restaurant, I was surrounded in a bright conglomeration of yellow, orange and red. Glass cases held row after pristine row of just about every hot sauce imaginable, while glowing red chile pepper lights kept the mood festive.

But what really made us chuckle was this:

My husband, Dave, and I stepped up to the spotlessly clean counter and placed our orders. As their team began assembly — everything is made to-order — we drifted over to the mighty “Wall of Flame.” More than 75 types of hot sauce, from mild to unprintably hot, are available to sprinkle over your food, or into the convenient little cups, if you’re in the mood to try several. By the time we’d laughed over the last silly label, our order number was called.

Places that have themselves a “Wall of Flame” are usually more than just gimmicky, and may offer some seriously good food. With “good food, outrageous portions and killer prices,” this looks like a no-brainer. We’d love to visit and dine there ourselves!

Their contact info:

California Tortilla
4917 Courthouse St.
New Town
Williamsburg, VA 23188-2687
757-229-9334

California Tortilla’s menu is focused on wrap-style offerings, along with fajita platters, salads and the option to make any tortilla item into a carb-free bowl. The real star of the show here are the burritos, which come in 10 varieties that run the gamut from The Classic to wrap-friendly Crunchy BBQ Ranch or Thai Chicken.

Hours: 11 a.m.-10 p.m., Monday-Saturday; 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Sunday

We seldom post restaurant reviews on places where we’ve not yet eaten, but this one caught our eye. Besides being chicken wing aficionados ourselves (and have struggled to find good ones locally), we just love what this author from the Memphis Commercial Appeal had to say about this wing eatery known as The Wing Factory. If anyone’s ever tried it, let us know if you agree with this review:

Some mighty fine chicken wings

Nice little shop on Park does something special with humble fare
May 25, 2007

A chicken wing is a humble object, not much use to the chicken, much less human beings. When I was a tot, my older brother used to pass off the chicken wing as another leg: “See, you can have a chicken ‘leg’ too, just like me and Dad.” Yeah, right, and years of therapy ensue.

All that changed in the far-off year 1964, when Teressa Bellissimo, at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, N.Y, little knowing what she wrought, took an order of deep-fried chicken wings and served them with bleu cheese dressing and celery sticks. Before too long, “Buffalo Wings” could be found in every bar from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, and from Coeur d’Alene to Corpus Christi. Seldom called “Buffalo” anymore, chicken wings are as ubiquitous a part of contemporary American gastronomy as soy lattes and taco salads.

Click here to read the rest of this article

Wendy’s 4-Alarm Spicy Chicken Sandwich Ingredients: Chicken filet, artisan bread, Pepper Jack cheese, pickled Jalapenos, chipotle sauce, lettuce, tomato and a more artificial colors and flavors then you can shake a stick at.

Fast food. In the fight to make the citizens of the United States of America fatter, lazier, more dumb, and unhealthy, it is one of the major culprits. Artificial flavors, colors, preservatives, grease, and many other nasty things are some of the main ingredients in the thing that they call “food”. And I ate it for this review.

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We ran across this restaurant review in a recent edition of the online L.A. Weekly, and the description (although from an admitted non-chilehead) was fascinating and alluring. Suffice to say, we hope that our resident Californian chilehead Jon Passow can find his way to this place and give us a full report. Check it out, dude!

Red Menace

Orochon Ramen’s Special 2: Eat at your own risk
By JONATHAN GOLD
Wednesday, March 28, 2007 - 12:00 pm

I’d like to begin this week’s column by pointing out that while I enjoy a certain level of heat in my food, I’m not a chilehead, not a real one anyway. A roasted habanero is delicious in its place, and I enjoy the more emphatic aspects of Thai cooking, but I’m not fond of the kind of extreme sauces whose labels brag about the level of harm the contents may wreak on its fans’ gastro­intestinal systems, and I’ve never thrown a red savina chile into a stir-fry just for fun. The idea of Pure Cap, a concentrated extract of capsaicin, the chemical that makes chiles hot, is frightening. I have fallen — once — for the gag of eating a chip loaded with a quarter bottle of Dave’s Insanity Sauce, and I am here to report that it hurt, a lot. I don’t know about you, but I am persuaded that a condiment powerful enough to temporarily blind its consumers is probably a condiment one should avoid.

Click here to read the rest of this awesome review!

The contact info:

Orochon Ramen
123 S. Onizuka St., No. 303 (Weller Court),
Little Tokyo
(213) 617-1766
www.orochonramen.com.

Open daily, 11:30 a.m.-10:15 p.m. MasterCard and Visa accepted, minimum $20. Beer and sake. Takeout. Lunch or dinner for two, food only, $13-$20. Recommended dish: ramen.

We are close enough to make an extended road trip to this place, but there’s a great online review of Mexi-Casa in Pittsburgh, PA which describes itself as the least authentic Mexican restaurant in town. A restaurant emboldened enough to make that sorta statement is probably pretty good despite its self-deprecation. One thing that got our attention was this remark made by the article’s author:

The interior of Mexi-Casa is pretty standard — adobe-orange paint and Mexi-kitsch laid thick on the walls. But one outstanding idea sets it apart — the exhaustively stocked hot sauce bar. It has every hot sauce you can imagine, from tried-and-true Tabasco to stuff that probably tastes like oven-roasted napalm.

Oven-roasted napalm? We’ve tasted more than a few sauces that fit that description, so we know what he meant by that. We haven’t seen a good hot sauce bar in quite a while…probably since visiting the Starboard Restaurant in Rehoboth Beach, DE to see Chip’s wall o’ sauces. The idea is positively fascinating to say the least.

Oh, and from the hot sauce bar, we can recommend Cheech’s Chipotle, Meredith’s XXXTra and something called “A** in the Tub.”

Here’s where we differ from the author. Ass in the Tub is a run-of-the-mill extract sauce, and not even one with all that good of a taste to it. Cheech’s Chipotle is also rather ordinary as far as chipotle sauces go. We think that the Meredith XXXtra mentioned is probably really Melinda’s.

Anyhow, here is the restaurant’s contact info:

Mexi-Casa
Hours: 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Mon.-Sat

Address: 3001 W. Liberty Ave., Dormont

Phone: 412-571-9001

So, go have a burrito and let ‘em know we sent ya!!

There’s a plethora of restaurants here in town, and many of them feature all-too-familiar themes. You have your Italian eateries, your burger joints, pizza parlors, ubiquitous Chinese buffets, and even the taquerias and other Mexican eateries. When we came across a review for the Tropical Bistro, our interest was piqued if only because it was different. It’s rare, if ever, that we’ve been to a Tiki bar and even rarer that we’ve had a chance to try food with a Polynesian flare to it. If you add the fact that there was some hot & spicy entree items, then it was a no-brainer that the Joe & Linda braintrust would be there to give it a try.

To get a little intro about this restaurant, here’s their description from their website:

The Tropical Bistro is a Polynesian-themed tiki oasis tucked away in the Mill Run shopping center in Hilliard, Ohio. The restaurant was founded in 2006 by two former employees of the Kahiki, Theang Ngo and Soeng Thong. The Tropical Bistro successfully captures the spirit of the Kahiki while also creating their own unique vision of a tropical paradise. From the moment you step into the Bistro you are greeted with a friendly lei of aloha. With colorful décor, multi-leveled booths and separate rooms, the Bistro caters to people who long for that magical place to escape.

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