The Chef at 15
Flynn McGarry designs eight-course tasting menus and interns in three-star kitchens. Now he wants to open the best restaurant in the world.
The Chef at 15
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The Chef at 15
Frank Bruni is sooo good and soooo right! There is nothing better than being welcomed at your favorite “spot”. And nothing better than bringing the people you love there too. This is Eat+Drink’s entire goal - to show you the places we love.
Frank Bruni, Former Restaurant Critic, on the Joys of Repeat Visits
What a cad I used to be, constantly ditching the bistro that had opened only four months ago for the week-old trattoria with an even dewier complexion, callously trading in the yellowtail sashimi that had been so good to me for a hot tamale of unproven charms.
Then, a few years back, the restaurant Barbuto and I settled down.
It’s bliss. She knows my heart, knows my drill: a gin martini to begin, a seasonal salad for my appetizer, the roasted chicken after.
And I know her. If the weather’s nice, a breeze will blow in from the West Village streets that her retractable walls open onto. The kale that she serves me will be sparingly dressed. And the breast meat? As plump and tender as it was the last time around and the dozen times before that.
We don’t have fireworks, not this late in the game. But we have a rhythm. Sometimes that’s better.
What I’m saying is that I’m a regular there, as I am at the Breslin, whose lamb burger is as true to me as I am to it; at Empellón Taqueria, where I never stray from the fish tempura tacos, which never let me down; at Szechuan Gourmet, where I don’t glance at a menu. I don’t have to.
I’m no monogamist, that’s clear. More of a polygamist, but I dote on my sister wives. I’ve come to see that the broccolini isn’t always greener on the other side of Houston Street, and I’m here to sing what’s too seldom sung: the joys of familiarity. The pleasures of intimacy. The virtues of staying put.
What you have with a restaurant that you visit once or twice is a transaction. What you have with a restaurant that you visit over and over is a relationship.
The fashionable script for today’s food maven doesn’t encourage that sort of bonding, especially not in a city with New York’s ambition and inexhaustible variety. Here you’re supposed to dash to the new Andrew Carmellini brasserie before anybody else gets there; be the first to taste ABC Cocina’s guacamole; advertise an opinion about the Massaman curry at Uncle Boons while others are still puzzling over the fugitive apostrophe. Snap a photo. Tweet it. Then move on. There’s always something else. Always virgin ground.
For years, I was dedicated to exploring it, by dint of my duty as The Times’s restaurant critic. I was a paid philanderer. It was exhilarating. It was exhausting.
Sometimes I wonder if we’re doing this tipping thing all wrong.
Leaving a Tip: A Custom in Need of Changing?
Try one of these techniques if you want better service in restaurants:
1. Become very famous;
2. Spend $1,000 or more on wine every time you go out;
3. Keep going to the same restaurant until you get V.I.P. treatment; if that doesn’t work, pick another place.
Now, here is a technique that is guaranteed to have no effect on your service: leave a generous tip.
I’ve tipped slightly above the average for years, generally leaving 20 percent of the total, no matter what. According to one study, lots of people are just like me, sticking with a reasonable percentage through good nights and bad. And it doesn’t do us any good, because servers have no way of telling that we aren’t the hated type that leaves 10 percent of the pretax total, beverages excluded.
Some servers do try to sniff out stingy tippers, engaging in customer profiling based on national origin, age, race, gender and other traits. (The profiling appears to run both ways: another study showed that customers tended to leave smaller tips for black servers.)
I could go on against tipping, but let’s leave it at this: it is irrational, outdated, ineffective, confusing, prone to abuse and sometimes discriminatory. The people who take care of us in restaurants deserve a better system, and so do we.
I swear summer isn’t over and I’m going to keep the grilling going far into the fall!
Welcome to the Post-Marinade Era of Grilling
Forget about marinades, at least on the grill.
That may sound like backyard apostasy, since common knowledge holds that grilling and marinating go together like … well, fill in your favorite eternal twosome here. You can’t open a cookbook or look at a restaurant menu without seeing them paired.
It may be due at least partly to the fact that a “tequila marinated grilled flank steak” sounds more enticing that just a plain old steak. But there’s also a well-rehearsed rationale for the partnership.
