Food and Drink Archives

Tuesday

April 16, 2024

Bar-hopping, Venetian style

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.

Kathleen Willcox

The grapes of wealth

Are the rich different from you and me as F. Scott Fitzgerald posited in 1926? Or do they just have more money, as Ernest Hemingway allegedly retorted? Whatever the answer, they’ve certainly become wealthier. While many of us normies have been sweating fallout from inflation and skyrocketing interest rates — buying a dozen eggs, never mind a new home, requires major budget adjustments — we can take comfort that at least the 0.001 percent are doing fine. According to the latest Oxfam International Inequality Report, the five richest men in the world have doubled their fortunes since 2020 — from a measly $405 billion to $869 billion. What do they sip as they stroke their fat white purebred cats atop piles of gold? It’s wine you won’t find at a store.

Ben Domenech

The magic of Charleston’s Gin Joint

There are few greater joys in life than to wander the streets of Charleston in the evening, the light and shadow of the holy city and the sea salt in the air guiding you near the haunted past, toward cobblestones and the maze of the French Quarter. The quiet of the port pierced by the occasional gull and the stopped-up cannons at every turn bring you back to the age of Henry Timrod, when ships brought the Carolinas “Saxon steel and iron to her hands, And summer to her courts.” As a believer that liquor has seasons, in the summer I shift to good gin, and for the most inventive cocktails on the East Coast there is no comparison to Gin Joint.

Calla Jones Corner

How now, Hausfrau?

It’s summer and very warm on the famed Café Tomaselli terrace in the heart of Salzburg. Nevertheless, I’m sipping a hot coffee and nibbling strudel (mit Schlagobers — whipped cream, of course!) with Melissa (Missy) Baldino. We are talking food, fashion and Rike & Co., the charming entrepreneur’s new business. Missy launched Rike & Co. this past October from her charming Victorian home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It may seem a bit incongruous in this age of hyperfeminism to be selling aprons and housedresses. But “Rike & Co.,” Missy says, “is all about family and being fashionable while cooking and doing housework and everything else that many of the fairer sex still enjoy doing.

Ross Anderson

The espresso martini is the best cocktail template

Try making up your own cocktail. It's hard. Really hard. Cocktails are balanced chemical concoctions, delicious flavors and fun textures that result from a trick of various dancing ingredients, and usually, when you come up with a cocktail idea and try to make it — even if you’ve read great theory books — it is either too sweet or too nothing, too flat. The best way to come up with one, then, is to play on existing templates. It’s not difficult to make your own sour or spritz, but the best of the best, perhaps the most fun cocktail ever, is the espresso martini. And no cocktail is easier to play with. Many of today’s classic cocktails trace their heritage to the Prohibition Era, but the espresso martini comes from the swinging nightlife of 1980s London.

Hannah Moore

How good is cod liver oil for mental health?

In the apocryphal Book of Tobit, Tobias is sent by his father to retrieve some silver that is owed to him. On the way Tobias is attacked by a large fish on the banks of the river Tigris. He cries out to his companion, a man named Azarias (he’s the angel Raphael in disguise), who tells him to grab it and bring it ashore. “Take out the entrails of the fish,” Raphael tells him, “and lay up his head, and his gall, and his liver for thee; for these are necessary for useful medicines.” Tobias seems skeptical. How, exactly, can the liver and gall of a fish be helpful? According to Raphael, “If a demon or evil spirit gives trouble to anyone, you make a smoke from these before the man or woman, and that person will never be troubled again.” And so it proves to be.

Roger Kimball

The blessing of a good wine shop

There are good wine shops and bad wine shops. Among their various attributes, the good ones have a broad selection of interesting wines from interesting places and — important add-on — a knowledgeable staff whose members can talk intelligently about their wares and can steer you in the right direction. The bad ones — well, you know. Their shelves are full of the stuff the distributors tell them to buy and their staff is not really sure whether Morgon is the name of the boss’s pet or a place in Beaujolais that produces good wine. My office in New York is close to an excellent wine shop called Flatiron Wine & Spirits. It is a big shop on Broadway at 18th Street and it boasts a large, expert and helpful staff.

Sunday

March 17, 2024

Marisela Ramirez

The classic charm of Exiles

On Washington’s U Street, nestled between a dry-cleaners and the city’s most notorious gay gym, lies Exiles, a modest Irish sports bar marked by a warm blue neon sign and a Bills flag. “It’s a Bills bar and they’ll play a Jets game for me,” boasts Carmen, a local sitting at the long wooden bar. Red Liverpool soccer scarves drape over bottles of whiskey. A large Guinness bell hangs in the middle of the bar. “What can I get for you darling? I almost didn’t recognize you with your glasses on,” says a tender voice with an Irish accent. It’s Donagh. Pronounced “DUN-AHH” according to a sign at the bar. He’s a bartender and one of the owners. “Donagh and Paul will make you feel right at home...

Calla Jones Corner

Wild boar: a nuisance and a delicacy

"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.

Mary Kate Skehan

The new Dada movement

I first came across the food influencer Samah Dada while searching for gluten- and dairy-free dishes. Dada, a twenty-eight-year-old food influencer with regular segments on the Today show, a cookbook, and a 400,000-follower Instagram account, somehow makes being a gluten-free vegan who doesn’t drink look fun. Her skin and hair are positively radiant with nourishment and nontoxicity; she looks very well-hydrated. Hoping to achieve some of this plant-based glow for myself, I headed to the Instagram account DadaEats and tried to eat like Dada. I started with the desserts, simply for the economy of scale: check out of the grocery store with almond butter, dark chocolate chips, rice cakes, maple syrup and dates, and you’ll be able to make almost any of her no-bake desserts.

