Food and Drink

Tuesday

Gage Klipper

When did restaurants get so boring?

The New York Times recently released its annual list of America’s Top 50 restaurants – and the perfectly predictable honorees highlight just how beholden the restaurant industry is to the tastes of a would-be cosmopolitan class. The casually refined, vaguely ethnic-fusion cuisine that you stumble upon even in America’s most provincial places is rife. From New York to Los Angeles and everywhere in between, America’s restaurant industry has never been more diverse. Yet somewhat counterintuitively, it’s also never offered more of the same. Often, these restaurants propose some mix of French staples (think mother sauces, patisserie) or Italian comfort food (pasta, pizza) fused with Latin, Asian and/or Middle Eastern flavors.

restaurants
tomato
Dan Fox

Why I haven’t created a tomato-cannabis hybrid

Jean-Louis was leaning out of his second-floor window. “Bonsoir, Dan!” I could hear the rumblings of a social gathering behind him – no music, just a cacophony of French voices battling for supremacy. I bonsoired him back and that would have been that, only my dog took the opportunity to evacuate by his front gate. “Montes boire un verre!” Jean-Louis was clearly drunk, but after 12 years of cordial nods, I momentarily allowed myself to believe I’d cracked the inner circle of village winemakers. And so, poop bag in hand, I politely accepted. Right away, it was clear that the vibe was off. Everyone had stopped talking and was looking at me as I stepped into the kitchen.

restaurants
Angus Colwell

Can American restaurants thrive in Britain?

To mark the arrival of Carbone in London and the imminent opening of Straker’s in New York, The Spectator’s Angus Colwell spoke with writer Gage Klipper about the differences between British and American restaurants, whether bad-boy chefs are back in – and which eateries couldn’t exist anywhere else. ANGUS COLWELL: Shall we talk about Carbone, which has just arrived in London? GAGE KLIPPER: For sure. I’m a certified Carbone hater: New Yorker, born and raised, but for me, Carbone just never really fit the New York vibe. It’s the Instagram person’s idea of what New York fine dining should be. Of course, they cater to this old-school, showy New York sensibility, but it’s not really New York in any real sense.

Tuesday

Jane Stannus

There’s more to pumpkins than you might think

There’s a famously untranslatable expression in Virgil’s Aeneid: lacrimae rerum. Latin scholars, always fond of threshing things out, have devoted reams of analysis to proving just how untranslatable it is. As is typical of academics, however, they go to lots of trouble to establish its utter untranslatability – and then turn around and translate it anyway. When pumpkins aren’t being cozy, they generally denote a sense of emptiness or artifice Word for word, lacrimae rerum means “The tears of things” (or, depending on your school of thought, “The tears for things.”) But each scholar has his slant on the sadness.

pumpkins
Roger Kimball

Revisiting the Devin Nunes winery

Anyone who writes about wine for a while finds himself coming back to old friends as the years go by. This wine here was actually fuller and more sumptuous in that vintage five years ago, while that wine over there really came into its own in the most recently released vintage. Just as with people, some wines with early promise somehow go astray and never amount to much, while others that were disorganized and introverted when young suddenly blossom and turn outward as they age, the magic sunflowers of viticulture. Most writers about wine will have similar stories. It’s a bit rarer for most of us, however, to get in on the ground floor and stand by while a new vineyard, fawn-like, is born, manages to stand up on its own and then goes trotting off.

Nunes
Rich Cromwell

Don’t let science stop you from baking

Sometimes, cooking is art. Other times, it’s science. When it comes to baking, both are involved, which is what can cause problems for those who are otherwise skilled in the kitchen. Whereas throwing together ingredients and tossing them in the slow cooker or on the grill can produce delicious results, baking demands precision. I have experienced great successes when making a host of dishes that don’t require me to get overly scientific A little too much sugar in the dough can cause cookies to flatten, caramelize or end up burned. Setting an oven to the wrong temperature – or failing to preheat – can produce bread or cakes that are unevenly cooked.

baking
Loyd Grossman

In praise of the Acropolis Museum Café and Restaurant

In the global poker game of cultural repatriation – otherwise known as who nicked what from whom – the Greeks seriously upped the ante with the opening of the Acropolis Museum in 2009. This lavish display of archaeological treasures in a light-filled building designed by the Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi is, alongside the recently opened Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo, an exemplar of such a building’s mission to educate and inspire. In the tradition of polemic buildings, it is also a $200 million plea to return the Elgin Marbles from the British Museum to Greece.

