Joe Ray

The Boston Globe - Sunday, April 15, 2012

I am famous for my cheese nights. An invitation goes out about a week or two in advance reading, “Bring a friend, bring wine, and bring a hunk of good cheese.” Even in France, where I have lived on and off for 10 years, I am famous . . . at least among my friends.

Cheese night started when I lived in Seattle as a way to connect to France, where I wanted to make my home. The tradition continued and grew exponentially at my apartments in the City of Light, where tables would be mounded with cheese and wine. At one of the first of these gatherings, a friend popped a bite of baguette laden with a wonderfully runny Vacherin Mont d’Or and proclaimed, “This tastes like I’m licking a cow’s rear end!” before going on to eat the rest of the wheel himself.

...Read the rest here in The Boston Globe Travel.

The Daily - Arts & Life - Saturday, March 17, 2012

At Brooklyn’s Palo Cortado tapas bar, owner Alessandro Piliego was speaking his native Italian on the phone. Apparently, a native Roman slinging 20 sherries by the glass in the bowels of Brooklyn is what it takes to help kick-start a trend.

“Sherry isn’t popular and Spanish restaurants in the United States haven’t done a good job at promoting it. It’s like going to an Italian restaurant and not finding grappa,” he said. But sherry, the once-fusty Spanish wine, is enjoying a budding new regard stateside.

... read the rest here in The Daily.

The Daily - Arts & Life - Saturday, February 4, 2012

The last time I was in Buffalo, N.Y., my hair caught fire in a botched effort to down a flaming Dr Pepper shot at Mulligan’s Brick Bar. The only other thing I remember from that weekend is the chicken wings: flaming hot and particularly good with cheap beer. But what makes this quintessential football food so important to its hometown?

Andy Denne, chef at Allen Street Hardware, a rather perfect bar and restaurant in the historic Allentown district, had a few answers. Denne is a Buffalo native and a journeyman chef, but only on special occasions does he whip up wings, making him a neutral insider in the wing wars.

I called him to ask if it was worth making a winter trek to his city for Buffalo wings.

“First of all, we just call them wings, and I wouldn’t eat wings anywhere outside of western New York state,” he said. “C’mon up, man!”

... read the rest here in The Daily.

The Daily - Arts & Life - Saturday, January 21, 2012

There we were, freezing our keisters off in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. The mercury had dropped well below zero, and the wind flung the snow so far sideways, it occasionally blew up at our faces from below the vines. We were a tiny group of harvesters, there to pick grapes in the name of Canada’s best gift to the winemaking world: ice wine.

We filled a few dozen bins with the brown frozen clusters of grapes, dumped them in the wine press and hit the switch. We peered in, waiting for the juice to appear between the wood slats and flow into the inch of snow that had accumulated at the bottom of the press. Nothing happened. It was a small amount of grapes, so we reconfigured the press and squeezed again. Still, not a drop.

... read the rest here in The Daily.

The Daily - Saturday, December 31, 2011

Walking into Vancouver’s Red Wagon, I spied one of the largest men I’ve ever seen. He had a twinkle in his eye, as if the waitress had just served him his favorite dish. Ever. Under his nose, a mound of buttermilk pancakes rose from an oval plate, interspersed with layer upon thick layer of pulled pork. Pinned to the side of the mound with a toothpick was a pair of butter pats. If a customer so wishes, he can also have a pair of eggs, sunny side up or over easy, atop it all for good measure. The man at the table certainly did.

Whether they have been around for a while, or are new spots simply conjuring an older ethos, a handful of diners across North America are shaking things up, putting smarter, better food on the Formica while keeping prices within reach.

... read the rest here in The Daily.

The Daily - Saturday, December 31, 2011

The Eiffel Tower and the snowglobe weren’t the only great legacies of the Paris World’s Fairs, though one of the longest-lasting icons spawned there resembles both. Louis Roederer’s Cristal champagne was the result of a meal hosted by Russian Czar Alexander II at the fair’s 1867 edition.

More than a century later, the wine’s history would bubble over into a controversy involving one of America’s richest MCs — a tale that began with some serious bling and ended with a boycott.

Cristal is arguably the most desirable bottle of champagne in the world, a pure status symbol. It’s what economists call a Veblen good — something like a Rolls-Royce or a Hermès Birkin bag, whose desirability increases with its price. That kind of exclusivity was exactly what Alexander II had in mind.

... read the rest here in The Daily.

WIRED.com - December 28, 2011

The steel briefcase arrived inside two other boxes, Russian doll-style. Its combination-lock latches flipped skyward with a gratifying snap. In the briefcase, snug inside custom-shaped foam, lay a device that looked like it was designed by a committee made of Steve Jobs, Q from James Bond lore and a sex therapist.

My therapy, however, would be the liquid kind — I’d be carbonating cocktails at home.

... read the rest here on WIRED.com.

AFP - Saturday, December 10, 2011

LINGUAGLOSSA, Italy — When a would-be winegrower comes to Salvo Foti, Sicily’s top wine consultant, for tips on starting a vineyard, he begins with a warning: to make good wine you have to be in it for the long haul.

“When they ask me ‘What’s the first thing I should do?’. I say ‘Have children’,” Foti told AFP, as he strolled among the thick, knotted vines of his own property on Mount Etna’s northern slope.

The son and grandson of Sicilian winemakers, Foti believes that getting the Italian island to shine requires a long-term commitment. His teenage son is at his side to oversee the harvest, learning just as he once did.

“Many winemakers are not thinking of the future,” says Foti. “If you’re thinking about money right now, you’re not thinking about terroir and what’s good for the vineyard.”

... read the rest here with AFP.

The Daily - Saturday, December 3, 2011

When a towheaded 3-year-old crossed the threshold of Federal Donuts, she beamed as if someone had hit a switch. “Does she ever turn that off?” the cashier asked of the girl’s smile. The answer turned out to be “Not while she’s here.”

Chef Michael Solomonov opened the Philadelphia hot spot in mid-October. The budding restaurateur also opened a sandwich joint, Percy Street Barbecue, in early November, a satellite of the South Street original he opened two years ago. (For good measure, he had his first kid, David, in August.) Solomonov, 33, also owns Zahav, a three-year-old, high-end Israeli street food restaurant. Every venue, whether takeout or sit-down, is tops in its class.

... read the rest here in The Daily.

The Daily - Saturday, November 12, 2011

Before I visited Portland to meet bartender extraordinaire Jeffrey Morgenthaler, I visited his blog. One distracting post, now two years old, offered video of a man giving the health department all the reasons it needs to send an inspector. In the post, titled “How to Make a Daiquiri – The American Bartending School Way,” Morgenthaler recaps “the way” with a 10-point breakdown, including steps like: 1) Chill an 8-ounce cocktail glass; 2) Pick your nose, and wipe the resulting findings on the back of your hand; 5) Wipe nose on back of hand for four full seconds; and 10) Enjoy! Morgenthaler’s subtle jabs make a sharp point about his craft.

Along with descriptions of new products like Xanté Pear Liqueur — headline: “Not A Sex Toy!” — Morgenthaler uses his blog as a platform to announce what he’s doing at the bar in Clyde Common, a Portland restaurant. The drinks and styles he writes about tend to become cocktail-world trends.

... read the rest here in The Daily.

The Daily - Saturday, November 5, 2011

Everybody needs to get away, look around and see what they think of the world. Most of us simply want more, but I’ve always had a soft spot for the ones who return home — not just because Mom and Dad and all of their friends are there, but because they know it inside and out and love it absolutely. These are the people you want to show you around when you visit.

I first met chef Scott Jaeger at the Bocuse d’Or — a sort of international “Iron Chef Live!” before “Iron Chef” existed, hosted by French living-legend chef Paul Bocuse in Lyon. Here, Jaeger, representing Canada in 2007 in front of legions of fans wearing JAEGER hockey shirts, was in his ideal culinary milieu, with his French-influenced competition-style technical cuisine — food that is incredibly precise and time consuming.

Jaeger found his style in his travels, in the kitchens of London, France, Austria and Switzerland. He could have set up shop in any major city in the world, but in 1988 he returned to Vancouver, where he’d lived since the age of 15, and opened the Pear Tree restaurant in the suburb of Burnaby. Despite Canada’s then-status as a culinary outlier, and his home city’s reluctance to adopt the relative pomp and circumstance of the cuisine he loved, the ingredients were there and he couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.

“A West Coast suit is jeans, a sport coat and nice leather shoes. People have tried and failed to run fine dining establishments here because they were seen as pompous,” he said. “Vancouver doesn’t do the big city dining where you go for a cocktail, then somewhere else for dinner, then the theater and a drink afterward. Here, dinner is the show.”

Perhaps that is why Jaeger sees the Vancouver dining scene as incredibly competitive.

“If you’re at a price point, the other restaurants in your category hold you to it,” he said. “At $30 a plate, it’s assumed you’re sourcing local, fresh and using the highest quality of ingredients. If not, diners will call you out on it because they have a lot of options.”

On that note, Jaeger sends me out to get the lay of the land. I go to see his former sous chef, Lee Cooper, at L’Abattoir, now considered one of Canada’s top restaurants.

... read the rest here in The Daily.

AFP - Wednesday, October 19, 2011

VICTORIA, British Columbia — They put the mojo in a martini and the mettle in a Manhattan.

Cocktail bitters, those tiny, paper-wrapped bottles filled with a liquid so intense that most cocktails only require a dash or two, are the bartender’s equivalent of the iron that turns a rumpled outfit into a crisp-pressed suit.

When a cocktail is missing a certain something, salvation is often just a few drops away. But beware, add too much and your sublime cocktail will be undrinkable.

Now, boutique bitters are springing up across the United States and Canada and craft bartenders looking for ways to transform an old-fashioned gin cocktail or a sour are fueling demand.

... read the rest here with AFP.

The Daily - Saturday, October 1, 2011

It begins with a discussion about trick journalism. It ends with a self-imposed dare to eat eight meals in two days, cooked by some of the world’s best chefs. I don’t even need to move. All I have to do is stay awake and hungry.

I score a seat at eight of them — four on Saturday from 1 a.m. to 5 p.m. and four more in the same time slot on Sunday, with a few hours on Saturday night to run home, take a shower and lament the dark circles beneath my eyes. Along with my camera gear and notebooks, I bring a Dopp kit and extra pressed shirts. On site, I take frequent catnaps in a back office set up for event staff and journalists, a space that rapidly takes on a locker room smell.

... read the rest here in The Daily.

The Daily - Arts and Life - Saturday, September 3, 2011

Tasting an oyster a few weeks ago, my friend Greg went into a state of rapture. He lifted, slurped, chewed and swallowed before slapping his hand on the table, declaring, not without a bit of theater, “That, my friends, was as if King Neptune him-self rose from the deep and gave me a big, fat kiss on the lips!”

I thought of him later when, sitting at a wooden picnic table in New Hampshire, friends brought lobster plucked from Maine’s Casco Bay that morning. We steamed it in a lobster pot and served it in a great pile in the middle of the table. Then, accompanied by nothing but bowls of melted butter, we began our attack.

I popped the tail off, pushed the flesh out, noted the slight hint of translucence, and sank my teeth in, and one bite was all I needed. The flesh was just firm, the butter ran down my chin and Neptune re-emerged for his kiss. Despite a lifetime appreciation for Homard americanus, this was without question the best lobster I’d ever eaten. So good, in fact, I had two and vowed to head up to Maine to speak with a chef and a lobsterman to get their takes on achieving this level of perfection.

... read the rest here in The Daily.

Private Clubs Magazine - September 2011

The abandoned-looking building has no outward indication that it will become one of my favorite Sicilian restaurants. All I notice is a misleading circular “BAR” sign next to the county road. Nothing announces Cucina Casalinga Beneventano.

Welcome to Southern Sicily, where you have to nose around and keep your ear to the ground to find its trove of great restaurants often hidden away in unlikely locations behind unpromising facades. Here, four finds that will have you licking your chops.

... read the rest here in Private Clubs Magazine.

The Daily - Arts and Life - Saturday, August 27, 2011

In a research office in the upper reaches of the New York Public Library’s main building, the rare books curator, the culinary collections librarian and the manager of a peculiar new project called NYPL Labs are throwing digitized pasta against the wall to see if it sticks.

The project, dubbed What’s New on the Menu, launched in April with the intended goal of transcribing all the dishes and prices on the 9,000 previously scanned menus in the library’s collection. In 10 days, a team of Internet volunteers that now numbers about 35,000 had transcribed 100,000 dishes. By August, half a million dishes had been transcribed, and now the plan is to scan and transcribe the 30,000 menus that remain.

It’s hard to imagine a concrete use for something like this. But then NYPL Labs manager Ben Vershbow began noodling around with it, typing in “Heineken” just to see where it was available and how much it cost.

... read the rest here in The Daily.

The Daily - Saturday, August 13, 2011

From the outside, The Aviary, the new Chicago cocktail emporium run by chef Grant Achatz (see: many of America’s best restaurants), is a model of exclusivity. There’s no phone number to call, but you can request reservations online and they might get back to you. Or you can just walk up. You may get in. Stranger things have happened. It’s wildly annoying.

It doesn’t matter. Suck it up and go anyway; this is more than just a bar.

... read the rest here in The Daily.

The Daily - Arts and Life - Saturday, August 6, 2011

In the parking lot of one of the Windy City’s better-known Italian beef sandwich stands, while waiting for my Uncle Joe to arrive for lunch, Uncle Charlie added the terms “juice loan” and “bag drop” to my vocabulary, as if Mafia-style extortion and illicit payoffs are part and parcel of a Chicago beef tour.

Inside the kitchen of one of these restaurants, someone politely told me, “You won’t be taking a picture of him,” and I stuck my camera right back into its bag, no questions asked.

As ubiquitous and popular a Chicago institution as pizza and Vienna hot dogs, Italian beef needs a guide. I’ve got family.

... read the rest here in The Daily.

The Daily - Arts and Life - Saturday, July 23, 2011

The Americana angle was huge. Who couldn’t take a sip of what’s called America’s oldest native distilled beverage, close their eyes and imagine sharing the bench seat of Steinbeck’s camper truck Rocinante with The Man himself and his dog Charley on one side, fingers surfing the air outside the window on the other, and cap the day with a “dollop” of applejack with the boys at the campground?

At one point, the whole industry almost went to pot, nearly tarnishing the romantic literary dreams of thousands of young boys like myself. It’s a small miracle that American applejack and apple brandy survived the 20th century and are now the fetish items of craft bartenders.

... read the rest here in The Daily.

The Daily - Arts and Life - Saturday, July 16, 2011

On a recent trip to Mexico’s tequila territory, my favorite discovery wasn’t the spirit itself, but the tiny glass with the blood-colored liquid served next to it.

Sangrita — literally “little blood” — is served in a glass alongside tequila, its traditional Mexican partner. The basic version is a mix of citrus fruit with spicy chili powder and, sometimes, a shot of tomato juice. From there, the options are endless. Sipped one after the other, tequila and sangrita play off each other, not only keeping the tongue from suffering alcohol overload but also enhancing each others’ flavors and revealing complexities. Despite close to 100 years of civilized enjoyment in Mexico, sangrita is only now coming into the limelight north of the border, thanks in part to bartenders like New York City gun-for-hire Toby Cecchini.

... read the rest here in The Daily.

The Wall Street Journal - Travel - Saturday, July 9, 2011

Shortly after I pull into Cerda, a small Sicilian town made semifamous by its yearly artichoke festival, Antonio Cappadonia hands me a brioche mounded with two flavors of gelato—enough to give it the size and heft of a softball.

It’s the last night of my Italian frozen-treats bender, and I have forgotten how many cups and cones I’ve consumed in the past 24 hours. I eye the sandwich and ponder bolting.

Instead, I devour it.

Seven perfect gelaterias, untold amounts of gelato ... read the rest here in The Wall Street Journal.

The Daily - Arts and Life - Saturday, July 9, 2011

There’s no great, street-spanning, pagoda-like arch heralding the entry to Richmond, British Columbia. Then again, nobody visits this part of Metro Vancouver for the architecture. In Richmond, the Asian food capital of the Western Hemisphere, the cuisine — often more authentic than what can be found in the actual Far East — is king.

Many blocks present 360 degrees of possibility. Restaurants — thousands of them — reflect Richmond’s whopping Asian immigrant population and represent the entirety of Asian cuisine and its subsets. It’s hard to know where to go, let alone figure out which specialties to order on menus with so many options each dish has a number.

... read the rest here in The Daily.

Private Clubs Magazine - July-August 2011

“I don’t like tequila,” says a woman on my flight to Guadalajara. “But the good stuff . . . ” she says, hand fluttering happily above her heart, “oh my.”

While tequila made entirely from the Weber blue agave plant traditionally costs well upward of $40, several new offerings fall in the more accessible $20-$40 range. Aged in ex-whiskey, cognac, and bourbon barrels to impart new flavors, the stock of the “good stuff,” most of which is made in the Mexican state of Jalisco, is growing.

Of our new favorites below, the Antiguo and Olmeca are slated to go from test markets to national distribution this year, the Cuervo just made that leap, and you’ll need to cross the border for the Dos Siglos. Oh my, indeed.

... read the rest of the story here in Private Clubs Magazine.

The Daily - Arts and Life - Wednesday, June 30, 2011

The mysterious voicemail from a well-informed friend arrived at the last minute. “Dude, we’re meeting in Red Hook in an hour and going to this bar that’s never open to taste homemade chocolate and drink homemade hootch. Wanna come?”

I arched an eyebrow, checked on clearing my schedule and called back.

“The guy designed one of those James Bond-style jet packs. That’s all I know. This is New York — are you coming or not?”

How do you say no?

... read the rest here in The Daily.

The Daily - Arts and Life - Saturday, June 18, 2011

If not for a wave of state legislation in the past five years, the microdistillery boom may never have come to pass. The Corpse Reviver could have lain dormant well into the next century, Tom Collins preferring to spend his summer in less trendy climes.

Remember the blossoming of the brew pub and the craft brewing trend that left the United States with a surprising number of good options on grocery store shelves? American distilling is now on that edge and the gold rush is on, even if it’s wrapped in a ball of red tape.

Click here to read more…

The Daily - Arts and Life - Saturday, June 11, 2011

Peeking at a menu in the window of a new Brooklyn restaurant, my sweetheart whispered in my ear, “I think octopus is having its moment.” An eater of all things, I was hopeful but unconvinced. A few hours later, my sister in Seattle mentioned a fantastic meal at The Tin Table starring grilled octopus over radish shavings with lemon confit. The next morning, I flipped through my notes from an interview with a Sicilian chef who cooked his octopus in a steam oven, giving it an incredible lobster-like flavor and texture.

Octopus is having its moment.

... read the rest here in The Daily.

Private Clubs Magazine - May-June 2011

The French love to hype the Paris-Lyon duel for the title of the country’s best food town.

But with a spate of new restaurant openings - many from chefs already operating other local hot spots - some foodies argue that Lyon is not only pulling ahead, it’s also raising the bar on quality and value.

But with a spate of new restaurant openings - many from chefs already operating other local hot spots - some foodies argue that Lyon is not only pulling ahead, it’s also raising the bar on quality and value.

We dispatched freelance food writer Joe Ray to check out five of the recent additions that get a thumbs up from Lyon insider Georges dos Santos, owner of the cult-status Antic Wine shop in Vieux Lyon and the neighboring Georges Five wine bar.

... read the rest here in Private Clubs Magazine.

The Daily - Arts and Life - Saturday, April 23, 2011

The Sicilian time machine is running at full tilt. The Holy Week feasts, or festas, have removed any vestigial lines between everyday life and religion, closing towns and cities where men hoist great statues of Jesus and Mary and plow through the crowds in day-long processions complete with marching bands and Roman guards.

These being Sicilian feasts, mammoth amounts of food are consumed at nonna’s table and on the street. Though baby steps are being made toward modernizing the Sicilian palate, the stars of feasts that dot the calendar are classics. The ethic of the Sicilian grandmother is not easily displaced.

“Imagine you go into your house. The first question your mother always asks is ‘Hai mangiato?’ – have you eaten?” says Pierpaolo Ruta, who runs Modica’s Antica Dolceria Bonajuto pastry shop with his father Franco. “You could be dying at the end of the phone and she’ll still ask that first.”

... read the rest here in The Daily.

The Daily - Arts and Life - Saturday, April 9, 2011

“When you write a tough critique, you must make sure you take a clean shot, straight to the head.” Seated at the Ritz in Paris, the most feared restaurant critic in France leans back in his chair, making a slow-motion pantomime of taking a bullet to the brain. “You don’t want to get blood everywhere. That’s horrible.”

His description recalls Jean Reno’s character dispatching a malfaiteur in “The Professional.”

“If your work is good,” says the critic, “the chef won’t even call.”

... read the rest here in The Daily.

The Boston Globe - Travel - Sunday, March 6, 2011

BARCELONA—Our tower begins to rise on the crowded plaza in front of Town Hall. With the buzz of a festival around us, we set the base, position by position, until we are locked into each other. A captain checks the formation and gives the all-clear. The music begins, a tiny band with oboe-like “grallas’’ and snare drums, played every time we start climbing into the sky.

The tower rises above us, layer by layer, its members walking on our shoulders to climb into place. There is the stink of sweat and the feet that step on shoulders inches from my nose. With a nod to two teammates in my position, I reach one level up and push my hands into the sides of Dan and Benet’s legs and the structure solidifies. The weight mounts steadily. Eyes, lost in concentration, stare at a faraway spot, breathing is strained, the lungs pressed against your back begin to heave, the hands gripping your arms begin to clench. They will not let go.

Another level goes up; the younger, more nimble — Aliex, Diana — climb on our backs. I will not let go of them. Higher still, we begin to send children into the sky. The tower rumbles — it’s a living organism. Any unsteady movement echoes through the muscles to the top and back down. At the same time, members from other teams at the festival come and reinforce the base. A weak link may appear — someone a level or two up, shaking with the effort. Below, a captain makes the decision whether to send the last four people to the top.

First to go are the “dosos,’’ a duo who lock the top of the tower and create a platform for the “aixecador,’’ or riser. Above them is the “enxaneta,’’ the child who, with the music reaching a crescendo, carries our hopes and fears upward with every eye in the crowd on her. Reaching a perch above it all, her hand flies in the air, blowing a kiss to the crowd. It’s an exultation and people watching throw their arms skyward, too.

This is castellers, the centuries-old Catalan tradition of building human “towers,’’ or “castles.’’ Soccer may be Barcelona’s passion, but this is Catalonia’s great and dearest sport. It had never occurred to me that I could participate, let alone in the first practice I stumbled upon. But a member, Gerard, grabbed me, put me in position, and said, “Put your hands here and here,’’ stabilizing the legs of two people above me. “Don’t let go.’’

At that point, I had lived in Barcelona for just a few weeks and had seen the curious castells only in pictures on the walls of bars and wine shops. Team members wore white pants, red bandanas, a thick, black sash known as a “faixa,’’ and a solid-colored team shirt.

How high do they go? The tallest, which can involve hundreds of people, have reached 10 levels. Do they fall? Occasionally. That’s called “llenya’’ — “firewood’’ — a description of the resulting limbs akimbo pile where the tower once stood. Most castles are a single spire, or levels of two, three, or four teammates, held up by the stocky, old, or tall, who are the dense base known as the “pinya’’ — “the pineapple.’’ The latter is both the foundation and a set of flying buttresses for a cathedral built of people.

With the pinya set, the band begins playing “Toc de Castells’’ and up rise level after barefoot level of progressively lighter, more limber, and younger generations of family and friends, capping it off with a child, usually between 5 and 7, who throws a Catalan salute to the heavens. I asked a teammate about the kiss that’s often part of the salute and he smiled, “It’s more beautiful, isn’t it?’’

That one practice session was all I needed. After that, practice with what became my team — the Castellers del Poble Sec — was Tuesday and Friday nights, with meets (often part of Catalan festivals) on weekends. This was my back door into the culture, a way to make friends in a town where I had few. A friend from another neighborhood later tried to get me to join his team, but I replied I was “Poble Sec for life.’’ He respected that.

With roots as a regulated sport dating at least 200 years and some records pointing as far back as the 15th century, the casteller tradition was included in UNESCO’s List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in November. Yet the bedrock, the underlying reason this tradition has become a tradition, is social. At the height of the season, teams offer something to do almost daily. Teammates are friends, family, and neighbors. It’s a rare slice of life in which generations are assembled in one place. There are screaming 6-year-olds, awkward teens, hippies, college students, young parents and their children, professionals and retirees.

Every Friday, Poble Sec has practice, then everyone heads to the clubhouse (every team has one) to have dinner together. We go to the beach on the way home from meets, host traditional Catalan barbecues called calçotadas as February fund-raisers, and play in inter-league soccer matches. If there’s a birthday, we celebrate together; if something goes wrong, we talk about it. Inevitably, the team — the “colla’’ — becomes a family.

In the end, however, we’re here to build castles and safely dismantling a tower can be even more difficult than building it.

Back in front of Town Hall, we are locked together, a seven-story tower still in the sky. The tiny enxaneta and aixecador climb down quickly, two little wisps sliding down our backs and plucked from the top of the pinya with a quick hug. The dosos, still locked together, shift their arms and pull against each other, edge down until they can let each other go and slide to the bottom.

Toward the base, Angel, a human tree trunk of a man who is always in the tower’s most strenuous spot, casts his eyes upward. His face is red, his mind and body are rumbling with concentration and effort. He will not let his team fall. He will not fail. He will not let us down. He sees his first teammates come down. One, then another, he holds. He holds and then, when it’s safe, he roars. The anxiety, excitement, strain, and trust that the team has put into pushing a monument into the sky has a voice.

Everyone is down now, except Angel, 220 pounds of muscle, throwing his fist in the air before being tossed atop the crowd as though he were light as a feather. Somewhere below, his mother is watching. She always is. His father, who supported him from the pinya, is lost in the crowd, as is his wife. There’s no doubt that someday soon, their children will be here, too.

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The Daily - Arts and Life - Saturday, February 5, 2011

In Seattle, people stare at a 360 area code like it’s from a foreign country. Heading north from the city to Lummi Island is a two-hour drive on I-5 and five minute ferry ride. Near Anacortes, vacationers peel off the highway toward the other San Juan Islands. Keep going and urban life falls away. It gets greener. Birds get bigger. There are seasonal waterfalls and floods, and visitors wonder whether the body of water under the mountains is a lake or an ocean inlet.

Quiet Lummi Island is a world apart, and the place where chef Blaine Wetzel, 24, will make his mark. The Olympia, WA, native arrived at the island’s The Willows Inn in late summer, fresh off a chef de partie gig at Copenhagen’s noma, voted best restaurant in the world by San Pellegrino while he was there. The inn will close in January for a kitchen remodel and when they reopen, the chef wants to give diners the meal of their lives.

... read the rest here in The Daily.

The Boston Globe - Travel - Sunday, November 7, 2010

Third time’s another charm for the author, his mother, and her meditative, rollicking, on-the-road self

By Joe Ray, Globe Correspondent |  November 7, 2010

When I told Mom I was writing a story about our upcoming cross-country drive — our third together — she balked.

“Does that mean I have to watch my mouth?’’ she said.

“Nah,’’ I bluffed. “If we go into Canada, though, maybe don’t get snappy with the border agent again.’’

We were driving from New Hampshire to Seattle to deliver one of my dad’s silver Volvo station wagons to my sister, a tradition that started years ago once Dad figured out how much it costs to ship a car coast-to-coast.

Because of our previous trips, Mom and I already had rules, routines, and rituals in place. I prefer small highways to interstates. Mom does not camp. We read a book aloud together. We try to eat well and bend that rule every day at around 4 when we stop for pie. We learn more about our country and each other.

This trip is a mix of all of these elements. Much of the time, we will blast down the highway. At other times — such as our first stop in Milford, Pa. — we’ll see beautiful, small-town America, with its large porches, tiny shops, little restaurants, and waving residents.

The first changes from what we know well are almost imperceptibly gradual as we cross Massachusetts and head into southern New York and Pennsylvania. Birds change, trees change, land contracts and expands differently, and the sky opens with a vertical quality unlike what we see in New England.

Each trip, Mom has a place to visit that, to me, seems pulled out of thin air. Last time, she voiced a longtime desire to see Niagara Falls. This time, she wants to show me Gettysburg.

“Gettysburg?’’ I say, wondering why she has chosen it.

“Could you imagine if it went differently?’’ she says.

I pause for a second, see her point, and we head west.

There they are. These fields. These few square miles where the decisive battle of the Civil War played out. We’ve bought a CD tour that you follow by driving from one battlefield to the next, and there’s this peculiar point where the narrator, actor Stephen Lang, asks us to close our eyes and imagine the fighting as he describes the last day — something that sounds hokey until we close our eyes and imagine.

Back on Interstate 70, Mom pulls out a book. Last time, we read Harry Potter No. 7. This time we wanted a classic. We try William Faulkner’s “A Fable’’ which, with what Mom calls its “long, long, long’’ sentences, is not written to be read aloud.

“Are you keeping up with this?’’ she says, after a few pages. I shrug and she continues for two more pages before saying, “Oh hell!’’ and flipping the book into the back seat, exchanging it for John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row.’’

It’s perfect. There’s an immediate sense of place, beautifully drawn characters, and an evident love of things he describes: — marine biology, the Model T, his beloved Monterey, the coast we’re heading for, human nature.

In turn, the quality of his observations opens our eyes that much more. Here we are, buzzing around the country, pausing at times to learn, skimming at other times. I get lost pondering how much of the land is managed, how much is wild. I wonder, as we cross Illinois, how much it reminds Mom of growing up in Joliet.

“Town used to be surrounded by fields like this,’’ she says, and the more we drive, the more I learn of her life before she moved east some 40 years ago.

“Truck farm,’’ she says later, pointing out a farm just large enough for its occupants to pack up their produce and sell it locally. Later, hunters’ gunshots get her talking about the relationship between crop harvests and bird migration patterns, connections to the land I never realized she had.

She hasn’t lived here for decades and these little bits of her past pop up as if from yesterday. Later on, I’ll notice her staring out the window, gone who knows where between the corn rows.

“Do you miss it,’’ I ask, wondering about a time in her life where, due to particularities in the parent-child relationship, I’ll never get a full answer.

“Yes.’’

In South Dakota, we hop off Interstate 90 and take the Highway 240 Loop Road through the Badlands. It’s my third trip through the park and the most gratifying. Mostly, I enjoy being with Mom as she sees it for the first time. On this morning, we drive into sunlight after a light rain — the clouds painterly, tall, and close-packed. The hills and their striated colors appear to hinge on the horizon, creating an inverse imprint below, ending only where it rises to meet my feet. It’s so complex and full of texture that I can’t take it all in, giving me that good feeling of belonging to something bigger than myself.

At this point, I do something peculiar. I interview Mom and one response sticks out.

“Why do you come on these trips?’’ I say.

“I’ve driven through familiar situations 99 percent of my life. I spent my first 21 years between Illinois and Wisconsin [where she was born] and never went to Iowa until you and I drove through. Now we live in New England and I still know very little about it,’’ she says without regret. “Besides, how often do we get to spend time like this together?’’

Farther on, in Sheridan, Wyo., we sit next to a table of 10 men in cowboy hats. It looks like something between a reunion of old friends and a work meeting. They turn out to be from all across the country, in town for a video cattle auction at the Holiday Inn, but dinner is all tall stories and catch-up.

We talk with Matt Bode, a buyer for the high-end Creekstone Farms meat processing plant in Arkansas City, Kan., which “finishes’’ cattle, buying cows and fattening them up.

“Finishing cattle is like a college freshman at a buffet,’’ he jokes. “All they do is sleep and eat.’’

I ask about buying and selling at a video auction, where buyers see the cows they’re purchasing only on a television screen. In most cases, though, they know whom they’re working with.

“It’s all in the handshake,’’ Bode says. “Your reputation as a buyer, seller, or cattleman is made or broken right then.’’

We follow the boys to Sheridan’s Mint Bar, an old-school western classic with buck and ram heads dotting the walls, hundreds of rodeo photos, and 100 years’ worth of stories most moms will never hear. Mom and I end up talking to different groups. Bode is telling me raunchy tall tales about past visits to the Mint. Mom gets involved in conversations with the boys about heifers, artificial insemination, and market access. I love looking across the room to see her shooting the breeze with a bunch of cowboys, completely out of her element and also firmly in it — a side I don’t usually see.

At the end of the night, I get a point-and-shoot shot of Mom and the guys. Behind the camera, I’m the one smiling the most.

“That,’’ she says, as we walk back to the hotel, “was worth the whole trip.’’

The next morning, I’m out by the car, staring at the mountains. The Rockies, and later the Cascades, rise like great, distant waves beyond the vast calm seas of the plains and deserts that precede them. Sometimes, I need a moment to remember how impressive they are.

We pass the eastern side of the Tetons, then go up through Yellowstone — parks I’ve been able to visit on a few occasions and where I have a growing set of memories. I realize the past builds a stronger present. The call of the West has changed over time but still rings clear, and as our trip winds down, there’s a peculiar ache, a nostalgia for the present.

Perhaps that feeling takes away from the moment — who knows if and when we’ll be able to do this again. Yet that same idea heightens the experience, of how lucky we are to see this and share it, spend this time together, traveling east to west, side by side.

See the story as it ran in the print version: page 1, page 2.

The Guardian, Saturday October 2, 2010

A tour of Delhi’s freshest and most authentic street foods with expert and blogger Pamela Timms

Delhi is in the middle of one of its hottest months on record. When I email street food blogger Pamela Timms to set up a meeting, she quips: “I hope your expenses budget includes salt tablets.”

We meet in the sprawling mass of Old Delhi – its hidden mosques, giant gates and crumbling mansions pushed against utilitarian modern buildings. Timms quickly scans a handful of eating places a local has suggested and immediately knocks one off the list. “That place is a grease factory.”

I’m in good hands.

A journalist by trade and Scottish by birth, Timms has lived in Delhi for four years and chronicles Delhi’s street food scene on her blog Eat and Dust, which was named one of India’s top five food sites by Good Housekeeping. The accolade helped her land a book deal and requests to write food columns for Indian newspapers.

“They’re fascinated that an expat – and a lady – is tramping around Old Delhi looking for food,” she says, making reference to the unofficial boys’ club of street food, “but they [the men] are more weirded-out than I am.”

We meet at Chawri Bazaar, where a modern metro entrance pushes out of the ground into the chaos above, and she immediately steers me to Ashok Chat Corner (3488, Hauz Qazi Chowk) 10 steps away.

“All you have to do is stagger out of the metro and you’re here,” she says, ordering papri chaat, a tiny bowl with crisp pastry discs (the papri), potato and fried chickpeas under a mix of sauces that include a yogurt-y curd, tamarind and spicy coriander. It’s soothing and calm, a perfect counterpoint to the hot, busy day.

From here, we look for one of her favourites, Jain Coffee House, a spot on a square with an alley-like entrance that’s so easy to walk past that we do two U-turns on Chawri Bazaar before we find it. (From Chawri Bazaar metro walk along Chawri Bazaar until almost at the left turn into Nai Sarak. On your left is a small gully, Raghu Ganj: walk in and turn left.)

Timms points to a grain merchant in the corner and asks, “Want a mango shake?”

Silly question. The “coffee house” is a side project for the grain merchants and along with shakes and chai, they make tiny sandwiches with seasonal fruit (one of her favourites is made with pomegranate seeds), fresh cheese and what Timms calls “a lashing of marmalade”.

“They’re not traditional, but they’ve been here for about 50 years,” she says, grinning at the slight contradiction while a white-haired man sifts wheat next to her.

There’s no reason to stop for dessert at this point, but we happen to be walking past Old Famous Jalebi Wala (at the corner of Dariba Kalan and Chandni Chowk), where all they make are samosas and jalebi – sweet rounds of fried batter, often with an orange tint. Old Famous is one of Timms’s favourites and clearly not an opportunity to miss.

“These are the ultimate sugar hit,” she says biting into a jalebi after we’ve had a small plateful weighed out for us. They are deeply sweet, but they’re not sickly – which is perhaps one of the main reasons Old Famous has been around since 1884.

“Only the owner is allowed to make the jalebi mix,” says the man at the cash register, and as we turn to pay, he smiles with a bit of a star-struck look, pivots his laptop and clicks a bookmarked page, bringing up Timms’ website. This rock star moment makes her blush momentarily.

Dessert inside us, we climb on a rickshaw and wend through the crush toward Hotel Adarsh Niwas (483 Haider Quli Corner at Chandni Chowk). It’s technically a sit-down joint, where you buy a brass token at the till and exchange it for their signature thali, all under the watchful eye of owner Satnarayan Sharma.

“It’s cool and clean and all the breads are very good. Simple, tasty and fresh in a good atmosphere,” she says, as if summarising an upcoming blog entry. Or street food itself.

Blog bites: More Eat and Dust tips

Best korma: Ashok and Ashok

If you only eat out once during your stay in Delhi, head for Ashok and Ashok: the chicken and mutton kormas here have been known to make grown men crumple. As well as boasting an edgy gangster heritage, A&A make chicken korma every day, mutton korma on Wednesday and Saturday (invariably sold out an hour after opening at 1pm) and biryani. The meat just melts, hinting at a magical mystery masala (apparently up to 30 different spices), pistachios, and a devilish pact with the ghee (clarified butter) tin.

• 42 Subhas Chowk, Basti Harphool Singh, Sadar Thana Road, Sadar Bazaar

Best kebabs: Ustad Moinuddin

For just a few rupees you can eat some of the finest kebabs in Delhi. On Lal Kuan close to where the great Urdu poet Ghalib once lived, you’ll find the beef kebab maker Ustad Moinuddin. As you wait your turn, you’ll have time to watch the master at work, packing soft meat on to skewers, judging the exact cooking time for optimum succulence before tipping them quickly on to plates and into waiting hands. Forget Bukhara; this is the real deal.

• Lal Kuan, at the corner with Gali Qasimjan, near Chawri Bazaar metro

Best paratha: Kake di Hatti

Head down to the Old Delhi spice market in Khari Baoli, and once you’ve inhaled the fumes from a thousand sacks of chillies, turn into Church Mission Road and order one of Kake di Hatti’s divine tandoor-fresh paratha:s. There are many flavours but favourites include potato, cauliflower and mooli (radish). And don’t miss the faluda (a rose-flavoured creamy vermicelli confection) at Giani’s next door.

• Church Mission Road, Khari Baoli

Best kulfi: Kuremal Kulfi

The Kuremal family have been making kulfi (ice-cream) in the old city since 1908. They turn out over 50 varieties, including pomegranate, tamarind, rose and custard apple, and also make a wonderful stuffed kulfi: mango or orange flavours stuffed into fruit skins.

• Kucha Pati Ram, off Sitaram Bazaar, near Chawri Bazaar metro

Best kheer: Bade Mian

Bade Mian’s kheer shop (oppposite Badal Beg mosque in Lal Kuan) sells the finest kheer (cardamom-laced rice pudding) you’re ever likely to taste.

• Lal Kuan, near Chawri Bazaar metro

Best breakfast: Shyam Sweets

Old Delhi is a wonderful place for breakfast – try the bedmi aloo (deep-fried spiced bread with a spicy potato curry) at Shyam Sweets, about half-way along Chawri Bazaar.

Best sweets: Chaina Ram

Try the Karachi halwa and other treats cooked in ghee at this Sindhi shop on Chandni Chowk.

Best snacks

Around the Jama Masjid area, stroll along Matia Mahal (also the home of the famous Karim’s and Al-Jawahar restaurants) and stop at any of the little stalls – it’s almost impossible to eat badly here. One highlight is shahi tukda, labelled by one enthusiast as “bread pudding on steroids”.

Best way to get around

It’s a good idea to hire a cycle rickshaw to get around Old Delhi. I recommend driver Rahul Pal (reach him on +919 871 533849) who knows all the places mentioned. Rates should be around 200 rupees an hour.

Directions and maps for these places can be found at eatanddust.wordpress.com

Follow me on Twitter: @joe_diner and on Facebook.