Roger Kimball

A French symposium

Just as night watchmen are constrained by duty to make their rounds, so are writers about wine. Sometimes the rounds are seasonal. Beaujolais Nouveau, for example, is released every year on the third Thursday of November at 12:01 a.m., just a few weeks after the September harvest. Gamay, the grape that makes Beaujolais, can be fresh, floral and ruby-like in this nymphet incarnation. Beaujolais Nouveau lacks the depth, succulence and complexity of more mature instances of Gamay — especially in Morgon and Côte du Py — but it is an agreeable, undemanding picnic wine that goes well with your preferred instantiation of déjeuner sur l’herbe.

Thursday

February 15, 2024

Madeleine Kearns

In search of the quintessentially British afternoon tea

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.

Ed Zotti

The Long Room, a reliable Chicago bar with all the essentials

I was sipping a beer on the patio behind Ten Cat Tavern with my friend Charlie, debating which was the better Chicago bar: the Long Room up the street, or the Ten Cat. The Long Room was a neighborhood bar that had once been a dive bar. Ten Cat, according to Yelp, is a dive bar now. This requires explanation. For old-school relics like me, calling a tavern a dive bar has not, historically, been a compliment. When we moved into the neighborhood thirty years ago, the Long Room was Blue Bird Liquors, a Chicago dive bar in the traditional mold — a combination packaged-goods store and neighborhood shot-and-a-beer joint. Blue Bird Liquors didn’t have the wall of TVs obligatory in modern bars. Considering how dark it was, I’m not 100 percent sure it had electricity.

Hannah Moore

How to do St. Patrick’s Day like an Irish American

For a country like Ireland, as devoted to its faith as to a good party, the fact that St. Patrick’s Day falls during Lent poses a problem. The saint himself is said to have broken his fast during Lent, eating meat instead of fish, for which he was so apologetic that an angel came to give him comfort. Put your meat into a dish of water, the angel said, and it will turn to fish. This Patrick did and was very pleased to see that the angel was right. The meat had turned to fish, and he could partake of it without guilt. The Irish call this miracle “St. Patrick’s Fish,” and feel no qualms about eating a pork roast to celebrate the day. You can also keep a holy day and drink to excess, if you’re drinking for the right reasons. St.

Roger Kimball

Truffle shuffle

Regular readers may recall the trip we took to St. Émilion on the right bank of the Gironde-Dordogne river system a while back. It being truffle season, some enterprising chaps organized a dinner revolving around that delectable fungus and one of the very best wines from St. Émilion, Château Angélus, a Premier Grand Cru Classé A, and its second label, Carillon d’Angélus. Note the bell motif: a single bell features on the label of Château Angélus, three on that of Carillon d’Angélus, so named because in the vineyards one can hear the bells from three neighboring churches ringing out that prayer to Mary (Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariæ...) in the morning, noon and around vespers. Those of you who were along for our last foray to St.

Jane Stannus

How eggs became the symbol of Easter

Thirty feet in the air off a northern Canadian highway stands the giant Vegreville Easter egg, rotating gently in the wind. The egg is eighteen feet wide, nearly twenty-five long and designed to turn with the breeze like a weathervane. It is decorated in a traditional Ukrainian pysanka pattern with thousands of gold, black and white aluminum triangles, for the egg is an homage to the Ukrainian immigrants who settled the area long ago. It is a technical feat: the tile- cutting technology developed to produce the mosaic on the egg’s curved surface was later used to tile the exterior of the Space Shuttle. Whatever day of the year you may spy it, it is undeniably an Easter egg.

Mary Kate Skehan

The delight of reading the New York Times Cooking comments

The cardinal rule of the internet may be “never read the comments,” but in at least one corner of the web, the rule should be never to skip them. I’m talking about the New York Times Cooking blog and app, the most-used resource in my kitchen. NYT has more than 20,000 recipes in its database. Many of them sport hundreds of “community notes” left by passionate home cooks. In my years using the app, I’ve noticed a few trends in the comments. The most famous NYT Cooking comment annotates the classic recipe for Katharine Hepburn’s brownies. The commenter gushes about the recipe before veering into a story about sharing her brownies with a German acquaintance. The note ends with a twist: “Eventually, she moved to the US and stole my husband!

Tuesday

January 23, 2024

Kathleen Willcox

The rise of English wine

Sometimes, I pretend that I worked the wine beat thirty or forty years ago. I picture myself in formal wear, kicking back in gilded settings, sipping perfectly aged first growth, trading bons mots with winemakers. We’d spend hours solemnly considering the slow, steady, seemingly eternal rise of wine culture, and how inevitably it would soften the cruder edges of society. It would be so merry, yet cerebral — but also something we could feel good, even morally superior, about participating in. Instead, I’m in 2024 wearing yoga pants and guzzling mineral water (must hydrate!) by myself holding Zooms with winemakers, sweating over the fact that scientists say climate change imperils up to 73 percent of the world’s current wine-growing regions.

Hannah Moore

Ringing in the Chinese New Year with homemade dim sum

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.

Marc Oestreich

New Buffalo’s Bentwood Tavern is an unapologetically tasteful beach town bar

Near the lake in the quaint beach town of New Buffalo, a rotating sign carries the silhouette of a shaggy mutt. A line forms near the door for the boring beachy fare, churned out at factory pace. The souvenir hoodies are out the door as fast as they can print them; the Stray Dog has become a destination in itself. I’ve seen their signature motto — Sit! Stay! — everywhere from Santa Barbara to Brooklyn. You probably have too. And don’t get me wrong, the Stray Dog is great at being what it is: the quintessential beach-town bar. But I prefer it here, half a mile south, in the uncelebrated version of a beach-town bar. There’s no merch store, no zany southwest eggrolls, no Jägermeister dispenser, no television. Just ten velvety bar stools and endless respite.