And walking among the tables of wares at Grandma’s Cookie Contest at Independence Village in Winston-Salem — five of them, larded down with chocolate-chip goodness, roasted-nut crannies, shavedcoconut nests, stacked on doilies, placed in muffin...

Eighteen dishes, six chefs, four featured ingredients and three nights all add up to one incredible first week of Fire in the Triad. All of that is simply a recipe for local culinary drama complete with a live audience and a soundtrack of forks clanging against plates in enjoyment and fun.

We’ve been hesitant to write about the mercadito — hidden back from the road across from our other favorites Villa del Mar and Banh Mi Saigon — because the chance of getting a table is already a gamble. Lucky for you, I can’t keep secrets about food. If for some reason the chicken torta.

Barring an act of Congress, Valley Meat Company in Roswell, NM will soon become the first horse slaughterhouse in the US since 2007, when the nation’s last equine abattoir closed its doors. For the time being, the resulting meat will be exported.

With the approach of the 100 th anniversary of the unification of Winston and Salem into one big, hyphenated metropolis, I thought it would be fitting to take a walk into the city’s past by having lunch the way downtown denizens have been doing it for decades.

Let’s face it: The Triad culinary scene is a little bit behind the curve. That’s not to say that there aren’t a lot of wonderful chefs doing amazing things around here — there are — but the trends are a bit slow in coming to this area.

Yum Yum’s definitely serves hot dogs — they have for generations on and around Spring Garden Street. But the dogs, which come either all the way with chili, slaw, onions and mustard or with any variation on those toppings, are as simple as they get, boiled and then placed in simple white buns.

On an unseasonably hot spring day, downtown Winston-Salem’s 4th Street bustles at the lunch hour with foot traffic from the office buildings, cars searching for parking spots and RiverRun Film Festival volunteers wheeling carts of sodas and snacks to the various venues in the district.

I’m fascinated by the different ways people handle what we consider to be “hidden gems.” Upon making a discovery, I think our primary nature is to share it, but whether we’d like to admit it or not we all value the feeling of exclusivity on some level.

I’ve always been amazed at the reliability of comfort food to live up to its billing. In times of sickness or sadness, a homestyle meal never fails to make me feel better. But oftentimes, I feel perfectly fine and just crave some comfort food to help maintain that feeling.

On March 18, Greensboro’s Deep Roots Market concluded business at the Spring Garden Street location it had operated from since 1990. The store’s dormancy lasted just a day, however, as it impressively held the opening of its new home on North Eugene Street on March 20, becoming downtown Greensboro’s only grocery store in the process.

Most of downtown Greensboro’s food milieu lands somewhere between fine dining and comfort. The recent addition of the Worx, with that exact mixture, presents a quandary: Do the denizens of Greensboro need another restaurant and bar if it will only serve the same purpose as Natty Greene’s or Gray’s Tavern?.

As a huge fan of “The Sopranos,” I’ve long idealized the concept of an authentic Italian meat market. On that show, the pork store served as a clubhouse of sorts for Tony’s crew, but also as the source of the Soprano household’s cold cuts. The business Tony conducted there put food on his family’s table, both figuratively and literally.

New York Pizza may be the city’s oldest non-chain pizza place, but it is also a nightspot, and if you grew up here it may be the place you had your first drink. The lively barroom at the back of NYP has seen live music shows and a crowd built on UNCG alumni and neighborhood folks, and seasoned drinkers, with some overlap there.

We arrived towards the tail end of lunch hour on a rainy Friday, the only customers in the place. “The weather,” the barman explained before leading us to a table in the corner. Normally an empty dining room at lunchtime is a bad sign, but I understand what cowards people can be in the face of a little freezing rain.

Dinner on Valentine’s Day can be a frustrating exercise, what with the reservations, the special menus, the harried servers and inexperienced patrons. It took me more than a decade of marriage to realize that lunch was the way to go on days like this, with one caveat: You’ve got to go first-class.

Ham Nolan had been eating Ronnie’s country ham his whole life, and he couldn’t bear the thought of losing the neighborhood staple.

I look forward to our Best of the Triad Reader’s Poll every year because it rewards culinary excellence in all its forms.

And in a lot of ways, it was. This was back in 2003. Hillman had just opened the place, what I considered at the time to be one of the only outposts of true New York-style pizza in the Triad. I was working for a different paper, in a very different role.

Down in the Crescent City, the barricades have gone up along the parade routes; the hotels, bars and restaurants prepare for an influx of humans so great it can only be estimated by measuring the garbage they generate.