Acropolis

Tuesday

Gage Klipper

Why Eleven Madison Park had to put meat back on the menu

Eleven Madison Park, perhaps the finest of New York’s fine-dining establishments, is adding select meat dishes back to its prix fixe menu after an ill-fated foray into veganism after the pandemic. Chef Daniel Humm announced the move in the New York Times, citing all the predictable reasons for ditching a plant-based menu. First and foremost: the finances. “It’s hard to get 30 people for a corporate dinner to come to a plant-based restaurant,” Humm told the Times, noting the negative feedback from diners over the years. Still, he framed the move in moral terms, explaining how he didn’t “realize that [the vegan menu] would exclude people.” To this, I can only muster an eye roll.

Eleven Madison Park
John Mountain

Why I was right to ban vegans

I remember the day I heard my culinary hero Daniel Humm had decided to make Eleven Madison Park’s menu plant-based. It was as profound as the day Princess Diana died and as pivotal as the birth of my first child, Lily Elvis. The news tore the joy from my heart as well as all the love and respect I had for Humm. The toil, tenacity and sheer stamina it took him to earn his three Michelin stars is extraordinary. Who am I to criticize one of the greatest chefs alive today? I’m a nobody. Yes, I’ve worked at three-Michelin-starred restaurants, served Queen Elizabeth II and starred in the BBC’s Great British Menu but I’m just a cook: nothing more and nothing less.

vegan
Charles Cornish-Dale

Is ‘carbon butter’ really good for us?

All butter is made from carbon, but not all butter is carbon butter. This is the name being given to a new environmentally friendly, 100 percent ethical lab-made food product. There’s not an udder, churn or milkmaid in sight. Carbon butter is yet another one of those foods of the future we’re told about, with wide-eyed, breathless enthusiasm, that will transform the way we eat as well as our health, save the planet and make sure there are enough calories to go round when the world hits a population of 10 billion, at some point in the next decade or two. A few years ago, it was cockroach milk – four times more nutritious than cow’s milk, said Bloomberg, excitedly – plant-based meat and “cultured oil.” Now, it’s the turn of carbon butter.

butter
Dan Fox

My quest for the perfect Christmas broccoli

I adore broccoli, but I despise seeing it shrink-wrapped and kidnapped in the grocery store. The sight of those slightly compressed, yellowing florets sweating under fluorescent morgue lighting is a rude tap on the shoulder from dystopia. That’s why I was in my basement in late August, cleaning out the propagation tent while everyone else was still at the beach. My goal each year is to enjoy homegrown broccoli with Christmas dinner. In this corner of the Mediterranean, that’s about as likely as a French civil servant answering the phone after lunch. But with precision timing and bloody-mindedness you can pull it off. And after years of suffering those supermarket specimens, I’m determined to.

broccoli

Tuesday

Marc Oestreich

Beneath the foam of the Pisco Sour cocktail lies a border feud

The Pisco Sour is poured by Maria, my business partner’s wife and the quiet boss of a small empire of bars and restaurants. It is served in the living room, the windows cracked open, friends drifting in and out, the kids out of school. It has rained and something in the air has lifted. Then comes the coupe glass: perfectly chilled, capped in silken foam, dots of bitters shaped like a closing parenthesis. I’ve had Pisco Sours before. But this one makes sense. In Peru, the drink is practically sacred, served at protests and presidential inaugurations alike The ingredients shouldn’t work – harsh grape brandy, raw citrus, egg – but in the glass, they harmonize. Chocolate at the edge, grape in the middle, something like spring itself underneath.

pisco sour
Loyd Grossman

Locatelli has entered the premier league of museum dining

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.

Locatelli
Zoe Strimpel

The cult of Erewhon

“So naturally the first thing I did when I got to California was go to Erewhon and get their hot bar because I have no self-control. I personally love Erewhon,” says Marianna Moore, a food influencer with nearly one million followers, a beautiful face, slightly gross online recipes and comic flair. She then tucks into a plate of tofu sticks, kelp noodles, Japanese sweet potato and buffalo cauliflower. At the end, she says with a smirk: “Was this worth $28? I don’t know! I couldn’t tell you.” She keeps on munching. I’ve not been able to find the seaweed gel or lion’s mane mushrooms in the form they are sold in Erewhon Having been studiously following food content on Instagram for nearly a year, I am finally finding my feet in the thicket of viral trends.