Marinating, it’s said, not only adds flavor and moisture that will stay with the food through the rigors of the grilling process, but also tenderizes whatever you’re about to put over the coals.
I love all the new, exciting foods coming out of Iowa and our country overall. Amazing time to have a love affair with American food and the natural, healthy, organic American food business.
Some Prosciutto Fans Turn to Iowa
NORWALK, Iowa — The decision came down to this: Would people buy prosciutto from a guy named Herb from Iowa?
“It was a crazy idea, but we didn’t think it was a stupid idea,” says Herb Eckhouse, the Herb from Iowa who spent some anxious years weighing that question. Racks of raw pork rolling into the refrigerated chambers around him suggest the answer.
It is Wednesday, salting day, so Mr. Eckhouse is preoccupied with the central task of making his prosciutto: coating the carefully trimmed hind leg of a pig with sea salt. “This is kind of the key time, so we want to make sure it’s done right,” he says. READ MORE
Awhile back I posted another New York Times article about Carl Edgar Blake and his award-winning Iowan Swabian Hall Pig. He also showed up on the Colbert Report with a couple of his little piglets. Stephen Colbert holds a piglet and eats prosciutto at the same time!
Loving these little bits they have on summer concoctions!! Check it out.
Gin, Tonic and a Dash of Restraint
Sipping a good gin and tonic is like finding a 20th-century oxford shirt in the closet and realizing that you can still wear it downtown tonight without looking out of step with the century we’re stuck in.
The Marvels in Your Mouth by Mary Roach
I love finding these random little articles about the process of eating. Maybe you will too. This article in the New York Times is all about the research being done at the Restaurant of the Future in Food Valley in Wageningen in the Netherlands where “15,000 scientists are dedicated to improving the quality of our meals.” READ MORE
More info today about Marilyn….
New York’s her dish
America’s newest hot restaurant critic, Marilyn Hagerty, has been touring New York’s top eateries after she became an overnight sensation when her review of the new Grand Forks Olive Garden went viral. Marilyn, 85, wrote a charming review in her North Dakota hometown paper, the Grand Forks Herald, with lines including, “My first visit to Olive Garden was during mid-afternoon, so I could be sure to get in.” After it went viral with more than 100,000 hits, Hagerty flew here to be a guest on “Piers Morgan Tonight,” “Today” and “The Early Show.” Anderson Cooper booked her on his show as well and sent her for lunch yesterday at Crown, where she dined on chef John DeLucie’s beet salad, scallops and chocolate soufflé. Sources said she loved the food and asked to take her leftovers with her as she went to tape the show. Hagerty has also dined at four-star Le Bernardin and three-star Dovetail, and we eagerly await to read how she thinks they match up to Olive Garden. Hagerty, who will appear on “Anderson” with DeLucie on March 20, also invited the chef to join her at Olive Garden the next time he’s passing through Grand Forks.
Have you ever heard of North Dakota food critic Marilyn Hagerty? Me either. But I just followed a NYTimes piece about her. Apparently she became a bit of a sensation when she reviewed the local Olive Garden. Her son, James, writes for the Wall Street Journal and wrote an article about his mom’s new found celebrity. And this is the NYTimes piece about her recent trip to New York and her review of a hot dog from a street vendor. I think she’s damn funny!
Have you ever heard of North Dakota food critic Marilyn Hagerty? Me either. But I just followed a NYTimes piece about her. Apparently she became a bit of a sensation when she reviewed the local Olive Garden. Her son, James, writes for the Wall Street Journal and wrote an article about his mom’s new found celebrity. And this is the NYTimes piece about her recent trip to New York and her review of a hot dog from a street vendor. I think she’s damn funny!
How shortsighted can we be?
Looking to Save Money, More Places Decide to Stop Fluoridating the Water
MIAMI — A growing number of communities are choosing to stop adding fluoride to their water systems, even though the federal government and federal health officials maintain their full support for a measure they say provides a 25 percent reduction in tooth decay nationwide. READ MORE
I LOVE the look that these guys have!!!! Yum!!! And they have a tumblr!!
