Food & Drink

Malbec, observed Hugh Johnson, is a “conundrum.” Sometimes it is light in color as well as body. That’s what it tends to be like in the Loire, where the grape is called côt (apparently its original name). It used to be grown in Bordeaux, where it was used primarily as a sort of filler, rounding out the cabs and merlots. In Cahors, its major French venue today, it is sometimes called côt noir or Auxerrois. There malbec tends to be bold, spicy and dark. “Dark,” in fact, is one of the wine writer’s favorite adjectives for this allotrope of malbec. This was the “black wine” that Thomas Jefferson would sometimes

On February 28, I jumped on a fishing charter with some friends and headed out into the Strait of Hormuz. There was barely any wind. The sea shimmered in the heat of the Gulf sunshine. On the very first drop of our lines, something hit my metal jig and went off like a rocket. After a couple more brief runs, a very stout, double-figure grouper rose through the water column, which I guided safely into the waiting net. It was a personal-best hamour (The Arab word for grouper), weighing between 10 and 12 pounds. I went on to catch a few interesting tropical fish, including a snapper, but I didn’t

Ham and barbecue have deep American roots, but they drifted apart. Here's the case for reuniting them on your Easter dinner table this year.

Most wine columns resemble recipes from Larousse Gastronomique or Mastering the Art of French Cooking in this way: they have happy endings. This column, alas, proceeds with a melancholy burden. The world of wine, it pains me to report, is in the doldrums. Is it because of a new infestation of phylloxera, the blight that devastated French vineyards in the 19th century, or some other pest? Is it some novel tyranny of teetotalers, outlawing the production and consumption of wine? No. It is something closer to original sin or what Immanuel Kant on a dreary afternoon called “the crooked timber of humanity” out of which nothing straight can be fashioned.

When I first became enamored with barbecue in the 1990s, I ate a lot of chopped pork at Carolina barbecue joints, and sometimes chicken and ribs. One thing I almost never encountered was beef, especially slow-smoked brisket. That barbecue cut remained mostly a Texas thing until well into the 21st century. A few pioneers did try to introduce it to the Carolinas over the years, with limited success. Tommy Brightwell, for instance, put brisket on the menu when he opened Pappy’s BBQ in Madison, North Carolina, in 2004. A review in the Greensboro News & Record began, “So, you think barbecue has to come in pork form only?” The public’s

Comb through Jeffrey Epstein’s emails and you find frequent correspondence with his private chef Francis Derby about “beef jerky.” Online sleuths have speculated that it is a code word for something more sinister. We know Epstein was a sexual predator, but what if he literally preyed on human flesh? After all, Derby cooked at a restaurant called the Cannibal. Make of that what you will. I can’t quite bring myself to believe Epstein was devouring the teenagers he trafficked, but he did seem to have the eating habits of one. He was picky, entitled and equally fond of fad diets and junk food. He substituted Sweet’N Low for sugar in

Jeffrey Epstein was a sick man. That’s hardly news. But a new dimension has been added to our understanding of him by the latest batch of files released by the Department of Justice. Physically, not just mentally and morally, Jeffrey Epstein was very, very unwell. For the better part of a decade, despite having billions of dollars and access to some of the world’s greatest practitioners of medicine, Epstein’s health only got worse. We can now follow his physical decline in depth – via emails and text messages, magazine clippings, scientific reports and website articles he saved – which is exactly what a number of internet sleuths have been doing.

It was a dark night in November that the criminals stole softly upon the sleeping snails. They snipped away the fencing, pried open the door with a crowbar and knocked out the security lights. Then, they advanced upon their victims, who were lying, defenseless, in cold storage. No use for the snails to flee; heliciculturists breed them for flavor, not speed. The hapless gastropods could only pull in their horns, make themselves as small as possible inside their shells, and wait. The crooks worked with merciless efficiency. Some 450 kilos of snails soon found themselves shivering in the getaway vehicle as it sped off down a route départementale in northeastern

About 15 miles off the I-80, tucked away in the Cleveland suburb of Warren, you’ll find a delightful bit of yesteryear, preserved from the 1970s and serving up your childhood dreams. Here you’ll find a Pizza Hut that forgot to evolve into a quick counter-service and delivery outpost like almost all the others. I had heard rumors of Pizza Hut Classics for some time. For years I’ve wanted to find one. As a person who would live solely on pizza if it weren’t for the heart disease and kidney stones that would inevitably follow, I knew I had to find one. Lo and behold, one such restaurant happened to be

Appearing yesterday on The View, a show that couldn’t possibly exist without the trail she blazed, Oprah Winfrey, promoting her new book, ‘Enough,’ had this to say about her recent, semi-permanent, GLP-1-induced weight loss: “All these years I thought I was overeating. I was standing there with all the food noise, what I ate, what I should eat, how many calories was it going to take. I thought that was because of me and my fault. Now I understand that if you carry the obesity gene, if that is what you have, that is what makes you overeat. You don’t overeat and become obese. Obesity causes you to overeat.” “Right,”