Food

Thursday

Tanya Gold

‘Five stars, no notes’: Arlington reviewed

From our UK edition

Arlington is named for the 1st Earl of Arlington and his street behind the Ritz Hotel. It used to be Le Caprice, which was opened in 1947 by the Italian Mario Gellati, who would not, by the new rules, get into Britain now, but this is not a column about pain. In 1981 Le Caprice was taken over by Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, and it became the most fashionable restaurant in London. Princess Diana dined here and when Jeffrey Archer was released from prison, he ate here. None ofthese dishes could be improved. Five stars, no notes After an interregnum from Richard Caring, under which Le Caprice closed in 2020 – it could not compete with Caring’s mad themed restaurants across Piccadilly – Jeremy King, who is more emotional and skilful than most restaurateurs, returned here.

Tuesday

Estella Shardlow

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.

Venetian
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.

cod liver oil
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.

Tuesday

Amy Rose Everett

Great Colorado restaurants, now with Michelin nods 

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.

colorado food

Thursday

Hannah Moore

Stop worrying if your child is a picky eater

From our UK edition

One parent in our class WhatsApp chat raised a pressing concern: her daughter was coming home every day with a full water bottle. Were other parents faced with the same unsettling discovery? There followed a lengthy discussion of how much water was left in each child’s bottle. Some children, when confronted, testified that they had drunk water during the day and then filled up the bottle at school. Anyone who expects children to enjoy cooked courgette has forgotten what it was like to be a child This was not good enough for the concerned parent. She took the matter to the teacher. ‘I am concerned my daughter is not given enough opportunity to drink water during the school day,’ read her message. She shared it with the group – and the teacher’s response.

Tanya Gold

‘Can’t help but exude warmth’: Paper Moon at the OWO, reviewed

From our UK edition

Paper Moon is the Italian restaurant inside the Old War Office on Whitehall, now a hotel called Raffles London at the OWO. It has nine restaurants and bars, because it is a Disneyland for the 1 per cent in the fraying centre of the British state, which is enraging and hilarious. I reviewed Saison in November and found it as chilly and finessed as the British state pre-crisis. OWO reminds me of a theme park I visited in Georgia, Russia, two decades ago in winter. It was a fine endeavour but pointless, the happy children had fled. You can’t have a grand hotel inside a post-Imperial bin fire. It makes no sense. Paper Moon is grey, and Art Deco, of course: the pre-calamity aestheticof choice Paper Moon is rather better than Saison: perhaps Italian food can’t help but exude warmth.

Thursday

Tanya Gold

‘The interiors are happily insane’: Dear Jackie, reviewed

From our UK edition

Dear Jackie is the restaurant in the new hotel Broadwick Soho on Broadwick Street in Soho, which is most famous, if you are an infectious diseases nerd, for being the site of the 1854 cholera outbreak and its cure. Dr John Snow isolated it to the street’s water pump, noted local brewers were immune, and proved cholera is not airborne. When children stopped dying, Soho eased into its time of moral rot. This is as spirited an attempt to re­animate the 1970s as I have found beyond musical theatre This is a changeable thing. Drama fled Soho in the 1970s, and Broadwick Soho is an attempt to put it back. This is no generic hotel.

Sunday

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.

boar
Dada
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.

Thursday

Tanya Gold

‘As good as you will find in London’: Noble Rot Mayfair, reviewed

From our UK edition

Noble Rot, which is named for a sickness that afflicts grapes, a self-aware name for a restaurant in London, is becoming a chain. Don’t get me wrong. The Rots in Lamb’s Conduit Street and Greek Street (which replaced the Gay Hussar that died in sympathy with the intelligent left) are two of the best restaurants we have. My only complaint is that, like the Plastics in Mean Girls, they know how lovely they are and have their own promotional magazine. This food has a loving intensity to it, and it is as good as you will find in London Now they have expanded into Mayfair – but the least horrifying part, which is Shepherd’s Market.

Thursday

Tanya Gold

‘You can stare at a cow you will soon eat’: The Newt, Hadspen, reviewed

From our UK edition

The Newt is an idealised country house in Somerset which won the World’s Best Boutique Hotel award last year. It is small, beautiful and mind-meltingly expensive, even for the Bruton Triangle and its mooing art galleries. Poor Somerset! It never wanted to be monied enough to have a triangle, but the rich make their own mythology. Since they paint every-thing grey – and now green, I learn at the Newt – they need it. A triangle fills the day. The Newt is for people who think that Babington House is stupid (it is) and though the Newt has its own issues – like the King, its taste is almost too immaculate – you never feel that the chief executive of a media conglomerate will bounce past you on a space hopper eating a fishfinger sandwich and shouting into an iPhone.

