Spectator Life

Venezuela is a prideful nation. Prideful about what? Is it the inflation or the fact that close to 25 percent of the oil-rich country’s population has fled the place? I know, the pride sounds misplaced. The average American likely thinks about their own southern border, dog-eating and communism when Venezuela is mentioned. Yet Venezuela also has the world’s tallest waterfall (Angel Falls), the most wins in the big four international beauty pageants, stunning white-sand beaches, lots of oil and award-winning rum and cocoa. Still, if there’s anything that makes me want to sing the Venezuelan national anthem, as someone who spent part of his childhood in Caracas, it’s the taste of a chicken, avocado and Gouda-filled arepa.

Does anything say “June” quite like strawberries and cream? The sweetness of sun-ripened strawberries allowed to remain on the plant until peak maturity, pairs exquisitely with the velvety, ever-so-slightly tart, richness of cream. Taste-wise, it’s a perfect match — and looks-wise, strawberries and cream are one of the prettiest dishes of summer. Some things are just meant to be. But life isn’t all strawberries and cream. Sometimes you have to shake things up with a lively new take: Gorgonzola and white chocolate cheesecake, for instance, or lamb with anchovy, garlic and rosemary. Love it or hate it, at least you’ll have your diners sitting up and paying attention. And sometimes a bit of experimentation can lead to a new favorite. That’s the story behind salt and caramel.

Often asked about my favorite places to go, and moreover, favorite places to eat, I find myself talking about Helsinki. Younger and more innovative than trend-driven neighbors Copenhagen and Stockholm, Helsinki’s established and rising culinary stars are making a special kind of magic. It’s something to do with marrying influences from both East and West, and certainly reflective of its natural proximity to both sea and forest. There’s a fresh and hyper-local feel to modern menus in the capital, evocative of the country’s ancient foraging culture and reverence for nature; but there’s far more to it than picking mushrooms and berries. So many natural wine dens, bistros and bakeries are saved in my Instagram, it’s overwhelming.

It’s a mist-steeped weekday morning in the Dorsoduro district. The kind when the rising lagoon licks at the old stones as if trying to devour the city, footsteps echo mournfully between peeling palazzi and even the marble statues seem to hang their heads. But not too early nor too dismal, it turns out, for wine. In Osteria Al Squero — named after Venice’s oldest boatyard, which it faces across the narrow canal — the lights are on. A huddle of Venetian men stands beneath the wooden beams with their grocery bags and small dogs, enjoying un’ombra. It means “shade” in Italian but also, here in the Veneto, a small glass of vino.

I’ll fight you to the death on this one: Colorado’s dining scene is hotter than a habanero.  A land-locked state within spitting distance of the culinary vacuum that is the Midwest (sorry, Chicago) might not spring to mind for its food scene. But nods from the Michelin guide prove the Mile High City and wider Colorado have a story to tell, minted in September 2023. I hopped in the Subaru and sampled a smattering of them, from Denver’s farm-to-table outposts, to whimsical epicurean adventures in Aspen, via stylish Italian brunches in Boulder. Denver Glo Noodle House 4450 W 38th Ave, Denver, CO 80212 As a tourist, you’ve got to hit Denver Biscuit Company for brunch, once.

"Comment trouvez-vous le sanglier?" Guillaume parent/hunter/head rôtisseur, asked me last spring, in the tiny village of Monthélie, next to Meursault, where my family lives and where I now live. We were there to enjoy a wild boar banquet. Guillaume, who was dressed as Obélix, Astérix’s sidekick, known for his voracious appetite (especially for wild boar), had roasted three sanglier shoulders on spits over coals from old wine vines. Many of the other villagers had also dressed as famous characters from the comic book series, which often depicts les Gaulois feasting on sanglier after defeating the Romans. Never mind that they are subsequently themselves defeated by the Romans at Alise-Sainte-Reine, an hour north in the Auxois region.