The Boston Globe - Travel - Sunday, September 19, 2010

Trains cut through the transient, mesmerizing sights of a country going nonstop

DELHI - Jump on a plane, pop up here and walk around for a day and it feels like your brain is stuck on ‘spin.’ An autorickshaw (a souped-up three wheeled scooter/taxi) blazes through traffic and the driver, one foot on his lap, will squeeze through openings so you can touch the bus to your left and the gravel truck to the right. Ahead, a couple weaves through traffic on a scooter, the woman sidesaddle on the back, ponytail swaying behind her in the breeze.

On a market street, the assault on your senses and emotions is complete. A vendor sells flowers, above him, an electronics shop blares white light and sound. Just behind, a crowd gathers around a street cart full of madly bubbling fritters. Under your arm appears a string of painfully poor children while masses of people file by, parting like a river around the cow in the road.

In the beginning, it’s hard to get India to stop.

Stand and stare for a few moments in one of India’s cities and you’ll understand the impossibility of summing up the country and how it sends you running into the recesses of your mind for quiet. The train system, however, is what the French would call a fil conducteur, a ‘conducting wire’ that links and combines India’s dizzying disparate elements - country and city, rich and impossibly poor, calm and chaotic. It is a rolling microcosm, a big, blue myth, proudly trundling along at an impossibly slow average speed.

Despite the myriad transportation possibilities available - from cycle rickshaws to Bombay’s wonderfully cool Premier Padmini taxis, the king of them all is the Indian Railways, the largest single-management train system in the world. Like Jessamyn West’s description of American rails as a “big iron needle stitching the country together,” India’s also serves as a metaphor for the whole country.

I know nothing of this when I board my first sleeper, but I’ve planned a route that will take me from Delhi to the Ganges and back, another from Mumbai to southern Goa and a night train from Kolkata toward India’s border with nepal to see the holy grail of train enthusiasts - The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway.

The first experience a night train - the Delhi to Benares Shiv Ganga Express. Onboard, different slices of life plays out in every direction – there’s an intimacy as if you’re sitting at someone’s café table or their living room - little movies that roll right in front of you or slide slowly by outside the window.

Between each column of sleeper-car beds, three ceiling-mounted fans spin away madly. Two men chat on either side of a berth and when a third plunks himself between them, they barely flinch.

Vendors walk up and down the aisles calling “Chai! Chai! Chai!” hawking their sweet, milky tea, followed like the Pied Piper by a parade of wallahs (people who perform specific tasks) selling different foods, including complete dinners made in mammoth galley cars. This isn’t the civilized charm of the TGV, it’s funky, vibrant and alive.

En route to Benares, we pass a temple festooned with garlands of red and white lights and the four year old girl in the family in front of me shrieks with joy when she sees it, putting her hands together to pray.

Once in the city, miles of ghats - concrete stairs that stretch for miles along the land’s drop-off - lead down to the Ganges. Travel-weary pilgrims come to bathe in its sacred waters, locals wash their clothes and the dead are brought to be cremated in riverside funeral pyres. The smoke hovers over the waters, sticks in the back of your throat. Yet it’s not disconcerting. Instead, it is hard not to be moved by peoples’ devotion and the beauty and mystery of the Hindu temples that crown the ghats. The lines between life, religion and ritual aren’t blurred, they don’t exist. Pilgrim or tourist, you are part of the flow.

At night, sitting atop a ghat, the moon glows behind a haze that makes every-thing in the sky blend with the river - a continuum where stars and far-off candles floating on the water’s surface are confused - a dark sea overhead that stretches into the water below my feet.

Back on the train, now heading between Varanasi and Agra, where I’ll watch hundreds of children on rooftops fly kites with the Taj Mahal as a backdrop, the differences between the many travel classes become clearer.

Indian trains can be dirty, bordering on disgusting, frustrating and incredibly hot, even with the fans blasting away.  The higher up the travel class scale you go, the more private and comfortable the experience is – and more insulated, for bet-ter and worse.

Sleeper class without A.C. is the best and worst of Indian rail travel - it’s where you’ll most likely talk to your neighbor and see the glorious weirdness of it all - the tiny scenes of family life, the snoring and the aggressively beautiful eunuchs who shame travelers into giving them money, then begrudgingly bless them when they do, the possibility to stare out the window for hours or sit in the open door between two cars and recalibrate your take on life.

The Mandovi Express, the 12-hour ride ride between Mumbai and southern Goa, is a near bust. I’ve chosen to spend the day on the train and discover that not only are the windows sealed shut in 2A class, but on this hot day, they won’t open the exit doors between stops until early evening. You want the wind in your face on these rides. Once they finally open the doors, though, it’s all worth it. Toes dangling out in the void, it’s a beautiful show.

Palm trees begin to appear and near Kudal the sun becomes a golden orange unseen further north. We’re remote enough that water buffalo in the train’s shadow are still spooked by the passing engine. People continually stop to watch the train’s blue streak go by - children playing cricket halt their match and smiling, clasp their hands overhead in a salute.

Further on, a woman walks toward a distant village, alone in a great wheat field, her flowing sari a sunlit blaze of orange. A few miles later, a man sits in the shade on the edge of a similar field, papers in his lap, pen in hand and a look on his face like he’s writing a lover’s poem to her.

Off the train, in the sleepy seaside beach town of Benaulim, I walk along the shore, trying to digest two weeks of city bewilderment. My feet are just under the water’s surface and in the space between wet and dry in front of me, millions of tiny clams rise to the surface like effervescent bubbles then immediately shimmy into the sand to submerge themselves when the water disappears. Above them, coin-sized crabs scuttle about and a few steps further out, their plum-sized big brothers do the same.

For my next leg, I cheat. Getting around on trains can take days. Rides can be incredibly long. “On time” is a happy coincidence and there are points when it’s simply a good idea to punt and take a plane like I did between Delhi and Bom-bay. A few hours on an airplane can save a day or three on a long route.

Ironically, it’s on a cross-country flight between Goa and Kolkata that I’m given an explanation of Indian sentimentality for their railways.

“The train is not about getting to a destination. In the winter it travels through fog and unknown villages. There are even places where it stops without any build-ings,” says Somit Doshi, 38, who runs Strawberry Outbound , an outdoor adven-ture and team-building company. “I do a train journey once a year with a group of friends. You meet fellow passengers - all sorts of people. We call it ‘romancing.’ If you’re going up a hill in the mist you hear the sound of the whistle or the click of the bell before you leave a station ... it might seem primitive, but we like it.”

His words conjure author Ruskin Bond’s tales of remote India. They also remind me why I’m heading to Darjeeling –  for a joy ride on the Toy Train. (cq caps)

The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway (a.k.a. the Toy Train) , built between 1879 and 1881 , is a set of century-old coal-powered steam engines which ride up into the mountains and directly into the hearts of train aficionados around the world. It winds up through thick forest, tiny hill towns lost in the clouds and tea plantations with their flat topped bushes making a pointillist’s study of green, punctuated only by the bright flecks of color worn by the women picking leaves and buds that make the world’s best tea.

The train picks its way uphill on special, two-foot wide narrow gauge track com-plete with S-curve style reverses, and even curlicue loops to help it wend its way up into the clouds. It is an engineering marvel and a labor of love. Lots of labor. Every switch, whether spring point or tumbler, needs a switchman and 100 la-borers maintain the fleet of 10 steam and four diesel engines in a Tindharia workshop.

You hear it first. An goose-bump raising whistle blast that echos through the val-leys between the train’s origin at the New Jalpaiguri station in Siliguri, creeps over the 7,407-foot high point at Ghum before coasting down to Darjeeling’s hill station. Closer, there will be a plume of smoke that looks like a hillside fire, accompanied by the unmistakable chug-chug-chug.

It feels culled from a reel of cinematic railroad history that by the time it appears hissing and spurting around the corner, every eye is on it.

“We’ve seen this since we were babies. The people of Darjeeling love the steam engine. It has this rhythm, it has this sound… If it goes uphill, it makes one sound and if it goes downhill, it makes another,” says Hiren Trikhatri , chief ticket in-spector at the Darjeeling station, the line’s home in name and spirit. “Everyone still waves when the train goes by, even the baby in the mother’s arms. If tourists miss this ride, they’ve blown their itinerary. You don’t find something like this anywhere else in the world.”

To hedge my bets, I’ve reserved a seat on two separate days for the two-and-a-half-hour ‘joy ride’ from Darjeeling to the nearby town of Ghum, whose station rises from the mist like a turtle plucked from “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.”

Three times may be the charm. Though I got as far as creating a section in my notebook called ‘On The Toy Train’ while in my seat, we never move. A shipment of bad coal has clogged the trains’ furnaces and hobbled the engines.

After a week in Darjeeling, however, I’m not disappointed. I’ve smelled the wet coal in the air and watched the train wend its way through the heart of town, the rails crossing the road with impunity or appropriating the sidewalk when need be, traffic, four wheel or two foot be damned. I’ve watched the local women with their babies in their arms look up and wave as the train goes by. I’ve seen the train up close, watching it leak from every pore, watched repairs simply done with a mal-let and studied the conductor’s perch - each part bent and beautiful, polished by use of a million hands.

They say that you either leave India right after you get here or come back for the rest of your life. On her rails, I don’t think about leaving, just about how India’s frenetic pace slows as we travel along the seams. On her rails, the needle gets under my skin.

Follow me on Twitter: @joe_diner and on Facebook.

IF YOU GO

How to book a ride
Indian Railways reservations
www.irctc.co.in
Tickets can be purchased online but the site often balks at foreign credit cards. You pay a premium at http://www.cleartrip.com, but the probability of the transaction going through improves considerably. Tickets can also be purchased at train stations. Watch for and use the tourist ticket line at many stations. A typical bare-bones sleeper ticket on an overnight train runs around $10 and goes up gradually from there.

What to eat
The many lines have individual specialties and their kitchens often are larger and better than many restaurants. It’s worth asking a fellow passenger what’s good on a particular line. It’s hard to spend more than a few dollars on a meal.

Where to stay
Palace On Ganges
B-1/158 Assi Ghat
Varanasi (Benares)
+91-542-2315050
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Nice rooms upward of $50 per night. Make sure to ask to see other rooms with a view of the ghats, or the rooftop room.

Chateau Windsor Hotel
86 Veer Nariman Road, Churchgate
Mumbai
+91-22-6622-44-55
Basic, and fun. About $75-$100 per night depending on amenities. Ask to see available rooms when you check in.
www.chateauwindsor.com

D’Souza Guest House
On the small road between Benaulim and Colva
Benaulim (southern Goa)
+91-832-2770583
Stay in a local home at modest prices a short walk from the beach.

Hotel Aliment
Dr. Zakir Hussain Road
Darjeeling
+91-354-2255068
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Not for those who need frills — the water heater is on for 90 minutes a day, the door lock is a padlock — but it has an authentic hiker-backpacker set feeling. Try to stay on the upper floors.

See the story as it ran in the print version: page 1, page 2.

The Boston Globe - Travel - Sunday, September 19, 2010

This city begins on the street where I spy an indoor-outdoor, sit-stand joint called Al Bake with a team of cooks trimming cooked lamb from upright spits before going crazy on the trimmed meat with a pair of cleavers. Wap! Wap! Wap! Wap! It leaves a mound of heavenly-smelling minced lamb and spice that, wrapped in flatbread, make one mean, minimalist, New Delhi-style shawarma.

At dinner, I corral a few friends and guilt-trip them into joining me at Al Bake. Munching away while sitting on plastic chairs under the stars, we are not disappointed. While Delhi can feel hard to connect with, exploring the street food scene is a direct path to its core.

“In India, life happens on the street,’’ says a friend, and nowhere is that more evident than in the Delhi street food scene, particularly in the pulsing heart of Old Delhi.

Indian street food explodes all day, from sidewalk-straddling sugar cane juice stands and kebab kiosks to full-out kitchens of men working like blazes to produce specialty items. For some of India’s best food, do a bit of research and make a list of places to try, haggle with a cycle rickshaw driver, and then plunge into the bazaar.

Old Delhi is a mishmash of stunning balconies, colossal mosques and temples, and atrocious modern architecture that begins crumbling as soon as the cement sets. Masses of wires dangle from buildings and telephone poles giving it a post-apocalyptic feel. There are hordes of people, wholesale vendors of every kind, entire streets and micro-neighborhoods devoted to metalworks, electronics, wedding supplies, spices, silk, and jewelry. Rickshaw wallahs cart scores of uniformed schoolchildren on their three-wheeled cycles, porters haul plastic, cooking oil, rebar, or great slabs of paper on their heads, backs, and carts. It’s a crush of hungry humanity and everyone needs a place to eat.

It’s also such a maze that finding the food stalls (finding anyplace, for that matter) can be half the challenge. Directions in local newspaper articles routinely suggest heading down a better-known street to a well-known landmark before doubling back 100 feet to make a turn you would otherwise miss. Even Google Maps gives up the ghost when you try to zoom in.

One of those first places I try, the Ashok & Ashok Meat Dhabha, makes the effort worth it. A tipster has sent me here to try mutton korma, a house specialty available only two days a week, where the spice-laden meat is seared, then slow-cooked over low heat.

“We’re out of mutton,’’ says the fellow taking orders in the sidewalk’s fray. “Have the chicken.’’ The stand has been open half an hour and the signature dish is sold out. Live and learn.

Or not.

The chicken korma arrives on a metal plate, a vessel for a host of spices and the clarified butter known as ghee. The chicken has a flavor so incredibly deep and earthy, it tastes as if its claws are still on the ground. It’s served with a dish of biryani rice, flecked yellow-orange with saffron, and a continuous supply of whole-grain chapati, or flatbread; either is a perfect means for getting more of the curry into your mouth.

If you need a breakthrough moment for Indian street food, this would be it.

Accommodations are spartan. Wooden utility tables take up most of the sidewalk in front and there’s an awning-tarp combination protecting some diners from the sun. You eat on your feet, licking your fingers and thanking the heavens.

“I can have a lot of Byzantine notions, but five-star hotel food isn’t very good,’’ says Rahul Verma, my Ashok & Ashok tipster, who has been singing the glories of Delhi’s street food for 20 years for The Hindu newspaper.

“I love it. I get energized,’’ he says. “If you look at street food, you get the whole city.’’

With a Rolodex of the best places to eat in the warren of Old Delhi, Verma seems custom-made for his job. He’s the kind of guy who holds court at the Press Club of India, continually dispersing spot-on information on the best places to eat and topping off your beer whenever you’re not looking.

“Street food is the closest link to culture and society and it’s evolved over the centuries,’’ he says, “and it’s cheap.’’

A perversely proud two-time survivor of jaundice, Verma has a strict set of ground rules to minimize the chances of catching traveler’s illnesses affectionately known as Delhi Belly.

1. “Go someplace busy’’ — the faster the turnover, the fresher the food.
2. “Eat food that is cooked in front of you’’ — to minimize the risk from food-borne bacteria.
3. “Always carry bottled water.’’
4. “Don’t touch the sliced onions.’’ They may have been staying fresh in a bowl of water.

With that and a handshake, he sets me loose on the city with a list of his favorites. I enlist Scottish-born journalist Pamela Timms whose Eat and Dust street food blog was recently voted one of India’s top five food sites.

We take a cycle rickshaw to Chawri Bazar, one of Old Delhi’s main drags (picture a chaotic “Indiana Jones’’-esque street scene, double the number of people, make sure they’re all sweating profusely, and you get the idea), and we head to Jain Coffee House, one of Timms’s new favorites.

We walk through an alley I wouldn’t want to head down alone at night and come out in an aqua-hued courtyard full of wholesalers. It’s a calm world, separate from the bazaar half a block away.

“There it is,’’ she says, pointing toward a white-haired man sifting wheat. Hidden in the corner is the tiniest of kitchens, taking up just enough space to make coffee, chai, and some peculiar specialties.

She orders a pair of mango sandwiches that arrive with the crusts cut off.

“Their sandwiches are usually fruit jelly with thin slices of paneer [a type of fresh cheese] and grape or pomegranate, and slices of mango or apple,’’ she says. “It depends on what’s in season.’’
Ours, which we eat while sitting on sacks of grain, are unlike anything I’ve seen in India — more, say, a fresh and slightly healthier version of the cream cheese and jelly I loved as a kid.

“They’re not traditional, but Jain has been around fifty years,’’ she says, smiling at the contradiction. “It’s a pretty unique enterprise.’’

We head to check out one of Verma’s suggestions, Manohar Dhaba, which is nestled into the electronics bazaar at the end of Chandni Chowk, across from Delhi’s historic Red Fort. Here, you eat “japani samosas,’’ one-of-a-kind stuffed mille-feuille with muddled, and not necessarily Japanese origins.

We take a bite — the flaky, cube-like puff hides an interior stuffed with peas and potatoes — which make a fantastic, if heavy mouthful.

“This would come in the ‘hangover food’ category,’’ says Timms, putting a fine point on the inherent greasy goodness.

From here, we cheat a bit and stop at a sit-down restaurant that’s on both Timms and Verma’s lists: Hotel Adarsh Niwas.

“Hotel’’ gets a bit of a stretch in Delhi, encompassing accommodation-free eateries. Inside, owner Satnarayan Sharma sits on the edge of a booth seat, his legs folded under him. We buy brass tokens at the register and hand them to the waiter without a word; he returns in a few moments with the restaurant’s signature thali — a large metal plate covered with smaller metal plates, each with a different dish: dal, curries, and even sweeter options to be eaten alongside the savory. One cup has a thin yogurt with puffed grains — something I’d be tempted to eat for breakfast or as an afternoon snack, yet in the context of the other options, it makes perfect sense. There’s also warm gulab jamun, sweet milk solids typically flavored with cardamom or rosewater that remind me of a perfect pancake from my youth.

We’re stuffed to the gills but Timms wants to make sure I have what I need.

“Need any other places?’’ she says.

“Not unless we’re within 10 feet of one,’’ I reply, raising the white flag.

She understands, but she’s a good foodie, and I can see the gears turning as we head out the door.

That evening, I take a walk in the Nizamuddin neighborhood where I’m staying. The mercury is still high and a block away from the flat, I hear the tinkling bell of the popsicle cart. All the man sells is three sizes of “kulfi,’’ a dense ice cream cousin traditionally made by boiling down sweetened milk. This version has traces of cinnamon and cardamom — cool, soothing goodness on a stick.

Follow me on Twitter: @joe_diner and on Facebook.

If You Go
How to plan

You need a plan of attack to know where to go on an Old Delhi street food jag. To get started, find a few destinations on the blogs of food writers Pamela Timms and Rahul Verma.


Even if you know the places you’d like to visit, your best bet is to find a cycle rickshaw driver. You should be able to negotiate a rate of around 200 rupees (about $4.30) per hour.


Cycle rickshaw driver Rahul Pal (+91 9871533849) knows many of Timms and Verma’s favorite places and can help find others.


Where to eat

Prices vary, but it is hard to spend more than the equivalent of $5 on a meal at any of the following establishments.

Hotel Adarsh Niwas

483 Haider Kuli Corner (below Andhra Bank)

Chandni Chowk

+91 (0)11 2392 9139


Al Bake

22 Community Center

New Friends Colony

+91 (0)11 3297 2881


Ashok & Ashok Meat Dhaba

42 Subhas Chowk, Basti Harphool Singh
Sadhar Thana Road

+91 989 1776283


Manohar Dhaba

38/240 Diwan Hall Road
Old Lajpat Rai Market (across from Red Fort Main entrance)

+91 (0)11 4139 1909


Jain Coffee House

Directions from the Eat and Dust blog: From Chawri Bazar Metro walk along Chawri Bazar until almost at the left turn into Nai Sarak. On your left is a small gully, Raghu Ganj; walk in and turn left, Jain Coffee House is the grain store at the far left.

See the story as it ran in the print version: page 1, page 2.

The Boston Globe - Travel - Sunday, August 29, 2010

MADRID - A taxi through the heart of town goes through an amazing architectural diversity, then down into herky-jerky underground sections with sharp corners and dropouts that are like navigating an abandoned coal shaft through the city’s belly. You pass so many bars and restaurants, the idea of a tapas tour sounds both fantastic and naive.

Eating tapas – tiny, snack-like dishes that historically ‘covered’ a glass of sherry to keep fruit flies out – In Madrid is one of Spain’s great pastimes and sampling a few dishes in several places over the course of a few wonderfully protracted,  gut-busting and inherently fun hours with friends is part of the game. The city leverages its central location to pull some of the best influences from every corner of Spain without ignoring local favorites and serves them up in places often decades if not more than a century old.

It takes 24 hours of mixed success - including a restaurant playing bad covers of Huey Lewis and Paul Young, with tapas to match - for the compass to stop spinning.

At Taberna de la Daniela, I try “salmorejo,’’ Córdoba’s thick gazpacho cousin. This one is topped with grated egg and tiny cubes of “jamón,’’ cured ham, which give it a simultaneously healthy yet sinful feeling. We follow it with a quail egg and chorizo canapé, an electric jolt of spicy and silky.

Later, near the Plaza de la Puerta del Sol, we have a cup of Lhardy’s signature broth, served from a silver urn and accompanied by a tiny glass of sherry. The combination is subtle but sublime, clearing my stuffy nose and making me rethink the difficulty of pairing wine with soup.

Things really hit stride when we meet Roberto Santos, former Barcelona restaurateur and Madrid native, at La Dolores, a century-old tavern known for its beer and certain tapas.

Santos is here to explain the tapas, and though his fiancée, Arantxa Uribe, gives us a kiss on the cheek when we walk in, he’s all business.

“First, take a chip,’’ Santos says in way of greeting.

No ‘Hi,’ no ‘How are you?’ just ‘Take a chip.’

I like him immediately.

“Next, put a mussel on the chip,’’ he says, skewering one of the tavern’s specialties — canned mussels in vinegar — and placing it on a fairly perfect potato chip.

“Now, pop it all in your mouth at once,’’ he says, tipping his head back. “That way, you don’t make a mess.’’

He knows how much I’m going to like it before I do.

“Maestro!’’ he says, flagging the passing waiter, “Boquerones!’’

A similar-looking plate arrives — this one with white, vinegar-soaked anchovy fillets, along with a handful of olives and “guindillas,’’ the Spanish cousin of what a Midwesterner would call “sport peppers.’’

“Spear the anchovy, take a chip, and follow with a guindilla,’’ comes the command.

The anchovies are soft and fleshy, the chip gives crunch and salt, and the pepper is a spritz of heat. Coated with vinegar, our mouths and lips pucker and we smile.

Santos gives the signal and we head a few doors down to the bullfight-themed Cervecerias Dos Gatos for a house vermouth with a blood sausage and pine nut canapé that’s earthy, slightly sweet, and gives me goosebumps.

From there, we head uphill along the calle Huertas to Casa Alberto for crackling crisp pork skin that makes my feet do their happy dance; “rabo de toro,’’ beef tail, historically made with the tail of a bull after its fight; and “callos a la Madrileña,’’ a punchy tripe dish with chickpeas and bits of chorizo. These last two dishes are “raciones,’’ larger portions good for sharing with a group.

What’s most intriguing is the specialization: something from one place, something else in another, then it’s off to somewhere else, forming an erratic hopscotch pattern around town.

“Traditionally places have a special touch with something and people start talking about it,’’ says Santos. “When people really enjoy a place, they want to have a story to tell their friends and what works in Madrid is word of mouth. People talk and talk and places become famous.’’

I notice at this point that it’s Friday at four and things show no sign of slowing down between lunch and dinner.

“Ha! Definitely not on Friday,’’ says Santos. “Things really pick up at about four because they get off early for the weekend.’’

“In other cities, people go out in the afternoon and again at night,’’ continues Uribe, “but here, they’re out all the time.’’

The next day, on my own, the tone is set at Casa Lucio by the secret service guard on the sidewalk — trademark earpiece dangling from his ear — waiting for his client to finish lunch.

Just inside, a blind man selling lottery tickets is as much a fixture as the busts above him. At the bar, under a dozen jamón hocks, there are three kinds of anchovies, two kinds of olives, boxes of canned mussels, and a big silver bowl full of ice and sherry bottles.

The barman asks if I want a drink and frowns like I’m a small-time player when I say coffee.

Floating through the arched doorways that link the dining rooms is Lucio Blázquez, 77, who owns three establishments including this bar-restaurant and the tapas bar across the street. He’s as much a Madrid fixture as the Prado and as famous as the celebrities who flock here.

After a lifetime of feeding people, he’s got a handle on the tapas draw.

“Tapas is informality, it’s fun, it’s going out and talking,’’ Blásquez says as he flips through a photo album of famous diners, all standing arm in arm with him. “You don’t sit,’’ he says, “you eat.

“Madrid and Sevilla are the most important places for tapas, but Madrid is tapas,’’ he says. “Madrileños are lighter than people in other parts of Spain — they like having fun. We take bits from around the world and make people feel welcome.’’

“But shouldn’t you be retired and relaxing under a palm tree,” I ask.

“I’m old,” he says, “but I don’t want to go anywhere else. I don’t have time.”

“...because you want to be here?”

“Siiii!” he bellows, not unlike a bull. “Some people like to go to the beach. I like it here. As long as I can walk, I’ll be here.”

More ubiquitous than even the sherry on Lucio’s bar — which pairs fantastically with almost every kind of tapas — are tiny draft beers known as “cañas.’’ Just having come from Barcelona, where the beer is often good, I can’t figure out what the fuss is about.

It’s all in the pour.

Back at La Dolores I watch barman Andrès Rivas and manager Oscar Arañda demonstrate the local version of the perfect pour.

Rivas fills the glass, almost foam-free, and sets it on the bar with a clack!

“That gets rid of the big bubbles — the ones that sting,’’ explains Arañda, pointing to the last few lolling toward the surface. Then he gives the tap a half turn, bringing up the percentage of tiny-bubbled suds in the glass and pushing the excess off the top with a spatula.

This isn’t lipstick on a pig. It’s a completely different animal, filled with Guinness-style microscopic bubbles. Poured right, lines of suds mark each sip on the inside of the glass. At La Dolores, everyone, from the two old ladies catching up by the window to the woman grabbing a quick lunch to all the guys at the bar are having one.

On my last day in town I seek out the new at Arzábal, a tavern-restaurant where I shoehorn into the bar for a plate of tiny fried artichokes and follow it up with Basque “kokotxas,’’ wedges of cod flesh hidden where the chin would be if a fish had a chin, bathed in a green olive oil, hot pepper, and garlic sauce known as “pil-pil.’’

Later, at Taberna Laredo, there are steak and green pepper dishes going by that nearly sway me from what I really want to get: “revuelto de erizo,’’ a sort of scrambled egg with sea urchin dish that gets a textural boost from the egg and slivers of al dente vegetables.

We also stop at Mercado San Miguel (cq), a former food market which got a huge makeover in 2009 and reopened as a giant, high-end tapas bar where you create a mix-and-match meal from the kiosks surrounding the central tables maybe perfect, pink gambas from one stand and bacalao and huevos roots – ‘broken eggs’ made with eggs (usually busted-up sunny side up) and sausage or jamón over chips – from another.

It’s a bit like a food court in heaven, but something about it - perhaps the Lhardy outpost serving their beautiful broth in a styrofoam cup or the perfect newness of it all makes me pine for the classics.

On my last night in town, I head to the Chamberi neighborhood to Cerveceria Fide and El Doble, two bars that are snapshots of bygone decades.

At Fide, locals, dressed as if they, too, were part of the photo, reconnect over beer and little plates of fresh seafood. The only nod to the modern is a flatscreen TV, broadcasting Madrid’s soccer rival Barcelona fighting Almeria to a 2-2 tie. Here, flat Galician oysters are ordered by the half-dozen, but thinking I’ve got a lot of eating to do, I finagle an order for just two. The idea lasts as long as it takes to swallow one, at which point I flag the barman for the other four.

Down the street, I step into the bustling, brightly-lighted El Doble, a seafood specialist, with many of their best coming from open tins proudly displayed under glass at the bar. It’s my last night in town, so with my beer, I get mussels and chips like I had with Santos and do as he instructed, popping the whole thing into my mouth. These are every bit as fantastic. The last small bites, the last few sips are little guarantees I’ll come back for more.

Follow me on Twitter: @joe_diner and on Facebook.

If You Go
Where to eat
Tapas enough to fill your belly and a drink or two run about $13-$19 at all of the places below unless otherwise noted. Many establishments also offer “raciones’’ — larger portions good for sharing with a group. Be on the lookout for classics like “gambas’’ (shrimp), “bacalao’’ (salt cod), sausages, “pimentons de padrón’’ (salty, sautéed green peppers where one in 10 is hot), cheeses, sometimes cured or preserved in olive oil, calamari, olives, and meatballs.

Casa Alberto
C/ Huertas 18, Madrid
011-34-91-429-93-56
Escargot, bull tail, spicy tripe, and vermouth on tap.

Taberna de la Daniela
Calle del General Pardiñas 21
011-34-915-752-329
Try the “salmorejo.’’

Cervecerias Dos Gatos
C/ Jesús 2
011-34-914-293-067
Don’t miss: house vermouth, sausage with pine nut canapé.

Arzábal
Doctor Castelo 2
011-34-915-572-691
http://www.arzabal.com
New, trendy, Basque, beautiful.

Casa Lucio
Cava Baja 35
011-34-91-365-32-52
http://www.casalucio.es (in Spanish)
Looking for an old classic and a superstar? This is the place. The tiny bar in front serves a good, though limited, menu. Order jamón and prices will skyrocket, but you won’t care. Also a good sit-down option. Get the aged Manchego cheese.

La Dolores
Plaza de Jesus 4
011-34-914-292-243
Perfect beer, mussels, anchovies pickled in vinegar, and potato chips that can’t have been made more than a mile away.

Taberna Laredo
C/Menorca 14
011-34-91-573-30-61
New, old, throbbing with customers on a busy day, and with a fantastic wine list. “Revuelto de erizo,’’ $23.

Cerveceria Fide
C/ Ponzano 8
011-34-914-46-58-33
A trip back a few decades in a stand-up bar, with tiled walls, marble bars, and perfect oysters.

Cerveceria El Doble
C/ José Abascal 16
011-34-91-591-94-62
My kiss goodbye with a mussel on a chip.

Where to stay
Room Mate Hotels
011-34-913-995-777
www.room-matehotels.com
A hip option for the younger set with four locations in town. Rates from $127.

Hotel Puerta America
Avenida de América 41
011-34-917-445-400
www.hoteles-silken.com/hotel- puerta-america-madrid/en/
An asthete’s dream with 12 floors designed by as many architectural firms. Weekend doubles from $178, weekdays from $216.

AC Santo Mauro
Zurbano 36
011-34-913-085-477
www.ac-hotels.com/144-ac_ santo_mauro.html
A former duke’s residence and a tiny Madrid classic; rates run from $254-$1,460. Watch for early-bird specials.

Download the PDF to see the story as it ran page 1, page 2.

The Boston Globe - Sunday, August 22, 2010

LUMMI ISLAND, WA — On the deck, in the sun, with the juice of local prawns dribbling down our chins, my dining partner lets out a discreet little moan. This is the moment I know that Riley Starks is onto a good thing.

Starks, 60, is a fisherman, farmer, and owner with his partner, Judy Olsen, of the Willows Inn on this under-discovered island.

“They are probably three of the hardest ways to make a living,’’ Starks jokes, but on the inn’s deck, where those three elements come together at dinner, you understand how and why he has aligned these stars.

A two-hour drive, five-minute ferry ride, and a world away from Seattle, Lummi Island is a place unto itself where the first thing we hear stepping off the boat is a resident explaining to a visitor why people don’t bother locking their houses. Life here is lived locally and admirably — the good life sans chichi.

Starks and Olsen fit this mold perfectly and moments after we’ve met, he opens a cooler next to the kitchen and pulls out a few spot prawns, fat crustaceans he keeps alive until the moment before they’re cooked.

“Where do you catch them,’’ I ask.

“Out there,’’ he says, with a gesture toward the open water of Puget Sound in front of the inn. And that, in a nutshell, is how Starks, Olsen, and the inn work. Between the salmon fishing he does, the prawns and lamb he buys from neighbors, and the farm they run, they can supply up to 85 percent of what they use in the kitchen. With sustainable fishing, eco-friendly farming, a beautiful B&B, and a fantastic restaurant, there’s a mix of what they want, what they need, and what’s good for the planet.

Using an aluminum tender to get out to the fishing boats, Starks taps the small, red plastic gas can with his toe. “This is the only fossil fuel we use for fishing,’’ he says. Instead, the fish come to him.

Understanding begins on the gear: a pair of bare-bones boats, anchored with an elaborate net strewn between them for a process called reef netting. It is a rig that dates hundreds of years to the Coast Salish Indians but seems borrowed from the “Waterworld’’ set. Hundreds of feet of ropes with blue plastic streamers leading to the sea floor in front of the boats guide the fish toward the net, and at the bow of each boat, lookouts on towers watch for the fish. Each of Starks’s gear boats uses solar panels that power the winches when the show starts.

“Everyone else brings two 100-pound batteries into shore every other day,’’ he says, pointing out the seven other gears here in Legoe Bay.

Heading north by instinct and pushed against the island by the tidal current, salmon — sockeye every year and pinks every other — are drawn to this spot like a magnet. The mammoth forces involved in the tides work beneath our feet and the current rips through the water as if the sound is part of British Columbia’s Fraser River, where these fish are heading to spawn.

Then the show starts. “Here they come!’’ calls a spotter and everything happens at once.

Sockeye, with their blue-green backs, appear on the surface between the boats, heading toward the nets, creating a floating, dreamlike effect seen from above. Everyone scrambles and winches scream, putting enormous strain on the ropes that tighten the net, while roughly jerking the boats.

As the net rises, the surface water whips to a frenzy as more than a dozen fish are forced to the surface and funneled into the live well, or holding tank. On Riley’s gear it is a rectangular hole directly above the water in the deck of one boat. There’s a small net below it to keep the fish alive and contained.

On this day, however, they are not destined for Starks’s kitchen. Instead, they are being tagged and released by Nanaimo, B.C., fisheries biologist Jason Smith, who works for LGL Limited, a group contracted by the Pacific Salmon Commission and the Fraser Salmon and Watersheds Program.

The fish are held in the live well until Smith nets one, sets it in a trough, plucks a scale from its side, measures its length, and crams a thumb-sized transponder into its belly. “It looks very uncomfortable,’’ Starks quips. Once the fish enters the Fraser River, the device sends dozens of unique readings that detail the life of the fish and its surroundings. Smith’s job is part of a peculiar balance between management and conservation — a sticky political business that depends on the good health of the fish.

“If you know there’s a weak stock out there, you can hold off opening fisheries to protect stock,’’ Smith says. It’s also something that despite the impressive amount of data they collect, is still fickle, still nature.

“Last year, they forecast a big year and nothing showed up,’’ he says, referring to the 2009 collapse.

It also highlights reef netting’s low impact.

“This is ideal,’’ says Smith, pointing to the live well. “The fish are in great condition. If you catch a chinook [off-limits for gear fishing] in a gill net and don’t get out to it soon enough, it’s going to die.’’

Here, they just flip them back into the drink.

This sustainability is only part of what makes Starks happy.

“My dad wanted me to be a lawyer,’’ he says. Starks got his law degree and after years of crewing on fishing boats to make college money, “I sold everything I owned and bought a boat.’’

Decked out in bright yellow bibs, a sou’wester cap, and sporting a graying beard, he looks like he should be the Bliss Marine spokesperson. He’s certainly a businessman but he’s got a smile big enough to make every office worker in the lower 48 jealous.

The grin doesn’t go away on the farm, where his crew grows impressive year-round crops on 5 1/2 acres and is organic in everything but name. (The farm was certified organic for 10 years and continues the same practices.)

“Let me show you the pig,’’ he says, ushering me toward a large fenced-in area with a giant mangalitsa, a Hungarian breed that resembles a wild boar and is prized for its polyunsaturated fat.

“Does it have a name,’’ I ask.

“Nope,’’ Starks says. “Everything’s for the plate.’’

The pig takes a few bites of grain then lumbers over to cool off in the mud.

“In general, we have three pigs every two years. We made a jamón [cured ham] with one,’’ he says, trailing off to a happy place. “I still dream of that.’’

It’s right about here when I realize I’m amazed by it all — what Starks has going, Lummi’s small-town beauty, the farmer’s market where a vendor’s spot costs two bucks. There’s a sense that on the island, this is the way things are. And were. And can stay.

What else could you need? In my case, dinner.

This is food — roasted fennel, chickpea salad, Lummi Island lamb, and Riley Starks’s salmon — where the less you fuss with it the better. This is a chef’s dream.

The best way to dine here, however, is à la carte. From May to Labor Day, the inn runs Sunday Prawns on The Deck, reason enough to make this place a destination.

While Starks tends bar - a perfectly fitting shoe - sous chef Jason Brubaker mans the prawn station. The process is simple: hot pan, hot oil, a bit of garlic, a fistful of prawns, some herbs, and a cover. Flip ’em and wait. Total cooking time? About three minutes. Plate with a lemon wedge. Eat with your fingers.

Maybe it wasn’t my partner moaning. Maybe it was me.

Follow me on Twitter: @joe_diner and on Facebook.

If You Go

The Willows Inn
2579 West Shore Drive
Lummi Island, Wash.
888-294-2620
www.willows-inn.com
Doubles from about $150, including breakfast; packages with three-course tasting meals for two, $220. Information about reef netting and how to go out on a gear can be found on the website.
Blaine Wetzel, sous chef at Copenhagen’s noma — recently named the world’s best restaurant — will take the reins as executive chef starting tomorrow. Weekdays prix fixe $30, weekends $50.

Follow me on Twitter: @joe_diner and on Facebook.

See the story as a PDF here: page 1, page 2

Sunday, April 18, 2010 - The Boston Globe - Travel

My friend Lexy likes to joke about teaching me “proper’’ English and the finer points of her culture. I am “excited,’’ she is “chuffed.’’ For years, she has tried to get me on the football (soccer) bandwagon. Recently she started telling me of the upswing in London cuisine and the mind-numbing goodness of the city’s ethnic offerings. I was leery. Historically, food from the United Kingdom has an awful reputation and a hefty price tag. I couldn’t imagine coming here just to eat.

My skepticism floats away with a bite of takeout the night I arrive. We eat Indian and Bangladeshi dishes from Tiffins Club that use subtlety, heat, and blissful flavor combinations to change my perceptions in a heartbeat.

More surprising is the resurgence of traditional English food. Typical offerings like bangers and mash (sausages with mashed potatoes) and fish and chips are ceding their spots on the menu to food prepared with a respect for tradition and an eye on the modern day. Hopping back and forth between the eastern and western ends of the city, ethnic and traditional come into a unifying whole.

At his West Kensington home, I pose the question of how to learn to love British food to Simon Hopkinson, former chef at London’s groundbreaking Bibendum restaurant and author of several cookbooks, including the much-acclaimed “Roast Chicken and Other Stories’’ and the just released “The Vegetarian Option,’’ and he smirks. “The smell of my mother’s rabbit pie in the old Aga stove. She’d pick wild rabbit up for a sixpence and braise it for two hours until it was falling apart and serve it with red currant jelly,’’ he says. “I couldn’t wait.’’

Nostalgia, it turns out, is a mixed bag. “There are a lot of boiled things and things at grammar school called dead man’s leg and suet jam roly poly. That’s suet, flour, and bicarbonate spread with jam wrapped in muslin and steamed,’’ Hopkinson says, grinning in a way that suggests he knows it’s hard to appreciate. “It had a cousin called apple hat with sliced apples, brown sugar, and flecks of butter where all the apples go gooey and soft,’’ he says, his eyes going to a happy, faraway place, accompanied by a big, happy “Hooo . . .’’

Dead man’s leg and apple hat might not be common finds on menus anymore, yet they make decidedly strong connections between the stomach, the mind, and the past. “Chefs will doll it up a bit, but there’s a resurgence of British cooking that’s about simple food,’’ Hopkinson says. “Mom made boiled, sliced leeks in a white sauce with lamb and mint sauce. That’s one of my most favorite things. You’ve got the lamb gravy and specks of fat from the skin all mixed together at the bottom of the plate — it just calls for a spoon . . . before second helpings so you can do it all again.’’

Farther west, in Southall, I find an Indian neighborhood so entrenched that the train stop signs are in English and Punjabi. Rumor has it, you can buy a pint at a local pub with rupees. Only a few miles from Hopkinson’s flat, I’m both effectively in another country and completely in London.

