When I tell people I review restaurants for a living, they reply, "You have the best job ever." Perhaps, but some folks have it even better: the friends and family who come with me to dinner. They reap the benefits of gluttony with no work required later. Yet my vegetarian buddies get the shaft o...

Stories vary, but nearly everyone agrees that the French dip was invented in Los Angeles around 1918. It coincided with a national craze for crusty French bread. Some say it started when a toothless old man wandered into a streetcar-terminal café and, seeing the baguette that the brisket s...

It's not every day you see a 4,000-pound oven flying three stories above Boerum Hill. But that's how Luca Arrigoni had to install the stove at Sottocasa, his new Brooklyn pizzeria.

The wood-fired beast had to be crane-...

In the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, the emperor stuck it to the czar. Japan tightened its grip on the Korean peninsula, and Korean refugees flooded Primorsky, the Russian maritime province to the north. Eventually, some transmigrated to far-off Uzbekistan and obtained work in the vast cot...