Spectator Life

Does your museum feel tired and run down? Is the entrance unwelcoming? The bookshop shabby? The restaurant a mere café? If so, call Annabelle Selldorf, the German-American architect whose talent and sensitivity have made her the go-to person for reviving weary museums. Her recent transformation of the Frick in New York has been widely acclaimed and she will soon start work on the Wallace Collection in London. But the latest masterwork has seen Selldorf sprinkle her fairy dust on the Sainsbury Wing of London’s National Gallery. Those with long architectural memories will recall how in 1984, the then Prince of Wales christened the proposed new wing of the Gallery “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may have finally met his match: the green M&M. Mars, which manufactures various popular candies including M&M’s recently announced it will be changing direction from its 2016 goal of removing "all artificial colors from its human food portfolio globally"... because Americans like their candy Red 40 red, rather than beet-red. The Health and Human Services Secretary has a plan to remove American children's spoons from their "toxic soups of synthetic chemicals." It's contingent on an "understanding" he has with major food companies that Americans don't want to be poisoned. Yet it seems his and the candy industry's mutual "understanding" is breaking down.

Chet Sharma – physicist, DJ and award-winning chef – only needs to sleep for four hours a night. “I inherited [this gift] from my mother,” shrugs the Londoner when we talk one morning before lunchtime service at his restaurant, BiBi. “She has unlimited energy!” Raised in Berkshire, England, to parents with Indian heritage, Sharma has a master’s degree in clinical and experimental medicine from University College London, as well as a master’s in physics and a PhD in condensed-matter physics from the University of Oxford. It was during those seven years studying that he also moonlighted as a cook and a DJ. “I’d do university in the morning, dinner service at a restaurant [at night], and at 11 p.m.

“C’est ma faute,” I called up to the local old boys as they strolled past my potager, chuckling among themselves. I tried to match their levity, but it was obviously affected; they could sense my panic. It was late-April and my garden resembled an eccentrically out-of-season Halloween scene, with tomato plants standing eerily motionless like infant ghosts, wrapped from head to toe in protective fleece. Everyone knows that 41°F is too cold for tomatoes, but spring had been deceptively warm, and I couldn’t help myself. AccuWeather had issued a grim prediction for the night’s minimum temperature. Only a few days previously, I had been openly proud that my plants had been in the ground for two weeks. I felt foolish and impetuous.

Oysters have recently achieved near-meme status as one of several “pick-me” foods alongside the dirty martini, pickles, tinned fish and other briny staples popularized online by Gen Z. These foods are noted for their slightly polarizing air – expressing a preference for them communicates an evolved palate, a niche preference, a willingness to see past an aesthetically questionable facade (the bumpy pickle, the barnacle-encrusted oyster). However, unlike its fellow “pick-me” travelers or its late, meme-ified millennial predecessor, avocado on toast, the oyster itself cannot be readily dismissed as a passing fad.

I’m sipping Madagascan hot chocolate out of white-and-gold Haviland Limoges, and nibbling on Venezuelan milk-chocolate bonbons, under an oil painting of Queen Victoria. I am on a visit to Guild Chocolates, “the finest chocolate shop in Petrolia,” in southern Ontario. The town’s population was circa 6,000 at the last census and on a Saturday morning, the chocolate shop is the place to be. During my visit, a sign on the Dickensian, wood-paneled storefront clearly indicates the shop is temporarily closed, but people keep turning the door handle and popping their heads in hopefully. Jaclyn Sanders, proprietor and chocolatier, calls warmly and apologetically out to them. Jaclyn opens her shop only one day a week: Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

It’s been almost 100 years since Arcady Fixon, a refugee from the Russian Revolution, opened the doors of Caviar Kaspia on Place de la Madeleine in Paris, and began beguiling his fellow exiles and the crème of Paris society with the exotic flavors of his homeland: shiny black caviar, served with blinis or potatoes, and ice-cold vodka. After being passed down through family hands, Caviar Kaspia is now owned by the charismatic entrepreneur Ramon Mac-Crohon, who has ensured that the place has lost nothing of its prerevolutionary charm: Nicolas II’s seal sits alongside antique porcelain in a display cabinet, and Nicolas Swertschkoff’s Troika, depicting a Russian horse-drawn sledge moving through snow, still hangs in the dining room.