I collar a pair of locals, ask where to eat, and moments later, I am sitting at Chandni Chowk in front of dishes of paneer samosa, triangular pastry filled with ricotta-like cheese and peas, and bhalla chaat, lentil crackers with chickpeas, potatoes, chutney, and raw onion. They seduce the taste buds then burn them, sometimes coming on smooth, at other times strong. Single bites can contain spicy, sweet, creamy, earthy, raw and scorched, crisp and bubbled into submission. Chandni Chowk isn’t perfect, but it’s very good and a great first stop in this community.

The idea of London as an unstirred melting pot may also be part of what makes the food so good. “The difference between here and America is that people who migrate to the US become American before being an Arab. Their own cuisine isn’t something they’re living,’’ says Anissa Helou, chef, instructor, author, and London food trend spotter, at her loft in the trendy Shoreditch section of Hackney. “I’ve been in London 36 years and when people ask where I’m from, I should say London but I say I’m Syrian and Lebanese. I didn’t have fish and chips until 10 years after I moved here. We’ve all become British, but most ethnic communities feel their identities retained here.’’

Had the local food been better as these communities evolved, the melting pot may have been stirred more. “When I came here, there was no good food to be had. If I wanted to eat well, I ate abroad,’’ Helou says, recalling the fresh fruits and vegetables of her youth, then the last few decades of London’s culinary history. “It was pretty disgusting,’’ she says, smiling and blushing, “I ate disgusting food.’’

Things got better. “It took a long time after I arrived before it got good. Bibendum was one of London’s first great restaurants, and from the ’80s onward, there would be a few good restaurants popping up. Now I can reel off great places all over town,’’ she says. “The fun thing is that now there’s a very varied offer.’’

We go to lunch at St. John Bread and Wine, one of two St. John restaurants under the eye of chef Fergus Henderson that have helped rekindle interest in traditional British food. We try a foie gras and duck liver paté with a light and buttery texture accentuated by the warmth and crunch of the toast it’s served on, then go whole hog and try a hearty caul-wrapped pork offal “meatball.’’

A few days later, my London host Lexy takes me to Albion, her favorite new English food “caff.’’ We have a starter of pork crackling, the layer of crispy fat that forms on top of a roast. It’s a carnivore’s ultimate snack food, both snowy soft and shattering with crispiness, served warm and accompanied by hot applesauce. (It should also come with a portable defibrillator and a little sign that says, “Warning, this may stop your heart.’’) Afterward, I try a steak and kidney pie, the UK equivalent of chicken pot pie. It comes with a pot of gravy on the side. I realize that with gentle prices and high quality, there’s no reason something this wholesome should have fallen out of favor.

For a full dose of nostalgia, I find Bob Cooke slinging pie, mash, liquor, and eels behind a counter at Hackney’s F. Cooke. “Pie ’n’ mash is East End,’’ says Cooke, who, at 55, is the last in a 145-year-long line of cockney Cookes who have owned this and other nearby pie shops. “We’re all named Fred or Bob.’’

This shop on the road known as Broadway Market, near the beautiful London Fields, has tiled walls, marble tables, low wooden benches, and sawdust on the floor. Cooke’s clients are stocky locals, artsy types, and tourists who wait at the counter for a steaming tower of meat pies and mashed potatoes, often with a curious green parsley sauce known as “liquor.’’ Everything is ordered in units and eaten with a fork and spoon; knives haven’t been available here for years. One pie and one mash makes for a handsome lunch, but a pair of stout brothers walk in. They each order three, and finish them off in 10 minutes.

At the bench under a paper titled “It’s my favourite meal’’ by Eleanor Jackson, age 10, I tuck into a plateful and the pie spills out gravy. “It may be on the lower stratum of food,’’ says Cooke, “but there’s a nostalgia for it. The people who know it, they come back. We had a pair of old girls who came in for lunch every Saturday at noon for 50 years. You could set your watch by it.’’

“Pie and mash,’’ concludes Cooke, “keep you young.’’

IF YOU GO

Where To Eat
Mangal I
10 Arcola St.
London
+44 (0)20 7275 8981
BYOB to one of London’s best Turkish grills. More than enough meat to fill a bowler hat for about 10 pounds. Do not miss the smoke-infused eggplant and pepper patlican salata. 

Rochelle Canteen - (click on ‘Rochelle School Canteen’)
Rochelle School
Arnold Circus
London
+44 (0)20 7729 5677
A hidden courtyard favorite of fashionistas and marked by nothing but the name “CANTEEN” on a street buzzer panel in a beautiful part of town, this is an under-the-radar gem.

St. John Bread & Wine
94-96 Commercial Street
London, E1 6LZ
+44 (0) 20 7251 0848 94-96
Chef Fergus Henderson leads a London revival in traditional preparations and products.

Tiffins Club
Indian and Bangladeshi cuisine
249 Amhurst road
London
+44 (0)20 7254 8459
My first bite of London. Take out only, but if you’ve got someplace to eat it, get some take away or have it delivered, it’s wonderful. Try the spinach and cheese sag paneer and screaming hot Chicken Jalfrezi.

Where To Stay

The Hoxton
81 Great Eastern Street
London
+44 (0)20 7550 1000
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
A trendy favorite with a wide range of prices and interesting (though a bit confusing) pricing options and deals. Specials tend to start around 50 pounds/night, but tend to be in the mid 100s…

The Boundary
2-4 Boundary Street London
+44 (0)20 7729 1051
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Big, beautiful and right upstairs from the Albion (though the recommendation came from a completely separate source). Enormous designer-themed rooms tend to start just under 200 pounds/night and go up from there.

More Info:
Two blogs that are labors labor of love and insiders’ views of London’s East End:
The Spitalfields Life
London Fields Lover

See the story as a PDF here: page 1, page 2.

Sunday, March 21, 2010 - The Boston Globe - Travel

GENERAL ROCA, Argentina — Speeding down the road, Hans Vinding-Diers shouts over the phone:

“V2 point two. Point four today? Pigeage and vit. Pump over five minutes. Open.’’

Turning onto the dirt road to Bodega Noemía de Patagonia, the car’s wheels lose contact with the ground. With one hand on the phone and the other on the gearshift, Vinding-Diers is doing what my father calls “fancy knee driving’’ and cackling like a madman.

It sounds like he’s homogenizing wines around the world but instead, we pull into the winery and he continues the conversation with his assistant Jesse Katz face to face.

It’s all part of harvest time at the end of the world.

I spent a week in Patagonia picking, hauling, destemming, and crushing grapes with my feet at Vinding-Diers’s Bodega Noemía and the neighboring Bodega Chacra, run by Piero Incisa della Rocchetta, an Italian wine magnate. Vinding-Diers, a Dane, has worked at top wineries on a few continents and Rocchetta is heir to the throne of Tuscany’s Tenuta San Guido estate.

Through them, I learned the winemaker’s job at harvest — when the winery gates are locked — and that Patagonia still maintains its rough, isolated frontier feeling. Throughout history, explorers, adventurers, and visionaries like Darwin and Saint-Exupéry were drawn to this place.

Winemaking in Patagonia sounds like a bad idea. This is the place so far from everything that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid came here to hide. This is the country where six bucks buys you a steak as big as your head. This is the land that made the late Bruce Chatwin, author of “In Patagonia,’’ write: “From its discovery, it had the effect on the imagination something like the moon.’’

Though reports indicate that Chatwin was never one to refuse a drink, at no time did he mention Patagonia as a good spot for winemaking, leaving one to wonder why two of the best winemakers in the world would bother. At no time did Chatwin mention Patagonia as a good spot for winemaking. Yet Noemía and Chacra are producing tiny quantities of world-class wines, and others may soon follow.

Compared with myriad and slick operations farther north in Mendoza, winemaking in Patagonia is a do-it-yourself adventure. Far away from easy access to the right equipment, Bodega Noemía’s first vintages were made in fiberglass tubs usually used as septic tanks. That same year, Vinding-Diers’s partner, Countess Noemi Cinzano, fractured a vertebra using a pole to “punch down’’ grapes.

That said, they are spoiled now by the winemaking they can do. Grapes are hand-picked and destemmed, and all of Vinding-Diers’s wines are crushed by foot — luxuries you pay dearly for in Europe.

Getting here and staying put wasn’t easy. Weeks before, I had presented my idea to a fever-ridden Vinding-Diers. He groaned, said yes, and hung up. After a two-day bus ride from Chile, I joined him for lunch and he asked why I was there.

“To get my fingers in the grease,’’ I said, repeating our phone conversation, feeling the others at the table squirm. “To participate in the harvest for a week.’’

Hearing the idea as if for the first time, Vinding-Diers derailed. “Harvest is the busiest time of year. I can’t baby-sit you for a week,’’ he said. “I’m sorry, I was sick when we spoke. I can’t have you here.’’ He rose and left.

That afternoon, I took a run, trespassing across a neighboring vineyard. I thought about the trip, crossing the Andes between Chile and Argentina. I remembered the beauty of that morning’s drive along the mythical Ruta 40 (the wild-eyed cousin of Route 66 that runs down to the end of the world), skirting the lakes and peaked mountains, then following the sparkling Limay River northeast through volcanic formations.

I looked around. The land was flat and often barren, but the pear and apple tree plots that are the area’s agricultural backbone are protected by long rows of poplars, framed by a fiery sunset and Patagonia’s wind-stretched clouds. Even in the middle of nowhere, it’s still easy to get that pioneer, stake-your-claim feeling.

Rocchetta took me in while Vinding-Diers cooled his jets, but he understood his neighbor. “Everything happens in four weeks at harvest time. It’s like a puzzle.’’

Rocchetta has a full plate with Italy’s ultra-high-end Sassicaia wines, yet his heart and soul are in Patagonia. “Have you heard of Super Tuscan wines,’’ he asked with a mix of humility and self-assurance. “That’s my family.’’

Why was he here?

“Today, life is fast drugs, fast food, fast sex, fast everything,’’ he said.

Patagonia is the opposite of that. Here, people are vastly outnumbered by livestock, and the boundless stretches of beauty and desolation cause time to hang.

“Here, it’s old-world winemaking that doesn’t seem to be in fashion. Wine should be like tasting 365 days of a place, like a sensory photograph as opposed to throwing in new oak and extracting tannins. Then you have a lollipop. That’s not for me,’’ he said. “If you try to please everyone, you don’t have an identity.’’

Instead, Rocchetta is creating his own.

In an old army Jeep, he drove up one side of the canyon that used to be the bank of the Río Negro. The sand, minerals, and sediment that make up the soil were revealed in the canyon walls. The sun was strong, the wind relentless: harsh conditions that yield a good grape.

Later, I tasted his wine, pinot noirs named for the years their vines were planted. I noted the deep rosy color of the 2006 Cincuenta y Cinquo, with its spicy, then intense licorice smell.

Like the “gotcha’’ smile he flashed to say, “Hello, trespasser’’ when we met, Rocchetta grinned, knowing I was sipping one of the best wines of my life.

“That’s why I got on a plane,’’ he said. “To do something like this in Europe is almost impossible.’’

Essentially, they’re coddling their fruit like serious European winemakers wish they could.

“In Bordeaux, those guys have been making wine for hundreds of years. Here, it’s seven,’’ said Vinding-Diers, who eventually realized I wasn’t leaving. “That’s what’s fun.’’

With this in mind, I joined both wineries’ teams for a few days in the fields.

“What should I wear?’’ I asked the crew chief.

“Your worst,’’ he replied, smiling.

There was an 8 a.m. pickup where a man named Umberto put 10 of us in the back of a truck, wordlessly handing out clippers. Everyone worked down one row and up the next, filling baskets that are taken away behind an old Fiat tractor. Your back aches and your hands, gloves, and clippers merge into a sticky mass, but it’s good, honest work that leaves you tired and happy.

Once picked and destemmed, the grapes go into a vat where time and expertise do their work.

Vinding-Diers and his crew stripped down to their skivvies and hopped hip-deep into a vat. The mass of Argentina’s famous malbec grapes in the vat was so solid that this was the only way to stir it up.

“Stand on top,’’ said Vinding-Diers.

I grinned, stripped to my underwear, and stepped onto grapes that had been in the vat for only a day or two. Walking on the surface, the grape skins popped beneath my feet like caviar.

In a second vat, I sank into the mix while Vinding-Diers explained the science between my ankles; yeast is converting sugar into alcohol, a frenzied exchange that turns grapes into wine. Our feet stirred the vat to homogenize its contents.

Later he poured a glass from the vat’s spigot. Taste, spit. Taste, spit.

“This is how we know what to do tomorrow,’’ he said.

I did my own tasting and spitting later. Vinding-Diers’s 2006 Bodega Noemía had a deep rose color with a lavender tinge and a smell that rivaled perfume in complexity, blending cream, fruits, and caramel. In my mouth, there were fruit and mineral flavors that were strong and clear without heaviness. At the end, my tasting notes read, “It fades out like the Patagonian skyline.’’

IF YOU GO

In Patagonia, distances are vast and travel can be slow — a minimum stay should be no less than 10 days. Options include wildlife viewing on the Valdes Peninsula preserve, staying on a ranch, glacier viewing, hiking, and horseback riding. Or you can rent a 4x4 and drive Ruta 40 to the end of the world. Just make sure you’ve got two spare tires, extra gas tanks, and camping equipment.

Where to stay
Helsingfors Estancia
Av. Córdoba 827, piso 11, depto. “A’’ Buenos Aires
011-54-11-4315-1222
www.helsingfors.com.ar
Luxury accommodations on the Lago Viedma inside Los Glacieres National Park. Horseback and walking expeditions head out regularly, as does a trip to the Viedma Glacier on a Zodiac. $235 per person, with meals and limited transportation.

Hotel Indigo
Ladrilleros 105
Puerto Natales, Chile
011-56-61-413609
www.indigopatagonia.com/uk/
The luxurious Indigo was conceived as a place to begin or end several days of intense hiking in the Torres del Paine National Park. Rooms begin at $260.

Estancias de Santa Cruz
www.cielospatagonicos.com
Has several working ranches across Patagonia where you can hike, ride a horse, or kick up your heels like a gaucho; Estancia Menelik is one of the most authentic. $60-$80.

What to do
Fly fishing
011-54-92944-582473
e-mail: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Guide Alejandro Leutgeb runs an exclusive operation out of Bariloche. Floating down the Limay and Manso rivers in the Nahuel Huapi National Park, fly fishermen chase several species of trout, landlocked salmon, and native perch. Prices are seasonal.

Hielo & Aventura
Av. Libertador 935
El Calafate, Argentina
011-54-02902-492205
www.hieloyaventura.com
This guide service offers journeys to the Perito Moreno glacier and boat rides that bring you alongside glaciers. Day trips start under $100.

Where to eat
La Tablita Coronel Rosales 28
El Calafate
011-54-02902-491065
www.interpatagonia.com/latablita
A wildly popular steakhouse along Ruta 40. Reserve ahead or wait in line. Dinner around $10-$15.

Kaupé
Roca 470
Ushuaia, Argentina
011-54-2901-422704
www.kaupe.com.ar
The city at the end of the world has one of Argentina’s best restaurants. Overlooking the Beagle Channel, chef Ernesto Vivian serves local seafood, including several variations of his specialty, king crab. Dinner around $60.

Read the story as a PDF: page 1, page 2.

Sunday, March 7, 2010 - The Boston Globe - Travel

ROSES - Standing in the kitchen of what may be the best restaurant in the world, I shake hands with Ferran Adrià, the chef behind it all. Every year, it’s said that millions try for the few thousand seats at his restaurant, El Bulli, for the six months it’s open. The odds are not in their favor.

If, like me, they are lucky enough to be invited by a friend, they drop everything and hop on a plane. Now, after all the hype, spectacle, and anticipation this man in front of me and his avant-garde cuisine have cultivated for 20 years, I don’t want to talk to him. I just want to eat.

Dining at El Bulli has taken on a sense of urgency. Adrià will be taking a sabbatical of sorts in 2012 and 2013 and the place will become either a culinary foundation or a different style of restaurant in 2014.

On our drive there, we ask the only non-foodie in our foursome, our quiet friend Edu, how much he knows about El Bulli (which is colloquial Catalan for a bulldog breed).

“I know it’s a good restaurant,’’ he says.

“Do you know it’s been called the best in the world?’’

Edu grins an uncharacteristically large grin and stares at the road ahead.

From Barcelona, it’s a two-hour slog north to Roses, then several beautiful windswept miles through the Cap de Creus nature preserve. Once at the restaurant our table is set slightly apart from the main dining room, giving us the sense that we are both looking in on a play and taking part in it.

The menu immediately sets an informal tone. Apéro “mojitos’’ and “caprihinas’’ are rectangles of sugar cane set in ice and soaked in white rum and cachaça, a sugarcane liquor. These are followed by a black currant and eucalyptus “tea,’’ presented like part of a Japanese tea ceremony, where a single green drop of concentrated eucalyptus floats atop molten red liquid in a tiny silver bowl. We cradle it in our hands, liquid bits of heaven and hell in one sip.

One of the first dishes to arrive is a Gorgonzola globe with fresh-grated nutmeg, presented in the center of the table like an ostrich egg we break into and share. We’re several courses in before someone realizes we’ve yet to see a fork. By meal’s end, we’ve used mostly our hands, lifting bites to our mouths and dabbing up sauce with our fingers.

For some courses, the tableware is as artistic as the food, for others, the receptacles are living things; pinch the end off a hummingbird-friendly flower and suck out the “nectar’’ inside in one dish or lap drops of honey from pine needles in another. In both cases, the vessel’s flavor is transferred to what we eat.

The meal creates personality shifts at our table of four. We talk and touch more than normal, as if the route to our emotions has been shortened.

There are themes that run through the meal: “Tender pistachios’’ are a meditation on about 10 ways to prepare them. Later, soybeans are presented at least 15 ways in one dish - every conceivable form presented like an abstract abacus. Other moments push a diner’s limits, like rabbit brains in consommé and a chicken cartilage canapé. Some tease perceptions with trompe l’oeils like “artichoke’’ leaves that turn out to be white rose petals or a “shark fin’’ made of clear, spaghetti-like pumpkin strands.

We share the food as a group or as couples; we guard it like cavemen and savor it like it’s the last thing we’ll ever eat. Edu breaks out of his shell. The man I’ve never associated with the word “goofy’’ is posing for pictures, making funny faces, clenching the rose between his teeth, and hanging a spoon from his nose. Out of the blue, while eating tiny sea anemones, he growls, “Mar!’’ (“Sea!’’)

We’re served a whole grilled passion fruit and once the top’s cut off, we find it’s been filled with chicken broth. The dish mixes sweet and savory and makes us pucker and giggle. Later, tiny cubes of marrow lie atop an oyster in its shell, which we spoon onto an oyster leaf and pop into our mouths.

Along with moments when we say, “Is that food? Should it be?’’ it seems Adrià is also showing us how we should treat food daily. There is a world of technology and science in his work that has fascinated me for years, yet seated at our table, it all falls away and I’m interested only in the glow of its effects. This food is privilege and deep pleasure, appreciated as art, slurped with a drip running down the chin, served with a dose of surprise, considered delicate or devoured sensually.

Two weeks later I interview Adrià and spend the first hour shooting photos in the kitchen and watching him work. There are 45 cooks, each practically glued to the 2 square feet they’re allotted, but Adrià never stands still. He is a conductor, constantly moving in and out of the frame. Before dinner, he checks kitchen stations, looks over product orders, and tastes everything he walks past, silently considering what he has in his mouth for several seconds before pronouncing a verdict.

Along with the customary things you see in a kitchen - bubbling pots, whisks and knives, the bent-head position of a cook at work - there are people walking around with blunt-ended syringes that they use to extract liquids from silver bowls. In a back alcove, there’s a machine that looks like a miniature cement mixer with a copper bowl and behind it, a cook runs his fingers across the top of a silver balloon, spinning it atop a liquid nitrogen bath that spills fog onto the table and across the floor, making the Gorgonzola “egg.’’

This is Adrià’s domain, the nexus of food, science, and art. He is known for foams, spherifications, and essences, reduced and reconstituted versions of products that are futuristic versions of a perfect past. Yet while other chefs struggle to understand his concepts, he simply uses them as a tool.

“It would take three days to explain spherification, but that’s not important,’’ Adrià says. “I’m after the emotions science brings out. We want happiness, not comprehension.’’

There is a world of culinary references and another of science and technique that would wreck the meal and its surprises - and leave you with lots of cold food - if someone took the time to explain it all.

I push Adrià a bit and his reply is enigmatic: “Bulli always talks about the past.’’

He’s not after old techniques, but the nostalgia that new ones can create. If he can come up with something in a near-perfect state, Adrià bets it will knock something loose in the heart or the mind. It’s an imperfect process.

“There’s no direct line,’’ he says. “If you make a salad with artichoke and lobster, that’ll do one thing for one person and something else for someone else. A flower brings out emotions in some people and not in others.’’

So he conducts. He breaks perceptions that border on what he calls “kitschy’’ to put customers at ease. He makes you eat with your hands. He plays with themes and juggles with the spots where sweet and savory show up during the meal.

“It’s complicated. It’s like editing a film,’’ he says. “If you don’t have a good rhythm, you fall asleep.’’

Yet when he gets the elements to line up, he creates a direct connection between your food and your emotions.

I think back to our dinner, to a squab consommé so clear and pure that it’s served in a wine glass and savored like a grand cru. There was also a perfect cockle floating on a gel seemingly made of a weekend by the sea and there you are, feet in the sand, face in the sun. Beaming.

“I want to do more than eat,’’ he says. “There is emotion in food and I want to feed the soul.’’

It flew.’’

Is it food? Should it be? This is why we go. Now, after 20 years as a restaurant that turned food on its end, perhaps only two years remain. It flew.

...
Follow me on Twitter: @joe_diner and on Facebook.

Read the story as a PDF here and here.

Spring 2010 - Centurion Magazine

Using three eaux de vie ranging in age from six to thirty years, a group of people in an antiseptic tasting room try their hand at creating emotion in a bottle.

Rémy Martin cellar master Pierrette Trichet watches over the group, pokes her nose in a student’s glass and frowns. “Smells a little old and a little expensive,” she says. Translation? Back to the drawing board.

The exercise gives a microscopic sense of what a cellar master (known here as a maître de chai) does every day as they work to blend the contents of thousands of barrels to create consistent cognacs year in and year out. I draw a mental comparison between the production process of Scotch whisky and cognac but quickly learn that the former has a Bauhaus-like pragmatism next to the latter’s Monet-style subtleties. Besides, this is France, land of grapes and mind-boggling bureaucracy; this will not be a simple process.

The crib notes for making cognac involve hundreds of producers from multiple, distinct regions who use the ugni blanc grape (entre autres) to make wine, which is passed to a network of distilleries, where they create the raw eau de vie. At 140 proof, you’re lucky if you get a whiff of something reminiscent of an Atomic Fire Ball before it blows out your nose.

Next, the mellowing process begins by using oak barrels of three different ages. These barreled eaux de vie are often blended and re-barreled in a lifespan that can last more than a century before a final blend and bottling.

What’s Trichet’s trick? Taking it one glass at a time. Demonstrating with the six-year in front of her, she detects notes of fresh fruit, almond and hazelnut while the
thirty-year has prune and walnut smells.

“You’ve got to memorize what’s in them,” she says simply.

She re-smells both, pulling out characteristics she’ll use as mental waypoints to remember this particular batch and give her an idea of what to do with it in the future. Still, the prospect of a warehouse full of barrels is a bit overwhelming.

“We taste them all. Every batch. Every year,” says Benoît Fil, maitre de chai for Martell. “The key to our work is tasting everything, every year. From those notes, I can tell what we’ll need to do with each one.” To this end, Fil works with a small tasting committee who taste a palatable number of eaux de vie every day.

What they learn is plugged into what he calls a ‘matrix’, the work of generations of blenders and tasters that charts the progress of each batch, which gives an idea of what they might be like in the future and how to blend them to create consistent products.

Science, however, only goes so far.

“When you blend, one plus one can make two, but it can also make three, five, ten or twenty,” says Laurent Lorenzo, Hennessy’s director of research referring to the quality of the final product. “No chemical analysis can tell you ‘This is good’ or ‘This is exceptional.’ Only tasting can do that.” For someone with a job this technical, there’s a refreshing amount of humanity in Lorenzo’s approach, and after tasting five eaux de vie, he smiles. “These are all beautiful creatures,” he says, always referring to them in the French feminine and consistently shunning a technical description for something on a more emotional level. “You can be loud and persistent,” he says with a dismissive shrug, while defining what he’s looking to put in a bottle. “But being delicate and persistent – that’s another story.”

Click here to see the article as a PDF.

The Boston Globe - Food & Travel - Wednesday March 3, 2010

LAGUARDIA, Spain - The quest begins on a tip from a Catalan friend. “While you’re in Rioja, you need to eat patatas a la riojana,’’ he says, referring to the region’s signature dish, a stew-like mix of local potatoes and the region’s native son, chorizo. He sends me looking for a man in a castle in the hilltop town of Laguardia.

“That guy’s a phantom,’’ one local tells me. “He’s got a room in his hotel called ‘Love and Madness.’ ’’

Sure enough, at Castillo El Collado, Javier Acilonna appears from nowhere, his shoulders hunched inward under an oversized suit. In a movie, his entrance would have been accompanied by a flash of lightning and a thunderclap. “Come,’’ he says, ushering me toward the kitchen.

Acilonna is no phantom. He’s a kind and hard-working hotelier in this Basque corner of the Rioja region, in northeastern Spain. His riojanas, also simply called patatas con chorizo, are a spiritual cousin to paella, pulling flavors from the ingredients and transferring them to the starch. “The potatoes must come from a dry climate,’’ he says, equating the spuds to the region’s trademark wine; a tough growth cycle yields a better grape. “It gives more flavor and they cook better.’’

He demonstrates a peculiar method for cutting the potatoes; he uses his paring knife to cut partway through before giving the handle a twist and breaking off a thumb-size irregular chunk. In the pot, his potatoes, which come from a handful of growers in the nearby Alava region, absorb the flavors of chorizo, dried piquillo pepper, fresh bay leaves he has grabbed from a tree out front, and the meat and bone of a single pork rib.

He combines all of these in a stockpot, brings it to a boil, and lets it bubble away until the potatoes are tender. In a separate pan over high heat, he pours in enough olive oil to generously coat the bottom of the pan and adds finely diced onion. He lets that sizzle away for half a minute, tossing it constantly, before removing the pan from the heat and stirring in a tablespoon of paprika. He tips the paprika mixture into the pot of potatoes.

“We use paprika in everything,’’ Acilonna says, “but my secret is in another ingredient: cariño (care).’’

It sounds a bit like what the French would call la soupe. But when he spoons up a taste from a bouillabaisse-like tureen, it’s easy to understand why the dish is so famous in the region.

In nearby Logroño, I go to try the potatoes on the Calle del Laurel, where there are a bewildering number of tapas bars, including places so specialized that they only make one or two items. It’s pure foodie heaven, but there are no riojanas. “There’s no mythical site for them,’’ says winemaker Juan Carlos López de Lacalle. “You have to make them at home.’’

For his potatoes, cariño surfaces again as López de Lacalle makes a batch with his wife, Pilar. “Breaking the potato with the knife makes a rough surface so more starch is exposed,’’ Lopez de Lacalle says. “If you just cut straight through, it’s too smooth.’’ It also adds texture and, some say, allows the potatoes to absorb more flavor. “You can still mess up the dish even if you use good potatoes,’’ Pilar says, “but if you use bad potatoes, you’re in trouble.’’

It’s beautiful to watch them cook together, pausing for the occasional toast or a kiss, even though their cooking styles vary slightly. After he adds the water to the stockpot, she adds a bit more when he’s not looking.

López de Lacalle’s recipe is markedly different from Acilonna’s, most notably in that he gently sautes the potatoes with a bit of garlic to begin, then continues stirring often until they’re done, slowly breaking the rough corners from the potatoes and giving the liquid the consistency of split pea soup.

The winemaker has the patience to devote to this dish. He drinks his own Rioja wine, holding the glass stem and inhaling with his eyes half closed. At the table, when he takes the lid off of his riojanas, his glasses are fogged by the steam.

We tuck in and López de Lacalle starts singing, clearly pleased with his own cooking. The wine goes with the dish as if it were made to. And it was.

Castillo el Collado, Paseo el Collado, 1, Laguardia, Spain, 011-34-945-62-12-00, www.hotelcollado.com Artadi Wines, Ctra. Logroño s/n. 01300 Laguardia, 011-34-945-600-119, www.artadi.com

Patatas a la Riojana
4 russet or other baking potatoes
1 thick pork loin chop on the bone
1 dried red pepper, seeds removed and crumbled into several pieces or 1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper
2 bay leaves
1/3 pound chorizo, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
Salt, to taste
3 teaspoons paprika
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 onion, coarsely chopped
1. Peel potatoes. Cut them into bite-size pieces by inserting blade of a paring knife about 1/2 inch into the potato and twisting the handle to break off each piece. (Some pieces will be larger than others.)

2. Remove the meat from the chop and cut it into 1/2-inch pieces. Set the meat and bone aside.

3. In a stockpot, combine the potatoes, pork and bone, red or crushed pepper, bay leaves, chorizo, a generous pinch of salt, and 1 teaspoon of the paprika. Add water to cover.

4. Bring to a boil and lower the heat. Simmer, uncovered, for 25 minutes or until the potatoes are tender.

5. Meanwhile, in a skillet, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add the onions and cook, stirring often, for 8 minutes or until softened. Stir in the remaining 2 teaspoons paprika and cook, stirring, for half a minute.

6. Scrape the paprika mixture into the pot of potatoes. Cook, stirring often, for 5 minutes or until the broth is flavorful. Remove the pork bone and bay leaves. Taste for seasoning and add more salt or crushed red pepper, if you like.

Serves 4

Sunday, February 21, 2010 - The Boston Globe - Travel - RAVE

DUFFTOWN, Scotland - Traditional Scottish cuisine might not have the best reputation, but Sandy Smart’s take on it should.

Smart purchased his 28-seat restaurant, A Taste of Speyside, here in 1997. It is a kitschy bit of the real thing: a red tartan carpet, cases filled with trophies on the wall next to tacked-up coloring-book drawings by younger patrons. Of course, there’s a well-stocked bar with excellent whiskies.

For Smart, the key is fresh ingredients, done right. If you want to try haggis, this would be a good place to understand why the Scottish still love it. His salmon fillets come out perfectly cooked and adorned only with a sprig of thyme. “My steak,’’ he notes, “is Aberdeen Angus. You don’t mess with that.’’

First-time visitors are encouraged to try the Speyside platter, a selection of local cuisine such as smoked salmon, whiskied chicken liver pâté, local farmhouse cheese, smoked venison, sweet cured herring, and oatcakes.

While the food is important, Smart, the son of a cooper, knows the importance of hospitality, of showing visitors a good time. “I’m not here just for the food,’’ he says. “It’s about how you’re greeted, how you’re spoken to. It’s about picking up on if your customers are a young courting couple who want to be left in peace, or if you want to come and have a laugh and a joke with us. If so, we’ll have a whale of a time.’’

A Taste of Speyside
10 Balvenie St.
Dufftown, Scotland
+44-1340-820860
Web site

Click here to see the story as a PDF.

The Boston Globe - January 10, 2010

All the earth’s elements are present for making whiskies distinct and memorable

DUFFTOWN - Good Scotch whisky is a road trip in a bottle.

Pour a glass, close your eyes, breathe in, and be reminded of the place where waves turn the seaside into a rough and craggy path for the strolling thinker.

Another glass may contain a wall of smoke that overwhelms the senses, or a delicate wisp that transports you to a bog where heather becomes peat.

A whisky storehouse at the Glenfarclas distillery in the Speyside region - near The Balveine distillery.

The kiln fire at The Balveine distillery in Dufftown, Scotland.

Stills at the Glenfiddich distillery - the sister distillery to Balvenie. The height and shape of each still has an effect on the flavor of the spirit they produce and the whisky at the end of the process.

Seen from the ferry from the Scottish mainland, heather covers the hills behind the homes coming into Islay’s Port Ellen.

Malted barley dries in the kiln at the Bowmore distillery in Bowmore on the island of Islay.

Distillery manager Malcolm Rennie inspects the barley in the ‘germination floor’ at Islay’s Kilchoman distillery.

Heather grows atop peat in a bog on Scotland’s island of Islay. Particularly on Islay, peat is often used to fire kilns to dry barley, giving the whisky a smoky aroma.

A road stretches off toward the horizon on the Scottish island of Islay.

Pipe Sergeant James McEachern plays bagpipe with the Islay Pipe Band at a festival in town of Craighouse on Scotland’s island of Jura

A cow on the island of Jura with the island of Islay and the ferry that connects the two between them.

A whisky tour through Scotland is a firsthand taste of the rocks and wind, fire and sea, mud and flowers that are a distillation of this thornily self-reliant part of the United Kingdom.

There is no single best place to tour. Scotch whiskies are divided into several main groups, each with typical flavor profiles. There’s the heather, salt, and fruit of the Highlands; easygoing Lowlands; smoky and complex Speysides; and the peaty and medicinal acquired tastes of Islay.

The best idea might be to pick an area or a few favorite distilleries and draw up an itinerary with a map. It’s hard to go wrong as long as you have a car, a tweed cap, and someone to remind you to drive on the left side of the road.There are points that are fundamental in the process of whisky-making, like the starch to sugar conversion of malting, the fermentation, distillation, and barrel aging. Other parts, such as the water’s source, the time the malt spends drying over burning peat, the shape of the stills, or proximity to the sea make each distillery’s offerings unique.

At The Balvenie along the River Spey in Dufftown, maltman Brian Nicoll is an old salt in the world of Scotch. Nicoll works at one of the few distilleries that still malts its own barley, a step most producers farm out to centralized facilities.

In a fast-clipped brogue that forces outsiders to lean in and pay attention, Nicoll explains the process, from barley arriving in trucks from southern Scotland to soaking it in tanks before setting it out to dry in a six-inch-thick layer called the germination floor.

We walk through concrete aisles and Nicoll motions for me to put my hand into the grain. It’s warm. “It’s like an electric blanket,’’ he says, sticking his hand in. “It’s the friction.’’

The soaking and slow drying force the grain to germinate, boosting its sugar content, which plays a key part in fermentation. Once the barley has begun to sprout, this “green malt’’ is dried in a giant kiln to halt the growing. If the kiln uses an appreciable amount of peat, it gives the grain a smoky nose.

Even with the help of machines, moving and turning the floor is a backbreaking process. “This place is so physical - you’re covered in sweat,’’ says Nicoll. “We call it the Balvenie gym. You work hard and feel good at the end of the day.’’

Making single-malt Scotch whisky (as opposed to a blend using spirits from multiple distilleries) is a straightforward process with thousands of variations. After malting, the grain is ground into grist and mixed with hot water in a vat called a mash tun to produce a nonalcoholic liquid called wort. This is transferred to a larger vessel called a washback where yeast is added and fermentation happens in two days of violent foaming - literally brewing to create what’s now called wash. These rooms can smell like applesauce, bubble gum, and the world’s best porridge, but stick your nose too deep into a frothing washback and you might be knocked out by the carbon dioxide that’s being produced.

From here, the liquid is distilled twice in giant, swan-necked copper stills and the best of it, known as the heart, body, or middle cut, is matured in oak barrels for at least three years.

Love at first sip is unlikely. It may take a few glasses or a few years, but slowly, like a thin road winding through fog, whisky reveals itself.

The roads between the Speyside region and Kennacraig are a driving enthusiast’s dream, flecked with micro-towns, straightaways, S-curves, views of the Loch Ness, and signs that read “Stone Skipping Championships This Saturday!’’ and “Apples £1/BOX.’’

The cafe on the ferry from Kennacraig to the island of Islay (pronounced EYE-la) is a sign of good things to come, with representatives of almost every distillery on the island behind the bar - a short and sweet selection that would blow most American bar choices away.

On the ferry, there’s an uptick in outdoor gear, boots, and wizened faces. Going up a set of stairs on the deck, the wind nearly stops me. As I look out through the rain and fog, there are sheep on a former spit of land, marooned until the tide goes out. Once Islay comes into view, the most distinctive characteristics of the untamed shoreline are the large, white distilleries, with their names in large black letters.

Luckily the car didn’t bottom out on the road up to Kilchoman distillery. The dirt track winds up through barley fields (used for some maltings) on the way to one of the only buildings for miles.

“On Islay, you work in a distillery, you work on a farm, or you’re a fisherman,’’ says Malcolm Rennie, Kilchoman manager and Islay native. “People still leave their keys in the car. Everybody waves. Once you’ve been here for a while, it’s hard to leave.’’

The son and brother of coopers, Rennie has been making whisky for 25 years, including a long stint as a mashman and distiller at Ardbeg distillery before helping found Kilchoman in 2005.

Here on a farm with horse stables, one of Scotland’s newest distilleries is, in some ways, the most traditional. “This is how it used to be. The farm produces the barley and farmers made whisky because they had all the raw materials,’’ Rennie says. “That was the ethos. It was what a distillery was.’’

That’s also the way it worked for centuries until excise taxes in the 19th and early 20th centuries squelched most home distilling. “After that, they tucked the stills into a barn,’’ Rennie says, grinning as if he still knows some bootleg operations. His distillery, one of Scotland’s smallest, isn’t too far from those early models.

Old-school or no, what Rennie and every other whisky distiller wants is to consistently create what he calls “a good, clean spirit.’’

“You design your distillery for what you want, but you still don’t know exactly what you’re going to get,’’ he says. “But people’s first taste is what they associate with the distillery. If the spirit quality drops off, I’ve got to sort it out.’’

In short, Ardbeg Ten Years Old should always taste like Ardbeg Ten Years Old.

So what if you figure out a way to change the process or even make it better? Rennie shakes his head. The question is moot. “My job is to produce a consistent product.’’

Producers get around this by offering different ages, blends, and barrelings called “expressions.’’ A Highland Glenmorangie, for instance, ages in barrels made of French or American oak or uses sherry or Sauternes casks while other whiskies are aged in a single cask.

More than 100 of these whiskies and expressions are on display behind Duffie’s Bar, a tiny whisky shrine tucked into Bowmore’s Lochside Hotel where Philip Gray and Angus Darroch tend bar.

They may make a pound or two pouring drams and pints, but money isn’t the primary motivator. Darroch is a stillman and Gray a maltman at the town’s eponymous distillery and though they may play up the ethos Rennie refers to - they’re bartenders, after all - they believe in it.

“I’ve been making whisky in the day and selling it on the weekend for 20 years,’’ says Darroch. “It’s not just the whisky.’’

The whole time we’re in Scotland, there’s no sun. On the fourth day, when we see a ray of light on a faraway hillside, it looks out of place.

Instead, an appreciation for the place comes with bursts of color from thistle, the bright head of a pheasant, defiantly red tractors, or a firm handshake. What comes with more time is an appreciation of the subtleties - shades of green, gold, blue, and even gray that keep you warm when paired with a knowing grin, good conversation, some friends, a fire, and a wee dram.

Breathe. Even if it rains, the whisky will tell you where you are.

If You Go

A visit to a distillery will take up the better part of a morning or afternoon. Many distilleries are prepared for walk-ins, but as a rule, it’s better to call ahead. Though not exhaustive, the Scotch Whisky Association’s “Distilleries To Visit” document is particularly helpful for trip planning:

Make sure to factor in time to enjoy your drives. As a Scottish friend reminded me before the trip, “The roads in the Highlands are not necessarily wide and straight!” and that pretty well applies for all of Scotland.

Where to stay
Castle Hotel
Huntly, Aberdeenshire
011-44-1466-796696
www.castlehotel.uk.com
A beautiful family-run castle. Doubles from about $160.
The Lochside Hotel
Shore Street,Bowmore
011-44-1496-810244
www.lochsidehotel.co.uk
A modest spot that overlooks Loch Indaal, houses Duffie’s Bar and boasts wonderful fare in its dining room. Doubles with breakfast about $135.