Thursday

Teresa Mull

The magic of making maple syrup

On one of those dark-too-early winter afternoons that might as well be midnight, I assessed my Subaru’s all-wheel drive capabilities with a slick spin up a long, snow-covered driveway. My destination: the sugar shack. Scott and Kelly Kolesar live on a piece of property Kelly’s great-grandfather homesteaded. And for all I know, standing on the clear-cut hillside that’s only ever been disturbed by the planting of some potatoes and strawberries and the hooves of cattle that grazed it decades ago, I could be right back in those early days of central Pennsylvania’s settling. The sky is clear and dark, with no light pollution to speak of, and diamonds twinkle above. The Kolesar home glows as a North Star up ahead, and another beacon next door serves as Halley’s Comet.

syrup
Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

Meeting Eric Ripert, chef of America’s best restaurant 

For Eric Ripert, cooking is like jazz. Ad-libbing, balance, motion. “One day the garlic is very pungent, one day it is not pungent. One day the onion is very juicy and sweet, one day it’s less, so you have to adapt all the time,” says the celebrated chef, who is the co-owner of Manhattan’s Le Bernardin, a close friend of the late Anthony Bourdain and a TV personality in his own right. “So, it’s very similar to music — I do not play the same notes all the time, I take a lot of freedom and liberties. Because I can.” Ripert is French but has — like his storied restaurant — become a New York institution. The chef lives on the Upper East Side with his glamorous, dark-haired wife Sandra (a real-estate broker who is Brooklyn born-and-raised, of Puerto Rican descent).

Ripert
tea
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.

Easter
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.

Deborah Ross

Sensuous, languorous, soothing and rich: The Taste of Things reviewed

From our UK edition

The Taste of Things, which is this year’s French entry for best international film at the Oscars, is a gastro-film but it is not of the ‘Angry Male Chef’ genre. It’s not Boiling Point or The Menu or The Bear. It is not stressful or adrenaline-filled. No one swears or screams ‘Yes, chef!’ Instead, it is sensuous, languorous, soothing and as rich and deep as (I now know) a consommé should be. It will also force you to reappraise vol-au-vents which, in the right, tenderly loving hands, need not be the mean little bullety things that were served here in the seventies. (My mother, I remember, bought them frozen from Bejam. But only for special occasions.

Monday

Amy Rose Everett

Opening a bottle with… Angela Hartnett

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.

angela hartnett

Thursday

Tanya Gold

‘Is it France? I don’t know’: Hôtel de Crillon, Paris, reviewed

From our UK edition

Hôtel de Crillon sits on the Place de la Concorde, a vast square renamed for bloodshed, then the lack of it – it was the Place de la Révolution, with knitting and bouncing heads. Now it is placid, and the Crillon is the most placid thing in it. No one does grand hotels like the French, except perhaps the Swiss, who have nothing better to do. Hôtel de Crillon was one of twin palaces commissioned by Louis XV before the French butchered his grandson and his wife outside them: it looks like Buckingham Palace but prettier and with possible PTSD. It has been a hotel for 115 years and next to it our Ritz and Savoy look grubby, needy even, but they were built for the bourgeoisie. They have a different kind of grandeur, a kind I prefer.

Thursday

Tanya Gold

‘I pity MPs more than ever’: the Cinnamon Club, reviewed

From our UK edition

The Cinnamon Club appears on lists of MPs favourite restaurants: if they can still eat this late into a parliament. It lives in the old Westminster Library on Great Smith Street, a curiously bloodless part of London, and an irresistible metaphor wherever you are. When once you ate knowledge, you now eat flesh, but only if you can afford it. Now there is the Charing Cross Library, which lives next to the Garrick Theatre, and looks curiously oppressed. Perhaps soon it will be a falafel shack and knows it. There is also the Central Reference Library, which could be a KFC, and soon will be. Public spaces are shrinking. They will all be online soon, and we will see how that goes. (It will be bad.) The Cinnamon Club, which identifies as ‘fine dining’, seeks finesse. What for?