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! Salma

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Since I’m about to sublet my apartment until next summer, I’ve been doing a ruthless decluttering of my apartment, 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 about myself, like my tendency to collect “Best Of NYC” restaurant issues—annual tomes put out by New York Magazine, Time Out NY (my alma mater), and various other publications. 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?