What to do
The Balvenie Distillery
Balvenie Maltings, Dufftown
011-44-1340-822-210
www.thebalvenie.com

Kilchoman Distillery
Rockside Farm
Bruichladdich, Isle of Islay
011-44-1496-850-011
www.kilchomandistillery.com

Tasting notes
Experts devote as much care and attention to whisky tasting as wine connoisseurs. Each distillery tends to have an original ‘signature’ blend and offshoots known as ‘signatures’ along with different agings. Whiskies tend to hit their stride in their teens and just get more complex from there. A few personal favorites.
Bowmore 12 Years Old - A golden wheat color with walnut, smoke, gingerbread and green almond smells. Beautiful, long-lasting, sweet aftertaste. An excellent Islay whisky and one of Scotland’s finest.

Ardbeg - This Islay distillery battles it out with the more medicinal Laphroaig for the title of “peatiest of the peaty.” I got a bottle of their Ten Years Old for Christmas last year and - with big peaty and gingerbread notes, it disappeared in a heartbeat. Fans of peat should seek out their hard-to-find “Supernova” which feels like it was wrenched from the earth’s core.

Macallan Twelve Years Old - My first-ever whisky. There’s a dark amber color in this Highland malt with vanilla, apple and waxy church-like smells. Take a sip for a subtle attack on the palate and minutes later you’ll have an aftertaste that reminds you of the Atomic FireBall you got at the village store as a kid.

Read the story as a PDF - Page 1, Page 2

Winter 2010 - Centurion Magazine

At a recent interview with Catalan superchef Ferran Adrià, the conversation flowed perfectly until we broached the business of El Bulli, at which point, he shut up like a clam. Why? It’s not his domain. For the business end, I spoke to manager, Juli Soler. He’s a fickle fish - a mix of businessman and artist. His responses can be cheeky, or need time before you realize they’re not glib.  Though the restaurant consistently tops ‘best restaurant in the world’ lists, it’s no cash cow. Instead, money comes in through offshoots like catering, consulting, lecturing and publishing.

How do you balance the artistic aspiration of Ferran Adrià with the need to pay yourselves? How do you work with Adrià?
With Ferran, we’ve always been working on developing our own style of cooking, but we’ve also been responsible for our own financing since the beginning.

Adria was quoted as saying: “Creativity comes first; then comes the customer.” What is the idea behind that? How did you react when you first heard that? In your case, does it work? Do you agree?
Yes. Of course! But it’s said with respect to our clients and friends. We have to work on the creative part to be able to offer our guests the best show!

Can you defy traditional business logic, by placing more emphasis on creativity and innovation than pricing and operational factors?
Our costs and sales prices would not change if we were a more conventional restaurant. The final cost is a result of the restaurant’s geographic location, raw materials and having a large team to ... provide a unique service to our clients.

How has the global financial crisis impacted on the restaurant business?
Not at all. The best restaurants in the world, whether popular or traditional cuisine, or culinary artists, haven’t suffered as a result of the crisis. All the world’s lovers of good cooking know how to enjoy and are still eating everything.

Restaurants at this level can be money pits. How does your approach differ from that of restaurants of other great chefs?
No great restaurant is a big business. The great restaurants around the world run themselves just so they can exist and live well, but none of them are ever going to be big businesses.

How satisfying is it to be involved in ‘Food For Thought. Thought For Food’ with Vincente Todoli, director of Tate Modern and the artist Richard Hamilton?
Those are very different kinds of love. Working with Richard Hamilton was absolutely his idea and project. As he’s been our client for more than thirty years, he wanted to compile and design this great work in the book that was published with the Tate Modern.

There are chefs who would sell their souls to do something like you have done at El Bulli. What would you say to a young chef with big aspirations?
It’s an authentic model that has inspired many professionals, both young and almost retired. Our advice is to take care of your staff and clients and you’ll find the satisfaction that creates happy diners. Success is guaranteed.

[Editor’s Note: The physical, emotional and possibly even financial demands of running a world-class kitchen were further hinted at shortly after the interview with the stunning announcement that El Bulli would close for two years in 2012 and 2013.]

Click here to read my Boston Globe Travel story on my recent meal at El Bulli and here to see the full photo shoot.

Winter 2010 - Platinum Magazine

Ahh, the Savoy region! The Alps! Skiing and hiking! Pastures of green! All that and we haven’t even started talking about the region’s famous dishes. Raclette! Fondue! Tartiflette!

“Pff!” says chef Raphaël Bonne with a classic French sound of dismissal. “Fondue is Swiss, raclette never existed as a cheese and tartiflette was developed for tourists!”

Bonne runs La Bergerie de Raphaël in the tiny French hamlet of Vallandry, 1,600m above sea level – right at the point where the pines start shrinking on their way up to the tree line in the Vallée de la Tarentaise. “Are you going to see that guy with the deck on the ski slopes?” asked an envious-sounding friend in Paris, a question I found curious as the Bergerie isn’t the only establishment in town with a deck. Once I met Bonne and tasted his cuisine, however, it was very clear that this guy was that guy and his deck was the deck.

Along with the Swiss fondue heist, Bonne explains that the potato-, reblochon- and bacon-based tartiflette is a bastardised version of an old Savoy dish called pela. His devotion to Savoyard cuisine is legend in the area. Bonne came to professionally freestyle ski and ski jump 30 years ago, quickly moved into the kitchen and now has an encyclopedic knowledge of the region’s cuisine and its history.

“I try to recreate the old recipes that Savoyard grandmothers used to make,” he says, citing pela, a buckwheat flour pasta called crozet and the grated potato, bacon, dried fruit and crème fraiche marvel, farçon.

Bonne’s cuisine is heavily based on tradition – he spends much of his time reading old recipes – but he also makes well thought- out steps toward modernity. In a ‘soup’ with tiny local escargots, spinach and a hint of cream, each ingredient has its moment in your mouth.

But it’s tasting his sauces where I really begin to understand. Bonne is the self-trained son of a saucier and there are several sauces bubbling away in pots at any given time in his kitchen.

“Instead of putting butter and flour in a wine sauce to thicken it, I’ll do a straight wine reduction and flambé it,” he says. “When it’s reduced to 30 per cent of what it was, I’ll add a sugar syrup to thicken it and give it flavour, but only enough syrup to give the sauce a sheen.” Syrup? “Yes,” Bonne says simply, explaining that sweetness in savoury dishes is a Savoy classic, but to the outsider, the syrup just sounds like a sweet and sticky bad idea.

Silly me. In the kitchen, he and Charlène Guillet, his second de cuisine, are continually tasting his sauces for flavour and seasoning (a mark of a good chef) and I try a spoon coated with a wine and blackberry sauce. What stands out is the savoury – the deep taste of the wine and herbs – while the fruit and sweetness simply underline those essences. Everything is better as a result.

These winks at local customs and respect for regional flavours are backed up with a commitment to local products. Bonne is part of a culinary group called the Académie du Goût et Traditions Culinaires de Savoie and as such, gets a large amount of his food from nearby producers.

Bonne also presents a jug of génépi – Savoy’s famous liquor made from the herb that gives the drink its name – that knocks the socks off of its competition. Normally talkative about the origins of his products, Bonne goes quiet about this one. I prod and he opens up, but just a bit. “Very, very local,” he says, and I let it go there, hoping he’ll break it out again the next time I come back.

Click here to see the original PDF version of the story.

Winter 2009 - Centurion Magazine

Walk down the street in New York City and on any given corner, you can get a noseful of a host of different cuisines. No matter what the budget, it is foodie heaven.

This diversity is no different at the top end, where chefs Daniel Boulud and Wylie Dufresne are like negative images of one another: Boulud’s restaurant Daniel is held up as the paragon of fine dining in New York and was recently awarded a third Michelin star; Dufresne’s wd-50, meanwhile, is like a laboratory for experimental cuisine.

Any thought that these two chefs are not on the same level should be dismissed quickly, though. Very simply, they are artists on different paths. Boulud is a big, media-friendly personality with a thumb-thick press kit full of information on his myriad restaurants in New York, Beijing and around the world. It is hard to find fault with Boulud and it easy to have your breath taken away. Dufresne’s cuisine isn’t nearly as accessible. He stays in just one kitchen, where the show begins in his head and ends on your plate. You have to be game for this kind of cuisine, but if you are, it can leave you speechless.

In short, Dufresne delights in showing us what we can do with food, while Boulud reminds us how wonderful it can be.

This disparate duo worked together to create this year’s Centurion Menu, each creating a starter, main course and dessert, which plays off against the other’s style, centring each dish around one of three ingredients: egg, scallops and pistachio. Though the ingredient choice was given to chef Dufresne, Daniel Boulud had no trouble getting into the game. A Frenchman by birth, eggs and scallops send Boulud over the moon. “But pistachios?” he jokes, “Why did he choose them?”

No matter, he cooks them all as if they were his own and displays a worldliness that is matched with a skill all his own. Boulud shows why he is one of New York’s most respected chefs with brave and artful combinations that call on his expert palate, as well as the wisdom to leave a good thing be. “A plate’s got to have an equilibrium,” he says, referring to his broiled scallop ‘rosette’ dish, which relies on the bivalve’s inherent sweetness to play off the tang of a black miso sauce and the textural crunch of crispy rice. The real bravura is the addition of stewed Brussels sprouts, even going as far as garnishing the dish with little ‘sails’ made from the sprouts’ leaves.

Some might go slack-jawed with appreciation at this point, but Boulud deflects with a joke: “You can’t be too much of an egoist – you’ve got to think of the wine.”

This attention to balance and detail continues with Boulud’s main course, which might best be called ‘pistachio three ways’. “The garnish is simple but harmonised and it cuts and elevates the rich side of the dish,” he says, referring to the baby zucchini, feta and cured lemon rind mixture which he tosses with a pistachio pistou and uses as a base for barbajuans – tiny, fried ravioli from Monaco – that he has stuffed with spinach, Swiss chard, leeks, ricotta and parmesan.

Need more pistachio? Boulud encrusts the lamb chop (frenched, bien sûr) with crushed Sicilian pistachios and even places a few drops of pistachio
oil on the plate next to minted lamb jus. The nut is the quiet star of a dish that is both simple and complex. As he says, “The pistachio is in good company”.

And for dessert?

“I came back to Lyon,” Boulud says of his decision to float meringue on a few spoonfuls of crème anglaise, all done his way. “When I think of oeufs à la neige, I think of Paul Bocuse,” he says of the beloved Lyonnais chef and a clear influence. “It’s a childhood memory.”

While his starter and main dish reveal a global depth of experience, this dessert looks inward and back to his childhood home. “We do the Lyonnais pralines,” he says of the city’s trademark sweets, made from toasted almonds coated in red- tinted crystallised sugar. As for the egg itself, he adds lime zest. “I never understood why we didn’t flavour it,” he muses, before concluding on the dish as a whole, “For me, this is what you do with an egg in a dessert.”

For all the sentiment he devotes to his hometown dish, what he really gushes about is Wylie Dufresne. Boulud is clearly one of the young chef’s biggest fans, having dined with Basque chef Juan Mari Arzak at wd-50 the night before the interview. He also featured Dufresne on the first season of his cooking show, ‘After Hours With Daniel Boulud’, where the two cooked a post-service meal in Dufresne’s kitchen for a few lucky guests.

“Chef walked into my kitchen with a bag of live baby glass eels,” says a still-impressed Dufresne, “so we had breakfast.” Though they made traditional eggs Benedict for the show, Dufresne has recently received a lot of attention for his deconstructed version of the breakfast classic and has kept a breakfast influence for his Centurion Menu appetiser.

A warning: if you don’t like the sound of ‘scrambled egg ravioli, charred avocado and hamachi’ as a dish, don’t come to wd-50.

“Don’t ask me for a salad,” says Dufresne, implying that the adventure that he will take you on will not include a bowl full of lettuce.

Sometimes the only place his creations make sense is on the palate. You might wonder if he conceived his egg ravioli dish while levitating above a yoga mat or just plucked the ingredients from the fridge at random. But put a bite in your mouth – preferably with a little bit of each element – and you might start hovering, too.

Dufresne disagrees with the idea that he and Boulud (whom he refers to as ‘Chef’) come from opposite ends of the table.

“You can’t say that. This is how the French ... and my mother ... taught me how to scramble eggs,” he says, citing two major style influences and referring to his starter, which includes a ‘ravioli’ cube made from egg yolk that contains scrambled eggs. “Where I’m going might seem non-traditional, but it’s not without tradition.”

Tradition is also a heavy factor in his scallop dish. The udon noodles served in the bowl may be flavoured with house-made pine oil, yet their preparation derives from an ancient method.

“We found old recipes where a guy stomps on the udon dough to get it right, so here, a guy stomps on ours every day,” he says, placing a few uncooked noodles on the table between us. I nibble one and it has beguiling a tangy, pine flavour. “Tastes like Christmas, right?” he grins.

The most impressive part of the meal might be the dessert conceived by Dufresne’s pastry chef Alex Stupak. The Sicilian pistachio cake is every bit the equal of Dufresne’s appetiser and main dish, blending pistachio with Meyer lemon and Chartreuse in a cake that looks like a pillow for the crown jewels.

What might be most impressive is that Dufresne has the confidence to keep a pastry chef this good when he constantly risks being overshadowed.

Typically, high-end chefs leave the baked goods to someone else and the clash of egos can keep the sweet end of the meal from standing as tall as the savoury. Here, though, the synergy is reminiscent of Ferran and Albert Adrià at Catalonia’s El Bulli restaurant.

“Wylie always loves to play it low key, but he’s the most interesting chef in town,” concludes Boulud. “It will be interesting to see when Michelin gives him three stars.”

Read it here - with recipes - as a PDF.

December 27, 2009 - The Boston Globe - Travel

Spontaneous fermentation and vintage methods make lambic beer reminiscent of another time and good times

BRUSSELS, Belgium—Belgium is boring.

That was the preconception. Then I remembered: great fries, friendly people, beautiful architecture, and beer that makes aficionados drool.

What was I thinking?

I grab a cone of fries and head to a brewery where I begin to understand why beer, particularly lambics - “wild beers’’ that are
products of “spontaneous fermentation’’ and aged for three years in oak barrels - runs in Belgians’ veins.

“There was a choice, and then again, there wasn’t a choice,’’ says Jean Van Roy, who, along with his semiretired father, Jean-Pierre, runs the Cantillon brewery, which was founded in 1900 and calls itself the last traditional brewery in Brussels. “My parents worked so hard to bring it back that, psychologically, I couldn’t do anything else.’’

The machines and methods used at Cantillon are decades and even centuries old and create beers that have blissfully little to do with the mass-produced brews that line the world’s supermarket shelves.

On a production day, light streams through the window, people work in overalls, and steam collects in drips on the ceiling. The tiny facility is a perfect way to understand how beer is made.

To begin, huge quantities of crushed wheat and malted barley are given a hot-water bath in a giant wooden tub, creating a heady-smelling liquid called wort, but this is where the similarities between lambic and mass-market beer end.

Aged hops - more of a preservative than a flavoring agent for lambics - are added and the near-boiling liquid is pumped upstairs to catch a cold. In a shallow copper vat known as a cooling tun that’s nearly as large as the drafty, musty room it’s kept in, the wort is exposed to the elements, particularly the wild yeasts native to Brussels’ Senne Valley (especially Brettanomyces bruxellensis and Brettanomyces lambicus) and perhaps others unique to the brewery itself.

Inoculated with the wild yeasts that will kick-start the fermentation process and turn this water into beer, the liquid is aged in winery-style oak barrels for up to three years, at which point the barely-fizzy brew can legally be called lambic.

“We’re not really trying to do it for effect, but it’s what the beer needs,’’ says Van Roy, who catches me staring at a hundred-year-old engine that’s connected by long belts to almost every machine in the production rooms.

“That’s the heart of the brewery,’’ he says, but instead of sounding worried that the antique’s performance is vital to his weekly paycheck, there’s an assurance that it is.

The family-run brewery embodies a definition of honest work and an honorable trade that are lost in time. Watching it happen, I realize that beer, the good stuff, is a link to tradition and the city’s postwar heyday.

Jean-Pierre Van Roy grew up in that period and has been gently reminding people of that way of life since he took Cantillon’s reigns in 1969.

“Belgium is a memory. Everything is a memory. It’s when I met my wife and studied and there was an ‘esprit national,’ but when I started working here, you wanted to hang yourself,’’ he says. “I remember being in my car and seeing people heading to work looking miserable.’’

It’s a reminiscence, a critique, and a gentle call to keep the heart and mind open. “The idea isn’t to live 100 years, but to take advantage of our time and what we do,’’ he says. “That’s what reigns here. That’s my Brussels. It doesn’t just happen.’’

Following a tip and inspired by sunny weather, I go off the map to find that feeling and head to the Saint-Gilles square, a terrace-lover’s paradise ringed by cafes and bars, each with its own personality and unique clientele.

Farther uphill, I find a diamond in the rough, Chez Moeder Lambic, a bar with perfect beer, local (and often raw) cheeses with suggested pairings, a surly staff, and a feeling of being in the thick of the good stuff. There may be better-known places in the center of town, but it’s out here that things begin to click around a glass of the local brew. The thriving city Van Roy remembers might be harder to find than it was a few decades ago, but it’s still here.

To understand the art of the blend, taking what’s in the individual lambic barrels and turning it into the finished product, I turn to Armand Debelder at 3 Fonteinen brewery in Beersel.

“Forget what you know about brewing,’’ he says. “There’s no science. There’s never anything exact about wild fermentation. As soon as you start talking about lambic, you’re talking about something else.’’

I mention winery and distillery blending rooms where scientific approach meets personal taste and Debelder quickly throws logic out the window.

“You can’t make these beers happen automatically. Experience is all that’s important,’’ he says. “When I taste something, I know.’’

Lambic takes some getting used to and has very little to do with a cold draft from the local bar. The brew tends to be served at room temperature and, after three years in a barrel, is just about flat. Get over those humps, however, and savor green apple and grapefruit aromas and flavors and a thirst-quenching quality that is second to none. Mix younger versions of the beer and you’ve got a fizzy gueuze. Macerate sour cherries in your lambic or gueuze for a very tasty kriek.

We try Debelder’s 2005 Oude Gueuze and, like with a glass of wine, we stare, swirl, and sniff. It’s got a coppery color and, at first, a smell like his brewery’s barrel room: neither good nor bad, but honest and surprising with an immediate sense of place.

“Never be influenced by your first influence,’’ Debelder counsels, Yogi Berra style. “You’ve gotta let it sit for a minute.’’

Sure enough, a beautiful smell of the grain, reminiscent of the wort it once was, is revealed.

“Everything takes time,’’ he says. “Take a first sip and coat your mouth, then wait a minute and take a second sip. Then you can pay attention.’’

A sip reveals grainy notes followed by characteristic green apple and grapefruit flavors. His kriek reminds me of a trifle dessert I made as a kid. Both have deeper qualities that make me think of the friends I’d like to share it with.

For the coup de grace, I follow foodie and purist leanings and head out of town, coupling a train ride to Liedekerke with a 20-minute walk to De Heeren Van Liedekerke, where Joost de Four, his wife, Jessie, and brother Tom (the restaurant’s award-winning chef) and infant daughter, Helena, host a nonstop flow of local guests and pilgrims drawn by an impressive stock of 350 beers and 200 vintage and Trappist brews including specialty blends made just for him.

“People love the variety and we know how to explain what they’re drinking,’’ says de Four who, along with being an official “beer ambassador,’’ has invested the mammoth amount of time required to visit almost every producer he stocks.

While de Four takes care of customers, I sip a Blanche des Honnelles dubbel wit, “from Montignies-Sur-Rocs,’’ he adds. It has a deep, long-lasting flavor that ranges from yeasty to spicy. Around the restaurant, large families gather at long tables for lengthy meals and an old couple stops in for a pint, a coffee, and a little plate of cheese, everyone connecting with each other and pulling traditions further into the present.

Back at Cantillon, Jean Van Roy shovels tons of wet wheat and barley into a cart that will be taken away and used by a local farmer. It’s slow and backbreaking work and someone comes by to ask if he wants a glass of water.

“Are you kidding?’’ he replies. “When I’m done, I want a beer.’’

Read the story as a PDF - Page 1, Page 2

The New Waver - December 2009

Shortly after being awarded the Society of American Travel Writers’ 2009 Lowell Thomas Travel Jour- nalist of the Year Award, Paris and Barcelona- based ‘mondo-blogger’ Joe Ray took the New Waver into the kitchens of two top chefs with green fingers, also capturing their special touch on camera. For starters, his own story…

Having no ‘Plan B’ is a good motivator.

I came to Paris in late 2001 with a plan – better stated as a ‘dream’ – but no idea what I’d do if it didn’t work out. I busted my butt. I also began concentrating on what I knew – food. I had been a cook in a dozen restaurants across the United States including a diner, a family Italian joint, a Pho kitchen in Boston and a high-end Asian joint in San Francisco and wanted to put that experience to use.

The travel part came from a US food editor who told me, “If you can’t get into your car and get it, it’s for the travel section.” I’ve since spread my wings a bit and even write the occasional travel story that has nothing to do with food, but I still tend to stick to what I know. The photos, on the other hand, are a joy. It’s a completely different job and just as time consuming, but it’s another way of getting to know someone and learn about how they work.

How did I end up spending so much time in Barcelona? I’d spent years in Paris without get- ting out – or realizing I needed to. I was jogging on the Canal de l’Ourcq and thinking of nothing when I suddenly thought: I’m going to Barcelona for a couple months. Two months turned into six and gradually I split my time between the two cities. The enthusiasm for food there is fantastic – and now my heart leads the way!

I came across Jean-Marie Amat and his new restaurant in Lormont [north of Bordeaux] thanks to a recommendation from prominent French food critic François Simon. I started blogging with François more than a year ago – he had been working on the French side of his blog but wanted something different for his English-language offerings and asked me to join him – talk about an offer you can’t refuse! We have a lot of fun with it, but take it seriously and are building up a following. I love the different takes we have on food and its functions and writing with one of the greats is a wonderful honour.

With Amat, it was all discovery… He’s a man unto himself – quiet and reflective, the person who makes the least noise in the kitchen. All the pretence is gone from the man and his food. You like his food or you don’t. He likes you or he doesn’t. I was lucky he let me in.

Passard is a tougher nut to crack. He’s a professional and a showman, spending amazing amounts of time on the floor talking to his customers – there’s more to weed through when he talks, but watching him work is a gift. He has an eye for detail and will stop everything to correct the tiniest flaw. He also has his eye on the clock and his mind on the customer. My favourite part of shooting the photos in his kitchen was when he checked the time then looked down at some roasting pork while doing a calculation in his head.

“Accelerate the pig!” he cried. Sure enough, the pig was done in time.

The man who always dines alone is in tonight.

His connection to Jean-Marie Amat is ‘purely’ gustatory and the chef creates five courses on the spot, just for him. The man always sits by the window and consumes each dish with dignity, concentration and a businesslike efficiency. The only contact he has with Amat himself is a handshake and a brief exchange of words as the chef heads into the garden surrounding the Château du Prince Noir in the Bordeaux suburb of Lormont.

That garden – the chef’s connection to the land – is part of a growing eco-sensitivity burgeoning in French kitchens. It’s not a conscious ‘go green’ switch, simply going organic for going organic’s sake. Instead greener, local and more seasonal products are the ones that taste the best. This might be considered an accidental ‘greening’ – the movement is being led by the senses more than by a desire to do good.

Sounds crass? You can be as green as you wish, but nobody, including the man dining alone, is going to eat it if what appears in his plate doesn’t look, smell and taste perfect.

“I’d rather live in rhythm with the seasons. That’s the chef’s metronome,” says Amat. “Besides, I don’t feel like doing the same things over and over.”
His L-shaped garden, flanking one of the corners of the château that houses his restaurant, and spilling down hills in several directions, tends to serve more as an inspiration – for instance, when edible flowers garnish a plate of perfect sashimi – and sometimes provide the basis for a pumpkin soup-like dish.

On this night, he’s making a fennel, courgette and basil soup, “with a little honey to round it off,” Amat adds. He takes a plastic spoon and gives me a taste directly from the pot.

“It’s cold!” I blurt, surprised.

“It needs garlic,” he counters, modestly.

With many ingredients coming from a stone’s throw away, it’s so full of flavour, it hardly matters.

“Le potage – la soupe – has fallen off the map, yet you can have a lot of fun with them,” says Amat. “Chefs are treating them like they’re a punishment for kids, yet people ask for them and they’re right.” Access to good ingredients is a big part of why.

Chefs are beginning to use their influence and unique position on the food and supply chains to create a demand for better and greener produce from their suppliers.

“We’re now finding suppliers who play that game. There’s a real difference,” Amat. “When someone comes in and proposes a new product we talk price, but it’s so natural to go down that road. It’s part of what it means to have the best.”

The best chefs are also finding that if they can’t get something that’s up to snuff, they’ll grow it themselves.

Amat has been working for years to put Bordeaux cuisine – which he says was a gastronomic “terre brûlée”(scorched earth) in the 1970s – back on the map. Now, thanks to his garden and years of sourcing the right products, he’s like an artist with a perfect, minimalist palette.

“It was a huge amount of work to get our garden going. For a while, all we managed to harvest was rocks,” he jokes, “but now it’s a pleasure and we want to be able to put that on the plate.” His lobster ‘comme dans un jardin’ (As if in a garden) is a prime example: perfect vegetables, changing with the seasons and practically untouched form a bed for sliced vacuum-cooked lobster tail. There is very little middle ground in a dish like this one. Throw something together without perfect products and you lose your good name in a hurry! Do it right, however, and you’re a genius.

Perhaps the best example of the ‘product power’ is Amat’s grilled pigeon with spices – deeply flavourful pigeon with an unusual mix of seasoning that includes cumin, cinnamon, powdered sugar and soy sauce. I combine some of the garden-grown fennel tips next to the pigeon on my plate with a forkful of the bird itself and one acidic, bright and wonderfully pungent bite later it has sealed itself in my ‘lifetime memory’ forever.

A TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse – High Speed Train) ride away in the City of Light, Alain Passard beats a similar drum. The Michelin three-star chef is what Brillat-Savarin would call a ‘born roaster’ – a skill Passard inherited from his grandmother. Yet when the mad cow disease scare ripped through France in 2000, Passard reinvented himself, moving away from meat in 2001, and sending shockwaves through the three-star world.

By 2002, frustrated with the offerings from his suppliers, he began growing his own vegetables in the French countryside, eventually building his farming venture to its current size of three farms that cover a total of six hectares and employing farmers in the Sarthe, Normandy and near Mont Saint -Michel. One is certified organic and the others are treated that way anyway.

As with Amat, the word ‘organic’ doesn’t pop out of Passard’s mouth every other sentence. Instead, it’s all about seasonality, local products and the best sourcing.

It isn’t easy. I tell Passard how American food icon Alice Waters recently mentioned her disappointment with the raw products available to French consumers, and he responds like an understanding diplomat.

“She must have had some rough experiences,” says Passard, “You have to ask yourself ‘Do you want something good? Do you want something healthy?’” So how do you get all that stuff stacked up in his kitchen?

“It’s desire. It’s a choice. They don’t just fall into your lap. You have to work to find them.” Fairly damning words coming from a chef who should be able to snap his fingers and get the best stuff, yet a clear explanation for why he chose to go ‘off the grid’: if he can’t get the good stuff from his purveyors, he’ll grow it himself. “Now, I want a passport” he says – describing the guarantee of provenance and quality he seeks, “...for everything.”

“I want grand cru vegetables. I want to talk about the carrot the way a sommelier talks about Chardonnay,” he explains. At L’Arpège it shows. Walk into Passard’s kitchen and his produce has an extra depth of colour and flavour that would make his colleagues drool with envy. You need only one look and one bite to realise he’s playing in a league of his own.

In the kitchen they cook big beets in a salt crust and, nearby, there’s a tiny baking pan full of courgette blossom and fennel with bulbs so young and thin they resemble lemongrass. Passard has succeeded to the point where other chefs now buy their vegetables from him. And now he’s worked meat back into his menu – all of which he sources with the same fanaticism he devotes to his vegetables. Chez Passard, it’s not chicken. It’s not even poulet de Bresse. It’s antique volaille du Haut Maine. “From Pascal Cosnet,” he adds, subtly implying that no other bird is up to the task.

Though the product’s sensory values prevail above all else, greener methods, seasonality and proximity are also key ingredients of that concern for quality.
“You’ve got to be disciplined. Tomatoes are for June, July and August. After that, they’re done,” he explains. “The guy who does organic is still going to grow them [off season], but that’s the problem. He’s still going to do it. I tell my gardeners the same thing I tell my cooks: you’ve got to taste. Otherwise, it’s pointless.”

Who knows? The man who dines alone may soon be making a trip to Paris.

amat_passard_new_waver.pdf

Sunday, December 13, 2009 - The Boston Globe - Travel - RAVE

PARIS - A needed breath of fresh air has hit the northeastern arrondissements of Paris, slowly luring Parisians and tourists alike away from the city center. Hotels like Mama Shelter, restaurants like Le Baratin or L’Escargot, and cafés like Titon and Le Léopard provide a mix of authentic, hip, friendly, and even inexpensive, while introducing the visitor to a part of the city they might not otherwise visit.

Lost in the outer reaches of the 20th arrondissment is one of the best of these new additions: Les Pères Populaires (The Fathers Popular, pictured here), which should win awards in the “fun, inexpensive, and inventive restaurant’’ category and the coveted “hip café I could spend all day working in’’ category.

Lunchtime prix-fixe menus run 13 euros (about $19) and recently included a three-for-three run of orange lentil soup with a dollop of parsley-laden ricotta followed by salmon filets covered in blue poppy seeds served with mesclun, and an ultra-dense chocolate almond brownie with candied orange peel.

This is, as Martha Stewart might say, a good thing.

Les Pères Populaires
46 rue de Buzenval
Paris
+33 1 43 48 49 22
myspace.com/perespopulaires

Read the story as a PDF

November 16, 2009 - Agence France Presse

LOGRONO, Spain — With the Copenhagen climate change summit looming, the world of wine convened on Spain’s Rioja region for a conference in which global warming emerged as the industry’s top concern.

“All over the world, alcohol levels are going up,” said British wine critic Jancis Robinson at the WineFuture conference, citing just one problem producers are facing as a result of rising temperatures.

“Champagne alcohol levels are becoming embarrassingly high,” she added, meaning that the heat which is raising the alcohol content changes both the texture and personality of a wine.

Robinson said there were some “benevolent effects” of climate change—the slight increases in temperature currently benefiting certain wine-producing regions like California or Germany, as well as more ominous global implications.

“Even in England, the grapes are ripening more,” she said. “Someone even planted a vineyard in Norway. Can you believe that?”

Less benevolent effects, added Robinson, are being seen in warmer wine producing regions around the world such as Australia where water shortages are contributing to the demise of many wineries.

“Farmers in Spain don’t have nearly enough water,” she continued, “Spanish wine has always been pretty dry and concentrated, but the last few vintages have reached a crisis point.”

In the short to medium term, however, what might drive producers to go green has nothing to do with conscience or desire to save the world. For many, it’s about money and marketing.

“I want to find new markets, particularly for export. I want to be the first winemaker who eliminates direct CO2 emissions. Nobody does that,” said Manuel Garcia of Rioja’s Bodegas Regalia de Ollauri. “As a commercial argument, it’s very important.”

Potentially, there’s also money to be saved by going green. At Garcia’s new vineyard, he installed a geothermal system that takes advantage of the constant temperature underground to cool his cellars in the summertime and heat them in the winter, a game changer for wineries whose power bills are often referred to as “astronomical.”

“My summertime cooling no cuesta nada (doesn’t cost anything),” he said, making a “0” in the air with his thumb and index finger. “We paid 250,000 euros to install the system, but we’ll recuperate our investment in four or five years.”

“You might not get vineyard owners to want to save the Earth, but they’ll want to save money,” concludes Garcia.

Winemakers are also being encouraged to rethink how they ship their wines and how they make their bottles.

At the WineFuture conference last week, speaker Nicola Jenkins, drinks category expert for the Britain.-based environmental agency WRAP cited a Chilean winery which used a “lightweighting” process on its bottles, reducing their weight from 485g to 425g and encouraging others to ship overseas in bulk using giant vats known as ‘flexitanks’—both processes that result in CO2 emissions reductions and shipping cost savings.

But it’s still a slow process getting winemakers on board.

“People go to a climate conference and get all excited then go back to their company and say, ‘Let’s buy solar panels!’ and their boss says ‘What?!?!’” said Miguel Torres, president of Bodegas Miguel Torres.

Yet Torres, who heads up a generations-old wine company has become something of an Al Gore for the wine industry, travelling the world with a climate change PowerPoint presentation, showing what his company is doing to go green and why he’s trying to lead by example.

At the new Torres winery in the Rioja town of Labastida, the facility is built into the earth, has a fleet of electric vehicles and special water collecting reservoirs.

“We won’t be able to make the same quality of wines if we don’t do anything,” he said, addressing the particular sensitivity of grapes and the winemaking process to temperature changes other crops could endure.

Some producers who want to continue to produce the wines they’ve made historically are adapting by simply changing physical location.

“You can work with latitude or altitude, or switch grapes,” he said. The latter has particular consequences in Europe, as a switch to grapes that are better adapted to higher temperatures could signal the end of the appellation system as a whole. “It’s going to change the map.”

“In 10, 15 or 20 years there’s going to be a frightening change with consequences,” he concluded. “If temperatures in Europe go up by five degrees, we won’t be able to grow grapes and I don’t want to have to explain to my grandchildren why we did nothing.”

Sunday, October 11, 2009 - The Boston Globe - Travel

After a distance of years and an ocean, seeking the roads and routines, the landmarks and laid-back nature of a home state

I grew up driving a route that has disappeared.

For years, our family would hop in Dad’s silver diesel Dasher wagon every weekend for the drive from my hometown of Atkinson to our Lakes Region cottage. For 66 miles along Routes 111, 125, and 11, it was New Hampshire at its best: tree-lined local highways passing through small towns flecked with mom-and-pop establishments.

“125?’’ says Fritz Wetherbee of WMUR-TV’s “New Hampshire Chronicle.’’ “It ain’t that no more.’’

Sure enough, there are now three Wal-Marts on the route, a Burger King, a few McDonald’s, several Dunkin’ Donuts, and a Honey Dew Donuts that sports a giant inflatable coffee cup festooned with rally flags. The drive that used to be part of a weekend ritual has become just a way to get somewhere.

Now that I live abroad, I long to find the authenticity of my home state: the people and places that make me smile when foreign friends ask about my home. I want to find the real thing, but does that place still exist?

Wetherbee is the perfect guide. Before his current nine-year run as a “storyteller and historian’’ for WMUR, he worked for 14 years on New Hampshire Public Television’s “New Hampshire Crossroads,’’ and on both, he’s known for his bow tie, granite voice, and, most of all, an appreciation for our home state. Plus, he has a bird’s-eye view of what makes New Hampshirites tick.

“This place was like this when it opened. Nothing has changed,’’ he says admiringly from a booth at Claremont’s Daddypops Tumble Inn Diner. “This isn’t something where they’re wearing hula skirts or trying to make it look older than it is.’’

Sure enough, the staff look like they’ve worked here forever and on this late summer day, they’re serving a near-perfect strawberry shortcake and still talking about last winter’s snow.

“There are very, very few things that haven’t been Barbie-dolled up in this state but once in a while, you find yourself in a place that’s unlike anything else,’’ Wetherbee says, citing a dreamlike room in Effingham’s Masonic Hall, Milford’s Swing Bridge, and the curious “great ruin’’ of hundreds of hulking, rusting trucks on Ralph Balla’s land in Acworth.

Wetherbee suggests heading up Route 12A along the Connecticut River toward Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish. It’s the former home, studio, and gardens of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the sculptor who created the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial on Boston’s Beacon Street and the “Seated Lincoln’’ statue of Abraham Lincoln in Chicago’s Grant Park.

It’s hard to believe that a National Historic Site is hidden out here, but the place is part of the larger find of the Connecticut River Byway (this part of it is also called the Maxfield Parish Highway, which follows the river up to the far reaches of Coos County, passing covered bridges linking New Hampshire with Vermont along the way).

We go through Hanover, grab an espresso, and walk around the Dartmouth quad, then continue north through the near-perfect towns of Lyme and Orford with their impressive Federalist architecture. Here, we turn east onto Route 25A (Governor Meldrim Thomson Scenic Highway) and within a mile, I know this is it. The Kancamagus Highway may be the elephant in the room when it comes to beautiful drives, but here, among the roadside signs that simply read “HAY,’’ “CORN,’’ and “WOOD’’ - often next to an unattended cash box - we skirt the southern side of the White Mountains, pass Camp Pemigewassett, and find the state’s pastoral heart.

Days later, I head north on a trip that will take me to the top of the state. Above Lincoln, where Interstate 93 becomes the Franconia Notch Parkway, the speed limit drops to 45 and, just above Echo Lake, I peel off and head north on Route 3, which leads 100 miles into the wilderness.

Following a tip from Wetherbee, I stop at Lancaster’s Garland Mill, the last water-powered sawmill in the state, which brothers Tom and Harry Southworth run with their sons, Ben and Dana.

The mill itself is exactly what you would hope: big, open, tin-roofed timber buildings and a pond where logs float, waiting to be hauled into the mill by a giant chain that runs through a notch in the floor. It looks much the same as it did when it was built in 1853.

“When we bought the mill, I told [owner Harold Alden] that I wanted to run it the way he would run it,’’ says Tom Southworth about factors that helped his 1974 purchase of the property. “I was just going to wing it, but when I bought it, the house Harold was buying didn’t come through right away, so I slept in the barn and he helped me out,’’ he says. “In the beginning, we didn’t even make enough money to fool our wives.’’

Joined by his brother Harry, they pushed on, adding a turbine in 1982 that powers the mill and pushes enough juice back into the grid for about eight homes for a year. They also got into post-and-beam home building that’s the bread and butter of their business.

Now, the mill runs seven months a year - the ones when the water isn’t frozen - and construction, from covered bridges in Ontario to local homes, goes year round.

After three decades in timber, Tom and Harry are transferring the business to their sons - slowly.

“I don’t have a lot of retirement options,’’ Tom says. “I’m going on 66. I work half to two-thirds time and intend to keep it that way. I’ll hang around.’’

Leaving the mill, I get a sense of his connection to the place by taking Lost Nation Road north to Routes 3 and 145, taking in Beaver Brook Falls, and follow the weaving ribbon of road across the 45th parallel on the way to the top of the state. It’s the kind of drive where every other corner has an atlas-cover view.

Later, on my summer-ending trip home from the lake, I stop at George Calef Fine Foods, a quiet institution that has been part of our drive to the lake since our first trip there more than 30 years ago. Walk in and you’re greeted by a smiling staff, homemade moon pies, and duck decoys made by Grandpa Calef. It’s one of the last untouched places on this stretch of Route 125 that’s also called the Calef Highway. Head to the back of the store and find the butcher shop of your dreams: beautiful meat, custom cuts, and instant assurance that this is where you want to buy your meat.

“I’ve been cutting meat for 35 years,’’ says owner Jim Calef, whose herculean working hours give him a wiped-out, proud-father-of-a-newborn look. “I’m 47 - I’ve been doing this since I was 12.’’

“And he’s still got all of his fingers,’’ calls out his wife, Becky, from across the store, triggering chuckles from the staff.

Though they do a cleanup job at their deli (their roast beef sub with tomatoes and crunchy pickles is a trip-to-the-lake staple), their skill as butchers keeps them afloat in a tough-margin business.

“Our baseline is meat,’’ adds Jim’s son Royce, with a tone of friendly expertise uncommon in 16-year-olds.

I ask Royce his favorite beef cut and without hesitation, he responds, “The flatiron. It’s like a Delmonico, but it cooks fast.’’ It seems to be a stock response fed to him by his parents, so I pull a meat cut chart from my wallet and ask him to point to the cut.

“It’s in the front shoulder in the top half of the blade,’’ he says, pointing exactly where he should. I’m sold. I ask how he got so good at this and he replies, straight-faced, “It’s my whole life.’’

Leaving home again, the authenticity I’ve been missing is still here. I might have to drive farther or look harder to find it, but it’s here.

IF YOU GO

Where to stay
Tall Timber Lodge
609 Beach Road, Pittsburg
800-83-LODGE
www.talltimber.com
Score a seriously cute lakeside cabin at the top of the state for a reasonable price: starting at $100 a night for two.