It is a strange coincidence that both my sister and I, born and raised in Scotland, have married Americans. I live in New York. Lily lives in Nebraska. But we were both in our mother country over the summer visiting family and keen to make the most of our British culinary tradition. There is more to miss than you’d think. Diluting juice, which the English call “squash,” fruit flavoring added to water. A Sunday carvery, roasted meat and potatoes, with gravy and vegetables, complete with Yorkshire pudding. Fish and chips. Real chocolate. Decent Indian food. Breakfast cereal not coated in fructose. Tea worthy of the name. And above all, freshly baked scones. Americans may think they have scones rhyming with “stones.

Quizzed on how to assimilate to new cultures, travel writer and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain once said: “Drink heavily with locals whenever possible.” The “Opening a bottle with…” series is about getting pickled with people far cooler than I am, in new places. To me, booking a ski trip at the start of the year is the ultimate luxury. With my birthday falling on the first of January, when the ball drops, I feel a sense of melancholy. As hangovers descend and diets begin, I want to carry on celebrating.  In European ski resorts, they keep the festivities going well into March. Christmas lights and religious displays stay twinkling. Fresh snow combats the winter blues. Everyone’s happy to share a bottle of good wine.

My husband and I live in a rural village about an hour from London. The nearest grocery store is a twenty-minute drive. I haven’t ordered takeout in six years. I spent a good few years craving Thai and Chinese food, and then we stumbled across a recipe in the Daily Telegraph for homemade dim sum. “But we don’t have a bamboo steamer,” I said. This seemed an insurmountable hurdle. “We can just get one on Amazon,” said my husband. And so we did. Making dim sum at home has been a pleasure beyond my expectations. They are surprisingly simple to make, and once you get the hang of it, not too laborious. The recipe we use is a classic combination of pork and steamed cabbage.

I arrived home six pounds heavier after three weeks in Sicily. That is the weight of a gallon of milk. Eight cans of beer. Or a small Yorkshire Terrier. I could try blaming the Cerebrus heatwave on my filthy granita habit and lack of almost any bodily movement (and it didn’t help) but the reality is this: Sicily is the fantastical realm they say it is and stupendously beautiful. And the food is even better.  Roman, Arab, French, Greek and North African influences spectacularize every meal. Almond milk granita is spooned into glistening brioche rolls before you can wipe the sleep from your eyes. Chocolate cannoli appear out of nowhere at breakfast. Arancini oozes globs of molten cheese in a manner that’s, quite frankly, sexy.

What do I cook when I don't feel like cooking? Scrambled eggs. Beans on toast. Canned soup. But Caro Chambers, recipe developer, Substack author and mom of three little boys, might instead go for Jerk Chicken with Coconut Rice and Strawberry Salsa, or Lamb Pita with Dilly Minty Yogurt Sauce, or some other recipe with prepositions in the title, from her popular Substack “What To Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking.” Once a week, she releases a new recipe to her 112,000 subscribers, who pay $5 per month for fifty-two new recipes per year plus access to the archives. “If you want something done, ask a busy person,” said either Benjamin Franklin or Lucille Ball. This could be Chambers’s slogan.

“Stealth wealth” became A Thing in 2023. TikTok was awash with “get the look!” fashion videos; magazines full of think pieces on crisp white shirts and camel cashmere. The idea is to ooze money — or at least look like you do — in classic, understated cuts and colors. What the Streeps and Paltrows have been doing for decades is now the standard for the aspirational and chronically online.  The trend came to mind as I tumbled into Rome’s five-star Anantara Palazzo Naiadi during the Cerberus heatwave. Slick with sweat, a suitcase half my size and missing one wheel, toenails unpainted and there to interview chef Heros de Agostinis, I wished I’d paid more attention. There are fancy hotels, then there are stratospherically fancy hotels like this one.

