What is Salmaland? It’s a place where you can find quick, painless answers to the eternal question, “Where should I eat?” To the left, you’ll find my current short-lists of Where to Eat in NYC, by neighborhood; or use the search tool to the right to look up a cuisine or restaurant. You’ll find a Where to Drink list on the left too. And down the middle, just below, are reports on my latest comings and goings. My recent Beirut adventures are here. Find me on Twitter (@salmaland). And for more about Salmaland, click on the “read more” link right here…

read more Welcome to Salmaland »

If you’ve visited Salmaland before or followed me on Twitter, you’ve seen me drop hints about my upcoming book, a memoir of the year I spent in Beirut trying to come home again. Now I can do more than hint about it: I’m thrilled to announce that Jasmine and Fire: A Bittersweet Year in Beirut, comes out this May from Broadway Books/Random House—and it’s ready to preorder now. Please preorder it via Amazon, Kindle, BN.com, Nook, IndieBound.org, and iBookstore and big thanks in advance for all your support!! More soon, Salma

Detail from ex-mural on Houston St. by Brazilian artists Os Gemeos

Just a quick note to say hi and happy new year to all readers, friends, and anyone stumbling onto Salmaland for the first time. It’s been quite a year–Beirut, New York, a book deadline–and I hope yours has been as eventful, and unexpected (in good ways), and memorable, and thrilling, and eccentric–pick your adjective.

As I’ve been buried in finishing up my memoir, Jasmine and Fire, over the past few months, I’ve managed to surface for a few minutes here and there to make little updates to the restaurant and bar lists on Salmaland. But mostly I’ve been caught up in nonstop work and looking a lot like the gal in the painting to the right. Now that I’m just about done getting the book into production and ready for a summer 2012 launch, I’ll be making lots more new additions to Salmaland in the coming weeks and months, so watch this space. In the meantime, cheers to a wild 2011, and all good wishes for a fantastic 2012. Bawseh! (“kiss” in Arabic) — Salma

Getting pangs of homesickness for Texas—been too long since I’ve been back. Just got done spending the whole past year in Beirut (and this summer buried in my laptop) finishing up a book about my search for home. So, where is home, ultimately? Stay tuned… the book will be published by Broadway Books/Random House in summer 2012. In the meantime, I’m going back to one of my former homes—Texas, that is—the second weekend in October to teach a writing class for Gemini Ink, a non-profit literary and arts organization. On Friday, October 7, I’ll do a reading from my manuscript, and Saturday, October, 8 I’ll teach a small-group writing class themed around the topic “Where is Home?” If you’ll be anywhere near San Antonio, join me! Sign up here.

That's yours truly in Byblos, Lebanon, from a pic in the ForbesLife essay.

For anyone who has asked, “How’s your year in Beirut going?”….here’s the beginning of an answer: An essay I wrote for ForbesLife about my experience in Beirut so far just came out in the May 2011 issue. The rest will be revealed when my book comes out….

Please check out the sidebar on page 2 of the story too, for a shortlist of some excellent books for anyone wanting to read more history, politics, literature, and musings about life in this crazy city, past and present (and a little Salmaland plug too). As always, thanks for reading!

Glamour magazine’s new cookbook, 100 Recipes Every Woman Should Know, plugs Salmaland, and includes some recipes from yours truly. Check it out—the cookbook is just now hitting bookstores. Some months ago I was neck-deep in helping produce the cookbook, when Glamour hired me to co-write the book and work with a small crew of staff editors and writers to make it all happen. Was lots of fun, lots of hard work, and a fantastic team at Glamour. (Btw in case you were wondering why there was radio silence from me for a tiny stretch, that’s why.)

The recipes were compiled from many sources, including the Glamour recipe archives, plus contributions from the team of cookbook writers and editors, along with our  food-obsessed friends around the U.S. and the world. Some of my favorites are the Indian-style potatoes (p.31), the spicy Michelada beer cocktails (p.72), the Tex-Mex migas (p.28), the classic Nicoise salade (p. 94), the awesomely buttery rib-eye (p. 105), the eggplant parmesan (p. 184), the glazed nuts (p.55), and the affogato sundae (p. 235), and many more. We tested the recipes like crazy for months on end, so you can pull them off with ease and success, even if you’re not the most frequent cook in the world. Enjoy!

If I had to make a list of desert-island foods, chicken-fried steak would be way up there. Since it’s incredibly hard to find great chicken-fried steak outside Texas (and a few choice places in the South), I’m not sure how I’d ever find a decent chicken-fried steak on a desert island. But I’ll worry about that when the time comes. For now, check out this TravelandLeisure.com article, where I talk about my comfort food, including…yes, chicken-fried steak.

