If you go to Fat Anne’s Bakery & Bistro’s new spot on Main Street in Ferndale (939 Main St.), get the fried chicken. Then tell me what it’s like because the fryer was down on the day I visited, though I hear it’s being remedied. It happens! But there is little that can stop my […]
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Down at the Docks
Sometimes I walk from the Journal offices down F Street to the plaza, with its wind-whipped flags, and look across the water as the fishing boats come into the bay as they have for lifetimes, bringing their haul back from the unkowable depths and think, “Shouldn’t we have, like, a million places for fish and […]
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Cocina on the Green
The incongruity of a Mexican restaurant on the grounds of a golf course lessens as you sit in a snug window booth at Cocina Mariposa (4750 Fairway Drive, Eureka), which you enter via the pro shop, and watch the sunset. On a recent rainy evening, when a lone golfer was whacking balls into the lake […]
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To Fill the Happy Hours
If you’ve had the good sense to make your way to Five Eleven (511 Second St., Eureka) for its Tuesday through Saturday happy hour starting at 5 p.m., I sincerely hope you ate. The duck fat French fries — served in a steel cup with a triumvirate of ketchup, green goddess dressing and Sriracha aioli […]
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Greek Pizza from the Irish Place
The pizza restaurant that once was Eureka’s Big Louie’s, then Marcelli’s, has been repainted an eye-popping green and reopened as Shenanigans (1604 Fourth St.). Given its name and pedigree (owner Kelly Erben runs Gallagher’s Irish Pub), you wouldn’t be crazy for thinking this is an Irish bar, but it’s a pizza joint. Listen, the Romans […]
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Coastal Comforts at Los Sinaloenses
Maybe you’ve sat in the maroon vinyl booth seats at 1134 Fifth St. in Eureka before — when it was a Mexican restaurant, then a barbecue joint, then another Mexican place. But for the last month, it’s been Los Sinaloenses. It’s named for the people of the coastal region of Mexico just inside the Gulf […]
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A Boozy Flavortown Meat Party
For the second year in a row, I ventured beneath the grandstands at the Ferndale Fairgrounds to check in at the “Judges Only” bar. Eighteen of us — mostly strangers who all clearly love meat — gathered to judge Guy Fieri’s sixth annual Surf and Turf BBQ Competition at the Humboldt County Fair. Lined up […]
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Pizza by the Sea
When eating in Trinidad, it’s a totally understandable knee-jerk impulse to veer toward fish and chips, clam chowder or crab anything. It’s the seaside atmosphere. But are you overlooking the pizza? In the shadow of its older sibling the Lighthouse Grill and on the former site of the Bergeron Winery tasting room, Headies Pizza and […]
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Meatless at the Barbecue Place
Most of the vegetarians at Shamus T Bones (1911 Truesdale St., Eureka) are on the walls — the taxidermied heads of deer, elk and buffalo looming in all directions. And yet the much-discussed Beyond Beef burger ($13.99 with a side) has landed here with its “bleeding” patty of coconut oil, proteins from soy, potato and […]
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Lady’s Choice
The grill at The Patron Kitchen (70 B Wildwood Ave., Rio Dell) can’t be more than 3 by 4 feet but the output, most of which winds up on a bolillo roll, is impressive. Two women with their hair in matching glossy black topknots, lay out meats, tortillas and chopped peppers in separate quadrants on […]
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All the Pretty Oysters
The drama. From the local beer debacle to the math error in a bacteria count that led health officials to temporarily close Humboldt Bay’s oyster fisheries two days before the festival, the lead-up to the 2019 Arcata Bay Oyster Festival was a lot. Head Oystress Sydney Morrone said she hadn’t heard of any oysters actually dumped […]
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Chinese Comfort Food
The “Secret Menu” at Szechuan Garden (753 18th St., Arcata) might be more accurately titled the Student Menu. Owner Nina Zhao, a native of Shenyang in Northern China who took over the place five years ago, added the page and a half list because so many Chinese and Chinese American students from Humboldt State University […]