The Agent Gallery store features unique items, such as a vintage hand-painted ear model, a metal Chief Paints sign and, most importantly, the above painting by a prison inmate.

—Zio

This puzzleboard by Oooms features an interlocking design and a place to hold a wine glass. Now you can use your free hand for more important things at parties, like texting.

—Zio

Food and art are two of our favorite things over at TWBE, so we decided to start a new series called “Artist Eats” that interviews artists about their favorite place to eat. Kicking off the series is Los Angeles-based artist Justin Van Hoy, who is known for his colorful designs and rad gallery.

“At the moment I would say I have two favorites,” Justin answers. “Most days I don’t go any further West than Lincoln Heights, where my office is. So these two picks are minutes from the house, office and gallery.”

[Read more]

Hand-cut paper art by Sydney-based designer Bianca Chang.

—Zio

Last week, Hot Knives gave Zio the recipe for their Manhattan pop-tart—the fourth of their top-five booze-based recipes—and now it’s time for the fifth and final installment: rarebit on toast.

“One of our earliest drunk cooking experiments was poaching an egg in Pabst,” Hot Knives explains. “This is a much more refined take on that notion—one that makes for a killer egg-and-cheese sandwich with a rarebit sauce spiked with beer. We use a malty German brew and a white cheddar, but feel free to play around with the ingredients. We think you’ll never touch cream cheese again.”

Continue reading for the recipe.

[Read more]

Last week, Hot Knives gave Zio the recipe for their gin holes—the second of their top-five booze-based recipes—and now it’s time for the fourth installment: Manhattan pop-tarts.

“While we greatly admire the Biotic Baking Brigade—the vegan activists who managed to smear Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Anne Coulter and multiple mayors of San Francisco with various animal-free pastry creams—when there’s booze in your pie, it’s best that it’s encased,” explains Hot Knives. “The pop-tart may in fact be the perfect vehicle for scuzzing around in public as a hidden wino; none of the other train passengers are any the wiser. Keeping it classy, we cook the cherries down in whiskey and top it with bitters for a Manhattan-flavored confection worth slamming in your pie-hole.”

Continue reading for the recipe.

[Read more]

I love when people combine my passions for food and rap. Like when Cee Lo rapped about a “heaping helping of fried chicken, macaroni and cheese and collard greens, too big for my jeans” on Goodie Mob’s “Soul Food.” Or when Steel painted portraits of Eazy-E, Tupac and Mac Dre with cheeseburger heads.

Now chef Eddie Huang has stepped up to the plate. For the second location of his restaurant BaoHaus, which opened last week, he had artist Sophia Chang illustrate the menu’s items and pair them with rap lyrics from Tribe Called Quest, Cam’ron, Lil Wayne, Waka Flocka, the Neptunes and more.

Now if only I can convince Big Ghost to start doing restaurant reviews…

—Zio

Last week, Hot Knives gave  Zio the recipe for their pumpkin beer muffins—the second of their top-five booze-based recipes—and now it’s time for the third installment: gin holes.

“Named for their shape as well as what it feels like when you eat too many, booze holes fall somewhere in between liqueur truffles and donut holes,” explains Hot Knives. “We first learned to love eating booze when we made a vegan adaptation to the Southern classic, bourbon balls. The first bite tastes like granny’s baking cupboard, but as soon as you breathe out, the unmistakable sting of bourbon whistles on your throat. This recipe, at its core, is just cookie crumbs, roasted nuts and powdered sugar all made wet and sticky by a mixture of booze and syrup. This allows you to play baker and bartender at the same time so you can stumble (literally, you will fall) upon combinations limited only by the span of your wet bar, and your spice rack. Gin is our favorite.”

Continue reading for the recipe.

[Read more]

Bootlegged or not, this packaging for a Nike shoebox is hot.

(It still doesn’t beat this cookie packaging though.)

—Zio

[Read more]

Last week, Hot Knives gave Zio the recipe for their beer-onion soup sandwich—the first of their top-five booze-based recipes—and now it’s time for the second installment: pumpkin beer muffins.

“We have zero reservations about drinking beer for breakfast,” says Hot Knives. “Why should we? Taken before noon it’s more like medicine than anything. Still, if you’re not as liberal with your a.m. libations as we are, there is a way to consume without feeling like a scumbag: just replace the milk or water in your favorite muffin or pancake recipe with beer and you’ll be eating your alcohol! Yeasty, wheaty and a little effervescent, beer can actually make great baked goods even better. There’s also something undeniably sick and satisfying about making a beer smoothie at sunrise and pouring it into a batter. Now, the only question you should be asking is ‘which beer?’ Listen up, because this may be the only time we’ll ever utter these two words in the same breath: Pumpkin. Beer. We usually mutter curses under our breath when we pass piles of this October trick in the shopping aisles. But bright orange and warmed with baking spices, we can’t begrudge a pumpkin beer muffin.”

Continue reading for the recipe.

[Read more]

I was searching the internet to see if anyone had ever used Google Maps to make a map of their sexual partners, when I came across this piece by Heather Gonsior.

It’s not what I was looking for, but still felt like a score.

—Zio

Evan George and Alex Brown are Hot Knives, the Los Angeles-based cooking duo that shares recipes and beer reviews on their ever-popular blog.

On September 6, Mark Batty Publisher will release the Hot Knives vegetarian cookbook Salad Daze, which covers a wide array of veggie recipes—from basic soup stock and cock sauce to psychedelic rice and Portobello poutine—as well as kitchen tips and tricks. Far from your typical cookbook, Salad Daze also features beer and song pairings with every recipe—such as Green Flash Le Freak and Talking Heads “Psycho Killer”—plus ample cuss words and drug references.

Over the next few weeks, Hot Knives will share their top-five booze-based recipes with The World’s Best Ever. The first recipe in this series is a beer-onion soup sandwich that Zio swears is the best grilled cheese ever.

“Of the five trophies we’ve taken at the Grilled Cheese Invitational over the years, our favorite winner is the only one with booze in it—no surprise there,” explains Hot Knives. “We take a beer-infused Belgian onion soup and turn it into a sandwich. The Trappist beer onions mimic a deeply beefy soup, while the crisp cheese-toast and oozy cheese emulate the gooey crouton on top. There’s one way to eat this sammich: we call it the ‘crunch-slurp’ method. And it’s probably as close as you will ever come to sipping a beer as a sandwich.”

Continue reading for the recipe.

[Read more]

Here’s a look at the work of Jayson Musson, the Philadelphia-based artist who plays Hennessy Youngman on the Youtube series “Art Thoughtz.”

(watch the latest video we posted yesterday here)

—Zio

I made this stout ice cream with Guinness last weekend. The fact that I ate a quart of it in less than two days should answer any questions about whether it’s good or not.

—Zio

Flickr set of mostly hand-painted signs across the United States. Found on Expresh, my favorite letter-obsessed blog.

—Zio

From planning his next meal to fantasizing about hookers with hamburger heads to painting portraits of rappers like Cheazy-E to collaborating on a beef-themed graffiti production, no one knows burgers better than STEEL. For this post, Zio asked the San Francisco-based graffiti writer and fine artist to list his top-five burgers in the city. His mouthwatering photos and poignant reviews are featured below.

[Read more]

Dana Tanamachi’s custom chalk lettering.

—Zio

Images from a collection of found dog show pictures.

—Zio

I just returned from Paris, where I saw a surprising amount of graffiti and street art, especially by French artists such as Space Invader, Horfe and members of the UV TPK crew. I wasn’t able to track down any of Andre’s “Love, Graffiti” series, so this video of his Melrose & Martel piece will have to do.

—Zio

[Read more]