The Lion and The Rose B&B
19 Lancaster Road (Route 3)
Whitefield
603-837-9200
www.thelionandtherose.com
Well positioned for exploring points north, this Victorian-styled B&B has rooms starting at $100 a night that range from beautiful to quirky.

Where to eat
Dirt Cowboy Cafe
7 South Main St., Hanover
603-643-1323
www.dirtcowboycafe.com
A stone’s throw from the Dartmouth quad and a good place to recharge on a road trip. Mean (good) espresso, juice bar, good chocolate.

Fully Brewed
187 Main St., Lincoln
603-745-8811
Good sandwiches and tons of beautiful desserts. A good stop before heading farther north. Lunch for under $10.

See the story as it ran in the Globe as a PDF here and here.

Sunday, October 4, 2009 - The Boston Globe - Travel

Where so many things can seem so big, impersonal, and expensive, the city offers intimate, delectable tidbits for the visitor and the native

NEW YORK—Day one in New York has all the rain we need for the Sunday blues. Two of us stand under the awning of a new SoHo restaurant, waiting for friends to show up for brunch.

“Could I get something for you guys?’’ says the man inside who has just delivered tasty-looking omelets to a table of customers.

“No, thanks. We’re waiting for the gang.’’

A minute later, the man brings out two flutes of champagne. Just like that. Never to be seen on the bill.

Blues? What blues?

The first real feeling that I was in New York had come the night before, at the big window of a 10th-floor Brooklyn Heights apartment. I kept the lights off, and there, across the river, were the skyscrapers of the southern tip of Manhattan. Straight ahead was Ellis Island, and next to that, the tiny off-angle lights of the Statue of Liberty’s crown and flame. It was a rush of emotion.

Still, after months in big cities, I’m yearning for something small, personable, and budget-friendly. I want a quiet grandeur to bring New York to a human scale, and Le Pescadeux is a perfect start.

“I base the way I run my restaurant on my mother,’’ says the man with the champagne, Charles “Chuck’’ Perelmutter, the restaurant’s owner. “Dad was a bit of a dry bone, but Mom was a gregarious person. If you take care of the customer, the customer takes care of you.’’

Perelmutter, 58, explains that his mother, Anne, was the first person to open a fancy food store in his native Montreal, and in terms of gastronomy and an ability to make you feel at home, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

“Dollars are OK,’’ he says in a light tone, “but I need to be liked.’’

This isn’t Perelmutter’s first act; for years, he ran the similarly-named Le Pescadou restaurant. “This way, people know I haven’t died,’’ he jokes. Decades ago, however, he came to the city to act. He’s known best for what he calls “being the first spoken role in a music video,’’ telling Bon Jovi they had “24 hours, boys’’ to get to Japan and back in the band’s “In and Out of Love’’ video.

In Le Pescadeux, he is a born host.

“When I was growing up, all the neighborhood kids would come to our place; Mom was the best cook in town,’’ he says, and it seems that he was taking notes.

Not only do you want to settle into a banquette at his restaurant and admire the Maggie Mailer paintings on the wall, you want Perelmutter to come over and tell you stories during your meal. You get the feeling that he’s whispered a sweet nothing or two in the ear of many a damsel, but with just a little coaxing, he’s got some good tales to tell. He may be a schmoozer, but he seems a sincere one. Along with a great brunch for just $14, part of the reason you want to go - or go back - is because he’s there.

Across the river, I walk into Fort Defiance, a new bar that’s a subway, bus, and world away from Manhattan in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood .

WHAM, WHAM, WHAM!!! Behind the bar, St. John Frizell, the owner, clubs a cloth bag of ice with a large wooden mallet to make a drink called the prescription julep, an 1857 recipe that blends cognac and rye whiskey, which are poured into a metal shaker cup and topped with a sprig of mint and a cherry. If it sounds a bit froufrou - like there should be a little umbrella shading the ice - instead, it looks perfect, almost serious, like something to pay attention to while you drink it.

“The key to bartending is making sure everybody’s having a good time,’’ says Frizell. “You can’t talk to everybody all the time, but you want everyone to be enjoying themselves.’’

That’s a tall bill for a bar and its rookie owner. Looking around, the bar isn’t filled with clients looking to get muddled, but people - single guys, couples at the bar, and families at tables - having a drink, tasting chef Sam Filloramo’s creations - think world’s best bar snacks, like a pair of deviled eggs or a muffuletta sandwich - while enjoying each others’ company.

It’s a far cry from Frizell’s previous job in sales and advertising for a publishing company, which he refers to as a “piranha tank.’’ He looks so at home at the bar, it’s hard to imagine him fighting the other fish.

Frizell drew inspiration for Fort Defiance from the obscure drinks legend Charles H. Baker Jr., whose 1939 “The Gentleman’s Companion’’ is broken into two volumes: “Exotic Cookery’’ and “Exotic Drink,’’ the latter with the subtitle: “Around the World With Jigger, Beaker & Flask.’’

“He’s got this breathless, faux-Victorian style, a sort of armchair traveler prose that’s long on color and short on details,’’ says Frizell, who is piecing together a Baker biography. “Yet he hung out with Hemingway, Robert Frost, and Waring . . . the blender guy.’’

I flip to the front of the second volume and there’s Baker in a photo, decked out like the captain of the Love Boat lounging with a big tropical drink, flanked by two women in hula skirts.

“That’s his wife and daughter,’’ says Frizell, chuckling. “Only about one in four recipes in there works . . . but they’re always fun.’’

Frizell leaves Baker’s frivolity at the door and instead draws on his curiosity for historic drinks like the julep and reverence for what Frizell calls “the proper drink, done properly.’’

It’s turned him into a drinks purist - not the kind who has spent 15 years brewing growlers of beer in his basement, but one who triple-filters the bar’s water, uses a specialized Kold-Draft ice machine, installs a custom seltzer system, and stands over the espresso machine watching each pour so he can pull the cup at just the right moment.

Before I meet a different kind of aficionado later that night, I see him play bluegrass at Red Hook’s Jalopy, a micro bar-cafe-concert hall and music school with a Mini Cooper (license plate: GOTBANJO) parked out front. Onstage, guitarist Rick Snell and his band, the Five Deadly Venoms, are framed vaudeville-style by strings of red and white lights and he holds his guitar high against his chest in a way that seems to allow him to coax emotion from it.

First question: Bluegrass in Brooklyn?

“It’s held up as a pure source,’’ he says. “The people who come are looking for that.’’

Snell, 32, points out the 1960s Greenwich Village folk revival where people went to cafes to see the likes of Bob Dylan play and would even head south to see the music at the source.

“It boiled over in New York; it was rural music reaching the rest of the world,’’ says Snell. “Now, there’s a DIY ethic to bluegrass, almost like a punk rock ethic, that Gen Xers and an even younger generation can identify with.’’

Snell has a deadpan style and a reserve that makes you wonder what he’s doing in New York, but as he talks, some of what sounds faraway turns out to be coming from within. “I love this city. To the core. I wouldn’t want to leave,’’ he says. “Maybe I’ll strike it rich and have a house here and somewhere else, but I’ll always have a house here.’’

After the show, I head out to the promenade near the Brooklyn apartment and see the Statue of Liberty across the water. She is far away, unmistakable dots: the crown and, out at an angle, the flame. Even at this distance, her iconic status kicks in and she’s out there alone at night, holding our hearts, hope, and history.

“Her position is the first and last icon of freedom,’’ says Barry Moreno, Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island historian. Yet from the Sept. 11 attacks until this past July 4, the small lookout inside the statue’s crown was closed.

“After 9/11, they said the statue was a fire hazard,’’ he says, “but then, that was resolved’’ . . . but the crown did not reopen.

“It was considered an impossibility to close the monument,’’ Moreno says, although there were a few exceptions like the 1916 “Black Tom’’ wharf explosion and the 1984-86 centennial restoration. “The story was, from the week it was unveiled in 1886, it was never closed.’’

Looking up at the statue, with the city off to her side, it feels good to know that the crown is open again and there’s a months-long waiting list to go up top.

On my last evening in town, with a thousand things to see and do, I opt for the views from the apartment, watching the sun go down behind the city.

Together, the places I’ve seen define only bits of New York, but they are big parts of the reason I’ll come back.

IF YOU GO

Leave on a Saturday morning, come back Sunday night. Making a weekend out of New York is surprisingly affordable.
How to get there
BoltBus
877-265-8287
www.boltbus.com
If there’s a better, more convenient option than the $10 advance-purchase one-way on Bolt Bus (which includes leather seats, free Wi-Fi, and a wall outlet), it would be free teleportation.

Where to stay
The Mave
62 Madison Ave.
646-237-2004
www.themavehotel.com
NYC hotels tend to eat up your budget in a heartbeat, so you might as well stay someplace cool. Rates at this brand-new boutique hotel start at $299 on weekends ($249 weekdays) and specials are on the website.

Where to eat
Le Pescadeux
90 Thompson St.
212-966-0021
Brunch is a steal at $14. Go classy and classic with a smoked trout and Dijon cr?me omelet or go crazy with a JYD, or Junk Yard Dog: eggs sunny side up, Pennsylvania scrapple, broccoli rabe, and country bread. Dinner is pricier; count on $60 per person.

Where to drink
Fort Defiance
365 Van Brunt St., Brooklyn
347-453-6672
www.fortdefiancebrooklyn.com
There’s the hint of a nautical theme owing to this bar’s namesake, a Red Hook fort that protected the city in the Battle of Brooklyn. From the kitchen, chef Sam Filloramo serves incredible muffuletta sandwiches along with tasty olives and deviled eggs so good, I want to go back to see what Filloramo will be making when his stove and oven arrive. The main reason for coming? “The proper drink, done properly,’’ as owner St. John Frizell puts it, for $8 or $10 a blissful pop.

What to do
Statue Cruises
877-523-9849
www.statuecruises.com
Lady Liberty’s crown reopened on July 4. Tours leave from Battery Park in Manhattan and Liberty State Park in New Jersey. Adult tickets with crown access $12, children $5; reserve in advance.

Jalopy
315 Columbia St., Brooklyn
718-395-3214
www.jalopy.biz
Catch bluegrass and other great local music - shows around $10 - in the fantastic, low-key Red Hook neighborhood.

See the PDF here and here.

Sunday, September 20, 2009 - The Boston Globe - Travel

By Joe Ray, Globe Correspondent |  September 20, 2009

LE PORGE, France - The stereotype for the countryside around Bordeaux as a stuffy spot with cufflinks and expensive wines goes down the drain in a whirl.

Wiped out and wanting to set up camp in the light after a day of driving, I pull off the highway an hour west of the city and find a tiny campground on a canal running through the French farm country town of Lagruère.

The restaurant that doubles as the campground office is empty, but the door is open.

“Anybody home?’’ I holler.

“Just a minute!’’ comes a faraway response.

A minute passes. Maybe two.

FLUSHHHHH!!!!

“Bonjour!’’

Out waddles the smiling André Maille, 48, a bus driver in Montpellier who, along with the rest of his extended family, comes back to his native region every year. He’s got a happy-go-lucky, joking personality that draws people to him in a heartbeat, including me when he mentions he’s been spit-roasting lamb for that night’s town festival.

“All day,’’ he says. “Over oak.’’

We walk up to the function room of the tiny Town Hall and here, in a town of 50, are 100 people, elbow to elbow, eating lamb and ratatouille while a band plays Bad Company’s “Feel Like Makin’ Love.’’

“My sister made the ratatouille,’’ says Maille before whistling to a brother-in-law at the grill to bring a plate for the late arrival.

I wonder aloud how many relatives he has in the room.

He looks left, right, and over his shoulder while counting on his fingers.

“Fifteen,’’ he says. “I think. We live all over the place in France, but come back here and get together like this every year.’’

Sure enough, just about everybody working the event is related to him by blood or marriage and, though they make a bit of pocket change from the fête, there’s more than that. “It’s about family,’’ Maille says, looking at the people gathered around the room. “There’s nothing here, but it’s so convivial that everyone gets together.’’

I’ll hear several variations on that refrain on this road trip, and learn that throughout the year the region is one of unexpected extremes - relaxed and sophisticated, wild and wonderfully civilized - a mix that demands the grandeur of a composed photo and the spontaneity of a point-and-shoot.

“People come here year after year,’’ says Bordeaux native Damien Reynaud, 31, a lifeguard at the Gressier beach, near the town of Le Porge in the Médoc region, where I’ll stay for most of my trip. “It’s calm. There are five little restaurants on the other side of the dune and no buildings on the beach except ours. It’s calm.’’

Except when it’s not.

Reynaud’s perch overlooks a swath of the Atlantic that is a magnet for surfers, and near the shore, waves break and foam. He cites a recent summer day when he and his team plucked 15 wayward swimmers from the frothy zone in front of his station.

I meet my traveling companions in Arcachon and head to the Dune du Pyla, which, at over 300 feet, is a mountain of sand separating forest and sea.

On a summer day, there are classic tourist trap warning signs everywhere: swarms of them wade through greasy food stands and knickknack shops that sell seashell necklaces and TokioHotel towels.

We climb the dune on a giant plastic staircase crowded with gawkers, but when we reach the crest and fan out, its immensity swallows us. Everyone suddenly has all the space they need.

Spread out far below are Arcachon Bay with its famous oyster beds and the sea beyond. Behind us, the length of the dune runs down into the trunks of the trees on the forest edge. High above the treetops, we joke that it feels like we’re peering down on the forest moon of Endor, yet there’s a peacefulness that comes from being in a high place that blends the new and the familiar.

So far, it’s been surprisingly easy to forget the elephant in the room: our proximity to some of the best wineries in the world.

We drive north on the D2, the two-lane departmental highway through the Médoc that hosts many of wine’s crown jewels like the Saint-Estèphe, Pauillac, Saint-Julien, and Margaux appellations, a stunning ensemble that merits an entire trip of its own. At Château Verdus in Saint-Seurin de Cadourne, we meet Alain Dailledouze, who has the build and personality of a boxer too gentle to deliver a knockout punch.

“I could have done other things in life, but this place was abandoned and had lost its aura,’’ Dailledouze says, gesturing at his beautiful fields and aging château, “but my father got the vineyard going again in 1965 and I took over in 1990.’’ Yet his connection is much deeper. “We have a wedding contract connecting our family to this land dating to 1471 and it goes even further back than that.’’

Dailledouze, 59, is a walking history book who dug his roots deep into the land and is now doing most of the vineyard’s work by himself and counting on family for untold hours of help.

“When you’re family, there are things you have to do, ways you have to navigate from top to bottom,’’ he says. “It gives you a certain character.’’

He’s got vines to trim, yet here he is, way after closing time, telling visitors about his wine and the region’s history. Why does he stay in it?

“I love it,’’ he says, smiling and almost embarrassed. “With a good bottle, you can remake the world.’’

This distilling philosophy continues with chef Jean-Marie Amat at his eponymous restaurant in the Château du Prince Noir in the Bordeaux suburb of Lormont. The château sits at one end of the graceful Aquitaine Bridge that stretches out and away from the grounds, vanishing in the mist above the Garonne.

Amat emerges from the kitchen, a quiet, humble, even fragile gentleman who seems to function on an interior emotional level. Yet he is, as the French say, good in his skin, dressed not in chef’s whites like the rest of his kitchen staff, but jeans, sneakers, a black T-shirt, and blue apron.

“When I started out in the ’70s, the Bordeaux restaurant scene was scorched earth. I’d rather live in rhythm with the seasons; they are like a metronome for a chef,’’ Amat says, evoking the arc of his culinary style. “Besides, I don’t feel like doing the same things over and over. It’s not that I wouldn’t want to make a classic lièvre à la royale [hare royale style], but truthfully, it bores me a little.’’

I watch as the kitchen gains momentum, the dining room fills, and orders crowd the rack on the back wall. Through it, Amat is quiet, reposed, and at home.

Watching him plate the dishes is like watching an artist paint, and his dish conception is an internal creation - simplicity that can come only from larger understanding.

The only one who makes much noise in the kitchen is head waiter Jean-Guylain Dupuy who, peering through the horizon of his rimless glasses, announces each order to no one in particular, tosses the order slip onto the shelf above the heat lamps with a flourish, pivots on his heel, and exits.

Amat’s dishes are as distilled as he is. Alone at my table, I try grilled pigeon with spices, which initially registers on a sort of primal level with singular descriptors like dense, deep, and bloody.

I continue to explore the dish, finding contrasting sweet and savory flavors with cumin, cinnamon, powdered sugar, and soy sauce. At first whiff, I think of my father’s French toast, but that’s too literal, and when I couple a bite with a salad of fennel fronds and mint, which Amat grows just outside the window, the whole thing explodes. Unconsciously, my feet bounce up and down.

At the end, there’s a fennel dessert: lightly candied cubes of the vegetable, with citrus sorbet and bits of crumble dough surrounded by a caramel tower. It’s a play on textures and preconceptions, a quiet tour de force.

Dining alone at a restaurant this good can be a tragedy, but here in Bordeaux I’m having the time of my life consuming a master class.

If You Go

Where to stay
Camping La Grigne
011-33-5-56-26-54-88
www.leporge.fr
This is car camping and there are plenty of neighbors - but the attitude is calm, family-friendly, inexpensive, and you can walk to the beach in a few minutes. Two people with a tent and space for a car, $16-$27, depending on your dates between April 1-Sept. 30.

Seeko’o Hotel
54 quai de Bacalan, Bordeaux
www.seekoo-hotel.com
An iceberg (the hotel’s name in Inuit) in Bordeaux; this new luxury hotel’s facade is covered in white Corian. Prices start at about $270 per night.

Where to eat
Restaurant Jean-Marie Amat
Château du Prince Noir
26 bis, rue Raymond Lis
Lormont
011-33-5-56-06-12-52
www.jm-amat.com
Prix fixe lunch $43, dinner $72; a la carte about $144 without wine.

Restaurant Le Savoie
1, place Tremoille, Margaux
011-33-5-57-88-31-76
Pleasant lunch stop, with glass roof in one room, lacquer ceiling in another. Specials include an appetizer-main dish prix fixe for $26 and a glass of a rotating stock of high-end wines for $10.

Café Lavinal
Place Desquet-Bages, Pauillac
011-33-5-57-75-00-09
Located in a restored hamlet, this cafe offers bistro fare with main dishes at about $22.

Read the PDF: Page 1, page 2

Fall 2009 - Centurion Magazine

Sequestered in Oregon’s picturesque Willamette Valley, could American Charlie Lefevre be about to change the face of the global truffle industry?

Truffles are buried in mystery. Want a straight answer or scientific certainty? This is not the field. Ask an expert on where to go truffle hunting and the response will be like asking a fisherman to divulge their favourite fishing area. Ask to accompany them on a hunt and they’ll give you 1,000 reasons why they can’t meet you or they’ll just laugh in your face.

It’s not hard to understand why – a handful of Italian white truffles from Alba or French black truffles from the Périgord can fetch several thousand dollars a kilogram. Unique in the food kingdom, a perfect truffle can reach past the sense of smell, through the taste buds, to a point where they brush up against your soul.

American truffle-lover Charlie Lefevre never got the secrecy message. He is at the forefront of the burgeoning truffle industry in the USA, a doctor in mycology, the founder of Oregon’s “truffle cultivation specialists”, New World Truffieres, and, as far as some of his European colleagues are concerned, persona non grata.

“They hissed at me,” says Lefevre, recounting an international truffle conference where he gave a speech about his work inoculating trees with the spores of French black, Italian white and Oregon white truffles. “I was trying to present the story that raking is a terrible practice [he uses a truffle dog whenever he can], but they didn’t let me get that far.”

I ask Lefevre if I can join him on an Oregon truffle hunt. Instead of balking, he gives me an enthusiastic “yes,” even guaranteeing that we’ll strike gold.

I hang up and wonder if the Europeans aren’t right.

Two weeks later, I meet Lefevre at the Willamette Valley Vineyards, about 100km north of Eugene, Oregon (‘Truffletown’), USA. The winery shares an exit off Interstate 5 with Enchanted Forest – a 1970s-era amusement park featuring a giant troll statue – along with a Kampgrounds of America camping site, a Buddhist retreat and a religious school with a large white cross with an upper arm that doubles as a mobile phone relay tower. It’s an arm-in-arm fit for the area and its budding truffle industry – a mix of trippy-dippy with business, beauty and austerity – with a ‘who-knows-if-it will-work-but-let’s- have-fun-trying’ feel.

Lefevre takes me to meet winemaker Don Crank and we walk to a deck overlooking the valley, where Lefevre points to a break in the trees next to a Christmas tree farm. “There’s some,” he says, smiling. “Ready?”

As we begin to walk in the direction indicated, Lefevre explains his attraction to this area: “When I came here the first time, I could tell that there were truffles here,” he states simply.

“Right after he left, we ran out and started digging,” says Crank, a devoted foodie, “Sure enough…”

Before long we pass through a break in the fence onto property that may or may not belong to the winery. “Most of truffle hunting is people sneaking around on other peoples’ land,” says Lefevre, adding a non-reassuring chuckle.

We fan out under a thick stand of Douglas firs and begin raking (truffle dogs are rare things in the United States), removing a thick top layer of dead pine needles around the base of each tree and scratching into the surface of the dense topsoil beneath. I assume we’ll be out here for hours and pray we’ll have something to photograph, but after about 30 seconds, Lefevre calls out, “Here’s some!” just as Crank, a few trees away, stops and stares at the ground saying “Oooohhh!”

In a matter of minutes, the duo have uncovered two handfuls of Oregon spring white truffle (tuber gibbosum), which, along with the Oregon black truffle (leucangium carthusianum) and the Oregon winter white truffle (provisionally named tuber oregonense) are the three main varieties of more than 300 found in the state.

“Truffles have only been used in food here [in the USA] since the 1970s,” says Lefevre. Despite the apparent abundance, they have still not caught on like they have in Europe.

Lefevre is now cultivating a small but fanatic fan base, stoking the fire by both organising the Oregon Truffle Festival and, with New World Truffieres, has started a programme to inoculate hazelnut and oak saplings with truffle spores so that – in theory – people can grow their own truffles. Is the project, which Lefevre started in 2003, now selling about 30,000 saplings a year, actually working?

His planted trees and truffles, partners in a symbiotic and mysterious relationship, need up to ten years before bearing fruit. His first – and only – success story is on a farm in Placerville, California, a place he calls “gold- rush country”. Meanwhile, Lefevre’s competition, Tom Michaels, announced that he harvested Périgord black truffles in Tennessee in 2007 using a similar process.

Lefevre’s method, which he’s alternatively vague and surprisingly honest about, may be similar to other methods, but it is his own creation. “I produced trees for four years before I saw anything anyone else was doing,” he says.

Over the course of his studies, however, he befriended French truffle legends Gérard Chevalier and Jean-Marc Olivier, meeting the two at a mycology conference. “They were sitting at a table by themselves,” he says, indicating surprise like he had found Shane Warne and Viv Richards twiddling their thumbs at a cricket fan club meeting.

“It’s a very cliquey business,” continues Lefevre, but he maintained the contacts, eventually becoming friends with the duo. “Chevalier eventually let me know that I already knew how to inoculate truffles,” he says before pausing, “I don’t think he intended to let me know that.”

So how does Lefevre do it? “Umm ...”

And it’s right here that I understand a little more about the man. Among dedicated truffle hunters, the hesitation is normal. There is lore, trade secrets and, potentially, a lot of money to be made. Though Lefevre is not averse to making money, he also has a scientist’s need to share his findings with the community. He loves the idea that mycology, particularly the truffle end of the field, is almost an anti-science; truffles will be under a tree one year and gone the next and no one, scientist or soothsayer, can convincingly explain why. Lefevre is fascinated by the questions and the uncertainty.

“It’s ephemeral. It’s like buried treasure that comes and goes and it’s beyond our capacity to find it,” he says with reverence when, seemingly, he should be exasperated. “It’s not a gastronomic connection,” he admits. “I’m into the mystique.”

So how does he do it?

There’s another pause and chuckle while his inner businessman and evangelist fight it out. “You can use a Petri dish, you can use spores or roots of established trees ...” he says, edging his way along the path of mentioning the various methods, “I don’t currently use them all.”

He knows he should keep his mouth closed, but he can’t.

“It’s a matter of controlling parameters for the plant and fungus so that they can both grow ... and keeping competing fungus out so they can dominate the root system,” he explains. “We have to grow the trees in a way that allows the tree and the truffle to grow. [The truffles] need tons of lime so we add phenomenal quantities of chalk like they have in the south of France. It’s an extreme environment. The trees would be better off without it.”

It’s a bit technical, but is more than most are willing to divulge and it’s easy to imagine that if he followed the ‘rake’ talk with this information, some of his French and Italian colleagues might want to teach him a lesson in an alley he wouldn’t forget in a hurry.

The question, however, is moot if the truffles are not up to task. “It’s not correct to compare Oregon and Alba,” says Kevin West, West Coast editor for W magazine, who began writing on the subject several years ago and was, as he puts it, “bitten by the truffle bug”, becoming something of a truffle historian and eventually speaking at Lefevre’s Oregon Truffle Festival in 2009. “Having said that, the Oregon native truffles are very good,” West continues. “That stirring essence is powerful and present.”

And what about Lefevre’s inoculated truffles? “Truffle cultivation is the Holy Grail of horticulture,” says West.

Lefevre, rake or not, is on the trail.

Read the PDF here

Fall 2009 - Platinum Magazine

Traditionally renowned for its beer, brewing in Belgium is still a love affair and lambics – ‘wild’ beers dependent on the naturally occurring yeasts in the air and an expert touch – are a conviction: a reminder of a different time and a balm for our own.

“When it comes to lambic,” cautions one producer, “forget everything you know about beer.”

The gulf between regular brewing and making lambic is vast. Certain parts of modern breweries could be mistaken for a clean room, but walk around lambic breweries like Cantillon, which calls itself “the last traditional brewery in Brussels”, and you might think you’re in a hundred- year-old wine cellar.

“We’re very isolated in the world of beer,” says Jean-Pierre Van Roy whose family has run Cantillon since 1900.

Here, antique pipes leak, you hit your head on the ceiling or slip on the floor. More importantly, when you see sunlight through steam streaming from a mashing tun, breathe air that’s heady with hops, hear an old engine clank away, or simply taste a beer, you realise you’re in a cathedral and pray things don’t change for another century.

Initially, lambic production is similar to modern beer making; crushed wheat and malted barley are combined with hot water to create wort (which smells like the best hot cereal in the world and should be part of the breakfast of champions), to which aged hops are added.

Here’s the fork in the road: the hot wort is pumped into a large, shallow copper vessel called a cooling tun, where not only does the wort cool, it essentially catches a cold when wild yeasts native to the Brussels’ Senne Valley (and some say to the brewery itself) settle onto the exposed liquid.

As opposed to modern and even Trappist beers that receive specific doses of yeast cultures, lambic is ‘spontaneous fermentation’ beer, essentially at the mercy of the elements that supply the yeast – the way things were until Louis Pasteur appeared and changed brewing.

Forever changed by its exposure to the elements, the liquid is aged in oak barrels for up to three years, at which point the brew can legally be called lambic.

“I’m from Brussels and now, Brussels is a memory – the city has changed, says Van Roy. “When I met my wife and studied, there was an ‘esprit national’. When Jacques Brel sang ‘Brussels bruxellait,’ that’s a memory,” he adds, optimistically scanning his brewery. “But we’ve saved traces of that here.”

What Van Roy was doing was saving a historical industry from extinction. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Van Roy took over the brewery from his father-in- law, lambics were losing ground to sweet, simple and sudsy beers.

“I changed to a policy of openness,” he says on his decision to welcome visitors, “but, the more people who came and the more I got to know, the more I realised that I wasn’t the only one who liked good beer.”

As I visit, there’s an Italian baker learning more about natural yeast, a photographer working on a project about Cantillon’s ecologically sound production methods, a French organic wine producer and a local green guide writer. “When I started, I knocked down doors to sell my beer,” says Van Roy, “now they knock on mine.”

A similar devotion can be found outside the city at Armand Debelder’s 3 Fonteinen brewery in Beersel. Though he buys ‘finished’ wort from nearby breweries (a common practice) and brews some of his own, Debelder is best known for his skills as a blender, pairing barrels of one- and two-year with three-year lambic to create a fizzy mixture known as gueuze.

He slides over a 2005 gueuze that’s coppery in colour and smells like the woody mustiness of the barrel room (a compliment in these parts), before giving way to the grains themselves. In the mouth, there’s cereal, acidity, bitterness and a slowly- evolving grapefruit flavour inherent in many of the best lambics. It’s bracing, with a thirst-quenching quality that gets the newly initiated over the acquired-taste hump.

“The art is in the acidity,” he says of the blender’s craft. “It’s really easy to end up with vinegar. There’s no science to this, you need to be able to taste something and see the future. I was born in beer,” he says with only a hint of a smile. “I can taste something and know what to do with it, but I can’t explain why.

Down the road, that love was also transmitted to Gert Christiaens, who grew up buying beer for his father at Beersel’s Oud Beersel brewery. When the previous owner retired, Christiaens coaxed him into teaching his craft and after a short hiatus, the 127-year-old brewery was re-opened under Christiaens’ charge.

“For years, lambic breweries were disappearing, but I couldn’t drink the [industrial] beer anymore,” he says, “I found lambics fantastic and started brewing as a hobby to protect them.”

He stops, sights a line of barrels and smiles. “People are starting to like lambic again.”

Nearby, the small town of Liedekerke seems an unlikely beer haven, yet it’s where Joost De Four and his wife Jessie run their restaurant, De Heeren Van Liedekerke. Here, the stairway to heaven passes down through his cellar where he keeps 350 beers and 200 vintage and Trappist brews. “Actually, I have another cellar at my house,” he later adds, “and another at my parents’ place.”

De Four can talk you through every beer he owns and has a beer sommelier to take up the slack when he’s busy. In the kitchen, his brother Tom cooks award-winning dishes.

“Pairing food with beer may be trendy, but we’ve been doing it for 17 years,” he says. “In Brussels, people usually drink wine with food, but that’s crazy. Here, we’re chauvinists. We make the best beer in the world.”

Read the PDF here

August 30, 2009 - The Boston Globe - Travel

BORDEAUX, FRANCE: Sample a novel approach to French wine Traveling in wine country this fall? Check out one of the newest, and either one of the most unique or most out-of-place attractions in Bordeaux: La Winery.

“French men feel like they’re born knowing wine . . . or they’re supposed to,’’ says Pascal Babeau, Winery communications director. “But so often we feel like imbeciles in the tasting room. This place is made for people who don’t know wines.’’

Some say it’s about time. For better or worse, French wineries don’t have an American-style open-door policy for visitors. At many you have to call ahead to set up an appointment to visit. Now, they are playing catch-up.

“The US figured [wine tourism] out - even Spain and Italy did - but France is way behind,’’ says Arnaud Plard, Winery sommelier.

The Winery is completely out of step with Bordeaux tradition. The building is modern, the tastings use more of a “I like it/I don’t like it’’ approach to build a simple, personalized profile that can be taken to the shop and later to the table of The Winery’s restaurant, Le WY. Some French and connoisseurs balk at the gimmicky approach, but in 2008 - The Winery’s first full year - 50,000 people passed through its doors.

“It works because it’s atypical. People come here because they’ve seen two or three vineyards and want something else,’’ says Babeau. “If we weren’t different, nobody would come.’’

La Winery
Rond Point des Vendangeurs
Départementale 1
33460 Arsac en Médoc
+33-5-56-39-04-90
www.winery.fr

August 9, 2009 - The Boston Globe - Travel

On a no-frills budget? Drop the tourist routine and savor the City of Light’s simpler luxuries

Je suis le dauphin de la place Dauphine
Et la place Blanche a mauvais’ mine
Les camions sont pleins de lait
Les balayeurs sont pleins d’balais
Il est cinq heures, Paris s’éveille

I am the dauphin of Place Dauphine
And Place Blanche looks a little rough
The trucks are full of milk
The sweepers are full of brushes
It’s five a.m. — Paris is waking

PARIS—Jacques Dutronc’s classic and controversial 1967 song “Il est cinq heures Paris s’éveille’’ is a set of snapshots of Paris between night and day - everything from the Eiffel Tower’s chilly feet to bakers making loaves called “bâtards’’ - a thousand quirky details that define the singer’s city.

Tighter times are a perfect moment to shift away from the glamour and well-worn paths and more toward the individual events that define the City of Light for its inhabitants.

I seek advice from Geneviève Brame, a friend I met years ago at a signing for her book “Chez Vous en France,’’ a guide for people looking to set up camp here for the long haul.

Forgetting I’m in France, I expect practicality, but instead get sociology and philosophy.

“There’s a shift happening. People are moving from conspicuous consumption to simply taking advantage of the city,’’ Brame says. “Paris is good for luxury and simplicity. You can sit on a beautiful terrace with a bottle of champagne or sit on the canal with some good bread and good cheese.’’

Parisians are heading toward what she calls “slow food’’ tourism. “The idea isn’t to go from one museum to another but to take a slow walk and enjoy it as a living city.’’

How, for example, would a tourist figure this out? “By going to the town hall,’’ she says.

Brame recommends stopping by the “mairie,’’ or town hall, of each arrondissement to see what’s happening - the front desk tends to be littered with fliers for local happenings. There are concerts, poetry readings, guided tours - and most are free.

I press her for a specific favorite and she shrugs. “Paris has its special rhythm - it takes its time. I love waking up early and having breakfast on the Seine.’’

Like a picnic?

“Oh, non! You must have your café on a terrace and you must be where the sun will be.’’

That said, the idea of Paris on the cheap seems inherently depressing - like missing out on the best stuff. Being frugal is doable but it requires preparation, an open mind, and a willingness to trade the bling for a different kind of authenticity.

“You have to detach yourself from the glitzy image of Paris and move away from tourist attractions where you’re a captive audience,’’ says guidebook writer Anna Brooke, who has penned everything from “MTV France’’ to the upcoming “Paris Free & Dirt Cheap’’ for Frommer’s.

“As far as capital cities go, Paris is very livable - it’s not just about business,’’ says Brooke, “and even in the center you can find neighborhoods that cater to the locals.’’

Brooke rifles through her bag and - mark of a good guidebook writer - pulls out a handful of restaurant business cards she has discovered on her wanderings. She finds one for the appropriately-named Le Bistrot in the ninth arrondissement. “It looks like nothing at all, but you can get wines for 2.50 euros [$3.50] per glass and lunch for nine euros [$13],’’ she says. “You’ve got no frills but local flavor.’’

This reminds me of one of my favorite lunch spots, Le Temps des Cerises, where, for $19, Yves and Michelle serve an ever-improving lunch menu in a picturesque bistro a stone’s throw from the Marais and the Bastille - and I would never have found it without walking past it. Want a perfect little dose of Paris? Go here.

Put simply, eating French - even in France - isn’t cheap. Dinner entrees at places I would recommend rarely dip below $14-$17. Lower than that and the bottom drops out almost every time. Factor this into your budget and the rewards can be great.

For fancier fare on a budget, moving up often means moving out of the center. The restaurants Parisians are talking about and going to in droves are the ones where they can eat well without - as they might say - costing the skin from their rear ends.

The gastro bistro trend of young, talented, and often classically-trained chefs who have set up in the city’s outer arrondissements and offer stellar meals at value-conscious prices shows no signs of abating. A prix-fixe dinner at somewhere north of $45 plus wine is a good chunk of change but also an incredible value for what you get.

Some favorites? Belleville’s L’Escargot serves my favorite duck confît in town - crunchy on the outside, melting inside, and served with a tower of truffle oil-infused mashed potatoes and a salad with a zingy vinaigrette to cut through it all. Farther east, in the gastronomic heaven known as the 11th arrondissement, try Au Vieux Chêne where chef Stéphane Chevassus consistently blows me away, particularly with vegetables like butter-braised cabbage and pumpkin velouté.

One new dining trend is that some favorites are moving into the city center, following the lead of gastro-bistro godfather Yves Camdeborde, whose $71 prix fixe at Le Comptoir should be on everyone’s list (think deep stews crowned with wonderfully un-mushy veggies and an organic pink sparkling Bugey Cerdon wine that will remove doubts that this sort of thing can be done well). Most notably Sylvain Sendra has moved from Le Temps au Temps on the rue Paul Bert in the 11th (where he wowed me with barely-marinated mackerel) to Itinéraires in the 5th, and American Daniel Rose is in the process of moving Spring (lamb three ways, pears belle Helene) from the 9th to a spot near the Louvre.

These places are literally (and often obscurely) all over the map - seek them out before you come and, most importantly, reserve way ahead.

The other major dining trend? Picnics. Dismissed with an ultra-Parisian pff! up until a few years ago, dining in the city’s parks and on the banks of its canals and river is now in. Find a market, grab some cheese, charcuterie, bread, and wine and you’re in business.

Picnics are also a perfect excuse to go to the market and get something more than a fruit cup, but knowing which stands are the best values isn’t easy.

“Capital cities cost a fortune and your eye naturally falls on the prettiest and most expensive things first,’’ says Sandy McKeen, who runs La Bergerie du Mesnil farm in Normandy and sells his products at Parisian market stands three days a week. “It’s not easy to find the bargains.’’

There are, however, ways to shop smart. “Come early in the morning and compare prices,’’ he says. “If you come later when the market is crowded, you’ll be here forever.’’

Also bear in mind that despite the utility of going to a supermarket, it’s not necessarily cheaper. It’s common to find plastic bags of supermarket industrial cheese at the same price as their artisan equivalent at the cheesemonger.

Eventually, you’ll need to sleep and again, getting out of the center helps get you into the best rooms for the buck. Design fans will flip for the Philippe Starck-designed Mama Shelter, a modern oasis that proudly sticks out like a sore thumb in the heart of the residential 20th arrondissement. Specials start at $122 a night and the city’s bar/restaurant of the moment is on the ground floor. There’s also Hotel Amour just off the beautiful Rue des Martyrs in the ninth, with its artist-designed rooms, playfully erotic motifs, and prices that - starting at around $142 along with ever-changing special offers - can be as soft as the pillows.

If you’re looking for something more classic and central, try the Aviatic on the Rue Vaugirard, which not only has prices starting at $170 for a double, but also throws in amenities like a free “apéro,’’ or aperitif, a few days a week.

Regardless, don’t be afraid to bargain. “If there’s not a discount on the particular date you’re looking for, you should ask for one,’’ says Brooke, who worked in hotel PR in a former life. “It’s always worth asking if they can do better.’’

It’s also worth looking into renting or exchanging an apartment, particularly for longer stays. Some apartments rent by the night - you can swing a studio for under a hundred bucks, less if you stay longer - and get as big and fancy as you want. Sites like vrbo.com, craigslist, vacationinparis.com, and rentparis.com can involve a leap of faith (make sure you check the scam warnings, vet the listing, and, if possible, talk to the owner), but the rewards can be great - particularly the economy and relaxation of having your own kitchen and dining room.

Following Brame’s advice, I wake early the morning after I meet her, find a cafe seat in the sun, and watch the city come to life around me. It’s been years since I’ve slowed down to watch, and as the city wakes, I see it with new eyes. There’s the relaxed talk of people still oblivious to the city’s rush; the perfect, flaky croissant; and the city at my feet.

This is the city I love.

If You Go

Where to stay
Mama Shelter
+33-1-43-48-48-48
www.mamashelter.com

Hotel Amour
+33-1-48-78-31-80
www.hotelamourparis.fr

Aviatic
105 rue de Vaugirard
+33-1-53-63-25-50

Where to picnic
The quays and bridges of Paris offer unbelievable city views. The Champs de Mars offers a front-row seat to the Eiffel Tower. The canals give a glimpse of residential life.

Where to find Sandy McKeen
Marché Président Wilson
Metro: Alma-Marceau, Iéna
Wednesday and Saturday 8 a.m.-2 p.m.

Where to eat
Le Temps des Cerises
+33-01-42-72-08-63ý
Lunch only. Entrees $14-$21 and a prix-fixe at $19.

L’Escargot
+33-1-42-06-03-96
Dinner only. Main dishes from $17-$28.

Au Vieux Chêne
+33-1-43-71-67-69
Closed Saturday and Sunday.
Lunch prix-fixe for $19; entrees (lunch and dinner) $28-$34.

Itinéraires
+33-1-46-33-60-11
Prix fixe only, lunch $37-$51, dinner $51.

