One of my favorite pizza spots growing up was Pizza Town USA in Elmwood Park, N.J., near an early location of my family’s Northern New Jersey retail appliance empire. It was a regular lunch spot back when I was delivering refrigerators and stoves during sweltering summers in high school and my first couple years of…

In my travels, I have chomped on crispy dead crickets atop a salad like they’re croutons and sawed through a rubbery layer of skin and fat to get to the meat of a grilled guinea pig. But as adventurous an eater as I fancy myself to be, I can be a predictable creature of habit when it comes to Italian restaurants. If…

I’m reaching way back to the earliest memories of my youth, to the first pasta accompaniment I ever knew and loved: Sunday sauce. Back then that’s not what we called it, at least in my family. It was just sauce. My immediate family wasn’t on the “gravy” train—which was odd because that’s what my maternal grandmother…

Welcome to Cheese Week, The Takeout’s weeklong praise of cheeses.

Next time you see pasta all’Amatriciana (more often than not, it’s bucatini all’Amatriciana) on a menu, don’t order it. I’m serious. Kind of. You’re better off making it yourself so you can see that it includes its most important ingredient.

Thus begins my open letter to a disturbing number of pizza joints and red-sauce Italian-American restaurants: If your menu says “baked ziti,” the dish had better be baked ziti. Eight out of 10 times that I order it (in my un-scientific analysis), your server delivers me a plate of baked penne. Now, I know what you’re…

The first time I attempted to make cacio e pepe, I thought it had to be just about the easiest pasta dish to make, outside of the un-sauced spaghetti and butter that young kids without functioning taste buds demand. I mean, most of its ingredients are in its name: cacio is “cheese” in a number of Italian dialects and…

If you’re like me (from New Jersey with a last name ending in a vowel), you very likely grew up eating “pasta fazool,” long before we found out that it’s actually “pasta fagioli”—technically pasta e fagioli or “pasta and beans.” Neapolitans, who have their own group of dialects, call it “fasule,” hence the…

I may call the Washington, D.C. region home these days, but I spent the first 93 percent of my existence in northern New Jersey, and will always identify as a proud son of the Garden State. That’s why I retroactively berate my younger self for voluntarily abstaining from what is indisputably North Jersey’s greatest…

If there’s ever been a truly global spirit, it’s rum. No single country, island, or region can truly claim to “own” rum, as any part of the world that grows or processes sugar cane very likely has a centuries-long history of distilling the stuff. Its ubiquity, perhaps, has made it one of the most taken-for-granted…

Welcome to Gateways To Drinkery, where The Takeout offers an entry-level course on our favorite libations, and some suggestions on where to start drinking them.

Welcome to Gateways To Drinkery, where The Takeout offers an entry-level course on our favorite libations, and some suggestions on where to start drinking them.