Pushing the Boundaries of Black Style
THE best posts on the style blog Street Etiquette find its principals, Travis Gumbs and Joshua Kissi, in motion. As opposed to the fascistically frozen street-style snaps of The Sartorialist and others, these pictures are styled and plotted fictions but also affecting ones, depicting a pair of young black men taking ownership not just of the body and what goes on it, but also of the environment it moves in. No one ever smiles on Street Etiquette: there’s business to attend to.
Most days, the actual business of Mr. Kissi and Mr. Gumbs takes place in a work-space-cum-clubhouse on Bergen Street in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. With vintage sweaters hanging from the ceiling and art books lining the walls, this is the nerve center of the Brooklyn Circus, whose flagship store is just a few dozen steps away, and which is a key collaborative partner for Street Etiquette, which began as a basic beautiful-things blog in 2008 but is now one of the foremost online repositories of black style. READ MORE
Rachel’s Last Fundraiser by Nicholas Kristoff (New York Times)
Perhaps every generation of geezers since Adam and Eve has whined about young people, and today is no different. Isn’t it clear that in contrast to our glorious selves, kids these days are self-absorbed Facebook junkies just a pixel deep?
No, actually that’s wrong at every level. This has been a depressing time to watch today’s “adults,” whose talent for self-absorption and political paralysis makes it difficult to solve big problems. But many young people haven’t yet learned to be cynical. They believe, in a wonderfully earnest way, in creating a better world.
In the midst of this grim summer, my faith in humanity has been restored by the saga of Rachel Beckwith. She could teach my generation a great deal about maturity and unselfishness — even though she’s just 9 years old, or was when she died on July 23.
In the midst of this grim summer, my faith in humanity has been restored by the saga of Rachel Beckwith. She could teach my generation a great deal about maturity and unselfishness — even though she’s just 9 years old, or was when she died on July 23. Rachel lived outside Seattle and early on showed a desire to give back. At age 5, she learned at school about an organization called Locks of Love, which uses hair donations to make wigs for children who have lost their own hair because of cancer or other diseases. Rachel then asked to have her long hair shorn off and sent to Locks of Love. “She said she wanted to help the cancer kids,” her mother, Samantha Paul, told me. After the haircut, Rachel announced that she would grow her hair long again and donate it again after a few years to Locks of Love. And that’s what she did. Then when she was 8 years old, her church began raising money to build wells in Africa through an organization called charity:water. Rachel was aghast when she learned that other children had no clean water, so she asked to skip having a ninth birthday party. In lieu of presents, she asked her friends to donate $9 each to charity:water for water projects in Africa. Rachel’s ninth birthday was on June 12, and she had set up a birthday page on the charity:water Web site with a target of $300. Alas, Rachel was able to raise only $220 — which had left her just a bit disappointed. Then, on July 20, as Rachel was riding with her family on the highway, two trucks collided and created a 13-car pileup. Rachel’s car was hit by one of the trucks, and although the rest of her family was unhurt, Rachel was left critically injured. Church members and friends, seeking some way of showing support, began donating on Rachel’s birthday page — charitywater.org/Rachel — and donations surged past her $300 goal, and kept mounting. As family and friends gathered around Rachel’s bedside, they were able to tell her — even not knowing whether she couldn’t hear them — that she had exceeded the $47,544 that the singer Justin Bieber had raised for charity:water on his 17th birthday. “I think she secretly had a crush on him, but she would never admit it,” her mom said. “I think she would have been ecstatic.” When it was clear that Rachel would never regain consciousness, the family decided to remove life support. Her parents donated her hair a final time to Locks of Love, and her organs to other children. Word spread about Rachel’s last fund-raiser. Contributions poured in, often in $9 increments, although one 5-year-old girl sent in the savings in her piggy bank of $2.27. The total donations soon topped $100,000, then $300,000. Like others, I was moved and donated. As I write this, more than $850,000 has been raised from all over the world, including donations from Africans awed by a little American girl who cared about their continent. “What has been so inspiring about Rachel is that she has taught the adults,” said Scott Harrison, the founder of charity:water. “Adults are humbled by the unselfishness of this little girl.” Yet this is a story not just of one girl, but of a generation of young people working creatively to make this a better world. Mr. Harrison is emblematic of these young people. Now 35, he established charity:water when he was 30, and it has taken off partly because of his mastery at social media. (He’s not as experienced in well-drilling, so the wells are actually dug by expert groups like International Rescue Committee.) Youth activism has a long history, but this ethos of public service is on the ascendant today — and today’s kids don’t just protest against injustices, as my contemporaries did, but many are also remarkable problem-solvers. As for Ms. Paul, she’s planning a trip on the anniversary of her daughter’s death next year to see some of the wells being drilled in Africa in her daughter’s name. “It’ll be overwhelming to see Rachel’s wells,” she said, “to see what my 9-year-old daughter has done for people all over the world, to meet the people she has touched.” Rachel Beckwith, R.I.P., and may our generation learn from yours.