Le Comptoir du Relais
+33-1-44-27-07-97
Reserve way ahead or show up early and eat on the heated terrace. Lunch and dinner $14-$43. In September, the $71 knock-your-socks-off prix-fixe menu resumes.

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June/July 2009 - Paris Magazine

Sandy McKeen brings the special taste of raw milk and tender lamb straight from Normandy to the Paris streets…

Almost nobody would expect to find an Irish cheese-maker successfully working in France. And yet three days a week, Sandy McKeen brings his fresh sheep, goat and cow milk cheeses to the street markets of Paris.

He also sells raw-milk yogurts, butters and crème fraîche, as well as free-range lamb, chicken, duck, and guinea fowl produced by him and others near his farm, La Bergerie du Mesnil, in Normandy’s Sainte Scolasse sur Sarthe.

How does he convince Parisians that a foreigner can make good cheese? By mixing hard work, good salesmanship and a bit of specialization. “It’s hard to find really fresh cheese in Paris – most cheesemongers in town buy their cheese in Rungis,” he says, referring to the giant wholesale food market outside of the city. With the made-that-morning goat milk cheese that he brings straight from his farm, he eliminates middlemen and has something few cheesemongers can procure.

Still, persuading Parisian visitors to his stands to become regular customers is a step-by-step process. “A pot of cheese in the display takes a lot of work to sell,” says McKeen. “For months, a woman will buy six eggs a week. Then it might be six eggs and some cheese. Breaking peoples’ routine isn’t easy.”

“If I shout like the vegetable guy in front of my stand, it doesn’t work. But sometimes I’ll give people a little present,” he says, slipping a nub of goat cheese or a pot of yogurt into a client’s bag. “They always want to pay for it, but instead, I ask them to tell me what they think the next time they come by.” His products are up to the challenge. Fresh cheese is rare and different in Paris markets – a succulent throwback to older days. His soft, fresh cheeses are made with unpasteurized milk that gives them a lactic acidity – a slightly sour and nearly sweet flavor that can be paired with tomatoes and olive oil, eaten with fruit or, better, all on its own.

McKeen also sells lamb steaks that are meltingly tender, yet retain both a taste of the grass the lamb was raised on and the animal’s slightly punchy flavor that its mass-market equivalent would be missing.

“My parents farmed in Drogheda, just north of Dublin, on a classic farm with grains and animals, but I didn’t see a future in it,” he says. “Last year, milk was at an all-time high and now it’s at six- or seven-year old prices – you’re a slave to the system. I wanted to be independent, but I still wanted to be a farmer.” So in 1999, he packed up and left Ireland, eventually partnering with a Dutch farmer in Normandy before buying him out in 2002.

It’s still tough going. Sandy gets up at 3 am to milk his animals and then drive to Paris. Selling in the markets is not easy either. “You talk to the old guys here at the market and they say the number of customers went down when supermarkets started showing up in Paris around the first Gulf war, then again when the euro was introduced,” he says, adding that he’s seen a decline in the number of customers in the past year alone.

“You look at supermarket trolleys and people don’t seem to reflect on what they put in their bodies,” he laments. “If someone asks for two large rolls of goat cheese, I can’t put them in a bag and charge12€, even though that happens every day in Parisian supermarkets.” Instead, McKeen charges 4€ each.

“It’s a lot of work to produce good raw milk and good cheese,” he concludes, “but I like to meet clients and I try to make nice stuff that’s not expensive.”

Where To Find Sandy McKeen in Paris
Marché Président Wilson
Av. du Pdt Wilson (between rue Debrousse and Place d’Iéna)
75016
Metro: Alma-Marceau & Iéna
Wednesday, 9 am – 2 pm and Saturday, 9am–2pm

Marché Point du Jour
Av. de Versailles (from rue Le Marois to rue Gudin)
75016
Metro: Porte de Saint-Cloud
Sunday - 9am–2pm

Click here to read the story as a PDF

April/May 2009 - Paris Magazine

PARIS—Jacky Lorenzo’s skill as a fishmonger is evident in his hands – strong, stubby and worn, each one as much of a tool as a fillet knife. Combine this with a lifetime of product knowledge and it’s easy to understand why, for discriminating chefs and demanding clients, Lorenzo is the most sought-after poissonnier at the street markets of Paris.

“I even sold sole and monkfish to the Pope when he was here,” he recalls. Technically, he sold to someone on Benedict XVI’s staff, but the word from on high is that the Pontiff likes monkfish.

Lorenzo’s is the story of the open-air markets of Paris for the last 30 years. “I used to empty trucks at Les Halles,” he says, referring to the giant wholesale food market that dominated the center of Paris for more than 800 years before being replaced by the Rungis market in the Paris suburbs. “I learned when you’re hauling stuff around to make sure you get paid first!”

Lorenzo got his start in the 1970s, moving from the Loire Valley to Levallois-Perret, where he learned the fishmonger trade for six years. In 1977, he bucked the trend and opened one of the first high-end fish stands in the Paris street markets.

Knowing how to buy
“There were only cheap fish on the street stands then. People weren’t used to being able to get the good stuff,” he says, “but we’d buy a 250-kilo sword- fish and have no trouble getting rid of it all.”

Now, dozens of top-quality fish and shellfish are on mouth-watering display at his stand at the Bastille, Popincourt and Président Wilson markets. Square salmon filets are arranged skin-up, skin-down next to one another, creating a silver and orange checkerboard; king crab sit atop mountains of shellfish, and cooked prawns fan out over the ice.

But presentation is only the tip of the iceberg. Lorenzo’s real skills lie in his product knowledge and sourcing ability. “In Paris, tuna starts in May – that’s the season when it’s running in both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. In June, there’s French sole from Dunkirk,” he says, reeling off a couple of seasonal examples.

Knowing how to buy is just as important as what he purchases.“When I buy, it’s at Rungis,” he says, quickly dispatching the idea that the best fish in Paris is bought off the back of the boat. “I tried buying it at the seaside, but all the best stuff is set aside for Rungis.”

Lorenzo makes a point of trolling the gigantic market at 1:30 am, even though the doors don’t officially open until 2:00 am. “I have buy- ers who take care of me, but you’ve gotta get there early to get la crème,” he says. “In fish, you’ve got to be the first one to Rungis and be good at sourcing. I make a swing around the market to see what’s there, but if I find a belle pièce, I buy it right away. If I don’t grab it, somebody else will.”

Looking for good deals
That said, if there’s an exceptional piece at a price that might scare some of his competitors away, he’s ready to plunk down the euros to get it. “I take risks and don’t hesitate to pay a lot for a big piece of fish, but at the end of the day, you’ve got to have the turnover to be able to sell it all.”

Unlike some other fishmongers, he also makes the extra effort of going to Rungis every day. “Young guys will just order over the phone,” he says, “but if I don’t see it, I don’t
buy it.”

Lorenzo is also on the lookout for good deals to pass on to his clients. “If I find scallops from Quiberon for eight or nine euros and scallops from Normandy for five or six, I’ll still take the ones from Quiberon. They taste better, and the small difference in price doesn’t make up for the difference in quality. But if the scallops from Normandy are two or three euros, I’ll take them and pass the discount on to my clients. That’s how I keep them. If people get a good price for fish, they come back. Eighty percent of my clients are regulars.”

Rare as hen’s teeth
Lorenzo also counts some of Paris’ most demanding restaurant chefs among his faithful customers. “Very simply, Jacky’s one of the best,” says Alain Plaud, owner of the seafood restaurant Les Portes.

But even for Lorenzo, being a fishmonger isn’t easy; fish stocks are declining around the world. “In the last three or four years, it’s become a lot harder to get the
fish we want,” he says. “They’re more expensive and the quality isn’t as good because processing machines now do the work that people used to do.” Finding good labor is also a huge problem. It’s hard to train and retain people who want to sling fish for a living, and he knows the value of what he’s got. Along with his son Fabrice, one of Lorenzo’s most important employees is Maxime Felen, the commis, whose job it is to skin and fillet the fish.

“Guys this good are as rare as hen’s teeth,” Lorenzo says. “I’m very demanding. My stuff is expensive, so I can’t tolerate mistakes. No bits of skin and no bones in a filet. I go crazy when that happens.

“You’ve gotta love this job,” he concludes. “When someone succeeds in this business, it’s because they like their work. Everybody’s struggling in this economy, but the pros will survive.”

Poissonnerie Jacky Lorenzo
Marché Popincourt
Bd Richard Lenoir between rues Oberkampf and Jean-PierreTimbaud
75011 Metro:Oberkampf
Tuesday and Friday, 8 am – 1pm

Marché Bastille
Bd Richard Lenoir between rues Amelot and SaintSabin,
75011
Metro:Bastille Thursday,8am–1pmandSunday,8am–2pm

Marché Président Wilson
Av. du Pdt Wilson between rue Debrousse and Placed’Iéna
75016 Metro:Alma-Marceau, Iéna
Wednesday and Saturday, 8 am – 1:30 pm

See the story in PDF form as it ran in Paris Magazine

May 27, 2009 - Penthouse Magazine

A defective latch sent a bag flying off the back of the bus and onto a Scottish motorway, where it was promptly run over by a car. The laptop inside was smashed beyond repair, the screen broken and the electronic guts splattered about. But a rare bottle of 35-year-old Linn House Scotch presented by Chivas Brothers distillers the evening before - and packed just inches from the computer - survived without a scratch. The driver, in his rich Scots burr, commented, “That is why they call it ‘cask strength’”...

Click here to read the story and see the photos in a PDF

Spring 2009 - Platinum Magazine

Expert Spanish cocktail mixer Javier de las Muelas on the importance of ice.

A man on a quest to build the perfect ice cube might be the best way to describe Javier de las Muelas. A worldwide mixed drinks legend and the head of Barcelona’s Dry Martini and Gimlet cocktail bars, he’s constantly straddling the line between innovation and class.

For his mixed drinks, ice is as important as liquor. The cube should make a drink cold, not wet; most important, it should not affect the drink’s flavour. Barcelona was the logical birthplace of his killer cube; the city’s tap water is so chlorinated it can taste like a pool, and so calcified it renders the steam function of an iron useless after about three shirts.

“Without good ice,” says de las Muelas simply, “your drink is a disaster.”

His aquatic solution included osmosis, decalcification and an American ice-making machine curiously named ‘The Scotsman’. Javier de las Muelas also worked on finding and perfecting the form: cylindrical. Watching his white-suited barmen pour a trademark Dry Martini (splash of Martini vermouth, a spritz from a lemon peel, Bombay Sapphire gin and a solitary olive), it’s clear something good is happening inside the mixer. Under a light, the drink gleams like liquid diamonds.

De las Muelas is a bit like a creative genius who runs an accounting firm – an innovator trapped in a classic field – yet he doesn’t see the disconnect. Dry Martini, a Barcelona standard that he bought 14 years ago, is a quintessential cocktail bar. With a prohibition theme, mirrors, old bottles, wooden walls, giant leather banquettes and drink-themed paintings that range from melancholy loners at a bar to naked ladies nestled into martini glasses, it’s masculine to the core and enough to make a non-smoker want a drag.

Yet he uses the classic backdrop as a platform for his creativity, creating custom cooling machinery to turn high-proof alcohol into ‘frappés’ and coming up with drinks some call “third-generation cocktails”, such as the tongue-tingling ‘carnyvore’ that combines Sichuan button flowers, strawberry purée, lime, passion fruit and papaya juices with chilli-infused vodka and Peruvian pisco, served in a carnivorous pitcher plant.

That, however, is where he draws the line – well before flashing anything like a Tom Cruise ‘Cocktail’ smile – and veers back into the classics. His barmen may shake a mixer with classy flair, but anyone caught juggling bottles would be given their walking papers.

“I love the formal aspect and the form of a classic cocktail bar: serve the ladies first, serve from the right,” he says. “My ‘grand illusion’ is to have Dry Martinis around the world,” a project idea that he is entertaining, he divulges. “Hotels are like operas and a classic bar is like a church,” de las Muelas adds, reiterating one of his trademark sayings. “When I bought Dry Martini 14 years ago, it was like buying the Vatican.” While it’s clear that de las Muelas is not the Pope, could he be something of a prophet? Perhaps, but the question is best pondered over a stiff drink.

Raise Your Glass PDF

Spring 2009 - Centurion Magazine

A traditional jeweler typically works in confined circumstances – engulfed by a crowded workbench, they create objects that, at their crudest, have limited creative potential; an engagement ring is a metal circle, a mount and a stone.

For French jeweller Philippe Tournaire (above), the idea of being confined doesn’t hold much truck and it’s rather doubtful that it ever did.

The artist, with three French boutiques and one slated for an August opening in Beijing, would rather paint with stones or build a city and put it on your finger.

“We’re not building around the stone any more,” Tournaire says of his vision of the trade. “It’s not a big stone and a big price tag that make beauty.”

Currently, his creative juices are fuelling an architectural bent – rings that include Paris on your pinky, Rome on your ring finger. “In the beginning, jewellery was a way to show where we were or where we’d been,” he says, citing architecturally themed fourteenth-century Jewish wedding rings and north African jewellery traditions as part of his inspiration. “When I was a child, my mother would drag me around to look at architecture. As soon as she’d find out about a pile of rocks with some sort of architectural significance, we’d go.”

“Jewellery is expensive, it’s uncomfortable and it’s not useful. It’s a gift. It’s simply something to jog your memory,” he says with droll bluntness. “The importance is in the symbol. If you ask a woman about the conditions when she received it, she can tell you about it like it was in a film.”

The most fun in his architectural series might be Tournaire’s take on the City of Light, with Notre Dame and the all-stars of the axis made of the Louvre, Tuileries, the Place de la Concorde obelisk, the Arc de Triomphe and La Défense on a platform. Where’s the Eiffel Tower? Wrapped around your finger. La Dame de Fer is the ring itself.

Tournaire’s was not a typical career path. In 1969, he gave up an electronics repairing job to follow a dream and began making jewellery in a cave. “I liked electronics because [in a stereo] you could follow the path of a wire from the plug to the sound and find what was going wrong, but when chips got involved, I became a chip changer,” he says, “all the fun went out the window.”

Instead, he chose another path, creating his workshop by literally digging a cave into a mountainside under his parents’ home. “It was about twice that size,” he says, motioning toward a compact Citroën in the street.

He shows me one of his first pieces – a bracelet made from a fork. “That cut down significantly on my raw material costs,” he adds with only a hint of a grin. Yet with no rent and little in the way of expenses, he could do what he wanted and kept money out of the picture.

“I was able to discover the trade myself, without constraint or someone who says ‘you’ve got to do it like this,’” he says. “There’s an inconvenience to it, but it’s also a huge opportunity.”

Truthfully, the fork bracelet is a crude piece – the work of the beginner he was. “I didn’t even know how to weld at that point,” he says, pointing out a few rough spots, yet there’s an ingenious clasp using a tine and, based simply on the fact that he still continues to make a much sleeker version of it all these years later, a clear bit of the artist’s soul.

Fast-forward through nearly four decades of work and a meteoric rise in recognition and Tournaire still shuns working on the traditional benches called chevilles (‘ankles’), instead sitting on the basement floor next to an anvil, just like he did in his cave.

When I watch the man at work, I expect him to straddle the anvil and pound away at a ring, but instead, he plops down Indian style on the thin, unpadded carpet, takes a long pair of tweezers and a tray of jewels and starts looking at how different shades of the gems play off of one another.

“I’m painting with stones,” he says, and begins working on one of his ‘metropolis’ rings – futuristic representatives of his architecture series where the building tops create a canvas the size of a postage stamp. Without seeing it, the idea could reek of over-the-top tastelessness – a stamp’s worth of precious stones gives a lot of space to be gaudy – yet in his hands or on the right finger, it looks like a small artist’s palette where the tiny ovals, circles and geometric shapes take on a Klimt- like quality. Even here, form follows function; the highest and most exposed parts of the ring’s surface (the tops of the metropolis’ towers) are capped with diamonds that protect the softer stones below.

Futuristic creations sound funny for someone who got his start in a cave, but for Tournaire, ‘modern’ has a personal meaning. Some aspects of his method clearly follow an ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ mentality, yet in others, he is as modern – and controversial – as they come. “We combine the archaic and the avant-garde. Some say that’s not the way it should be,” he adds, but he clearly couldn’t care less. “As soon as you’re outside of the system and succeed, the ones who follow the traditional path get a little disturbed.”

Using his architecture series as an example, he and his team employ 3D rendering software that is eminently modern. From there, he uses a high-tech printer that uses layers of wax as ‘ink’ to build three-dimensional moulds of his creations. Indeed, many of his ideas and most of the architectural series would be impossible without the technology that he simply sees as a tool. “A computer doesn’t make something interesting or beautiful,” he counters. “It doesn’t create or give it a soul.” From here, however, he might turn a project over to his workshop where, along with modern tools, they still use others like ring clamps that appear to have been designed centuries ago.

In the shop, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree – Tournaire’s son Mathieu now works in the workshop from Monday to Friday and on Saturdays, he comes in to do his own work and build his own personal style. “I realised that I was doing my best work at the workshop,” says Mathieu, reflecting on anthropology and history studies and working for a Lyon- based jeweller for a year. “I knew it was where I was at my best.” I ask Mathieu about the pendant he wears around his neck – it’s got more whimsy and less technique than his father’s work – but there’s also originality and a bit of soul. Is it his own creation? “Of course.”

Like his son, Tournaire senior also wants to keep his fingers in the grease, his rear end on the basement floor and his spirit unfettered. “I hit a point where I needed to decide whether to grow the business or continue with creation,” he says of a recent turning point. When the artist tried to figure out if he needed to bring in a business partner to free him from the day-to-day operations, he let the response come from his soul. “You can be for or against things in your life,” he says, “but you’ve got to dig in.”

Read the PDF here

Spring 2009 - Centurion Magazine

Acclaimed Italian seafood chef Mauro Uliassi reflects on his new Hong Kong adventure and food’s sensual nature

It was a big year for the maestro of fish. Mauro Uliassi, head chef and owner at Ristorante Uliassi in the Italian town of Senigallia, won a seafood award, a fish soup award, a best dinner of the year award and second star in the Michelin Red Guide.

“We won everything!” says the smiling chef with an English and humour that are uncannily similar to Roberto Benigni circa his 1999 best actor Oscar speech. “We should close and stop while we’re perfect!” Fat chance. Along with the second star and a year’s worth of different accolades, Uliassi capped 2008 by opening Hong Kong’s Domani restaurant in November.

“We went to Hong Kong for a promotional event,” he says of Domani’s advent, which included a fortuitous encounter with a restaurant magnate. “The next day we went to Pacific Place and that’s where we are now.”

Going global has been a whirlwind education for Uliassi, who technically signed on with Domani as the consulting chef. Along with several hours of private English lessons each week to improve his foreign endeavour, he’s been learning to translate his style into something compatible with the local culture.

“My cuisine is Italian, but I’ve travelled the world and the food we have in Senigallia reflects those influences,” he says. “This is what we’ve brought to Hong Kong.”

“Domani is not Uliassi,” he adds, marking a change, yet confirming that the chef is remaining true to himself. “It’s Italian. With Italian food and ingredients and our know-how.”

Hong Kong hasn’t meant giving an Asian flair to his cuisine or making radical style changes. Instead, it’s simply acclimatising to local customs and habits. Food is served with less salt and “very hot,” he explains while underlining the words in the air. Sometimes, it is more a case of switching from the habits of a small seaside town to those of a big city on the go. Instead of a multi-course tasting meal, Uliassi explains that Domani customers want only one or two dishes. “Three, max!” he says, smiling, “Served very fast.”

Most important, his personal and modern style has been able to win the hearts and taste buds of both tradition-based Italian diners and Hong Kong’s cosmopolitan tastes. Uliassi won me over at a 2006 Paris food show with what he called cuttlefish carbonara – shaved ribbons of al dente cuttlefish, cooked sous-vide (at a warm temperature over a long period of time in airtight plastic bags), topped with oven-crisped pancetta and egg yolk, also sous vide, grated over the top – a daring, well thought-out and perfectly executed dish with a clear tip of the hat to the classic carbonara recipe.

Classics, however, are only a starting point in Uliassi’s cuisine. He uses words like ‘try’ and ‘experiment’ with reverence and ‘puritan’ falls out of his mouth with clear distaste; he seems to have too many ideas in his head to be able to just stick to the established classics.

“We close Uliassi for three months every year [roughly January through to March] and go to work in other places,” Uliassi explains, divulging part of his creative process. “When we come back, we lock ourselves into the kitchen and reflect on what we had. Then we practice the dishes for a year. That way, we’re sure they‘ll be good.”

When we catch up with him at a gastronomic forum in Spain, his blend of classical training along with his culinary artistry and capacity to experiment are all on display. And sex. That, too, he explains, goes into every dish.

Uliassi’s biggest lesson is that food is an exploration of the senses. Food is erotic. He is not shy, but he is also not looking to provoke, either. The way he looks at it, there is no reason to be embarrassed by such a parallel. Coming from Uliassi, it is like listening to a course on philosophy and haute cuisine.

“We cook erotic food. Food, like eroticism, uses all five senses and when you cook it gives you the same satisfaction. When you see a beautiful dish, you salivate. Your mouth waters. Like when you see a beautiful girl,” he says.

There aren’t any girls on stage with Uliassi, but he is making a seafood stew that has got most people salivating. For this, he separately sautés tiny crab, langoustines and little squid in large copper pans, finally combining them in a cylindrical press that squeezes out every last drop of their primordial ocean goodness. Later, he‘ll rub baby squid with garlic before quickly sautéing them and adding them to the stew moments before it is served. I completely understand when an Italian food journalist says in an aside, “He’s the maestro of seafood.”

Later, Uliassi moves on to marinated anchovies – one lounging in a shallow bath of pineapple marmalade and mandarin orange gelatine, with another atop buttered and toasted nut bread. Served next to each other, they’re a yin and yang of texture, fat, sweetness and acidity. The trade show is the last place I want to be taking a bite – I want to be on Domani’s Hong Kong rooftop or perched above Senigallia’s seaside with a nice bottle of chilled Champagne.

“Sex began eroticism. Food became gastronomy. When we think of a dish, we try to conceive something that involves all five sense,” he explains. “You hear the crunchiness, the thing itself is a beautiful sight, you lick your fingers,” he explains. “Food and love are written into our DNA and once you’ve got past the necessity, there’s also pleasure. We don’t just eat because we’re hungry, food is a pleasure. I want to give that pleasure.”

Chef Mauro Uliassi PDF

April 26, 2009 - The Boston Globe - Travel

Catalan capital reigns over Spain’s cuisine with dishes that are creative and sincere

BARCELONA—Over the last decade Spanish cuisine has been propelled into the global limelight in the slipstream of a culinary cannonball named Ferran Adrià.

As the chef at El Bulli, probably the most coveted reservation in the world, Adrià builds dishes like gels, foams, and “spherified” olives, creating something Catalan author and El Periódico food writer Pau Arenos coined “technoemotional” cuisine.

For a while, it looked like every chef in Spain wanted to be the next Adrià, creating his or her own gels and spherifications. Instead, the lasting effect has been to give Spanish cuisine a long-lasting adrenaline boost. Instead of burn and fade, eating here has been like watching a slowly building fireworks finale that, just when you think it’s got to end, gets better.

Now, instead of slowing in the middle of an economic crisis, there is not one movement, but many. The brightest of the new is “bistronomic”: restaurants that combine quality, creativity, and well-timed economy, often run by friends or couples, with

Chef Roger Martinez in the kitchen at his Barcelona restaurant, La Mifanera.

Guacamole tapas at chef Roger Martinez’ Barcelona restaurant, La Mifanera.

Chef Fidel Puig Durall in the kitchen of Barcelona’s Embat restaurant.

At Barcelona’s Gresca restaurant, chef Rafael Penya opens an egg souffle with vegetables, cream and ham that features a cooked egg white encasing its still-liquid yolk.

Gresca owners Mireia Navarro (l) and chef Rafael Penya take a break outside of their Barcelona restaurant, Gresca.

Michelin-star-trained chefs in the kitchen.

I meet Luis Plamas, Juan Coma, and Josep Casas-Febrer for a crash course in bistronomics at Gresca, one of the movement’s founding restaurants. The three men are all retired or semiretired locals who seem to devote most of their time to dining well. They belong to a Barcelona eating club called La Xefla de Gelida - 30 or so friends who meet once a month to cook a big dinner and tell tall tales.

“We like to eat, but we like to eat well,” says Coma.

Get them talking about El Bulli and they start twitching and tipping their heads with excitement, yet the tiny Gresca is one of their favorite restaurants.

Why here?

“Hombre!” says Plamas. “This is sincere food.”

“There’s simplicity to what he does, but he also creates perfect combinations and not all chefs can do that,” adds Coma, referring to chef Rafael Peña’s efforts.

When the dishes arrive, the three take a closer look, using their forks to inspect what’s in front of them. They had had a big lunch and asked for something lighter than the offerings on the dinner menu. Peña came up with a “salad” of thinly sliced raw artichoke, Iberian ham, Parmesan flakes, and paper-thin croutons under a drizzle of olive oil. Sweet and salty, fresh and crunchy, the flavors and textures play off each other.

“There are three keys to cooking,” says Coma. “Product quality is most important. Segundo is the combinations, and third, the exact cooking temperatures. If you’ve got all of this, the food is perfect.”

I see this with my main course: two filets of John Dory, stacked atop cockscombs, asparagus tips, and walnuts. It’s just as Coma explained: top-quality fish, cooked so that the skin is crispy, the flesh flaky on the edges and agreeably firm on the inside. The cockscomb adds fantastic texture, playing off the good, gelatinous qualities of the fish, while the nuts and greens give crunch and texture.

It’s also the kind of dish that if the chef botches it (Fish and fowl? Cockscomb?), he goes down in flames.

Achieving this level of quality day in and day out while staying within budget is no small feat.

“We follow the market and change our prix-fixe lunch menu every two days,” says Peña, who runs Gresca with his partner, Mireia Navarro. “Today we had John Dory, but we’ll do something else if it’s too expensive tomorrow.”

“When I do the ordering for the wine list, I have eight wine shops I work with,” says Navarro, who runs the front of the house. “I go with the seller with the best price for each wine.”

This mix of economy, variety, and seasonality is key to bistronomic’s survival and a gift for a motivated chef who wants to do his own thing. Before opening Gresca, Peña paid his dues, going from a job as a pizzeria cook to gigs that included El Bulli and Lasarte, chef Martín Berasategui’s Barcelona restaurant.

“After working in kitchens for years and years, you get tired of having a boss. The only way you can get out from under that is to do a small place,” says Peña.

Nearby at Restaurante Embat, run by chefs Fidel Puig Durall and Santiago Rebés Weindl, there is more clever play with combinations of classic local ingredients.

Lunch appetizers include a chickpea, sausage, bacalao, artichoke, and mushroom dish that’s a hearty play on textures. Another plate features chorizo, potatoes, and green beans with a poached egg perched on top. Tuck in and the yolk becomes a simple, luscious sauce.

Economy? The meal-on-their-own appetizers top out at about $9 to $13. Mains, except for a $16 entrecote, stop at $12. An artisan yogurt for dessert is about $3.

“These chefs are hugely ambitious and spend a lot of time thinking about the dishes they create,” says Arenos, the food writer. “They work with products that they [and in turn their clients] can afford, creating high cuisine at reasonable prices.”

And this trend is happening all across Spain?

“Nope,” he replies. “Only in Barcelona.”

Arenos pauses to recount recent Catalan food history: Michelin-starred restaurants grew in number, Spain got its first female three-star chef in the person of Catalonia’s Carme Ruscalleda, and Barcelona now has a bumper crop of young chefs with one or two stars in the Michelin Red Guide.

Worthy movements with names like prêt à manger (“ready to eat”) and neopopular grew, and high-quality tapas and ethnic restaurants sprang up and flourished.

Yet with all of this happening, it’s clear that Arenos loves bistronomic food and its chefs, the stars of Barcelona’s bright future.

“It’s a rough life,” says Arenos. “They don’t have a lot of money and their restaurants are their lives.”

“Our little guy, Nil, used to sleep over there when we first opened,” says chef Roger Martínez, pointing at what looks like a closet shelf behind a curtain.

Martínez cooks while his wife, Marta Floria, runs the floor and does the accounting at their restaurant, La Mifanera, in the Sarrià-Sant Gervasi district.

“It’s hard work. Sometimes the bank calls and it gets a little tense,” says Martínez. “When you work for someone else, that sort of thing is their problem, but this is our place and we want people to eat well.”

Martínez concentrates on creative tapas and rice dishes, a pair of favorites for the local audience. “You don’t come here for fish or meat,” says Martínez, “unless it’s in the rice.”

One of his current favorite dishes is an artichoke risotto with local anise liquor, Parmesan, and a dash of espresso grounds. It sounds gimmicky, but it’s well thought out.

“There’s sweetness from the anise, bitter from the coffee, salt from the Parmesan, and acidity from the artichokes,” he says.

“After months and months, you’re changing dishes and trying to keep up - it can get tiring. If you’re not motivated,” says Gresca chef Peña with a grin, “it’s impossible.”

It’s not impossible. It’s fantastic.

If you go…
Where to eat

La Mifanera
C/Sagués16
011-34-93-240-59-12
www.lamifanera.com
Lunch or dinner about $40.

Gresca
Provença 230
011-34-93-451-61-93
www.gresca.net
Tasting menu, lunch $24, dinner $60.

Restaurant Embat
Mallorca 304
011-34-93-458-08-55
www.restaurantembat.es
Even a la carte, it’s hard to spend more than $27 at lunch. Dinners and Saturday lunch a la carte, about $53.

Where to stay
Hotel Condes Barcelona
Passeig de Gràcia, 73-75
011-34-93-445-00-00
www.condesdebarcelona.com
Central and beautiful; rooms from $200.

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April 12, 2009 - The Boston Globe - Travel

The raging sea is a powerful lure to this craggy isle

BELLE-ÎLE-EN-MER, France - Alone on a cliff above the ocean, a low pine is so bent by wind, its seaward edge no longer holds needles. Rising hundreds of feet to the low-swelling plains, the cliffs that surround this island off the Brittany coast have the look of gnarled, petrified wood - twisted strata of schist and quartz that embody a defiant, frozen history of the angry sea.

“We live and work in the part of the world where the sea meets the land,” says Patrick Tanguy, a former resident who returns to the cliffs dozens of times a year to fish for gooseneck barnacles, stubby mollusks that look like dinosaur toes at the end of a rubbery black neck.

Tanguy likes to fish on the Côte Sauvage - literally, the “wild side” - of Belle-Île, where the ocean crashes into the land in a magnificent explosion of sea spray. Wearing only a neoprene scuba suit, he scrapes barnacles from rocks at the point where the unstoppable force meets the immovable object.

This wildness is at the heart of what Belle-Île offers its 5,000 residents and thousands of their countrymen who regularly flock here to be soothed by its power. This is where, guided by nature, they come to grieve or heal, to be alone or fall in love.

Half hopping, half waddling between the rocks, Tanguy brings me down to take some photos of the barnacles on a “calm” day off. The water is a turquoise froth that rushes in from several angles at once. Apart from some hearty mussels, the barnacles are the only things that can hang onto the rocks in this thrashing surge. “A couple people died right here a couple years back,” says Tanguy, whose wizened face resembles Gene Hackman’s.

In the 35 years he has been doing this, “three or four” licensed fishermen (out of a group of only 47) have lost their lives. Tanguy has had three accidents in the last two years, including one that ripped a hole in his calf muscle and left him dangling upside down from a cliff with his foot pinned in the rocks.

Despite the danger, he couldn’t imagine doing anything else. “We’re in nature,” he says, gesturing around him. “Doing this, we feel free. Everything is beautiful.”

Along the Côte Sauvage and all around Belle-Île, there are no Jet Skis buzzing the beaches, no boardwalk to see and be seen on. This is not the place to come for a wild weekend with the gang.

“This is the anti-Saint Tropez,” says Serge Albagnac, who has been preserving and promoting Belle-Île for 50 years.

“I came for a girl when I was 18, but by the time I moved here, we were done,” he says, smiling at a far-off memory. Now, he’s the president of the island’s tourism bureau, conscious of the mix of locals, tourists, and nature needed to keep Belle-Île thriving.

Historically the area was a strategic military and fishing location until both industries eventually dried up and went elsewhere. Now, the majority of employment on the island revolves around visitors.

“A local might deplore the idea of the importance of the tourists who come here [particularly in the late July through August vacation season], but, very simply, the island is a mix of populations,” Albagnac says.

And if there were no tourism?

“It would be catastrophic,” he says. “Fishing and farming couldn’t hold - everyone depends on it.”

Albagnac is also very aware of the number of French seaside towns that have been swamped by development. “Concrete,” he muses, “isn’t very pretty.”

Much of the coast is now off-limits to development, preserving hundreds of miles of walking paths and seaside wilderness. There’s an abundance of old convertibles - especially Citröen 2CVs and Méharis - which, despite their age, are still the cars best-suited for the island.

As I explore Belle-Île on foot and by bicycle, the absence of concrete is a blessing. There’s a purity, particularly of light and smell, that jostles memories and invokes calm, leaving little wonder why Monet, Matisse, and scores of other Impressionists began setting up camp here in the late 1800s.

Riding my bike late one afternoon, I crest a hill and, surrounded by fields and hay bales with the sea in the distance and the sun setting beyond it, everything else drops away. For a brief, blissful instant, life is as it should be.

It gets better: I’m on my way to dinner.

“About 75 percent of what we use here is local,” says chef Pacôme Epron at La Table de La Desirade. Most of the restaurant’s fish, meat, and vegetables come from island producers. Other items, he forages for himself.

“To like it here, you’ve got to like nature,” Epron says. “Every afternoon, I’ll go fishing or out picking wild produce. Right now, we’re out picking mushrooms; we’ve got death trumpets and chanterelles, and soon we’ll have cèpes. We’ve got 300 kinds of mushrooms here.”

Epron denies having a signature dish, preferring the mantra “que du frais, que du frais, que du frais!” (Only fresh!) and rolling with the seasons and product availability. It creates dishes that play with taste, texture, volume, and simplicity.

One of his best dishes combines layers of cockles and zucchini between thin layers of potato rosettes. It’s all drizzled with a foie gras-infused meat jus. Purists might call the combination of meat and shellfish heresy, but the jus transforms the dish from delicate seafood to something almost carnal.

As opposed to the manicured mainland, which islanders refer to as “Le Continent” or just “the Other Side,” the overriding sense here is this link to the primal, the wild - not comfortable but comforting - that lures people and keeps them coming back.

“It gets in your blood. It’s a virus,” says Didier Lemoine, who began coming to Belle-Île when his father got a job designing diving suits for Jacques Cousteau and his team here 50 years ago.

“I was 8 years old and told my father that I’d own a place here one day,” Lemoine says on the deck of his home in the hamlet of Nanscol, “and I started coming by myself when I was 15.”

Though Lemoine, who has lived around the world, held high-level jobs with the European Commission and is now on development committees for new airports in Rennes and Nantes, his passion has always been for Belle-Île.

“As soon as I could, I always came back,” he says.

“There’s history, gastronomy, flora and fauna, geology, architecture - what more could you want?” he asks. “It comes little by little, but if you know how to observe, you love it. If we pay attention to nature, she’s extremely generous.”

Back on the rocks with Tanguy, this generosity, this connection to land and sea, to the “sauvage” is as intense as the sun’s reflection off the water.

“Those who talk about beauty are the ones who miss it,” says Tanguy. “We don’t talk about it because we live it.

If You Go

Getting there

Several trains (http://www.tgv-europe.com/en/home) go from Paris to Auray daily and a shuttle bus brings visitors to the ferry, Compagnie Océane (http://www.compagnie-oceane.fr/uk/, 011-33-2-9735-0200). Located at Quiberon’s Gare Maritime, the ferry takes you to Le Palais. $35.
Plan on visiting between late spring and mid-July or September and mid-October. Avoid the tourist crunch from late July through the end of August. Many places close during the cooler months.
Rent a bicycle or go native and rent an old Citröen convertible; rental agencies for both are in Le Palais.

Information

Belle Île Tourism Bureau
Quai Bonnelle
011-33-2-9731-8193
http://www.belle-ile.com

Where to stay

Hotel La Desirade
Petit Cosquet, Bangor
011-33-2-9731-7070
http://www.hotel-la-desirade.com (English version coming soon.)
Charming host, excellent restaurant. A basic room for two, $162-$218.

Hotel Le Galion
Place de l’Hôtel de Ville
Le Palais
011-33-2-9731-3737
http://www.hotelegalion.com
Basic, decent accommodations. Doubles $57-$106.

Where to eat

La Table de La Desirade
(See above)
One of the top restaurants on the island. Prix-fixe dinners start at $40.

Roz Avel
Rue du Lieutenant Riou, Sauzon
011-33-2-9731-6148
Fish specialties in an impossibly cute and colorful town. Dinner $37-$66.

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March 2009 - BBC’s Olive Magazine

Olive magazine’s guide to great-value spots around the world - including Michelin-starred food in London, tapas in Barcelona, cool hotels in NYC and a lead photograph (cheese, of course) by yours truly.

Click here to see the PDF

March 8, 2009 - The Boston Globe - Travel

PARIS—La Mère Agitée looked promising before I got there: The tiny restaurant’s website features a photo of the contents of a saucepan being submerged in a stream of heavy cream. Next to the photo is the claim: “best pig’s head in the world since 1995.”

Likewise, an artist’s palette in a display window outside Chez Lucette reads “traditional cuisine made without microwave ovens,” “little dishes, simmered with care,” and, even better, “pontiffs and grumps stay away.”

Ask most Parisians - even those in the know - if la cuisine traditionnelle made and often

At Chez Mamy in the 11th arrondissement, a customer chats with Pauline Clavel, who owns the restaurant with her daughter.

Diners inside Ribouldingue (above)... whose neighbor (below) is Notre Dame.

Bottles of eau de vie at La Mère Agitée.

delivered to your table by what the French would call a dame d’un certain age still exists in the City of Light, and they will probably give a nostalgic sigh.

Luckily, a handful of these places, perfect in their ability to make you feel as if you’re eating at Grandma’s, are still here. Combine fantastic comfort food with a gentle price tag - and the feeling that you are both being cared for and part of something greater - and you have got something incredibly well-timed for a sagging economy.

“Right now, people want a sure thing - they want the recipes of their grandmothers,” says Valerie DeLahaye at La Mère Agitée.

Part of DeLahaye’s philosophy became clear the first time I ate at her 14th arrondissement bistrot. Arriving very late for a group dinner, I asked whether I could have a pitcher of wine, and she pointed at a half-full bottle of red on a nearby table and said, “Take that one.”

“I’m in a niche,” she explains. “It’s not expensive here. At 35 euros with wine, you know coming in that you’re not going to drop more money on a bottle. I’ll even throw in an apéro.”

La Mère Agitée has no fixed menu; you eat what DeLahaye makes on a given night. She says this as she prepares a salad topped by toast squares with duck rillettes that will be followed by a classic blanquette de veau and, in honor of its recently-deceased creator, Gaston Lenôtre, an Opéra - thin layers of almond bread coated with coffee cream and chocolate frosting.

“And tomorrow?” I say, thinking she’ll explain the next day’s dishes.

“An homage to Louis XIV!”

It turns out that the first Wednesday of every month, a group of friends get together at her restaurant to sing old French songs, and tomorrow’s meeting honors the Sun King.

“This is the only restaurant in Paris where we sing songs this old,” says Jacques Arnold, a friend and client of DeLahaye who has stopped by to finish composing a new song for the homage.

“We’re unclassifiable here, we’re all friends and all kinds of people come through the door, ” he says, gesturing around the dining room, “but we’re all brought together by Valerie’s magic.”

Back in the kitchen, that magic is taking shape with several heads of red cabbage. DeLahaye cuts up the cabbage, transfers it to a large pot, and adds a bottle of vinegar, a few handfuls of salt, a shot of water, a little bucket of honey, and a jar of her mother’s homemade apple jelly. Le coup de grace? Two snow-white bricks of pork fat.

“I’ll let that bubble away for five or six hours tomorrow,” she says, with a grin that would make a French monarch proud.