For restaurant tips, Salmaland updates, and miscellaneous food/drink musings, follow me at… @salmaland

In case I haven’t mentioned it here before (I guess I have, once or twice), I’m in Beirut at the moment working on a book. Throughout the coming months, I’ll also be blogging about my Beirut food adventures here on Salmaland: Click the BEIRUT 2010-2011 link at the top of this page to see what I’m eating and drinking around the city and in villages all over Lebanon. Now that we have things like Video Skype (the ultimate retro-futurist fantasy finally realized), you’d think there would be a way to pass the smoky babaghanoush, the crunchy fried fish drizzled with lemon, the minty fattoush salad, and the chargrilled, garlicky chicken kababs directly through the computer screen straight to you. Alas, not yet; in a couple of years maybe. In the meantime, I’ll do my best to simulate that killer app of the future. Sah’tain! (“Bon Appetit,” in Lebanese Arabic.)

R.I.P. Beppe

Since I’m about to sublet my apartment until next summer, I’ve been doing a ruthless decluttering, throwing out pretty much everything or giving it away. Tossing things out, ripping them up, hurling them into trash bins: It’s fantastic therapy. Highly recommended. As I wade through closetfuls of junk, I’ve been making a few observations, like my tendency to collect Best-of-NYC restaurant issues—annual tomes put out by New York Magazine, Time Out NY (my alma mater), et al. I rarely refer back to the issues, but somehow they still pile up year after year.

New York Mag’s Where to Eat 2004 issue caught my eye, and I scanned the restaurant Hot List from that year. Whoa—dozens of the so-called “Hot List” restaurants from ’04 don’t even exist anymore. Felt like I was walking through a graveyard. I counted up the corpses: 40 restaurants on that Hot List—that’s more than a third of the 115 places listed—are now closed. Dead, gone. What does this all mean? read more NYC: Best or Worst Restaurant Town? »

Too fried from the August-in-June heat to figure out what you want to do this weekend? Hit the NYC Food Film Festival, where all you have to do is show up, lounge around, watch short films about food, then eat the stuff on screen. I went to one of the events last night, Brad Farmerie’s Southeast Asian Street Food Market at Astor Center, where chefs from Double Crown (Farmerie and his staff), Betel, and Kampuchea served up things like beef tendon balls, dessert burritos (filled with cantaloupe ice cream), and squid chips, inspired by the food in various short films that were screening at the same time. Apparently pig’s blood popsicles were also in attendance but I got there too late (dammit). There were also loads of snacks that didn’t make cameos in the films, like a fantastic Thai beef salad and a mini banh mi.

I couldn’t help wondering if a couple of the less-impressive short films were cooked up specifically for this festival — so that local NYC chefs could then recreate what’s on screen—but whatever. I was too busy eating and craning my neck to see the screen to get much quality time with all the films themselves (I did like one I did see, called “Night Market Taipei”). Taller guys standing in front of me were laughing throughout a bunch of the films, so I have a feeling I missed out. But I kept busy scurrying around, drinking Tiger Beer and Riesling, and making sure I tried all the luscious snacks —before, er, dinner at Kenmare.

Tonight and tomorrow’s events are sold out, but the ones on Sunday aren’t: On Sunday at noon at the Tobacco Warehouse in Brooklyn, there’s “It’s Grits,” a short 1978 film about grits by director Stan Woodward, followed by a grits cookoff by 30 NYC chefs—and more grits than you’d possibly ever want to eat. Sunday night at 6pm, same place, it’s the Brooklyn Burger and Beer Party, with a screening of a film called “Beer Wars” with an all-you-can-eat burger and beer scenario…

Salumé is one of those ultra-boxy, shiny, clean-lined spaces that look suspiciously sleek at first—too sleek to be turning out soulful Italian sandwiches, not to mention sandwiches you’ll want to pay double-digits for. What finally got me inside, a few weeks after the place opened on West Broadway near Grand Street earlier this summer, was the owners’ mission to redefine panini for an audience trained to believe “panini” means “pressed sandwich,” as opposed to “sandwich.” So they don’t press the sandwiches here, because as owner Michele Colombo (his wife Alessandra designed the space) says on the website: “Pressing panini dries out—and sometimes burns—the ingredients, which compromises their uniquely delicate flavor, texture and taste.” True that.

Salume’s menu lists about 25 sandwiches. Racked with indecision, I tried to order the combo of four mini-sandwiches, “for an Italian tasting journey,” which turns out they don’t do anymore. Too bad. Finally settled on the Courmayeur ($11.50) : prosciutto cotto, fontina, arugula, tartar sauce on slightly toasted ciabatta. On first glance: too small a sandwich, too high a price. On first bite: Exceptional ingredients, especially the fresh arugula and tangy tartar sauce and supple prosciutto (bonus is that the “cotto,” i.e. cooked, prosciutto is less stringy and presents fewer stuck-in-teeth issues than the “crudo” kind). There’s even too much prosciutto in the sandwich. Salume aims for a 2:1 topping-to-bread ratio, which is admirable but potentially in need of a tweak. And speaking of ratios, the bread has a deeply satisfying play of moistness-to-crunch —and frankly the whole sandwich, minus maybe a smidge of ham, was highly tasty (“very good,” to use a favorite Sifton-ism). Trouble is the price.

read more Soho: On Italian Sandwiches and Non-Italian Shoes »