Death of the Silicon Valley dream

The Loire Valley is the place for bargain hunters

North of Cognac and Bordeaux, due west of Burgundy, the valley of the Loire River, attended on the second half of its journey east by the Cher River, stretches from the Pays Nantes and the Atlantic Ocean to Orléans in the heart of France. It is not quite right to say that this area is like Hamlet’s “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns,” but it’s my sense that Americans tend to overlook it in favor of its flashier neighbors. This is a pity, not only because the Loire Valley boasts lots of excellent wine, but also because the region still offers many conspicuous bargains, something you will look long and hard for in Bordeaux or Burgundy.

Timothy Jacobson

The trouble with food porn

Food porn, an exaggerated photographic representation of how food supposedly looks, has been with us since the 1970s. Today, it is as ubiquitous as “traditional” porn and just as sad. It disorders our senses. Food tastes and smells, only thirdly does it look. Youthful gazing through the bakeshop window is one thing; seeing food mediated through the photographic image is quite another: it titillates but does not nourish. It has been a steep fall from the innocent old days of “Oh boy, that looks good!” exclaimed in the real presence of home-prepared meatloaf or macaroni-and-cheese, not in response to a picture of it. This disordering of our senses manifests in two ways.

Jane Stannus

In praise of burnt Basque cheesecake

Spring, as Chaucer pointed out, occasionally has the curious effect of making people “long on pilgrimage to go / And palmers to be seeking foreign strands / To distant shrines renowned in sundry lands.” The May morning may come when you find it in your heart to pick up the pilgrim’s staff and wend your way along the paths of olden Spain to Santiago de Compostela. There are several ancient ways to reach the distant shrine of St. James, and if you are a lover of the road less traveled, you may find yourself drawn to the Camino del Norte, which begins in the western Pyrenees of the Basque country, then hugs the long beaches and jagged cliffs of the Atlantic shoreline through Cantabria and Asturias before curving inland through Galicia to the Apostle’s tomb.

John R. MacArthur

Lucien, the best bar in New York for writers

When I search my memory for a favorite bar, I’m struck by thoughts about bars of legend that I can only fantasize about. My drinking life is a tale of three cities — Chicago, New York and Paris — but since I’ve spent most of my adulthood in New York, it’s hangouts in Manhattan, some long gone, that first come to mind. And establishments where writers and reporters liked to drink hold for me a privileged position. I wish that I could have bought a cocktail in the 1930s for the tragically brilliant novelist Dawn Powell at the now defunct Lafayette Hotel in Greenwich Village, or at the nearby Brevoort Hotel on Fifth Avenue and 8th Street.

Mary Kate Skehan

Surviving the summer with no-bake desserts

Summer comes early to San Antonio. I moved here in January, dodging the worst excesses of the northeastern winter, but by March, the temperature had already reached into the nineties. By the time you read this column, summer will be approaching the rest of the country as well. It’s no-bake dessert season. I’ve always been intrigued by this genre of dessert recipe, which involves a vast spectrum of quality. The worst can be appalling — think of gelatin salads, gloppy pudding pies, packets of flavored powders and demeaning names like “mess” and “fool.” On the other hand, some no-bake desserts are transcendent: for example, panna cotta and the Magnolia Bakery banana pudding.

Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

Making a home through food

At the age of sixteen, chef and restaurateur Forough Vakili, now forty, left Iran to meet a brother she barely knew, eventually settling in America. She didn’t return for eleven years. As a member of the minority Baháʼí faith, which teaches the value of all people, regardless of gender or religion, Vakili had hit a wall in her homeland. “I came here so I could continue my education,” she says, when we speak over Zoom. “We didn’t have many rights back in Iran — there wasn’t a lot offered for us after finishing high school.” It was in Vienna, waiting for her American visa, that Vakili reconnected with her brother for the first time since she was a toddler. Six months later she moved in with him, his wife and three daughters in Atlanta.

Food & Drink