ORGAN GRIND
        Journalism, home & abroad          

We’ve come quite a distance from the virally virginal days of early March when we were still adjusting to certain grim realities I need not elaborate upon. Since then, the public’s psychological pendulum has swung, in some quarters at least, from caution and prudence to the reckless impulsiveness of ill-informed hoople-heads (e.g., the heavily armed, wannabe militia men who cowed the Michigan State Legislature last month). But most people aren’t reacting to the crisis in a ma

Gordo’s Cantina, a brand new restaurant on the eastern border of Bushwick, offers something rare for New York: skillfully executed, authentic Mexican food without a solid fine-dining price tag (dinner for two at Enrique Olivera’s Cosme can easily set you back $300), set before diners in a low key, friendly space by people possessed of similar qualities. Reyna Morales is the executive chef at Gordo’s. She is far, far from a marquis name along the lines of Chef’s Table star Oli

[Editor's note: The following six paragraphs were from the writer's original edit of this Bushwick Daily article - which were not included, sadly, in the final version. Enjoy!] First of all, the superficial nature of this, a cursory survey of a group of Bushwick restaurants that constitute a kind of Latin American “buffet,” cannot be overemphasized. It is the smooth rock skipping over the glassy surface of Lake Titicaca, the long, curved knife yielding a razor thin curl of or

Nothing fogs up the windscreen of the critical faculties like having within arm’s reach an eight-foot-tall tree (fake, but made of real wood) jutting up from the center of your table, decorated all over with small plastic bottles of Patron tequila. Even less conducive to forming a clear-eyed appraisal of a restaurant’s pluses and minuses is having a stream of un-aged agave spirit etch a path down your esophagus vis-à-vis a burnished steel luge wielded by a giggling waitress.