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Where: Nam Vietnamese Cuisine Restaurant, 2727 Fondren, 713-789-6688

What $13 gets you: A delicious, healthy, heartwarming meal – followed by a firm slap in the face

That was my experience, anyway.

I wandered into Nam not knowing what I was getting into. It’s located in a charming little mall just north of Harwin. It was after two and I arrived hungry. I knew right away that I had scored when I saw Press food critic’s Robb Walsh’s review from about three years ago framed and hanging on the wall.

I got the daily special, grilled snapper ($8.95), and since it was before three o’clock it came with choices of egg drop and chicken rice soups, spring or egg rolls and fried rice or vermicelli noodles. I wanted a Vietnamese coffee ($2.50) but decided instead to stick with water and lemon and leave a more generous tip.

Recommended? Yes, I recommend it, even if that does make me unadventurous, mainstream and white bread.

Mother's Day is this Sunday - have you made reservations for Mom?

Cru: A Wine Bar (9595 Six Pines Dr., Suite 650 in The Woodlands) is putting on a three-course brunch, with offerings including brown-butter poached sea scallops, eggs Benedict, pan-seared ahi tuna and roasted duck breast, not to mention more than 300 wines. ($27.95.)

Fleming's Steakhouse and Wine Bar's (2405 West Alabama) three-course brunch offers a choice of filet mignon benedict, crab cake benedict, bone-in ham steak, and roasted turkey crêpes ($10.95.)

Hotel ZaZa's Monarch Restaurant (5701 Main) is offering up an enormous brunch buffet in honor of Mom. ($65.)

And both The Tasting Room Uptown Park (1101-18 Uptown Park) and Max's Wine Dive (4720 Washington) are offering all moms 20 percent off all wine purchases during Sunday brunch, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

I boiled the hamburger in beer in a cast iron skillet on top of the stove, adding five pinches of salt and three squirts of mustard along the way. It was the only “loosemeats sandwich” in the hamburger book and my daughter and I wanted to try something different – different at least for people like us who’ve never been to Marshalltown, Iowa where Taylor’s Maid-Rite makes “a sloppy joe without the slop.”

Actually, put between two pieces of bread with plenty of pickles it was great. Just like a lot of the other slightly more traditional burgers look to be in this ode to that most American of meals.

For two years George Motz drove around the country, eating burgers. (His wife is a vegetarian, he delights in telling us.) He’s written up 100 of his favorites and although recipes are few – Taylor’s being one of the few places not keeping secrets and secret sauces – just reading about these places and the hamburgers they serve makes for true entertainment.

May 1st is Labor Day in Mexico. There was a big parade in downtown Matamoros and a lot of people were out in the streets. After a touring the taco stands of Plaza Allende and taking a lot of pictures, I sat down at a table at my favorite Matamoros restaurant, Los Norteños, which is located between Calle 8 and 9 near the Mercado.

Founded in 1950, Los Norteños looks like it hasn’t changed much since it opened. There’s about a dozen dark wood tables in the downstairs dining room patrolled by four mustachioed waiters in jackets and ties. The manager is a white-haired guy named Ignacio who everybody calls “Nacho.” He stands up front near the door at an old-fashioned wooden cashier stand that looks like a pulpit except for the big glass jars full of candy. There is a separate room that houses the mesquite grill where the cabritos roast, and you can see them from the street.

I ordered the riñonada portion of the cabrito, which included ribs, some tender loin meat and the kidney. First you get a bowl of bean soup and some tortilla chips. Then you get a huge stack of hot tortillas in a wicker basket, and a plate with lettuce, tomato and raw onions. Then there’s a bowl of hellishly hot pico de gallo with big hunks of raw serrano in it and another bowl of a milder cooked salsa. When you finish the soup, they bring your plate of cabrito.

As an undergraduate, I had a very serious love affair with my school’s cafeteria. It was the perfect place to gossip and watch the rotation of meals from breakfast to lunch and from lunch to dinner. Often I would make my way through several full days at Kline Commons, starting with the make-your-own Belgium waffles and troughs of molded eggs, and moving on to the iceberg lettuce salad bar and burgers, finishing with a plate of nachos or re-creating the morning with the ever-popular breakfast for dinner. Since then, I have often dreamed of spending the day at a restaurant in this fashion.

Recently the Internet in my apartment went out, and I felt this was the perfect time to try my experiment. There were two requirements - one, the restaurant had to serve breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and two, there had to be Internet access available.

The two places around the corner from my house competing as healthy and healthier were the obvious choices. Let me start by saying that I have the same concerns about the word “healthy” in my eating as I do a PG-13 rating in most movies: good, maybe; great, not likely. In order to find out once and for all, I put down my Cheetos and went to work.

When did South Post Oak go Salvadorean? I counted three new pupucerias south of 90A, including this charming pupusa trailer near the intersection of Tidewater.