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Celebrating the Girls of Summer
By FRANK BRUNI
Published: August 3, 2011
As the millions of readers who made “The Help” a publishing phenomenon know, the novel explores the poignantly modest aspirations and profound humiliations of black maids in Mississippi in the 1960s. It’s a story of racial injustice, reconciliation and sweet, overdue revenge.It’s also a story of female grit and solidarity — of strength through sisterhood. I was reminded of that early this week when I saw an advance screening of the movie version, which opens Wednesday.
What struck and pleased me most was the way “The Help” pushes back against a Hollywood tsunami of beach-season superheroes, sorcerers and simians (the “Apes” swing into theaters on Friday) by putting women in the foreground. Also the midground. They monopolize the background, too. An hour after seeing it, I couldn’t visualize a single male character. What a bracing, welcome tonic.
Especially because I had been so focused on Washington and its stormy climate of reigning men. Despite the long strides women have made in public life, they were absent from center stage in the debt-ceiling melodrama, which, at times, seemed a cautionary tale of testosterone run amok. READ MORE
This Op-Ed piece in today’s New York Times about the inappropriate pro-slavery view of family values is smart and the writer is a Princeton professor of history and African-American studies.
Putting an Antebellum Myth to Rest
WAS slavery an idyllic world of stable families headed by married parents? The recent controversy over “The Marriage Vow,” a document endorsed by the Republican presidential candidates Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum, might seem like just another example of how racial politics and historical ignorance are perennial features of the election cycle.
The vow, which included the assertion that “a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President,” was amended after the outrage it stirred.
However, this was not a harmless gaffe; it represents a resurfacing of a pro-slavery view of “family values” that was prevalent in the decades before the Civil War. The resurrection of this idea has particular resonance now, because it was 150 years ago, soon after the war began, that the government started to respect the dignity of slave families. Slaves did not live in independent “households”; they lived under the auspices of masters who controlled the terms of their most intimate relationships.
Back in 1860, marriage was a civil right and a legal contract, available only to free people. Male slaves had no paternal rights and female slaves were recognized as mothers only to the extent that their status doomed their children’s fate to servitude in perpetuity. To be sure, most slaves did all that they could to protect, sustain and nurture their loved ones. Freedom and the love of family are the most abiding themes that dominate the hundreds of published narratives written by former slaves.
Though slaves could not marry legally, they were allowed to do so by custom with the permission of their owners — and most did. But the wedding vows they recited promised not “until death do us part,” but “until distance” — or, as one black minister bluntly put it, “the white man” — “do us part.” And couples were not entitled to live under the same roof, as each spouse could have a different owner, miles apart. All slaves dealt with the threat of forcible separation; untold numbers experienced it first-hand.
Among the best-known of these stories is that of Henry “Box” Brown, who mailed himself from Richmond, Va., to Philadelphia in 1849 to escape slavery. “No slave husband has any certainty whatever of being able to retain his wife a single hour; neither has any wife any more certainty of her husband,” Brown wrote in his narrative of his escape. “Their fondest affection may be utterly disregarded, and their devoted attachment cruelly ignored at any moment a brutal slave-holder may think fit.”
He had been married for 12 months and was the father of an infant when his wife was sold to a nearby planter. After 12 more years of long-distance marriage, his wife and children were sold out of state, sundering their family.
Slave marriages were not granted out of the goodness of “ole massa’s” heart. Rather, they were used as tools to keep slaves in line and to increase profits. Many slaves were forced to marry people they did not choose or to copulate like farm animals — with masters, overseers and fellow slaves.
