Author Archives: Jake Conway

Basil Restaurant opened two weeks ago at 142 Howe St., with little fanfare — and little to recommend it. The noodle house, which took over the space once occupied by the pan-Asian clunker East Melange, hardly offers anything new to students searching for cheap and quick eats. The menu is essentially the same as Ivy »

Even when our economy is malnourished, there are those who want to make sure everyone is fully fed. Last night at Taste of the Nation New Haven, nearly 400 people gathered at the Omni Hotel for a huge culinary gala to raise money to end childhood hunger. Sponsored by Share Our Strength, a national organization »

Like any fast-food hamburger joint, Five Guys Burgers and Fries serves up greasy roadside fare at cheap prices. But what separates Five Guys from the rest is that their burgers maintain a semblance of homemade taste, thankfully devoid of the highly processed, standardized flavor of the Big Mac or the Whopper. In fact, the whole »

Willoughby’s on York Willoughby’s trademark is “Serious coffee.” No prefatory “we know,” or “we love,” just: “Serious coffee.” Walk up to their coffee boutique on 258 Church St. during the morning rush and you will understand. First, you hustle into the line, which funnels into the store like a conveyor belt. Once inside, an aggressive »

The problem with Bru is as simple as its chichi, postmodern name. The coffee shop on 141 Orange St., formerly Koffee on Orange (before that, Moka), is another fledgling split-away from the now almost defunct New Haven coffee empire spelling its shops’ names with that annoyingly egregious “K.” Not to be one-upped by its predecessor, »

One look at the luscious title script of Erin McCarley’s “Love, Save the Empty,” flowing freely on a sepia self-portrait on the album cover, and it is easy to write off the Texas singer-songwriter’s debut as another jaunt into a hackneyed fairyland of escapist romance. Or maybe a Britney-fied pop brothel. But with the voice »

The only thing reminiscent of a “Circus” in Britney’s sixth studio album is her low, husky, almost lion-like growl. Unless your vision of a circus includes lascivious Britney strutting her “six-inch heels” and scanty “lace and leather” garb intoning: “all eyes on me / in the center of the ring.” In that case, this is »

I have been to the Great Wall twice, but I always avoid Badaling. Badaling is its most visited section, an overly renovated expanse of Disney-theme-park-style stone signal towers and perfectly rectangular steps and railings, replacing real disintegrating ruins, where foreign dignitaries and tourists giddily frolic and, with their backs to the stretches of walls and »

Buffalo Wild Wings Grill & Bar is not for the meek. It is for the virile, the macho, the utterly heterosexual masculine. Everything about it screams manliness. It reaches levels of testosterone even Jason Giambi could not handle. Buffalo Wild Wings is a chain of sports bar and grills started by — no surprises here »

Yale Food From the Earth, a student-run activist group, wants to bring people together to discuss the critical relationship between agriculture and social justice — over good food. Today on Cross Campus from 12–2 p.m., the group is sponsoring an eat-in, which takes its name from the sit-in, to do just that. The group hopes »

In solitary confinement in Tilanqiao Prison, Lin Zhao wrote: “I’d rather die free / than a slave in prison be.” What makes such harrowing words all the more disturbing is that they were marked on the cell walls in her own blood. She wrote tens of thousands of vicious letters and poems condemning Communist dictatorship, »

The name of the Italian dish, saltimbocca — a thin cut of meat dredged in flour, layered with sage and ham or bacon and then shallow-fried — roughly translates to “jump in the mouth.” Almost all of the dishes at L’Orcio, an upscale Italian eatery at 806 State St., live up to the audacious expectations »