Where: Pappas Bar-B-Q, 1100 Smith, 713-659-1245

What $13 gets you: Some not-too-bad barbecue from the city’s biggest corporate chain of barbecue restaurants

I never much cared for Pappas Bar-B-Q. The barbecue sauce is thin, the links and ribs are nothing special and I still don’t get the appeal of sliced beef served atop a giant baked potato. Plus, the food there isn’t expensive but it isn’t cheap either. Add fries and a drink to that sandwich and you’re up to about ten bucks.

But there are things to like – it just took me a few visits to find them.

You can put together a picnic lunch for two at the Russian General Store for a pittance. The gourmet meats are sold for less than half the price that upscale grocery stores charge. And the General Store has the best selection of salamis in the city.

The fabulous rustic Alpino salami is $8.99 a pound, the Russian smoked ham is $6.49 a pound, and the ready-to-eat hunter’s sausage called kabanosy is $4.79 a pound. Pastry-filled meat pockets (pierohi) are $.70 each.

All right, so you might not actually want to bring your date to this event, but it could make a future evening hawt. Martha Hopkins will be appearing at Central Market on Saturday from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. to promote The New InterCourses: an aphrodisiac cookbook. The book includes plenty of food porn, not to mention recipes using ingredients that will get you in the mood, like chocolate, asparagus, chiles, coffee, basil, grapes, strawberries, honey, artichokes, black beans, oysters, rosemary, edible flowers, pine nuts, avocados, libations/alcohol, and figs.

The book even recommends recipes based on the season, time of day, or stage of the relationship. Not sure if we're buying that last part, but bring on the oysters and, um, the libations/alcohol.And by the way, you can find many of those ingredients - fresher than fresh - at the Midtown Farmers Market at Monica Pope's t'afia each Saturday.

Mother's Day is right around the corner (May 11), and if you're looking for the ultimate food and wine experience for dear old Mom, don't miss this: the Dom Perignon Buffet Brunch at the Marriott Westchase (2900 Briarpark Drive).

The restaurant is offering limitless glasses of Dom Perignon champagne, served in gorgeous stemware with their own twin holders, for $99.95. (Have you priced a bottle of Dom recently?) Everything on the buffet is first class, from the three types of caviar to the incredible handmade desserts.

$99.95 too expensive? You can still get the same incredible food and limitless glasses of Chandon champagne for $35.95. After a couple glasses, she'll never notice the difference. -- Paul Galvani

¡Que irónico! The beloved taco truck culture of Los Angeles is under attack from an Hispanic politician.

District 1 County Supervisor Gloria Molina has asked the L.A. Board of Supervisors for new rules that threaten to put the city's taco trucks out of business. Under Supervisor Molina’s regulations, all mobile food operations, including taco trucks, would be required to change locations every hour, or face a misdemeanor charge carrying a $1,000 fine and/or jail. This would end the now common practice of each taco truck parking at the same spot every day.

Olivia Flores Alvarez

Where: Candelari’s Pizzeria, 6001 Washington Avenue, 832-200-1474

What $13 gets you: We tried the lunch special which includes soup, salad, pizza, pasta, dessert and a drink for $10.50 (available seven days a week). We also tried two by-the-slice slices of pizza, salad and a drink for just under $13.

I had the sausage pizza and pepperoni pizza from the buffet, while my partner had two slices with feta cheese and red peppers. We also taste-tested the cold pesto pasta salad and hot noodles with meat sauce, both of which were about the right temperature, but lacking in flavor.

Somebody told me to check out Dickey’s Barbecue in Buffalo. There was a billboard on I-45 about halfway between Houston and Dallas that said “Dickey’s Barbecue Since 1941.” I thought it might be an old traditional barbecue joint. And I was hungry, so I turned off the highway for lunch.

Turns out it’s a franchise. The guy behind the counter told me they used an Old Hickory barbecue pit, which is one of those stainless steel virtual barbecue contraptions that cooks with gas or electric heat with a little bit of smoke.

I got a mushy brisket sandwich to go and ate it in my car. I couldn’t detect any smoke aroma or flavor. While I was sitting there eating my crappy sandwich, I stared into the adjacent parking lot. I watched a guy over there remove a blue plastic tarp from an outbuilding to reveal an honest-to-god Texas barbecue pit. He started loading it up as I watched.

The Houston International Festival is here, and it's not just about the music and performances either - don't forget the food. Sample the cuisines of Africa at the H-E-B Cultural Stage, where celebrity and local chefs will be doing cooking demonstrations several times a day. There will also be food from more than 50 of Houston's restaurants and caterers, offering a tempting array of international cuisines. For information, visit www.ifest.org.

Today, as you might've guessed from the title, is National Licorice Day. Now we know Red Vines and Twizzlers and the like technically don't make use of the licorice plant, but we almost got sick eating three boxes of Red Vines before lunch the other day, so we gotta give the red stuff its due. (Plus we just kinda like the photo.)

Local purists might chose to celebrate this momentous holiday with dried root from Té House of Tea or a whip from The Chocolate Bar, but we're heading to the nearest corner store to get a wonderfully heavy tummy all over again. -- Keith Plocek