Author: Ann Bauer

  • A Bad Movie and a Fine Hungarian Wine

    Here’s how we end up at Gusto Cafe & Wine Bar in Hopkins: It’s Saturday evening and we have nothing to do because the party we thought we were attending actually is next week (someone — that would be me — put it on the wrong space in the calendar) and all the kids are…

  • Eating Japanese, I Think We're Eating Japanese

    And if you’re not eating Japanese yet, what exactly are you waiting for? First, there was a minor surge in the opening of small sushi and bento box places over the past year. Then, last week, in roughly the time it took for 2007 to become 2008, we went from an urban core with shamefully…

  • January: Days of Emergen-C and Ice

    Let’s face it. The Days of Wine and Roses are past. This is January, month of frigid temperatures and atonement. And all I have to say is, if you overindulged in December. . . .well, join the club. I’m not a glutton by nature. I don’t typically stuff myself; I’ve been drunk maybe twice in…

  • Looking Back on 2007

    Say you were offered the option to go forward or backward in a time machine. Which would you choose? If science fiction is any indication, most people would leap ahead to find out what the world will be like at some future time. Me? I’d go back: to the Last Supper, to Ludwig Beethoven’s Vienna,…

  • Zimmern's Complaint

    Here’s what happened. Mitch Omer — one of my dearest friends in this world — showed up at my house on Thanksgiving with a red-lined version of Andrew Zimmern’s December column, livid about some of the things it contained. Mitch railed. I defended Andrew on many points. We got into a bit of a tiff,…

  • Can You Eat Your Way to Better Sex?

    So. I was at the Jewish Community Center on Christmas Day — along with what appeared to be every other fitness-minded non-Christian in the western metro — on the elliptical trainer, reading Self magazine, when I ran across an article entitled The Great Sex Diet. And out of a deep sense of professional responsibility, I…