Though there are wooden spoons marked “sweet” and “savory” in her cluttered kitchen, there are no measuring cups to be seen. When I ask where they are, she scrunches up her face and says, “I only use them when I bake.”

“When I was 3, I knew I’d have a restaurant. At 5, I got a book from my grandmother called ‘Cuisine Est Un Jeu d’Enfant’ (‘Cooking Is Child’s Play’). Now, I’m 51 . . . and a half,” she says, and when she catches me smiling at her playful honesty, she adds, “That’s my childish side. I keep that.”

Back in the dining room is Yves de Saint Front who, like his father, was a painter and a navigator. He’s here with friends and family, including his son, a hermit in the mountains of Tahiti, who is home for the first time in eight years.

“When I sailed with my father we went everywhere - Spain, Tahiti . . . ,” says Saint Front, “he’d like it here.”

“Cooking is happiness,” says DeLahaye. “Cooking is sharing human warmth.”

What you get at these matron-run restaurants that, particularly as a visitor, you might not get anywhere else in Paris, is that human touch. Parisians can have a rough, off-putting exterior that’s hard to break through and restaurants like these - for visitors and locals alike - can be a place to connect.

“This is a meeting place,” says the owner and chef at Chez Lucette in the 17th arrondissement who identifies herself simply as Rose. “When people are having a tough time, they come here. They want the exchange.”

The real price of membership at the restaurant locals call simply Chez Rose is acceptance of the Golden Rule. “When people come here, they accept the other,” she says. “They integrate themselves in the atmosphere . . .” she trails off for a moment and smirks, then adds, “or I kick them out.”

Sure enough, everyone seems to know everyone in her restaurant. On any given night, it could be a couple of tables of blind people, Alsatian accountants in town for a conference who have found the restaurant through word of mouth, or the woman who comes in every night for a plateful of shrimp and a pitcher of wine. Clients are addressed by their first names and Rose knows who’s looking for an apartment, trying to sell their car, or just in need of a spiritual pick-me-up, which she generally remedies with an ear-splitting kiss of greeting on each cheek.

Like at La Mère Agitée, Rose tells customers what she’s cooking that day. It could be steak and fries that she cuts to order, farm-raised chicken, or leg of lamb. At the end of a meal, it might be a homemade crepe or tarte Normande so good it’s wise to reserve your piece when you walk in the door. (I was nearly blacklisted from Chez Rose when, thinking she didn’t have time to do it all by herself, I asked where she got one of her desserts.)

“If the food is good, it creates a sort of relaxation,” she says. “It brings people down to earth and shows there’s more to life. It’s not like you’re shooting the breeze at a bar - it’s more profound. Here, we get down to the essentials.”

At these restaurants, there is inevitably a switch from talking about the daily grind to talking about life - anything from a granddaughter’s upcoming trip to a US summer camp, to the best way to cook pot au feu, to a slowly-dying husband.

“I thought this species had disappeared,” says Christian Millau, co-founder of the Gault-Millau restaurant guides and a legend in French food circles. “These places are based on simple and innocent feelings: that the woman will be honest, do her own shopping, and cook without the arrogance of male chefs. These women are cooking because they learned from their mothers,” he adds. “They treat their clients like their children. They have a strong and affective link with them.”

Hidden in the shadow of Notre Dame, just around the corner from the famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore, is the wild card of the group: Nadège Varigny, at the Ribouldingue restaurant. At 40, she’s the spring chicken, neither grandmotherly nor the one cooking the food, yet one of the best examples of the heart and soul of these restaurants. When you eat at Varigny’s restaurant there’s no doubt about who is in charge.

“I’ve got an eye on everything. You have to. I used to let the chef run the show, but now I govern,” she says.

As the daughter of generations of butchers and bonnes femmes from the southeastern department of Isère, Varigny was taught to love and appreciate traditional French cuisine.

“We sell what we love. I can’t deal with stuff I don’t like,” she says. “I can’t stand bad wines or paying too much.”

Traditional, yes, but not all dishes here are for the faint of heart. Since opening in 2006, Ribouldingue has become a reference address for what the French call the “noble parts” - offal dishes like tête de veau, sweetbread, and tripe.

“When you come here, you eat an appetizer, main dish, and a dessert - not just a main course,” Varigny says. “I want to create a place for bon vivants who love to eat.”

On this day, a group of health care specialists (gland experts, no less) have set up camp for a long, lingering lunch, and at the table, a tiny woman scoops marrow from a roasted bone larger than any in her body.

“I like people who like to eat,” Varigny says. “I like getting them to try things,” and even more than that, as the 12-year front of house manager for star chef Yves Camdeborde’s former restaurant, La Régalade, she is expert at setting up an eater’s atmosphere.

“I loved working there - I learned so many things, like not letting stuff get under your skin,” she says, “but mostly, that it’s got to be perfect. It’s your place.”

IF YOU GO

Where to eat

La Mère Agitée
21 rue Campagne-Première
011-33-1-4335-5664
http://www.lamereagitee.fr
Eat well, drink well, linger and sing along to old French songs if you’re here on the first Wednesday of the month. Meals about $44, wine and an apéro included.

Chez Lucette
43 rue de la Jonquière
011-33-1-4627-7254
Your jaw might drop after your first taste of the tarte Normande. Dinners around $38.

Ribouldingue
10 rue Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre
011-33-1-4633-9880
For those hesitant about the (fantastic) offal specialties served here, fear not - the classic offerings are just as good. Fixed-price lunch and dinner menus about $36, plus wine.

In Paris, like eating at grand-mere's PDF1, PDF2

Winter 2009 - Platinum Magazine

Alice Waters floats in rare air. Above the hustle and clang of the kitchens occupied by the best chefs in the United States, she is the country’s reigning grande dame of cuisine.

“I’m standing in my garden right now. I’m eating raspberries – they’re the best ones of the year,” says the American food icon and founder of California cuisine, indirectly dispensing part of her philosophy. “It’s so nourishing to be in nature – there’s a rhythm there that connects you with it. Things grow and die, then grow again – it’s optimistic.”

For the uninitiated, Alice Waters founded California’s landmark restaurant, Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, in 1971, and has spent the succeeding decades reaching beyond her kitchen in an attempt to fundamentally change the way America thinks about food. Former icon Julia Child inspired Americans to create unforgettable meals through her landmark cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and a series of smart, approachable public television cooking shows. Californian MFK Fisher explained how to take good food and “Serve It Forth” while legitimising food-writing as a form of literature. Waters promotes a lifestyle; she traces the arc of a meal from the garden to the table, explaining why every step along the way is crucial. In short, food must be local, organic, prepared with and served to good company.

“We’ve been told by fast-food culture that [taking time to prepare a meal] is not fun,” Waters says, “but there’s nothing I’d rather do than wash lettuce.”

At times, her conviction can sound ludicrous – some critics might say she’s been wandering around on her own little island in the near 40 years since Chez Panisse opened its doors ... unless you’re talking with her, at which point, it all just makes sense. Who wouldn’t want food that tastes better and isn’t treated with chemicals? After a lifetime of hard supermarket tomatoes, the perfectly ripe, garden-grown peach she’s always talking about really is fantastic. After an interview with Waters, I try to figure out a way to grow pesticide-free vegetables by hanging planters outside the window of my sixth-floor Paris apartment and spend a fruitless half hour online trying to devise a way to compost in a city that doesn’t.

Though she is still the face of Chez Panisse and is ostensibly promoting her new book, The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution, Waters doesn’t really talk about either during the interview. In a sense, she doesn’t need to; by now, she’s built up so much momentum with her ‘delicious revolution’ that her book and restaurant take care of themselves.

“I’m not trying to tell people how to live,” she explains, “I’d rather the change I want to make be to cook the simple food we need to be cooking in this country.”

It’s an uphill battle. America is, after all, the land of the free and the home of the Big Mac. Obesity is rife. Family meals are an endangered species and the microwave is king.

“There’s a rhythm to [the fast-food lifestyle] – it’s like we’re in bumper cars,” she says, “but life goes by too quickly to live like this. “You have to not let those things be in your way,” she explains. “I want to cook something in a minute and eat ... but I have a tomato confit in my pantry ... and I have some pasta ... and I have some herbs in the garden. I can make a meal in ten minutes. I can put some salad on my plate, cook a little piece of fish, boil some potatoes. You have to have a pantry. You have to have some basic techniques and a few things, but it’s so gratifying ... Later, I’ll take fresh mint and pour hot water over it and I have mint tea.”

Her optimism is contagious. Chez Panisse has produced chefs like Paul Bertolli, who now runs Berkeley’s Fra’Mani Handcrafted Salumi, Judy Rogers of San Francisco’s Zuni Café and Jonathan Waxman, who has opened restaurants in California, New York and London. The Revolution According to Alice also means teaching school students about food, from the garden to the table, in her Edible Schoolyard programme and working with schools across the country to get cafeteria lunches to be both healthy and nurturing.

Kids, says Waters are one of the keys to making sure the changes continue, because it’s easier to get them to the ‘aha!’ moment when they understand what she’s trying to teach. “It’s harder to get adults to that place; it’s easier when they’re younger. Children are open and eager and want to be connected to nature.”

It can appear that Waters lives in some sort of organic, affordable la-la land that more closely resembles the Hobbits’ Shire in Middle Earth than anything on Planet Earth, but at the very least she lives her dream and has swayed millions of Americans to give her lifestyle a try. Once they get a taste of the good life, Alice bets they won’t go back.

“It’s a seduction to bring people to biodiversity through pleasure,” she says convincedly. “I want to give them a taste to wake them up.

“This isn’t like studying and doing something painful. This is finding another world of beauty, a different fabric of life. It’s very profound and terribly, terribly important,” she emphasises. “It’s something we all have to learn again.”

At some point a few days after the interview is over, I’m rushing, I’m still working and I need to eat, pronto. I catch myself putting together a ‘food as fuel’ meal that would cause Alice to twitch, catch myself and adjust. I add some fresh-chopped coriander to my salad and doctor my stock vinaigrette by adding lime juice and soy sauce – it’s good. For my pasta, I pull the noodles from the boiling water while they’re still crunchy (a full minute or two earlier than I usually would) and Sicilian-style, finish cooking them in the ‘sauce’ I make by bubbling chopped tomatoes with clove of garlic. Total extra cooking time? Thirty seconds, if that.

It’s so tasty, I decide to celebrate with a cup of mint tea.

THE NEXT GENERATION
ROLL CALL: a short list of Chez Panisse alumni who have successfully followed in the footsteps of Alice Waters.

Mary Canales - Ici Ice Cream
If wildflower honey ice cream doesn’t get you curious ...
2948 College Ave, Berkeley, CA
ici-icecream.com

Paul Bertolli - Fra’mani salumi
Handcrafted salumi
1311 Eighth Street, Berkeley, CA
framani.com

Christopher Lee - Eccolo
A product-first trattoria Italian
1820 Fourth Street, Berkeley, CA
eccolo.com

Russell Moore - Camino
The website gives the hours and the daily menu. A random pick shows fresh black-eyed peas, shellbeans and rapini with artichokes
and egg cooked by the fire. I’m in.
3917 Grand Ave, Oakland, CA caminorestaurant.com

Suzanne Goin - Lucques
Lucques is a restaurant named after an olive. Crispy belly pork with peaches and special Sunday dinners keep customers returning.
8474 Melrose Ave,
Los Angeles, CA
lucques.com

Amaryll Schwertner - Boulettes Larder
Half stockist of your dreams, half product-centric restaurant, but whole home cooking. What more is needed?
1 Ferry Building, San Francisco, CA
bouletteslarder.com

Judy Rodgers, ZunI Café
Mediterranean inspiration and a Bay Area classic in its own right
1658 Market Street San Francisco, CA
zunicafe.com

Read the story as it ran in PDF form

February 15, 2009 - The Boston Globe - Travel

TAMANRASSET - In the city of nomads, a brief encounter with a half-blind nun leaves us with words to live by on a trek into the Sahara: “We only see well with our hearts.”

Swallowed by the desert the following day, its foreign silence, beauty, and endlessness force me inward. I stare out from the ridge of a mountainous dune. The big issues that have not found firm homes in my heart and mind are cast onto the sand like items from a drawer flung empty.

I was looking forward to the desert void, but had no idea what to expect. A small group of friends who had been several times before organized a trip into the southern Algerian

With a flat tire, and night falling in the Sahara, Touareg Salah Kberat stands atop his 4x4 to signal our location to the other truck in our caravan.

A boulder and a sand dune, seen through a hole in a larger rock formation. Some rock formations were formed millions of years ago when the desert was the sea, with volcanoes burbling underneath. A combination of time, wind, water and sand worked to form what remains.

At the end of the day a hiker and a Touareg nomad walk atop dunes and rock formations in the Algerian Sahara.

At day’s end, camp is made and dinner prepared in the Algerian Sahara. With the Southern Cross and Polaris playing cat and mouse on the horizon, you sleep under the stars.

Looking a bit like a golf ball on a tee, this base of this pillar in the Algerian Sahara was literally blasted thin by low-flying, wind-whipped sand.

At the base of a dune, ripples caused by wind sit beneath rock formations literally sandblasted by time. A combination of time, wind, water and sand create forms that can look like inverted yogurt pots, pinnacles and walls of brick.

With rock pinnacles in the distance, the effects of the wind are seen in diverse patterns on dunes in the Algerian Sahara.

Touareg Abdou Zounga takes a break near a rock formation. Though Zounga earned a degree in computer programming and later had a desk job in the city of Tamanrasset, the call of the desert was too strong. “I told my father, ‘I’m sorry – I can’t do this,’” he says of life connected to a keyboard.

In a shelter at Assekrem, Touareg Abdou Zounga pours tea at arm’s length to mix in the sugar and give each glass a bit of foam on top. “Tea without foam is like a Touareg without a cheche (headscarf),” he jokes.

Sahara and Hoggar Mountains with a local agency. They promised we would sleep under the stars, climb dunes to their tops, and see mountains that would have made the late Western movie director John Ford green with envy.

There were a few downsides: They talked so much about the stringy camel meat we would be eating that I brought extra floss. A false alarm. There were the hygiene stories: “Showering” is a moist towelette rubdown. Asked where the restrooms are, your guide may simply grin and make a sweeping gesture across the landscape.

Desert silence is disconcerting, melting time and perspective, leaving you listening to the blood swish through your veins as Polaris and the Southern Cross play cat and mouse across the night sky. Later, the sense of time dissolves and the silence becomes addictive: literal quiet comfort that allows the beauty of the desert and the people who live here to reveal themselves.

“We don’t follow time,” says guide Abdou Zounga as we share a pungent lamb, barley, and vegetable stew called chorba. “No one here ever asks what time it is.”

Zounga, 30, is a Touareg, desert nomads descended from Berbers who have roamed the northwest African desert for millennia. Though he earned a degree in computer programming and had a desk job in the city of Tamanrasset, the call of the desert was too strong.

“I told my father, ‘I’m sorry. I can’t do this,’ ” he says of life connected to a keyboard. “I want to be physically tired at the end of the day. . . . In [the 9-to-5] life, my eyes were red, I trembled, I couldn’t sleep,” he says, taking up the hunched-over form of a programmer as he talks.

“Sometimes the Touareg are hard people and the Sahara can be a hard place,” says Zounga, “but even when life is hard, it is beautiful.”

This is understatement. Even in the age of satellite phones and GPS tracking, the desert quickly hobbles or kills the unprepared. The traditional Touareg headscarf known as a cheche (or tagelmoust) that seemed so awkward to wear on the first day eventually becomes soothing, protecting from wind, sand, and sun. As we drive, I ask about the hundreds of car-sized mounds of rock that line the trans-Saharan nomadic trails. “Those are burial mounds that predate Islam and Christ,” says Zounga.

Even with expert guides, there are moments when a visitor wonders whether they will have their own trailside tomb: Tires can blow several times a day, rims warp, wells run dry.

These situations lead to a set of survival rules. If you find water, top off your cans. If you find firewood, take it. If someone needs a hand, help him. These are not suggestions - this is the desert.

Over the course of a few days, fear of the unknown is replaced by a heightened sense of surroundings. Our first night out, we sleep beneath a freestanding rock arch hundreds of feet high. With no light pollution, the stars are so bright that picking out the principal constellations becomes tricky. Orion has a bow-shaped string of stars to his side that I’ve never seen and all seven sisters of Pleiades are visible. One moonless night, I take a 10-minute walk to the top of a dune and, once there, realize I’ve done it by starlight.

In some spots, rock formations bubble out of the ground like inverted mud pots - testament that the desert was the seabed millions of years ago. Elsewhere, top-heavy rock formations rise hundreds and thousands of feet into the air, their bases literally sandblasted by time. In one spot, heat and humidity have taken a tall column of rock and cleaved it in two, leaving it looking like a couple standing in the sand, locked in an embrace.

This beauty is the backdrop for life as a Touareg, and while nomadic life may be losing ground to the modern world, there’s a romance to it that makes you believe it will hold on for a few more generations.

“One of the first things I learned as a child was respect for my elders,” says Zounga, explaining a system where the final say always goes to the oldest in a group. As part of a team of guides, this might mean he calls the shots on one trip and washes dishes on the next, all depending on the ages of the others.

Aside from an old-fashioned respect for elders, one of the most important traits that Zounga explains is solidarity among Touaregs, no matter which country they are from. Another is sharing whatever you have, whether it’s with someone who needs it more or as a way to express gratitude.

Salah Kberat, our lead-footed Touareg driver and guide, loses his sunglasses on one of the first days into the trip. A few days later, he hits the brakes in the middle of nowhere, makes a U-turn, and drives back a few hundred feet to where he’s spotted a pair of shades in the sand that fit him perfectly. He flashes a million-dollar grin and gives a yelp of joy. Five minutes farther on, we come across a herd of goats followed by a young shepherd holding a newborn kid. Our guides stop to talk with him and, saying goodbye, load him up with oranges while Kberat puts his new sunglasses on the shepherd. Easy come, easy go - a louder yelp, a bigger smile.

These lessons become even clearer later in a wadi (dried riverbed) garden in the desert. Fearing the ethnic and religious violence in their native Nigeria, Touareg farmer and shepherd Mohamed Ali, his wife, Salaam, and their infant daughter, Zarnat, joined the thousands of refugees who have fled their country in the past year.

“Before, I was a shepherd, but my sheep were being stolen and I had to flee with my wife and child,” Ali says. “Eight of us came in a clandestine taxi from Nigeria. We’ve had no news from our family who stayed behind.”

Sitting across from Ali, it’s hard to imagine - let alone digest - his story, yet some of the problems he could face here are alleviated by his Touareg roots. He has found work as a gardener in this tiny cooperative, selling vegetables to passersby and to the farm owner who sells in the markets of Tamanrasset.

At the end of our talk, he asks me to take a few photos of him and his daughter and I show them to him on the camera screen. He smiles, takes a ring from his finger and hands it to me. It’s not an exchange or a veiled attempt to ask for money, but like Kberat’s sunglasses, a gift.

I look to Kberat, who has been translating, on how to return the ring without insulting his friend. He says a few words to Ali, nods, and I hand it back.

“What did you say?” I ask.

“I told him that the gift was ours in meeting him.”

If You Go

Visa
US citizens must obtain a $100 tourist visa through the Algerian embassy. Information can be found here: http://www.algeria-us.org/content/view/38/35/.

Guides
A guide service is not only a must but also a legal requirement in the Algerian Sahara. Typically, you’re met at the Tamanrasset airport and dropped off there when you leave. “Tam” tends to be used as a base on the first and last nights of a trip.

Prices vary by agency, whether you are traveling by 4x4 or camel, how many people you travel with, and your itinerary. Count on $641-$1,282 per week, all-inclusive. If what you eat is a concern, discuss that with your agency before you go.

Working knowledge of French is useful, but tour operators will make sure that an English-speaking translator is part of your group.

Guide agencies
Akar-Akar
Abdou Zounga and Salah Kberat’s employer is one of the oldest and most respected tour operators in Tamanrasset. Food is good (three square meals a day), staff friendly, and management works hard to accommodate your needs. Their booking for English-speaking clients is run from France:
011-33-2-47-50-66-10
akar-akar.net
Agence Mero-N’Man
The agency’s name translates into “what the soul desires,” which is especially helpful if you wish to take a camel trek across the desert.
011-213-293-44201
E-mail .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Desert rules PDF Page 1, Page 2, Page 3

January 25, 2009 - The Boston Globe - Travel

LISBON - I knew for years before I arrived that I would fall in love with this city. What I hadn’t counted on was falling for the sardine lady.

The love story began in 1994 with “Lisbon Story,” German director Wim Wenders’s ode to the city, its gentle people, trademark fado music, cobblestone streets and tiled facades, and the tiny, heartbreakingly cute yellow trolleys that make their way up and down its seven hills. Leaving modern Europe and the languages he knows behind, the film’s protagonist enters the city with his heart and his senses wide open.

I vow to do the same and discover people who are Portugal’s living soul, conscious of the need to preserve their heritage and constantly redefining themselves using a sage mix of beauty and sadness, with both the past and hopes for the future as guides.

“There are people who pass through life,” says Regina Ferreira, who runs the Conserveira de Lisboa (The Lisbon Cannery), “and then there are people who have life pass through them.” Lisbon is gifted with a bumper crop of the latter.

I meet Ferreira, whom the French might gently refer to as une dame d’un certain âge, without looking for her. Guided only by good fortune, I wander in front of her store, a Lisbon landmark since 1930, tucked into a corner of the grid-like center of town known as the Baixa. Sitting on a wooden bench beneath a wall of boxes of sardine tins, I realize I’m in trouble when we compare the goose bumps on our arms talking about singer Jacques Brel.

Above, One of Lisbon’s signature yellow trolleys (also known as eléctricos) in front of the city’s cathedral, known as the Sé de Lisboa. Photos: Joe Ray for The Boston Globe

Ferreira explains how for decades her father and her husband ran the company, creating products that eventually outlasted the long reign of dictator António de Oliveira Salazar (1932-68). She left her job with the state and took over the cannery after the death of her husband in 2004.

“Working can be like mental prostitution,” she says, comparing her old job to her new one, “but food is culture.”

The conversation eventually transcends sardines, and it’s evident that though her business is successful, she is here because the cannery is an ode to her country, and working here is a way to continue saying “I love you” to her husband.

As she speaks, Ferreira is so endearingly caught up in ideas of her country, her family, and the past, she leans so far forward her head is nearly horizontal.

I worry aloud that, like the mom-and-pop hat and glove shops that still dot her city’s streets, a place this wonderfully outdated might eventually succumb to time and be replaced by one of the chain stores that are slowly multiplying around town. “We’ve gotten past problems with factories, with freezing, with the arrival of big box stores. We made it,” she assures me. “We’ll be here.”

Change has come, but it takes time to understand how a nation this isolated at the end of the Iberian Peninsula survived being drawn into the 21st century.

Below, a view from inside a café, in Lisbon’s central Baixa district. Photos: Joe Ray for The Boston Globe

“We had a rough regime up until 1974. Between ‘74 and the mid-‘80s, people . . . survive,” says José Caetano, who got together with Italian chef Augusto Gemelli to open the high-end Gemelli restaurant in 2007.

“My parents - our parents - were in a prison. It was impossible to get out. If you did, you took a bag and the clothes on your back and you left,” Caetano says. “Now, Portugal is changing in terms of maturity. People who are 30 and 40 are more interested in food, cinema, art, theater, and expositions. These are the people who are pushing the country.”

Here, something clicks. Portugal’s political and geographic isolation created an island-like buffer that gave its people time to evaluate and adopt or decline an outside influence. While Paris paved over miles of its cobblestones, Lisbon’s streets and sidewalks are beautifully coated with them. Here, people are both set in their habits and open to doses of outside influence.

“We’re strangely motivated by our personal culture. We like sardines and tuna and fado,” says Caetano, “Young people now like these things because they are Portuguese.

“I don’t think too many Starbucks will come,” he says, referring to the Seattle company’s lone Portuguese outpost, in a shopping center several miles west of the capital. “If you talk with a thousand people, they’ll all say they prefer Portuguese cafes. We like to get our coffee in the morning at the cafes near our homes. I send my son to pick up breakfast, and I’ll go down and pay later.”

Many here are realizing that there are things worth preserving. The wood-lined yellow trolleys - this city’s leisurely icons - still clink their way across five routes in town. Though the trolleys are hopelessly outdated money vacuums, locals habitually shun the metro and bus systems for a ride on their eléctrico.

“Four years ago, my feeling was that with globalization, we were all starting to be alike, to dress alike, to use the same products,” says Catarina Portas, a former journalist who opened A Vida Portuguesa, a boutique that specializes in nostalgic and enduring Portuguese products. “It was evident that we’d see a resurgence of the local.”

Inside the Conserveira de Lisboa - The Lisbon Cannery , owner Regina Ferreira prepares a package for a customer. “There are people who pass through life,” says Ferreira, “and then there are people who have life pass through them.” Lisbon is gifted with a bumper crop of the latter. Photos: Joe Ray for The Boston Globe

The store is a shrine to the past, but cleverly in tune with the present. It exalts everything from Ferreira’s sardines to Coração metal polish - complete with the original 1928 logo of a heart pierced by an arrow - to tiny shrines to St. Anthony, the patron saint of good marriages and the finder of lost objects.

I watch a group of women in their 60s walk through the shop, stopping in front of almost every item, each clearly associated with a memory. Moments later, a twentysomething guy grabs a tube of Couto brand toothpaste and heads to the cash register as if he’s never heard of multinationals like Crest or Colgate.

“The younger generation has no idea what it was like to live in the Salazar times,” says Portas. “It influences us much more than we are conscious of, but these products help us figure out who we are.”

Over dinner with friends of friends (who, in typical local fashion, immediately become my friends), this quest for the Portuguese to understand who they are becomes evident when it comes to expressing themselves; that pierced heart is often worn on a sleeve.

“I think we became explorers because there’s nowhere to go,” says Pedro Matos, a United Nations consultant and founding member of the local citizens group, Um Dia Por Lisboa (One Day for Lisbon), referring to the country’s history as a global empire. “Our back is to Spain.”

He’s almost paraphrasing Portuguese literary hero Fernando Pessoa’s poem “The Field of the Castles.”

A skater takes flight in Lisbon’s central Baixa district. Photos: Joe Ray for The Boston Globe

Europe, stretched out from East to West
And propped on her elbows, stares
From beneath her romantic hair
With Greek eyes, remembering.
Her left elbow is pulled back;
Her right forms an angle.
The first, lying flat, says Italy;
The second says England and extends
the hand that holds up her face.
She stares with a fatal, sphinxian gaze
At the West, the future of the past.
The staring face is Portugal.

Over dinner, a theme of gentle melancholy and the identity it fosters is tossed around the table, each person with a slightly different nostalgic picture of the origins of their slightly sad souls.

Later, we spill out the door to continue our discussion on the streets of the bairro Alto neighborhood - the heart of Lisbon’s night life. Starting at midnight, young and old mix in the street, often ducking into tiny bars they affectionately call chapels to buy another round. Over the course of the evening, everyone trickles downhill, making a small exception near daybreak to go back up to the “illegal bakery” on Rua da Rosa where, if the police aren’t around, you queue up for sandwiches and pastries ordered through an iron grate.

One thing that sticks out over the course of the evening’s conversations is the aside, “You’ve heard fado; we’re all about jumping out the window.”

The many faces of Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (who wrote under many different names/personalities he called heteronyms). The cup before the figures reads “poetic vision”.Photos: Joe Ray for The Boston Globe

I quietly mention that I haven’t been to a fado show, and their glances urge me to rectify the situation quickly.

“Go here,” says a friend, directing me to the Mesa de Frades club in Alfama, the district where fado was born.

The next night, listening to a singer known as Carminho, people take on the look of the devout at prayer. Tinged with the deep feeling of a Berber chant or Jewish hymn, history and melancholy course through the songs.

The crowd is silent at the end of one of Carminho’s best, where the lyrics may be heartbreaking, but her voice is a vehicle for pure emotion, both singing of pain and piercing it. As a group, they shudder and capitulate and the entire city - the art, architecture, tiles on the wall, and people on the street - it all connects.

In Lisbon, there are these moments, like seeing the glint of a streetlight reflected on a tile facade, or hearing the rumble and electric hiss of a trolley, or feeling the touch of a little woman who leans on you while she’s speaking, moments where the hope and expectations of town are surpassed by reality, where, using only your heart, you understand the Portuguese love of country and the feeling about themselves that’s still being defined. It’s all there, it’s always been there: the heart on the sleeve.

Joe Ray

If you go…

Where to stay

Pensão Ninho das Águias
Costa do Castelo, 74
011-351-21-885-40-70
For the budget-minded, the “eagle’s nest” is hard to beat. Though the rooms are devoid of charm, the staff is kind, and there’s a terrace and a tiny sunroom accessed via a spiral staircase that offer stunning views. Doubles start at $45.

Hotel Britania
Rua Rodrigues Sampaio, 17
011-351-213-155-016 and toll-free 866-376-7831
http://www.hotel-britania.com
A four-star Art Deco gem designed by architect Cassiano Branco in 1944 and renovated in 2005. Rooms start at $175-$649.

Where to eat

O Caracol
Rua da Barroca, 14
011-351-21-342-70-94
If fresh seafood like squid or cuttlefish sautéed in their own ink doesn’t appeal, try pork that gives way under the weight of your fork. Three courses and wine for less than $39. Call ahead.

Bar do Peixe
Rua Praia do Moinho de Baixo
Near the town of Alfarim
011-351-21-684-732

Going to the Meco beach 40 minutes out of town is a perfect day trip if you’re here for a few days. The woman who runs the restaurant gets her fish from her husband, who fishes in front of the restaurant. Lunch or dinner with wine for $26-$39.

O Cacho Dourado
Rua Eca de Queriós, 5
011-351-213-543-671
If you want to dine with happy locals, this is the place. Lunch for less than $19.

Gemelli
Rua Nova da Piedade, 99
011-351-121-395-25-52
http://www.augustogemelli.com
Count on about $130 per person at this restaurant that blends Portuguese products and Italian style.

Shopping

A Vida Portuguesa
Rua Anchieta, 11
011-351-21-346-5073
http://www.avidaportuguesa.com
For hunters of unique souvenirs.

Conserveira de Lisboa
Rua dos Bacalhoeiros, 34
011-351-218-871-058
Pick up tasty canned goods and fall in love with owner Regina Ferreira.

Loving Lisbon PDF1Loving Lisbon PDF2

January 2009 - Centurion Magazine

The Changing Man

Maverick French chef Alain Passard reveals his ever-evolving culinary style, ‘grand cru’ vegetables and continuing his mother’s legacy

PARIS - Very little talking happens in Alain Passard’s kitchen. Crammed into a tight space, everyone has a job, knows it and doesn’t say much. The man himself refers to everyone working for him as ‘monsieur’ or ‘madame’. They, in turn, call Passard ‘Chef’, with a capital ‘C’.
Outside of the kitchen, however, Chef has evolved and changed so much since opening his Michelin three-star restaurant, L’Arpège, nobody, from his critics to his legions of admirers, is sure what to call him.
Passard, however, appears comfortable enough, arriving to work dressed in trendy jeans, boots, a starched white shirt with French cuffs, a Polo hoodie and – for a bit of Gallic flair – a green silk scarf. His full head of salt and pepper hair is long enough in the back that he could be on his way to a gig with the Stray Cats.

“I’m a roaster,” he says, referring to the skill that made him famous – a trade he learned from his Breton grandmother, Louise, who has the honour of being the only photo in Passard’s modest-sized dining room.

After making his name as a roaster, Passard has now expanded his repertoireto include the vegetables from his own gardens. Above, his famous tomate confite farcie aux douze saveurs. Photos by Joe Ray

At least he was a roaster until a mad cow disease scare ripped through France in 2000.

“Rungis told me they had done everything they could,” he says, referring to the mammoth wholesale food market that supplies products to Parisian restaurants, “but they couldn’t be sure everything they sold was untainted.”

There must have been a moment in this roaster’s mind when he thought, ‘My goose is cooked,’ and while some might say he shifted gears to adapt, others think he got out of the car, jumped on a tractor and drove into the countryside looking for solutions.

Not only did Passard give up on meat in early 2001, a move which made big waves in the three-star world, he rejected the entire food production chain – all the way down to the farmer – and started growing his own vegetables.

“Now, I want a passport,” he declares, describing the guarantee of provenance and quality he seeks, “…for everything.”

In 2002, he began growing his own vegetables on a two hectare farm in the French countryside, an idea that flourished to the point that there are now three farms spread across a total of six hectares in north-west France: one in the Sarthe, one in Normandy and another near Mont-Saint-Michel. Passard’s team of twelve farmers not only furnishes L’Arpège with produce, they also sell their goods to other restaurants and at a countryside market stand.

In the kitchen at restaurant L’Arpège in Paris, tiny beets (above) sit on a pudding-like mixture of Banyuls wine and cacao.Photos by Joe Ray

“I want ‘grand cru’ vegetables. I want to talk about the carrot the way a sommelier talks about Chardonnay,” he explains.

“We have a winemaker dynamic where I tell my gardeners the same thing I tell my cooks; you’ve got to taste, otherwise, it’s useless. We’ll taste onions, shallots or garlic from each farm and say ‘There! That’s where it’s best!’”

After his long stint cooking vegetables to the exclusion of more traditional proteins (large squash and pumpkins still serve as voluptuous table and window decorations), Passard has now worked his way back into meats, fish and poultry, but he keeps strict tabs on his products’ passports.

On cue, passport holder Bernard Antony, one of the premier fromagers and affineurs (cheese agers) in France and the provider of the ultra-rare three- and four-year old Comté served at L’Arpège, walks through the front door and gives Passard a kiss on each cheek.

I ask Chef if his “antique volaille du Haut-Maine au foin et vin de paille” is made with the famous French chicken known as poulet de Bresse, and Passard scoffs like I’ve insulted a friend. “Non! It’s Pascal Cosnet!” (I’ll later learn Cosnet runs the Ferme du Patis near Le Mans.) [The volaille, incidentally, is one of Passard’s signature dishes with chicken cooked on a bed of hay in a large Le Creuset pot.]

Slow-roasted beet cooked in a croute de sel de Guérande at Alain Passard’s Michelin three-star restaurant, L’Arpège in Paris. Photos by Joe Ray

To continue digging my grave, I ask how much of the produce in the restaurant is grown on his farm and how much he buys. Chef shudders at my ignorance. “There’s not a single carrot that doesn’t come from my farms!” he exclaims. Later, I wonder which of his three farms has the right growing conditions for the limes he uses in his kitchen and I pretend not to be listening when Chef and his assistant talk about the variety of organic apples they bought, but I get Passard’s point; it’s easy to understand that, animal or vegetable, they’re all his babies, prepared his way.

This can mean slow-roasted beets in a Guérande salt crust – deep coloured rubies that emerge from a salty shell or other, smaller beets that leave the kitchen as an amuse bouche on top of what looks like a dark pudding. Sous chef Anthony Beldroega catches me staring, smiles and simply says, “Banyuls. Cacao,” while handing me a plastic spoonful of the creation.

The thick, earthy combination of the port-like wine and chocolate simultaneously pulls my taste buds in two different directions and without realising it, I grin.

On the other side of the kitchen, past a stove covered with pots and pots of slowly braising vegetables and some of Passard’s famous tomate confite farcie aux douze saveurs, is a small grill with a whole chicken and some pork cooking over chunks of hickory.

Amuse bouches await to go out to the dining room. Photos by Joe Ray

At one point just before lunch service begins, Chef looks up at the clock, down at the pork, and commands: “Accelerate the pig!” Next to it, there’s the chicken I’ve insulted, removed from the nest of hay it was partially cooked in while sealed inside a Dutch oven. Now, it’s held in the perfect grilling position with spoons cleverly wedged between grill grates.

Later, with the pig still insufficiently accelerated, Passard improvises a little and flattens the pork against the heat using the heavy Dutch oven formerly used to cook the chicken.

Problem solved.

Stil life with gourds in the dining room.Photos by Joe Ray

As Chef tells it, his cooking method is merely the result of paying attention to the grande dame whose photo hangs on his wall.

“They’re all her recipes,” he says simply, pointing to Louise Passard’s picture. “She gave me everything, taught me what to look for when I made my first purchases, taught me the right cooking times and temperatures.”

She also taught him how to mix the arts of creating and hosting, something he’s worked to blend since opening L’Arpège. On the floor, an oasis of tranquility where he often spends generous amounts of time speaking to clients, he knows who came for lunch yesterday and how al dente someone else likes their risotto.

During lunch, he floats in and out of the kitchen – a beehive of activity, packed with almost as many cooks as there are diners in the restaurant – yet he can walk in and immediately know exactly what’s going on at any station at any given moment. He conducts the orchestra, but also loves to put his head down and jump into the fray.

“My grandmother had a sense of fire and the strength of fire, but she always liked pleasing people,” he explains. “The common thread that’s run through the restaurant’s history is her combination of passion and pleasure.”

-fin-

See the .pdf version of this story as it ran in American Express Centurion Magazine here

January 19, 2009 - Agence France Presse / AFP

BARCELONA (AFP)—With the economic brakes on worldwide, many chefs are reeling as diners scale back. But while French chefs turn in their Michelin stars, some of Spain’s best are staying a step ahead with “prêt-à-manger” dining.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in food-crazy Barcelona where a host of what some call “prêt-à-manger” restaurants have sprung up, making the country’s Michelin-starred chefs look like economic fortune-tellers.

“The mood here is gray,” said Pau Arenos, author and food writer for newspaper El Periódico where he coined the term “technoemotional’ to describe the space-age cuisine chef Ferran Adria, who helped launch Spain into the culinary limelight in the last decade.

Now, Arenos is watching the pendulum swing back. “There is fear and excitement—it’s hard to know who will fall or if the model of haute cuisine is in jeopardy.”

“Now, diners order cheaper wine and those who occasionally went to big restaurants but fear a crash are remaining in their homes. Check totals have fallen by 30 to 40 percent, and one-star restaurants, particularly those with younger chefs, have been forced to offer fixed price lunches at around 35 euros.”

It’s not all bread and roses on the Iberian Peninsula, the chefs agree.

“Restaurants are fighting,” confirms chef Carles Gaig who runs the one-star Gaig Restaurant, along with the tradition-based Fonda Gaig.

“The future is uncertain and 2009 looks like it will be even tougher than 2008, particularly for high-priced gourmet restaurants. Every day, people are spending less, so [high-end] chefs are looking for alternatives—whether that’s opening a new style of restaurant, incorporating different offers at their existing places, or simply battening down the hatches.”

Gaig and several other Michelin-starred chefs have gone for the first option, opening new restaurants that concentrate on the classics without melting the credit card. Martin Berasategui, Nandu Jubany and Joan Roca—all starred chefs, now have “prêt-à-manger” offerings.

Chef psyche has been forced to swing with their clientele’s needs, switching from out-of-this-world technique and expensive products like foie gras and truffles, to making the best of the basics.

At the high-end Gaig, one of the chef’s best-known plates is cannelloni with truffles; at the crunch-friendly “La Fonda Gaig” his macarrones de cardenal—pasta with sofrito, onion, Iberian ham and a parmesan sauce—are much more economical, but still draw rave reviews.

Chef Ramon Freixa runs the one-star El Raco d’en Freixa, where diners might choose a dish like streaky bacon cannelloni with curly endive, pumpkin milk curd and white truffle yogurt.

But at his brand-new Avalon, one of the most popular dishes is a traditional “arroz del senorito”—a type of seafood paella.

The back-to-basics trend shows no sign of abating.

Fermi Puig, whose one-star restaurant, Drolma, has been wowing Barcelona diners for years, opened the classic-heavy Petit Comite on December 17.

“We need these tradition-based restaurants to help us keep a strong base for our cuisine,” says chef Freixa. “We couldn’t keep our roots without them.”

For in a curious twist of fate, these avant-garde chefs are now rekindling interest in traditional Catalan cuisine, pouring energies once devoted to “airs,” “spherificiations” and foams into updating the classics.

“They’re using new methods like “sous vide” (vac-pac cooking), new products and new appliances,” says journalist Arenos, “but what appears in the dining room looks like it came out of grandma’s kitchen.”

This isn’t a rejection of the avant-garde, but a market-driven pot-stirring for clients who are hunkering down.

