Lastest Stories by Colman Andrews

It’s no secret that the restaurant business has been particularly hard hit by the pandemic. Restaurants thrive on social interaction and dining room capacity limits and the on-again-off-again bans...
An earworm is a song or song fragment that gets stuck in your head, on endless repeat, for a day or a week or more. According to the experts, about 90 percent of people experience one at least once a...
French fries aren’t French, Swiss steak isn’t Swiss, and Mongolian barbecue isn’t Mongolian — or, for that matter, barbecue.  These are just three examples of foods with misleading names....
Is it almost time for us to start going to restaurants again — sitting indoors like we used to, not huddled, bundled up, inside plastic huts on the sidewalk as diners in the colder regions of the...
“There’s one thing that’s really great about waking up early,” the comedian Kathy Griffin apparently once said, “and it’s not jogging or greeting the day — it’s just that that’s...
Our ideal breakfast in this country consists of scrambled eggs, crispy bacon, toast, and coffee with milk. At least that’s according to research collected by the international data and analytics...
More than 17 million Americans can claim Italian descent. The majority of them have origins in southern Italy, and they settled mostly in the Northeast, California, Florida, Louisiana, Ohio, and...
Psoriasis and eczema are both common skin conditions. Eczema affects about 31.6 million people in the United States, while as many as 7.5 million suffer from psoriasis. Both cause red, itchy skin,...
Spring is still almost two months away and the country is still in the midst of the long-predicted winter surge in COVID-19 infections. The severity of restrictions imposed on businesses —...
The abundance of wine produced around the world today is truly overwhelming. It’s made in every U.S. state (yes, even in Alaska and Hawaii) and in more than 75 countries around the world. There are...
As one of the industries that has been particularly hard hit by the pandemic, the restaurant trade is understandably anxious to return to business as usual as soon as possible. Unfortunately, studies...
American cooking is as diverse as America itself. Scores and scores of different nationalities, over recent centuries, have populated our country and enriched it with their cultures, languages,...
When it comes to beer, there’s nothing wrong with everyday thirst-quenching lager, readily available, easy to quaff, and usually inexpensive. Lovers of craft beer, though, look for something more...
English is an impressive language. It boasts a functional vocabulary of about 200,000 words (French and Spanish commonly use only about half that number each), and adds thousands more words each year...
Food historians generally agree that the first Chinese restaurant in America was Canton, opened in 1849 in San Francisco. A second Chinese place, Macao and Woosung Restaurant, appeared later that...