Roger Kimball

The best bargain burgundies

Apropos the subject of this column, videlicet, wine, a friend told me an arresting story about the once-famous British theater critic and playwright Kenneth Tynan (1927-1980). Sometime in the 1960s, when the prickly Gamal Abdel Nasser ruled Egypt, Tynan went sailing on the Nile. One night, he came ashore to enjoy dinner at the Luxor Hotel. The wine list was impressive. He ordered a famous bottle that cost practically nothing. The head waiter swept over to tell him, so sorry, they’d drunk the wine out. Tynan manfully looked again at the list and asked for the second best bottle. Alas, the waiter replied, that wine, too, had been exhausted. “Well, what do you recommend?” Tynan asked. To which the answer was: “We have no wine of any kind.” That hasn’t happened to me yet.

Burgundy

Tuesday

Kara Kennedy

Eric Trump is storming the cider industry

When a name as famous as “Trump” is smacked on the side of a bottle in dazzling gold letters, one might be forgiven for assuming that whatever lies within is the product of too much money and too much time. All the gear, no idea, as they say. Yet in Charlottesville, on a pretty magnificent 1,300-acre estate, Trump Winery confounds expectations – thanks largely to its master wine and cider maker, Jonathan Wheeler. Jonathan has watched the winery’s tumultuous history unfold with the sort of resilience that would make a diplomat blush. The saga began with John and Patricia Kluge, who briefly enjoyed the distinction of being America’s wealthiest couple until a certain Bill Gates took their crown in the early 1990s.

Loyd Grossman

How to café hop like a Parisian

You will be familiar with the 1930s line, “Whenever I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun.” Whenever I hear the word culture I reach for the nearest restaurant. Culture makes me hungry and there is no better place to post-mortemize the latest exhibition or concert than from a comfortable seat in a local joint. For 19th-century progressives, railway stations were the most in-your-face examples of a new and better world. “The railway station is the highest monumental and artistic expression of the industrial and commercial genius which so specially characterizes the era in which we live,” César Daly proclaimed in 1861.

Café
drink
Kelly Chapman

What your choice of drink says about you

In my early twenties, nothing felt more sophisticated than drinking a French 75 at the bar. No matter that it went down like a piece of sour candy: ordering it made me feel like a real lady, a grown-up woman who knew what life was about. It was a cocktail with history, two kinds of alcohol and – most importantly – I felt it imbued me with the aura of a dame in a film noir. It was fun but classic; stylish without being too obviously trendy. Not try-hard like Carrie Bradshaw’s worldly Cosmopolitan. Certainly not like ordering a Martini. Even I knew that ordering a Martini at age 21 would have been an affectation. No, a French 75 was the perfect cocktail for me. I knew my place. Not much has changed since then.

Le Veau d'Or
Roger Kimball

The wait is worth it at Le Veau d’Or

The story of the golden calf is preserved in Exodus 32. Moses had gone up into the mountains to see a man about the law. He tarried. The people grew restless. Eventually they turned to Aaron, Moses’s elder brother, and said, “How about it?” Aaron could see trouble brewing as well as the next chap. “There’s lots of gold in them there earrings,” he said, looking around at the multitude. “Give me the gold and I’ll make you something to worship.” Hence the golden calf, which the people rallied round, much to the irritation of Moses and the higher authorities when they caught wind of it.

Hannah Moore

‘I don’t build new restaurants’: an interview with Tyler Florence

As a child, the chef and television host Tyler Florence had 42 different listed allergies. It wasn’t until he was 13 years old that he tasted melted cheese for the first time. “I had a very weird early diet. I could only eat and drink things like salmon, lentils, goat’s milk.” As a teen, he finally outgrew the allergies and tried foods most kids had been eating their whole lives. “It was like an explosion – all the flavors and the textures. I couldn’t get enough of it.” His first job was as a dishwasher at the Fish Market restaurant in Greenville, South Carolina. “It was the nicest restaurant in town. All the waiters had tuxedos and cummerbunds. It was the 1980s, so there were pink tablecloths and fish tanks in the dining room.