Abolitionists and ex-slaves publicized excruciating details like these, but the world view of pro-slavery apologists like James Henry Hammond, a senator from South Carolina, could not make sense of motivations like Brown’s. “I believe there are more families among our slaves, who have lived and died together without losing a single member from their circle, except by the process of nature,” than in most modern societies, Hammond claimed. Under the tutelage of warm and loving white patriarchs like himself, slave families enjoyed “constant, uninterrupted communion.”
Hammond’s self-serving fantasy world gave way to reality during the Civil War, as slaves escaped in droves to follow in the footsteps of Union Army soldiers. Although President Abraham Lincoln had promised that he would not interfere with slavery in states where it already existed, he and his military commanders were faced with the unforeseen determination of fugitives seeking refuge, freedom and opportunities to aid the war against their masters. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler developed a policy of treating slaves as “contrabands” of war, inadvertently opening the door for many more to flee. In early August 1861, Congress passed the First Confiscation Act, which authorized the army to seize all property, including slaves, used by the rebellious states in the war effort.
“Contrabands” became the first beneficiaries of a government appeal to military officers, clergymen and missionaries to marry couples “under the flag.” The Army produced marriage certificates for fugitive slave couples solemnizing their marriages, and giving legitimacy to their children for the first time. But it was not until after slavery was abolished that marriage could be secured as a civil right. Despite resistance from erstwhile Confederates, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which extended the right to make contracts, including the right to marry, to all former slaves.
Why does the ugly resuscitation of the myth of the happy slave family matter? Because it is part of a broad and deliberate amnesia, like the misleading assertion by Sarah Palin that the founders were antislavery and the skipping of the “three-fifths” clause during a Republican reading of the Constitution on the House floor. The oft-repeated historical fictions about black families only prove how politically useful and resilient they continue to be in a so-called post-racial society. Refusing to be honest about how racial inequality has burdened our shared history and continues to shape our society will not get us to that post-racial vision.
**Tera W. Hunter, a professor of history and African-American studies at Princeton, is the author of “To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War.”
The Rise of the Fake Apple Store (in China)
Apple products have always been coveted by other electronics makers, especially Chinese manufacturers. The company’s products are so sought after that some electronic makers actually create fake replicas of iPods, iPhones and Mac computers, which are sold in electronics stores and online marketplaces.
Now Apple has to contend with a new genre of copycats, those who are actually replicating Apple Store retail locations and setting up shop around the world. The fake stores are selling real Apple products, though it’s unclear how they’re procured. Read More
I kinda went on a rant in today’s blog….hope you guys understand….sometimes it just happens. :)
Same Sex Marriage in Vermont Gone Wrong
I read an article the other day by Karen Hartman in the New York Times. It chronicles her very unusual situation. You see, back in 2000, Karen and her girlfriend drove from their home in Brooklyn up to Vermont to get hitched under that state’s more favorable same-sex marriage laws.
I have to add a disclaimer here and let you know that my family is from the great state of Vermont. I lived there until I was ten; my grandparents are buried there; my grandmother Pearl worked for the state’s long-standing senator Patrick Leahy; my mother and cousin graduated from the University of Vermont…I love that state. But even I didn’t run off to get married there “just because I could”.
As you know, New York just recently passed a new law to allow same-sex marriage in their state and the first ceremonies will be held this Sunday, July 24th.
The problems began for poor Karen and her nameless lesbian wife four years later when Karen had an affair with a man and decided she wasn’t gay anymore. Read More
Mandatory Contraceptive Insurance Is Urged - New York Times
Besides… If men are going to make women take the birth control (which wreaks havoc on our systems) for a shared act it should at least be paid for! :P
I agree with you on all accounts. I didn’t think that unintended meant teenage but I was just in complete shock that 50% of ALL pregnancies are unintended. Clearly 60% of those go to term, etc and I’m sure those families are happy. I guess for people with fertility struggles or same-sex partners like us (on both accounts), it just boggles my mind that pregnancy could be “unintended”. Know what I mean? Doesn’t everyone have a bunch of doctors, nurses, drugs and medical procedures involved like we did? :)
What do you guys think about these arrests of alleged members of the hacker group Anonymous?