Catching Up in March

I am under the wire for my Catching up in March post.  Usually there’s a common theme that emerges in the stories that I come across but March was all over the place, a bumper-car month.  There was a Cuban sandwich ‘throwdown’with Bobby Flay won by Nick Vazquez of Jersey City’s Azucar.  There was also a good New York Times review for Pilar Cuban Eatery, a new  cafe in Clinton Hill named after Hemingway’s boat that’s about bringing Miami to Brooklyn and another one for El Parador Cafe, the oldest Mexican restaurant in New York.  If you’re looking for seemingly random food rules, Leslie Freeman Riva collected a few for the Atlantic (though I still believe that hot showers after dinner are terrible for digestion).  For more straightforward market rules, the Los Angeles Times guides you through a Brazilian market in São Paulo.  Finally, there was Drug Lords vs. Chocolate: From Coca to Cacao in Peru in Times magazine.  I’d missed it in January but wanted to include it now.  As Lucien Chauvin reports:

In October 2009, chocolate produced from the cacao beans of a small agricultural cooperative deep in one of the country’s rain forests was named the most aromatic in the world by the Salon [du Chocolat in Paris]. “We used to be known for making cocaine paste, but now we are known for chocolate,” says Elena Rios, 52, secretary of the Tocache Agroindustrial Cooperative.

Looking forward to a (hopefully) smoother April, here’s the grocery store musical from Improv Everywhere to get April Fool’s day started early: