Armand Ortega, son of the Armand Ortega whose name dominates billboards for trading posts along Interstate 40 in New Mexico and Arizona, has opened a new restaurant called Balconies on the Plaza.

Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue—the popular Victorian wedding poem fits Azur like the sea inside the Mediterranean shore.

Every food blogger, policy wonk, nutritionist, restaurant critic, farmer, grocer and concerned parent has weighed in on the government’s new graphic representation of dietary guidelines. One end of the spectrum is crying foul—saying the whole thing is food-industry propaganda—and the other end is congratulating the United States Department of Agriculture on its progressive leap forward.

After spending last week describing how the term “supper club” is code for an unsanctioned restaurant, I now am forced to present a completely legitimate and on-the-level supper club.

Supper club is the polite term for an unsanctioned, unlicensed, irregular underground restaurant, the kind of thing OCD food inspectors have nightmares about, and food and drink aficionados reserve for wet dreams. These days, queuing off the technological trend, such things are often more brief and less organized; the typical term is “pop-up” restaurant. Some regular businesses have capitalized on the trend by changing up the décor and menu with certain degrees of extremism and frequency, but the term generally implies a fleeting, momentary, had-to-be-there presence. It’s the food version of hacking or culture jamming: Come out of nowhere, serve up some choice material and vanish just as quickly as you appeared.

Silver Coyote is the name of the first product unveiled by Santa Fe’s first official distillery, Santa Fe Spirits. It’s a single-malt white whiskey, meaning it’s made with a single grain—in this case, barley—and it’s bottled straight out of the distillery without aging or coloring. Instead of the oak and caramel that most people associate with whiskey, it’s a pure white liquor with a relatively unsubtle flavor, closer to tequila than bourbon.

Though I’m not into most sports, I am addicted to Top Chef—mostly because it’s basically a blood sport, but with delicate sauces. So when I heard that Luminaria—the restaurant that chef Matt Ostrander commands at the Inn and Spa at Loretto—was hosting a wine dinner with six different chefs squaring off in one meal, I signed up for eating (and drinking) duties. Who would stand victorious at the end of the night?

Standing on Grand Avenue near Lake Merritt in Oakland, Calif., a couple of weeks ago, I was hit by a wave of both personal and cultural nostalgia. The personal came from having lived in the neighborhood a couple of decades ago—when young, naive, self-indulgent white boys were a rare commodity in the area. The cultural came from the sensual smoke wafting from new restaurants at the vanguard of the Bay Area’s wood-fired cooking renaissance.

Let’s face it: The only reason to order a chicken-fried steak is pure guilty pleasure. Some people prefer to use the more wholesome-sounding synonym of “comfort food,” but it is what it is—in this case, beaten, battered, fried and coupled with creamy mashed potatoes and rich, fatty gravy—no matter what you call it.

On a clear, beautiful spring evening, I cruelly descended on Max’s with a barbarian horde of food writers, chefs and service professionals. It was a mean and unruly crowd, unfit for public display, and a walking headache for any restaurant’s staff and chef. But partners Maria Renteria and Mark Connell (who also wears the chef’s hat) fielded the gruff invasion without blinking.