Camelot's kooky crusader

What to do when you only have modest wine on hand for a decorous guest

So, I’ve have been rooting around in Horace’s Epistles, which are full of amusing things. They really are not “epistles” in the conventional sense, since they were make-believe letters, artfully wrought jebux d’esprit that employ the convention of addressing a friend in order to entertain not (or not only) that friend (who may or may not exist) but one’s readers. Horace wrote two books of Epistles, one circa 21 BC when he was in his early forties, one a decade later, a few years before his death in 8 BC at the (it seems now) tender age of fifty-six. One that caught my eye when sitting down to write this column was Epistle 1.

Neal Pollack

The quest for child-free dining

The people who follow my social media know that I’m not kidding when I say that restaurants should ban children. You can’t avoid kids in certain fast-food or large outdoor-patio situations, but on the whole, children in restaurants are a horrible war crime. So when Nettie’s House of Spaghetti, a red-sauce joint in Tinton Falls, New Jersey, announced in February that it would be banning kids, my inbox flooded with the story. “We love kids,” the restaurant wrote. “We really, truly, do. But lately, it’s been extremely challenging to accommodate children at Nettie’s. Between noise levels, lack of space for high chairs, cleaning up crazy messes and the liability of kids running around the restaurant, we have decided that it’s time to take control of the situation.

Mary Kate Skehan

How to become a ‘salad freak’

Imagine a summer morning in Southern California. You rise with the sun in a palm-shaded bungalow and stroll to a nearby farmers market, where the tables spill over with heirloom tomatoes, sweet corn and cartons of juicy strawberries. Your canvas tote filled with the season’s bounty, you return to your sun-dappled kitchen to prepare a farm-to-table feast for all your friends while listening to your favorite vintage records. Sigh. This is the dreamy lifestyle purveyed by Salad Freak: Recipes to Feed a Healthy Obsession by Jess Damuck (Abrams, 2022). I’ve always aspired to be the kind of woman who can “just toss something together,” making a light, fresh, delicious dish with ease, rather than worrying that something will catch fire if I leave my post by the stove.

Timothy Jacobson

A parting salute to the swizzle stick

We live in the age of takeaway-everything, a phenomenon amplified since the late, great plague by another barbarism: the drive-thru. You need no longer even get off your derrière to collect the goods. Just lower the power window, flash your phone, then “grab-and-go.” That this is a powerful cultural proposition the conga-line of cars filling multiple lanes at your local Chick-fil-A, where they have it down to a science, will attest. I recall my first innocent meeting with drive-thru, then called drive-in, in 1959 when a bank in the small town where my family lived cut a hole in the wall and installed the requisite sliding drawer. Things have clearly gotten out of hand since. Not all takeaway is created equal.

Jane Stannus

The charm of Toronto’s Park Hyatt Writer’s Room

Foie gras doughnuts, check. Rooftop location, check. Framed collection of fountain-pen nibs on the wall, check. Where should a scribbler with aspirations to the higher life turn his feet in Toronto, if not to the Park Hyatt Writer’s Room? At seventeenth-story level, the higher life seems within easy reach. The Writer’s Room is the renovated and rechristened edition of the historic Rooftop Lounge, a famous hotel bar that first opened its doors to the public in the Thirties. Before the renovations, it boasted Toronto’s longest-serving bartender, Joe Gomes, who worked there for fifty-seven years. His fondest memory, he said on retirement, was meeting John Wayne. Everybody who’s anybody seems to have popped by for a drink at some point: Leonard Cohen, Brangelina, Hunter S.

Madeleine Kearns

Italian cooking lessons in the home of a Venetian chef

My mother advised that I get a plain wedding ring. Diamonds, she said, interfere with a woman’s ability to knead dough. “But I don’t knead dough,” I protested. “You will when you’re married.” I guffawed. And yet there I was, four days into my marriage, in an Albanian chef’s Venetian home, being told in no uncertain terms that while my husband Nick could keep his ring on, mine would need to come off. We had arrived in Giudecca, an island in the Venetian lagoon, by water bus, having spent the day in Padova. There, we’d visited the Basilica di Sant’Antonio, home to first-class relics of the great saint — bones, lower jaw, incorrupt tongue and cartilage from his larynx.

Food & Drink