Food & Drink

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. In short, it is the news that the wine industry itself is dying. Why?

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?

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 his morning coffee, while eating takeout pasta from Caravaggio and burgers from J.G. Melon for dinner.

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 France (where else?

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 in my path on a road trip to Detroit over the holidays.

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,” say the ladies of The View. “Obesity causes you to have all of that food noise.

Here we are at the beginning of a new year. Since I don’t have any childcare “learing centers” to offer my readers, I thought, the weather being frigid here in the northeast, I would reach out with the warmth of – no, not “collectivism,” to which I am allergic – but of some recent discoveries in the world of wine. Much cheaper, believe me, and much more palatable. It is only fairly recently that the Santa Cruz Mountains have come into their own as a California wine-producing region. I was deeply impressed by the 2021 Estate chardonnay from Rhys Vineyards. Sourced from three spots in the mountains, with elevations ranging from about 700 to 1,400 feet on a variety of soil types, this chardonnay is exceptionally well-structured.

I have been writing about restaurants that are in or near cultural landmarks: museums, opera houses, historic sites. This column is an exception, as it is about one of the few restaurants in the world that is a cultural landmark in its own right: Harry’s Bar. It is an even more remarkable fact given that the restaurant is in the midst of probably the most culturally dense city in Europe, Venice. I must declare that I have eaten at Harry’s at least once, sometimes twice, on every one of the many trips I have made to Venice since 1977. I love it. Not everyone does – or maybe it’s more accurate to say that not everyone gets it. I took a friend there on his first visit and he complained that “the chairs are too low, the drinks are too small and the prices too high.