I can still remember it: probably the worst seafood dinner of my life. A slice of fish that was simultaneously cold, hot, dry, crumbly and rubbery, surrounded by overcooked vegetables and accompanied by a mysterious whiff of cigarette smoke. It was so repellent that even though I was famished, I summoned the waiter, returned the dish and retired to my room, there to endure a dinner of Pringles from the minibar. What made it worse was that I was in a celebrated fishing port. All I had to do was look out the window and I could see trawlers bringing in some of the world’s finest fish from some of the planet’s richest seas. It was dismaying, saddening, deflating and left me starving. What it was not, however, was surprising.

I love Italian food, and I love food writing and TV shows, so you might think I’d love Stanley Tucci. And yet I find him creepy and his recipes are rubbish. I can’t be the only one. The actor, who I first saw in the brilliant film Big Night, about a Jersey Shore Italian-American restaurant, is probably best known for The Devil Wears Prada, a film I adore. His character in that film did wind me up, but it took a while before Tucci himself got on my nerves. I suppose it began with him coming over all chef, like he’s the new Anthony Bourdain. I kept being told to watch his TV series where he travels around Italy, but the sight of his smug face on my screen turned out to be more than I could bear.

These pages recently carried a lament for the little French restaurant, and the loss from the cities they once graced of a certain element of gentility and, yes, class. On the same subject, let us consider another era when class was valued more highly, and which produced the classiest, and the grandest, French restaurant of all. This requires a journey. In July 1936, a Chicago family, relations of mine, embarked on an unrushed two-month European vacation. A meticulous Thos. Cook & Son-Wagons-Lits, Inc. itinerary routed them first to France, then Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Holland and finally to England. It was a thoroughly first-class affair.

Cool guests, hot food; cool music, warm hostess: the recipe for the perfect party, and the motto of Perle Mesta, one of the most successful postwar Washington hostesses. Good King Wenceslas, a model host of even greater status, lived out this motto in legendary style centuries earlier. His guests were cool, if not downright frozen; their host was warm of heart (and sole, as the page discovered on treading in his footprints). The food was hot, for the king ordered up pine logs along with the flesh and wine. As for the music, the rude wind’s wild lament must have been on the cool side — though jollier tunes would surely have prevailed once the king and his fellow diners made it back to the royal fireside.

For first-time restaurateur Bolun Yao, New York is a city to experiment in: “I feel like New York is the city that is always exploring new things. If you have a new idea, you put it here.” The Chinese-born entrepreneur — who has also spent significant time in New Zealand — came to NYU to complete a master’s degree in food studies. He quickly fell in love with the fine-dining Korean scene, including the two-Michelin-starred Atomix and COTE, America’s only Michelin-starred Korean steakhouse. Both merge contemporary and traditional techniques and ingredients. “Wow, that’s really, really smart and really creative,” the twenty-eight-year-old recalls thinking. “Why is there not a Chinese restaurant that does the same thing?

If you’re hesitant to ask someone if they are American or Canadian — the latter are often offended to be mistaken for the former — ask them instead about their favorite holiday. It isn’t a foolproof method, but if they say Halloween then you know you’re talking to an American. No other nationality would choose it — because no one else gets it so right. The origins of All Hallows’ Eve belong to Ireland and Scotland. The Celtic festival Samhain was not only a huge feast to mark the start of winter: it was a day full of superstitious activity, which included bonfires to clear the air of ghosts and sacrifices to appease anything all-powerful that might curse food supplies during the dark months.