In a world full of muffins, they say, be a cupcake. As an inspirational saying, it’s a good effort. But handsome is as handsome does: for solid worth, texture and deliciousness, give me the muffin every time. I remain open-minded and willing to be proven wrong, but it seems to me that however gloriously frosted, sprinkled, beflowered or bedazzled the exterior of a cupcake may be, its interior texture is always trying, in a socially anxious sort of way, to be cake. All the icing in the world can’t hide the strain. Allow me to suggest an alternative: in a world of Christmas cookies, be homemade shortbread. The last word in simplicity, shortbread is the Hermès scarf of the cookie world. It has confidence, identity, classical elegance.

When New York City restaurants closed their doors in March 2020, Rahul Saito and his husband Howard Chang took a radical step. They brought the dining-out experience home, hiring Mitsunobu Nagae, then the chef de cuisine at the Michelin-starred Shun, to prepare weekly dinners in their Manhattan apartment.   The food was unfussy, yet profound. “There was a gazpacho, very simple, a cherry gazpacho,” recalls Chang, thirty-two. “It felt like something you could make at home, but the taste and depth was something I’d never experienced. That’s when I was like: This guy really has something.”   Inspired, Chang and Saito, who both have backgrounds in finance, approached Nagae, thirty-six, to suggest they open a restaurant together.

The Indians, as we innocently called them in the days of my youth, put their name to it: “Indian Corn.” Somehow, “Native American” or “First Peoples Corn” just doesn’t do it, so here let us observe this now-verboten usage. Technically, Indian Corn (known as calico or dent corn too, for its coloration and dents in the kernels) is one variety of maize, first cultivated, they say, in Mexico thousands of years ago. Columbus, who called the natives “Indians” because he was looking for India, brought back seeds to Europe in the 1490s; they did not take. The Plymouth colonists in the 1620s, from whose early travails the American feast of Thanksgiving emerged, grew Indian corn courtesy of the local Wampanoag tribe. It no doubt helped them survive when the English peas ran out.

If I’d known what a whole monkfish looks like, I would never have ordered it. It was only weeks later that I saw a picture of the horrid creature: small, wicked eyes, prehistoric head, skin like rusty medieval armor and a gaping mouth overflowing with jagged teeth. Truly the stuff of nightmares. We’d popped over the border from France into San Sebastián, Spain, for a bite of dinner, selecting a spot a stone’s throw from the Baroque exuberance of Santa Maria del Coro. The daily special was monkfish, and for some reason — perhaps an excess of sun that day — the image that came to mind was, inaccurately, that of the innocent red mullet. The daily special in a fishing town is bound to be fresh, so it seemed fair to give it a try.

The Cerberus heatwave is as fierce as they said it would be. I feel like I’m being microwaved on a low heat, my phone hot to the touch inside my pocket. A friend and I heave suitcases into the imposing stone lobby of a.d. 1768, then slump on chairs, dizzy. A palatial, historic residence hidden in plain sight, I’m gratefully swallowed up by its high ceilings and cool shadows. We’ve navigated Italian roads (and road rage) from Catania to Ragusa Ibla in 107.6 degrees Fahrenheit to seek out one hotel, and one man: Ciccio Sultano.  Our month-long road trip through southern Italy is finishing in the late Baroque towns of UNESCO World Heritage Site Val di Noto, collectively rebuilt after a huge earthquake on January 11, 1693.

Flour furnishes most everyone’s kitchen. If you’re a baker or breadmaker, you will probably have several five-pound bags of it in the pantry alongside the yeast. If you don’t bake or don’t bake much, you will probably have at least a cup or two of it in the canister on the kitchen counter for thickening the gravy, frying the chicken or making the roux. Most likely, most of it will have come from wheat. Wheat has been with mankind for 10,000 years or so and was first domesticated somewhere in the Fertile Crescent, or, as our old geographies used to say, Mesopotamia, which also, it was hinted, was the neighborhood of the Garden of Eden. Wheat’s genetic diversity made it adaptable to a variety of climes and continents.