On Nov. 21, just five days ahead of Thanksgiving, for which Plaza Grill already had 300 confirmed holiday dinner orders and another 200 awaiting confirmation, owner Bill Chino picked up the phone and started calling customers to cancel. A front-of-house employee had just tested positive for COVID-19. The call list was daunting, he says, “but […]
On the Table
Posted inEat + Drink
Farm to School
The iconic image of a shiny, red apple is symbolic of “school” but getting an apple, or any other food, into the hands of a student is a complicated process involving rule compliance and paperwork. It’s even more of an ask that the food be local. But Humboldt is making inroads in bringing local food […]
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Apples and Apples
Many of us wait expectantly for Humboldt’s annual abundance of apples with a plan for baking, canning, pressing or distributing them. I have encountered a rather remarkable number of people, however, who would like to do something with the apples growing on their properties but don’t know what. Apples can be used to make so […]
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Thanksgiving Break
If you’ve been wringing your hands, agonizing over Thanksgiving dinner, I hereby free you. In the name of safety, sanity and gratitude for the community with which we’re blessed, I release you from piling in a car, watching your life inch by in traffic and eating a very big dinner very early in the day […]
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Wine Tasting with Friends, from a Distance
Ah, Monday night, the wine tasting night we’ve looked forward to since, well, since the previous Monday night. After all these years, we still can’t wait for our special evening. Normal times would see us arriving at the venue of the evening with smoke from the grill filling the air and sounds of the game […]
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Pouring in a Pandemic
Even in Humboldt County’s enviable seat in the yellow/minimal risk zone of California COVID-19 safety tiers, reopening bars doesn’t mean we’re back to body shots and plaza crawls. (Maybe we shouldn’t bring back body shots.) Some of the things we miss about bars — the crowd, shouting over the music, huddling together over drinks — […]
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Nerds and Curds
If you’ve already burned through your standing queue of true-crime podcasts, you might consider one that’s both lighter and heavier: Cheese the Day. In its most recent episode “Cheese Crimes,” the sixth produced by the North Coast Co-op, hosts Thomas Wehland and Veronica Rudolph, the respective heads of the Eureka and Arcata stores’ cheese departments, […]
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Election Cake
In the highly charged political culture of the day, hardly a word has been left untagged with electoral rhetoric. Take “patriotic”: the darling of the conservative minority, coopting the red, white and blue, and displays of affection for our incredible yet terribly flawed nation. On the other hand, progressives have claimed “science,” once a benchmark […]
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Frankie Goes it Alone
On Saturday, Frankie Baker turned on the lights at Frankie’s NY Bagels tucked behind the Turf Club at Redwood Acres Fairgrounds at 2 a.m. He came in an hour earlier than usual to manage the extra eight dozen bagels on pre-order. He worked in solitude for six hours — boiling and baking 40 dozen with […]
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Falling For Gooseberries
When my friend Debbi told me she was busy making gooseberry jam one evening, I had a vivid image of goose-shaped berries dangling on a vine. Although I still haven’t seen the actual plant, I have been enjoying the cape gooseberries from the farmers market. I learned about their health benefits, such as possibly helping […]
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Comfort Food When There is No Comfort
I made too much Japanese curry last weekend. I chopped the onions, carrots, mushrooms and potatoes while talking on the phone with a friend who is struggling with whether to fly across the country to visit her ailing father. She was calculating the risk of traveling, how she’d manage quarantining before going near her parents, […]
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Starting Fresh
A plexiglass barrier suspended from hooks in the ceiling sways just a little as Keaka Roberts-Fonoti zips between the register and the kitchen. A large pass-through window frames her and husband Samasoni Fonoti side by side at the flat-top grill as she gets a takeout box of loco moco ready for the pair of sunny-side […]