“Chefs are being forced to become more creative and imaginative to get better results out of the same ingredients,” says Gaig. “We do this by paying much more attention to cost and product selection.”

At Barcelona tapas bar Inopia, Albert Adria (pastry chef at the three-star El Bulli and brother of that restaurant’s superstar chef, Ferran) gets his tripe from Hospitalet de Llobregat, the brothers’ childhood home.

Carles Abellan, chef at Barcelona’s one-star Comerc 24, is now becoming famous for a kettle-cooked dish combining eggs, potatoes and blood sausage at his “prêt-à-manger” restaurant, Tapac 24.

After a while, it’s hard to tell if the overall trend is pushing Catalan cuisine ahead, or back to its origins.

“Forward,” affirms chef Gaig. “Catalan gastronomy is based on its roots.”

“Actually, both,” counters chef Freixa, “There is no evolution without tradition.”

-fin-

January 12, 2009 - brandchannel.com

Downtown Lisbon is a funny place to find the rare air of branding. Here, the street vendors who sell hot chestnuts in paper cones along with tiny hat and glove shops still outnumber the chain stores. For the time being, the total number of Starbucks in the whole country is exactly one…

Continue reading the article here

December 2008 - Centurion Magazine

Barcelona Over the past decade, Catalan chef Ferran Adrià has turned the food world on its head with creations like spherifications, essences and gels. Shockwaves of his influence – a cuisine he’s perfected called ‘molecular gastronomy’ – rippled around the world. Catalan and Spanish cuisine got an incredible boost and chefs here have both risen to the challenge and rode the wave. It has created an inescapable, contagious excitement about food in Spain that the French can only dream about.

Fellow Catalans and Michelin three-star chefs, Santi Santamaria of Raco de Can Fabes, in Sant Celoni, and Carme Ruscalleda of Restaurant Sant Pau in Sant Pol de Mar, are both understandably closer to classic Catalan than Adrià’s otherworldly offerings, but are each doing their distinct best, basing their work on magnificent, pure presentations of local ingredients.

Each chef offers a unique and delicious definition when asked, ‘What is Catalan cuisine?’ Ruscalleda, who thrust herself into the spotlight in 2005 when she became Spain’s first female three-star chef (she also has two Michelin stars for the Tokyo version of Sant Pau), tweaks her definition every time she stands behind the stove or considers what to highlight in her frequent menu changes. Santamaria, who has a total of six Michelin stars including the three at his Can Fabes home base, forced the question when he unleashed a media firestorm in early 2008, attacking Adrià and Spain’s new wave.

Exclusively for Centurion readers, the chefs have conceived the Centurion Menu around three typical ingredients chosen by Ruscalleda: zucchini flowers, gambas (prawns) and chocolate.  Product selection isn’t much of a stretch for Ruscalleda, who comes from an agricultural family in the town of Sant Pol de Mar, about 50km up the coast from Barcelona – for her, food has always played a central role.

“We didn’t have a TV,” she says, recalling her youth. “We had food and we talked about it. Everyone worked hard. Everyone did their part. I come from a generation where we helped out at home. Today, if a parent told their 12-year old to cook dinner, they’d scream child exploitation.”

Instead, the self-taught Ruscalleda relished the experience. “My training is domestic, but I sold and grew vegetables and meat. I learned everything from my mother,” she explains. Now, continuing the family tradition, she is joined in the kitchen by her son, Raul.

Carme Ruscalleda with her son Raul in the garden of Restaurant Sant Pau in Sant Pol de Mar, Spain.Photo by Joe Ray

Ruscalleda also had an artistic side to nourish. At 16, she taught herself the art of charcuterie. “I learned to kill pigs at home,” she says, playfully flaunting skills few chefs at any level possess. “I discovered that I could do classic sausages and more adventurous ones and people liked those, too. This is what opened the door for me.”

Her artistic side might now be most evident in what she calls ‘squid 2008 with five flavours’, where flavours are distributed across the protein in gelatin packets that are a gentle wink to Ferran Adrià, each containing liquid distillations of tastes like tomato, red pepper or squid ink, each bite different.

This love, understanding and appreciation of the product is evident in Ruscalleda’s ingredient choices. “The gamba is the princess of the sea,” she says, as if playfully referring to a fellow member of royalty. “In the kitchen we only use masculine zucchini flowers,” which are slightly smaller and grow on the plant stem, “they have the right form and nutrients.”

And the chocolate? She grins. “All women love chocolate.”

The real fun comes in seeing what Ruscalleda does with her products. Her deceptively simple ‘zucchini flower in tempura’ dish is encased in a nearly invisible tempura batter and dusted with gold flakes. Its ‘liquid stuffing’ combines Catalan classics like blood sausage, pumpkin and zucchini, which ooze from its floral wrapper only when cut.

Her ‘gamba omelette’ is a nib of pa amb tomàquet – garlicrubbed, olive oil-coated tomato bread – rolled into an ultra-thin omelette. Beneath it, a pink sauce made from roe, all topped with one perfect, finger-sized gamba with fiery red stripes.

The chocolate she loves is part of a well-thought-out dessert simply called ‘bitter’ – coffee, chocolate, hazelnuts and citrus ice cream, each lending different forms of bitterness and acidity, all floating above a pool of grapefruit juice. It’s the perfect follow up to a cheese course and a sumptuous meal.

Santi Santamaria, on the other hand, is an altogether different proposition.

While Senyora Ruscalleda is the gentle teacher who wins your heart by sliding edible art under your nose, the Can Fabes chef is a Spanish bull in a china shop.  He is also a man on a mission – the Catalan version of activist French farmer José Bové. He knows what he likes about his food and what he doesn’t like about other styles of cuisine.

While Bové literally drove a tractor into a French McDonald’s restaurant, Santamaria has been driving a figurative one through Spain’s new wave of cuisine for the past year. He is both a protectionist and a predator, a genius and a manipulator, a relentless self-promoter; you will know what he thinks whether it’s through your mouth or your ears and after a long interview, I can’t decide if I want to hug the man or hit him.

Among other wildly provocative statements, in early 2008, he accused Ferran Adrià and his camp of poisoning diners by using ingredients such as methylcellulose to help create gels and emulsions. This went down like a lead balloon in Spanish gastronomic circles, causing hundreds of back-bitten chefs to sign a protest letter.

‘Bitter dessert’. Photo by Joe Ray

“We learn to cook from our parents and we’re at the point of major change,” he says, undaunted.“We have to respect our products. I have to denounce these things.”

You get the sense that his take on the world has been shaken to the core by Spain’s new wave and now he’s lashing out, but when we spoke, he did show a bit of soul beneath the hot air.

“There’s a time where chefs have to say, ‘This doesn’t go on a plate,’ and we have to ask what kind of society we want,” he says, defending his attacks. “I don’t have problems with other chefs – I’m talking about food and morals.”

His methods can be brutish – his is a very blunt instrument – but he’s also forcing the thinking gastronome to question everything they put in their mouth. Is this good? Is it worth it? Why? Plus, the person he raises the bar for the most is himself, a challenge he relishes.

Curiously, Santamaria wants change. More specifically, he wants progress, but his vision of progress is linear, not the parabolic rise Spain has seen in the last several years. He may serve cockles in a ginger broth, leaving the tiny bivalves blissfully untouched, but unlike Ruscalleda, it will be a cold day in hell before he makes any on-plate references to Ferran Adrià.

The dish also reveals Santamaria’s strict adherence to product primacy. “You can’t make an oyster more perfect,” he exclaims, exhibiting restraint in one of his favourite ingredients. “The chef’s job isn’t to dominate. We must just understand. Usually, we have fantastic local mushrooms. This year, there aren’t as many, but there’s no way I’m going to import them.

Santi Santamaria, sans toque in the kitchen of restaurant Raco de Can Fabes. Photo by Joe Ray

“A menu must always be a function of time – it’s got to go with the seasons.” He uses what his local farmers and fishermen can provide; this is what he knows and he will fight for.

His choices for what to do with the Centurion Menu ingredients reflect and flaunt this primacy. His ‘zucchini flower with cheese’ is a perfect example of this. Even in their fleeting season, the flowers are incredibly temperamental – available one day, closed up and off the market due to foul weather the next.

Storage tends not to be much of a problem – if you get them in the morning, you serve them that evening or you throw them on the compost heap. On the plate, they are presented both cooked and uncooked to flaunt their beauty, stuffed with fresh cheese.

He creates ravioli with gambas, or more precisely, ravioli from gambas – replacing the pasta with thin slices of the crustacean and surrounding it with a mushroom sauce that has bubbled away in the oven for an astounding twelve hours. His chocolate beignets are traditionally a cream-filled Easter dessert in his homeland, but chocolate is the star this time, stealing the show when each beignet’s tiny orb is broken and the molten chocolate truffle slowly works its way across the plate.

“The kitchen is a living organism,” Santamaria states, before adding, “Discussing is good. I don’t want to sleep through this – I want to fight,” he says, taking a bite of cured meat and sipping vermouth, “This is good. If I like it, I say it. I feel alive.”  - Joe Ray

See the .pdf version of this story - with recipes - as it ran in Centurion Magazine here

December 2008 - Platinum Magazine

Some might say it‘s her huge smile and the twinkle in her eye. Others might guess it‘s the company she keeps, but I fell in love with Betty Koster once she started talking about what the French would call un mariage parfait: pairing an artisan Dutch cheese with coffee. It didn‘t matter that her husband, Martin, was standing nearby minding their cheese shop, L’Amuse, a short train ride from Amsterdam. From then on, I was putty in her hands for a Dutch cheese tour.

Good thing.

“They all look the same,” she says, motioning up at a wall full of large cheese wheels behind the counter. “And,” she adds, “all of the sub-par ones get shipped abroad. We always kept the best to ourselves.”

Which means I was glad she was leading the way. Armed with only a cheese slicer exactly like the one my mum used to use, Betty walks me through her country’s best offerings, introducing me to each by taking a slice from a larger wedge and placing it in my hand.

Tasting the first one, I knew I was in the right place. She sells the Netherlands’ best, often being the only cheese shop in the country to carry a certain producer’s limited production. In a sort of beautiful, self-fulfilling prophecy, her producers make sure she gets the crème de la crème.

“If we make them a star, they’ll be faithful to us,” she says, giving me a sliver of a seven-month old Wilde Weide Kaas (wild meadow cheese), which is a Gouda that has an almost sweet flavour and a beautiful, late-arriving herb taste.

“This guy has a waiting list to become a client,” she says, passing a sliver of 18-month old Olde Remeker. “This is the best cheese we have in Holland.”

“Really?” I ask, thinking of all the other cheeses the country has to offer.

There’s no pause: “Absolutely!” she says, and my tasting notes simply read, “Wow!” The Olde Remeker has all the flavour of an aged cheese with the creamy texture of a younger one.

I ask Betty what kind of drink she’d pair with it, thinking of the large quantities of wine the Netherlands imports.

“That’s the biggest challenge,” she says, before lifting the corner of her mouth with a look like she could finally trust me with an inside tip, “but it’s beautiful with coffee. The caramel and buttery notes of the cheese make a wonderful combination with an espresso. It’s like coffee and cream.” - Joe Ray

L’Amuse,
Hoofdstraat 185, 2071 EG
Santpoort-Noord
www.lamuse.nl

See the .pdf version of this story as it ran in American Express Platinum Magazine here

December 1, 2008 - brandchannel.com

Talk to enough people at the high end of French food and wine about how to compete with “new-world” wines - how to sell the “French” grand of wines - and it sounds like a broken record: quality, quality, quality, terroir, terroir, terroir (the latter roughly meaning the locality and the expertise of the producer). It gets old fast…

Keep on reading the article here

November 3, 2008 - brandchannel.com

Michel Janneau and Thierry Consigny. De-vine intervention.

Using an actor or porfessional athlete is a classic way to build a brand. Tiger Woods is the face of precision and perfection for TAG Heuer and Nike. George Clooney contributes classy sophistication to Nespresso with his trademark smirk. But, athletes and actors aside, associating full-blown artists - stereotypically volatile personas - or their work with a brand is a far more daring proposition…

Keep on reading the article here.

October, 2008 - Centurion Magazine

Ciccio Sultano has brought me out a tiny bowl that coddles a few forkfuls of homemade pasta bathed in almond milk and swirled artfully beneath a raw local shrimp known as a gobetto. Sweet, salty, slippery and sublime, it’s a carnal dish. “This is modern, but it’s Sicily,” clarifies Sultano “It’s like the perfect ... [insert four-letter word here].”
For the chef, achieving this level of perfection on an island so awash in history is a balancing act that relies heavily on layers and layers of classic Sicilian contrasts: the sacred and the profane, the sweet and the bitter. These play out every day on any Sicilian street. Kids in gaudy fake designer goods swagger and strut past ancient widows dressed in black. Ferraris carrying rich businessmen flick past peasants in horse-drawn carts, clicking slowly down the street. The one-show cinema in the town of Modica plays Iron Man one day and Gomorrah the next.

Sultano’s cannoli, a Sicilian classic, sitting atop gelato and a prickly pear sauce. Photo by Joe Ray

Above all of these contrasts (and perhaps because of them) are art and architecture. The island’s cuisine as part of the former clashes with the thousands of years of the island’s conquests and, at their best, bring these forms to their highest levels.
Yet, if you want to mess with the heads of Sicilians, play with their preconceptions about how they prepare food. Depending on who you ask, coffee is to be heaped into a tiny, octagonal stovetop espresso pot until overflowing, long pasta (like spaghetti or fettuccini) must be dropped with a spinning motion into a large pot of heavily salted water. There are time-tested ideas about how to prepare chickpea soup, stewed meats or the bittersweet classic, caponata, a mix that includes eggplant, onions, capers and tomatoes. Grandma is usually right, after all, but this often means that, for better or for worse, the menu hasn’t changed much since she was a little girl.
Sultano the artist uses a layered approach to create his own contrasts, slowly turning Sicilian food into a modern cuisine, always using the island’s best ingredients without upsetting the Motherland’s matriarchs … at least too much.

Jars of Sicilian pistachios used on Sultano’s cannoli. Photo by Joe Ray

For Sultano, this can mean pushing through some major, long-standing and historic barriers, but to listen to him and taste his food, it just makes sense. Though he may use history and time working with foreign chefs as a guide, his reliance on Sicilian products, such as olive oil, almonds and seafood is both primary and elemental, causing well-heeled clients from Ragusa Ibla and around the world to flock to his lavish dining room. This devotion even spawned a film, La Variante Sultano (‘Sultano’s Way’), a timpani-bashing ode to the island’s bounty, from the fields to the markets to the table. (A short clip can be found on the restaurant’s website, http://www.ristoranteduomo.it)

Sicilian pizza, deconstructed. Photo by Joe Ray

Depending on the season, a tasting meal might include thin slices of housesmoked grouper prosciutto wrapped around melon from the nearby town of Pachino, white wine made with zibibbo grapes that give off a ginger bread nose, a tomato sorbet that jars some sort of childhood memory and a sea urchin with lemon zest ricotta, which is not like a taste of the sea, but somehow the sea itself.

“Ragusa Ibla is quiet, it’s natural inspiration, but it’s all of Sicily that inspires me,” says the chef. “Palermo’s cuisine, Catania’s cuisine … everywhere. Sicily is very large and the mix of many domains, but I make recipes that are the story of Sicily.”

Then Sultano’s inner Sicilian steps out a bit further. “You need the playful side and the real eating. You need to laugh and smile, but you need to eat.”

Joe Ray

Where to eat

Il Duomo

Sultano takes a break with the hills of Ragusa Ibla behind him. Photo by Joe Ray

Via Capitano Bocchieri, 31
www.ristoranteduomo.it
A Sicilian splurge, Il Duomo is considered
by many to be Sicily’s best restaurant.
Put yourself in chef Ciccio Sultano’s
hands and let him guide you through
a seasonal and local menu.

Cucina Casalinga
About halfway between the towns of Modica
and Ispica, this unmarked restaurant looks
more like a bar/café from the outside (it’s
across from the Agip petrol station at a
90-degree turn in the road where SP 45
takes off toward Pozzallo), these are simple,
Sicilian home-style meals made for locals.
Try the chickpea or fava bean soup.

Where to get dessert

A pesto made with almonds and sprinkled with bits of sun dried tomato.

Antica Dolceria Bonajuto
Corso Umberto I°, 159
www.bonajuto.it
They had it right in The Godfather
– leave the gun, take the cannoli. And
the chocolate. Franco Ruta and his son
Pierpaolo have been making chocolate
and other delicious sweets the old
fashioned way for more than 100 years.

Caffe Sicilia
Corso Vittorio Emanuele, 125 Noto
Cheat just a little and leave the Ragusa
province for a drive to nearby Noto for
some of Sicily’s best pastries. Take
one of pastry chef Corrado Assenza’s
famous gelatos for a stroll through
this beautiful baroque town.

See the .pdf version of this story as it ran in American Express Centurion Magazine here

October, 2008 - Platinum Magazine

PARIS: on a side street at the top of the Marais neighbourhood, lost among wholesale shop fronts and residential apartments, there is an unassuming door. Enter and follow the maze of passageways and courtyards back to the end and you’ll find the last hand-forged silverware maker in the City of Light.
“Isn’t there someone out in the suburbs who still does it by hand?” silversmith Jean-Pierre Cottet calls back to his boss, Francis Regala.
“Don’t think so,” comes the response. “Didn’t that guy die?”

The Rue des Gravilliers is the historic home of Paris’ orfèvres – silversmiths – and while the other ‘white blouses’ have left the street and given way to more modern practices and changing tastes, the three-person Orfèvrerie Richard is still going strong.“It was our little project. Francis had worked [as a silversmith] with his father who had done the same thing,” says Danielle Regala, describing how she and her husband moved from Provence to Paris in 1994, buying the shop and its name from its previous owner. “We are one of the last to do everything by hand. That’s our little plus,” she says, borrowing the last word from English.
“I started doing this when I was 16,” says Francis, as he shines up a few pieces on a buffing machine. “I’m 58 – so that’s 42 years.”
While larger French competitors like Odiot and Puiforcat have a technique that’s more modern than Richard’s hammer forging, you will likely find their goods in high-end boutiques in a more up-market section of the city, and pay twice as much.
“We’re hidden in a courtyard,” says Danielle, who is the face of this tiny operation, “It’s like a confidential showroom.

The tiny display room, filled with display cases of products, feels crowded with more than two people, but in the back, Messrs Regala and Cottet have room to roam or swing their mallets. There are individual and shared workbenches, shelves of silverware dies that, here, serve as more than trendy bookends and scores of specialised tools, all centred around a giant press, flanked on either side with huge flywheels.

The walls are covered with scores of mallets and hundreds of tiny cubbyholes filled with fittings, clippers, and tiny nuts and bolts, probably not too dissimilar to a silversmith‘s shop a century ago.

“It’s a rare trade. It started disappearing in the 1950s,” says 27- year-old Cottet. “But now people are coming back to it. We’re learning to present things again.”

Spoons on the workbench at Orfevrerie Richard in Paris. Photo by Joe Ray

Known as orfèvre cuilléristes (Danielle likes to simply call what they do l’art de la table) they repair silver as well as create new items. They serve antique dealers, museums and individuals, and offer near-impossible-to-find services on an incredibly personal scale. Regular customers often go directly into the workshop and chew the fat with Francis before placing an order.

Though they never divulge clients’ names, they do share some of their more interesting projects. Cottet places a special silver and gold fork made for a Russian client in my hand, and I immediately note its comforting heft. I place it on the tiny scale next to the cash register: 102 grammes.

Along with their classic designs and silverware, there’s also what they call the Cinderella Teapot – a beautiful and incredibly detailed one-off which they did as a trade show piece. With rough-cut precious stones and stubby little wooden feet that make it look like it might shuffle away at any moment, it’s lighthearted, but also a testament to the beauty and intricacy of the work they can do.

With items like these, the Marais shop turns out to be the perfect place to let your mind wander. I imagine an exquisite last meal à la François Mitterand, centered around a man with his golden silverware set, old, lonely yet dignified. The phone rings and I wander over and pick up some silverware-sized ingots that are the raw blocks the finished pieces begin with. They are still warm to the touch. Fifteen minutes earlier, they would have roasted my hand – the first step in the silverware-making process is heating these with a flame-thrower until they turn a molten red colour.

“It’s a rare trade. It started disappearing in the 1950s,” says Jean-Pierre Cottet. “But now people are coming back to it. We’re learning to present things again.” Photo by Joe Ray

Cottet’s insistent hammering in the main room takes me out of my reverie and he shows me part of the production process. He places a fork over a convex mould and begins tapping away at the tines.

“When you work silver,” he explains, still tapping, “hitting it makes it harder.”

I take pictures as he hammers, but as I watch through the lens, the fork jiggles with each stroke, but it doesn’t look like much is happening.

“This must take forever,“ I venture, but it turns out he was just posing for photos. He smiles and switches hammers, this time picking up a short-handled cousin of a sledgehammer to do it for real. With full swings that make satisfying Bam! Bam! Bam! noises, the fork quickly bends to his will.

“It’s physical,” Cottet adds with a smirk. “We end up with one arm bigger than the other.”

I ask Francis if he’s thinking of retiring and he pauses and squints like he‘s trying to see into a too-distant future and says, “I’ll stop slowly.”

Another pause. Another squint, and then, “If there’s interesting stuff to do, I won’t stop.”

http://www.orfevrerie-richard.com

Joe Ray

See the .pdf version of this story as it ran in American Express Platinum Magazine here

September 14, 2008 - The Boston Globe - Travel

RAGUSA IBLA - The way homes cling to the hillsides in southern Sicilian cities often looks like an M.C. Escher drawing: Look up and there’s a stairway, look down and there’s a stairway, forget to look and you fall down the stairs.

Contrast that tightly-packed beauty with the Ragusa region’s endless fields of fruits and vegetables, almonds and olives, all neatly delineated with mile after mile of white stone walls. It’s Baroque and Liberty architectural styles brought to a high point, juxtaposed with pastoral perfection, all joined and made human by the history of the table.

“When you look at it from far away, you feel the harmony that’s been created, but there’s nothing casual in that harmony,” says Ciccio Sultano, who runs the kitchen at Ragusa Ibla’s Il Duomo restaurant and is arguably the island’s best chef. He’s talking about Sicilian architecture, particularly his Baroque hometown on a hill, but this is also a key to understanding his philosophy on cuisine. “Even from the inside you feel it

. . . you feel the layers of architecture piled atop one another. From past to present, history made them harmonious,” he says. “When I make a recipe, I don’t hide ingredients. I build upon them. It’s stratified.”

Now, a year after my first visit to Sicily, Sultano officially restarts the tour by coming at me with a layered spoonful of contrast.

“This,” he says cryptically, “is Sicily.”

Sultano had just spent a lot of time drawing a diagram of his one-bite course to explain the key contrast between sweet and bitter so that I would understand the idea. Finally, he threw in the towel and prepared the real thing.

The spoon combines a rectangle of raw snapper floating on a cloud of fresh ricotta with flecks of raw spring onion, all posed under a tiny dollop of caviar. The secret weapon, represented by a black dot on his diagram, is on the bottom of the spoon - a smudge of local Corbezzolo honey.

The honey is beguiling, more bitter than sweet and thick enough to be almost rough on the tongue. The textures and flavors mingle: raw milk cheese, raw fish, raw onion crunchiness, caviar’s sea-saltiness. It’s a mouthful of the Motherland.

I began traveling to Sicily and learning about its layers last year in a three-month effort to connect with my Sicilian heritage. Francesco Padova, who works for his family’s almond and olive oil business, Mastri di San Basilio, became a friend and guide, highlighting the contrasts that make this island famous: old and new, bitter and sweet, and, above all, a culture unto itself.

“Ciccio looks at Sicilian cooking from a simple, straightforward angle. Sometimes you have the feeling his kitchen is the only place where rural and sophisticated cuisines find common ground,” says Padova. “Centuries ago, this same attitude created arancini [literally “little oranges” - cooked, stuffed rice balls], cannoli, and other Sicilian cooking staples.”

A daytime scene in the southern Sicilian town of Modica. (Joe Ray for The Boston Globe)

At Il Duomo, placing perfect products together has magical results, like a “prosciutto” of house-smoked grouper combined with ultra-sweet melon from the nearby town of Pachino. There’s also octopus, softened in a 40-minute boil before being grilled, with an orange salad. Inspired to up my cephalopod consumption, my tasting notes read simply: “Cook more octopus.”

After lunch, Padova and I make the short drive from Ragusa Ibla to Ragusa to meet photographer Giuseppe Leone. Compared with the region’s rolling hillsides, populated mostly with sheep and lonely shepherds, the adjoining cities are compact doses of urban Sicilian culture. Old men, typically wearing driver’s caps and thick glasses congregate in the town squares, their wives gathered elsewhere in smaller groups, to cook or knit in the front windows of street-level apartments.

Outside, fruit and vegetable hawkers comb the city’s warren of streets in tiny three-wheeled Vespa “trucks,” bringing the country into the city, announcing their offerings in a mix of Italian, Sicilian, and what a smirking Padova identifies simply as “grunts and noisemaking so their customers will recognize their voices.”

Leone’s decades of work make him one of the island’s best historians and the de facto keeper of its visual memory. Many of the labels on his photo cabinets revolve around food: “agriculture,” “harvests,” “products from the earth,” “carob and almond trees,” and “festa” - festivals that combine religious ritual and gastronomic heritage.

“Sicily can be like a time machine and festas are the most evident way to see how past and present coexist,” says Padova. “Today in a festa, you see young faces pray to a saint just like their ancestors did. Leone frames these faces and these ideas with the same eye, and sometimes the same cameras, as he did 50 years ago!”

The grainy, high-contrast images are instant reminders that Sicily is an island that time forgot. Modern life may be here, but round any corner and you can go 50 to 100 years back in time.

Leone’s photos instantly recall a pair of festa scenes I saw last year. In Palermo, the capital, I followed thousands who had come out to watch as giant statues of Mary and Jesus were carried in a Good Friday procession through the ancient Ballarò market. Old couples watched from their windows, Roman guards protected the fallen body of Jesus, uniformed schoolchildren in berets escorted a grieving Mary. Under a light rain, a band alternated between dirges and uplifting songs.

It became a moment with no indicator of what decade or even what century it was.

A few weeks earlier, I had watched as members of the city of Catania’s fish sellers’ union hoisted a 10-foot pylon, filled with lights, sculptures of saints, and religious scenes onto their shoulders, walking and running it through the city’s main square for several hours as part of the feast of Saint Agatha. Though there was a jovial atmosphere, the men had just spent the entire day hawking fish, and hauling a 200- or 300-pound column around at night was clearly an act of devotion.

“The roots of the farmworker culture are based on the festa,” says Leone, recalling Sicily’s connection to its rural roots, “Take the fava bean; historically, it’s poor people’s food.” Now, something as simple as a fava bean soup is a celebration of, and perhaps longing for, the past, a devotional to spirit and sustenance.

“These festa come from past cultures and events,” says Leone. “They are the DNA of Sicily.”

While Leone’s work often shows how present the past can be in Sicily, and chef Sultano has the luxury of using history as a springboard, at Antica Dolceria Bonajuto, something between a chocolatier and a pastry shop in Modica, Pierpaolo Ruta and his father, Franco, tread carefully between being the guardians of food culture and practitioners of how to do things best.

“Cocoa has 450 flavors and 380 of those disappear in sterilization,” says Pierpaolo, alluding to the flavor-stripping industrial process where chocolate is cooked for up to two days. The Rutas refer instead to a 17th-century book by Francesco Redi, where cocoa is crushed by stone.

A Roman guard during a Good Friday festa procession near the Ballarò market in Palermo. (Joe Ray for The Boston Globe)

Modican chocolate is a bizarre and beautiful experience, with a granularity that takes it about as far as you can get from a Hershey bar. The Rutas’ shop is the local inspiration for doing things the old-fashioned way.

“What we do isn’t marketing,” says Franco at a desk so covered with books and magazines that there’s no workspace. “We choose our sweets as a way to remember how our ancestors worked: making things by hand. For me, the soul of the artisan is in the way you use your hands.”

“Sometimes we’re more of a cultural association than an enterprise,” says Pierpaolo half-jokingly.

With fresh ricotta filled to order in a crisp crust, their cannoli are something of a religious experience. “There are many ways to make things faster,” says Pierpaolo. “But we prefer to make them one by one, the way it was transmitted to us.”

Eating one, it dawns on me that getting cannoli into the mouths of FDA or USDA representatives might be the easiest way to relax US laws against raw milk cheese imports.

“If someone asks what we’re doing, I have to show them,” says Franco, pointing to the kitchen. “The only way to keep the soul is to continue like our ancestors.”

This makes Pierpaolo think of their centuries-old chocolate shaking process, where chocolate tablets, still in molds, are shaken to get rid of any air bubbles with what he describes as a “tupa-tuptuptup” noise. “That’s the sound of my childhood - that’s the sound of his childhood,” he says, gesturing toward his father. “We don’t want to change that.”

Later, I join Padova’s family for a Sunday cookout just outside the small town of Ispica. A plate of their cured, home-grown olives is making the rounds and his uncle Guido presides over the festivities and mans the barbecue, cooking several cuts of meat over wood from olive and almond trees. At the table, it’s a fun free-for-all; Vincenzo, Padova’s father, and Guido laugh and talk in a mix of Sicilian and Tuscan dialects. There seem to be more conversations than people, with everyone munching, talking, and reaching across the table for a little more.

In some places, I look at a good mom-and-pop store and wonder if it will be there next year. But protected by history, Sicily is preserving my next taste of a memory.

Joe Ray can be reached through his website, joe-ray.com, and his Sicily blog, Eating The Motherland.

If you go…

What to expect
Bring walking shoes and an extra memory card for your camera. Sicilian cities are excellent for roaming, but so are the countryside and beaches. A bus network (http://www.aziendasicilianatrasporti.it) connects towns, but is unreliable. Better to rent a car.

Where to stay
Nacalino Agritourismo
Corso da Nacalino, Modica
011-39-0932-77-90-22
nacalinoagriturismo.it
This family-run farm and bed-and-breakfast is somehow both romantic and a great family option. The owners’ young daughter often hosts afternoon tea parties and farm tours for little visitors, while her parents cook up wonderful and reasonably priced meals with organic food from their farm. About $50-$60 per person. Dinner and wine is well worth it for an additional $28 or so.

Poggio del Sole Resort
3½ miles from Ragusa on the road to Marina di Ragusa
011-39-0932-666452
poggiodelsoleresort.it/inglese
This luxurious hotel sits between Ragusa Ibla and the sea. Doubles with breakfast about $212 in low season, $268 in high. Ask about promotions.

Where to eat
Il Duomo
Via Capitano Bocchieri, 31
Ragusa Ibla
011-39-0932-651265
ristoranteduomo.it
A splurge, Il Duomo is considered by many to be Sicily’s best restaurant. Let chef Ciccio Sultano guide you through a seasonal and local menu. Tasting menus at about $140 and $155 with vegetarian options available.

Cucina Casalinga
About halfway between Modica and Ispica, this unmarked restaurant looks more like a bar/cafe from the outside (it’s across from the Agip gas station at a 90-degree turn in the road where SP 45 takes off toward Pozzallo). Here they deliver simple, Sicilian home-style meals made for locals. Try the chickpea or fava bean soup. Meals run around $17.

Where to get dessert
Antica Dolceria Bonajuto
Corso Umberto I, 159
011-39-0932-941225
bonajuto.it
Clemenza had it right in “The Godfather”: “Leave the gun, take the cannoli.” And the chocolate. Franco Ruta and his son Pierpaolo make chocolate and other delicious sweets the old-fashioned way, as it has been done for more than 100 years.

See the .pdf version of this story as it ran in the Boston Globe: page 1,page 2, page 3

September 1, 2008 - brandchannel.com

Campbell Evans is quick to set the stage in what he calls a “higgledy-piggledy tour” of the state of the Scotch whisky industry.

As the head of government and consumer affairs for the Scotch Whisky Association, Evans reports that the 500-year-old process of making whisky is Scotland’s biggest industry, with 90 percent of it heading overseas in exchange for GBP£ 5.6 billion, making it one of the United Kingdom’s biggest exports. With 40,000 employees, it’s also Scotland’s biggest employer.

Initial reports indicate that though struggling with tough economic times, the United States—the biggest export market for Scotch whisky—is still a steady customer, and there is what Evans terms as “enormous growth” in Asia.

With this success, it’s no wonder everybody wants a wee bite of the big Scottish pie. Counterfeiting is rampant and maintaining the brand image of Scotch is as important as ever.

“We have five lawyers who would sue anybody, anywhere,” says the grinning but not really joking Scot. “We have 60 to 70 court cases going on at any one time around the world.”

Describe your job:

I’m in charge of the PR and media relations for the Scotch Whisky Association. We protect the interests of the Scotch whisky industry around the world.

Scotch whisky can only be made in Scotland, but is drunk in 200 countries—it makes us take a global perspective and one of our priorities is to protect Scotch’s good name.

How big a deal is counterfeiting?

Companies love to dress up their product with our name. The nature of counterfeiting makes it difficult to determine how much is out there, but in 2006, we clamped down on 100 million bottles. We’ve seen “Highland Blend Whisky” coming out of China and similar stuff from Holland. We also found bottles trying to be smuggled from France to the UK and as a result, found an operation that had made somewhere on the order of two million bottles of product over an eighteen-month to two-year period.

We even found a canned product [Evans cringes when he gives this example] claiming to be Scotch whisky. We tracked the supply chain through Turkey and back to Austria and uncovered sixty million cans. So from one can, we found sixty million.

There was even a guy in India who named his “Highland Terrier” and tried to convince the judge that it was because he loved dogs so much.

How long do the cases take to resolve?

It depends where you are in the world and how interested the local authorities are. In many cases, there will be a lot of help—we’ve even been involved in raids with the South African Scorpions (a SWAT team-like special operations branch of the South African government).

Surprisingly, we even get lots of support in China, yet in India, some cases can take twenty-five years.

At that pace, why bother?

If someone tastes a knockoff and doesn’t like it, we’ve lost a potential long-term sale.

What’s the external perception of Scotch whisky? Which brand(s) best fits into this and why? How has it changed over time?

The perception of Scotch varies from country to country. In new markets like southern Europe and in Asia, Scotch is seen as a fashionable drink to have along with water, cola, soda and other mixers. In its more longstanding markets, such as the US and UK, Scotch had come to be seen as a drink for middle-aged males, but that’s changing. With the growth of single malt (the product of one distillery) in particular, a younger consumer is exploring Scotch whisky and more women are choosing Scotch, both blended (the product of many distilleries) and single malt.

While maintaining a bit of a boy’s club image, the industry is also pushing toward this younger (late 20s to 30s) market and trying to attract more women—how do you attract new consumers without alienating the existing ones?

Different markets view Scotch in different ways. There’s a big difference between single malt enjoyed with a little water and those who like to add a bit of cola to their blend… Lighter Lowland and Speyside malts offer an easy introduction for first-time malt drinkers, but many like to dive straight in to the robust, smoky flavor of Islay whiskies.

The industry went through some tough times in the 1970s and 80s, and as a result, there was a wave of industry consolidation and many distilleries were mothballed. Could you explain the branding problems faced in that period and how the industry and brand recovered?

From the 1950s to the early 1970s, there was strong international growth for Scotch whisky. Difficult global economic conditions due to the 1970s oil crisis led to a slowdown in volume demand. This was followed in the 1980s by a short-lived fashion that avoided red meat and brown spirits. The benefit for consumers was that companies were able to focus on single malt Scotch whisky in the late 1980s, creating in the following 20 years a new market and interest in Scotch, resulting in record sales of Scotch in 2007.

Why is the high end of the industry doing so well and what are the regional differences we see in that sector around the globe?

There has been a growth in interest in premium spirits in the US, especially a drink like Scotch that offers the consumer flavor, character and integrity with a strong link to the place of the drink’s creation. In Asia, new economic wealth, plus improved economic prospects in South America have driven growth in Scotch sales. The opening up of eastern European and Russian markets has also benefited Scotch, although there is still a long way to go—different drivers, but all resulting in growth.

How will Scotch whisky branding evolve in the next 10 to 20 years?

The economic growth in many Asian countries, increasing interest in single malt Scotch whisky and a growth in premium blended Scotch in more traditional markets indicate that there will be growth in many parts of the world for Scotch in the next decade and beyond. As a result, we might see further consumer interest in the flavors and aromas that can be found in different Scotch whiskies and a return to an appreciation of the differing characteristics to be found in blended Scotch whisky. The growing interest in Scotch has led to investment in distilling and warehousing in excess of US$ 800 million being announced in 2007.

How will the industry simultaneously ramp up production and maintain a strong brand reputation?

Scotch remains closely linked to Scotland and to individual distilleries. This sense of place, or the craft of the blender, means that the individual character of each whisky comes through as a personal experience for every drinker.

What’s a brand you like and why?

Plymouth Gin. There’s a hint of sweetness, but I find it has a full, fruity flavor which mixes well with tonic, the ice and a slice of lime—the combination works perfectly.

… but that sounds more like a way you like to unwind, not your favorite brand.

They’ve changed their packaging, but the taste is the thing I go for, not the packaging. If you want to have a sustainable enjoyment, it’s the flavor, character and taste. Not the packaging. Not for me. It might be attractive first off, but it’s what’s in the bottle that’s got to deliver.
 
 

Joe Ray is a Paris-based freelance journalist specializing in food and wine. He can be contacted via his Web site: www.joe-ray.com.

August, 2008 - Centurion Magazine

PARIS - When chef Otis Lebert and I headed over to try a new restaurant with a whiz-kid in the kitchen, I wasn’t anticipating a clash of egos on the street. Like two cagey boxers squaring off for the first time, both chefs immediately flash an unpleasant side right there in front of the restaurant. I make a note to myself: bad idea.
“You have trouble getting fish right now?” asks L’Incroyable 1793’s Mehdi As Siyad, the younger of the two, not exactly extending an olive branch to the visiting chef, but at least making an effort.
Generally a polite and shy type, Lebert, who runs the fine Taxi Jaune restaurant in the Marais district of Paris, gives a rude grunt as a reply.
“It’s always like this between chefs,” says As Siyad in a not-so-quiet aside, ignoring Lebert as he flicks his cigarette butt into the alley and heads back into his kitchen.

Not bad. Less than a year under his belt as a head chef and the kid’s already learning to push himself off the ropes.

Lebert isn’t the only chef interested in visiting L’Incroyable. Threestar chef Marc Veyrat, As Siyad’s former boss, wants to come try the pigeon en pyjama crucifié – crucified pigeon in pyjamas – because about a year ago, the young chef invented a new method to debone the bird.

“One afternoon, [Guérin] made me cook with a blindfold and a sauté pan,” recounts As Siyad. “‘Ok, what do you smell? What does this make you think of?’ he asked. I learned that flavour pairings don’t work on pretentious old ideas.” Photo by Joe Ray

Chefs – including Lebert – go nuts for this sort of thing. Once deboned, the bird is cooked in a sauté pan and crudely nailed to the cutting board it’s served on – the hammering back in the kitchen alerting diners that their order is ready. Once on the table when the mains come around, Lebert needs to be coaxed into sharing – it’s nicely seared and a little crunchy on the outside and has a perfect rosy pink centre. Though daring in name and presentation, it is excellent and modern French food.

“I like pushing limits,” As Siyad says, grinning. “It shocks the older set, but afterwards, they eat it and they like it.” His favourite customers so far were a pair of octogenarians who ordered the pigeon and liked it so much, they invited him to their home for Christmas.

Is this the future of French cuisine? Lord knows, but this is a chef with chararcter, his heart is in the right place and, at just 24, he is quickly finding his feet.

Thanks to a series of stints at several Michelin-starred restaurants, starting with a watershed year with Eric Guérin at La Mare aux Oiseaux in the Guérande region and culminating in three months with Veyrat, As Siyad has gained an innate sense of what is good and how things work.

A pair of Proust-worthy madeleines, accompanied by pink grapefruit wedges under a drizzle of raspberry reduction and a sprinkle of fleur de sel. Next to it is a tiny glass filled with goodness. “It‘s just melted Werther’s (caramels) with a little butter and cream,” says As Siyad, modestly jiggling the bait. Photo by Joe Ray.

On another day, sans Lebert, As Siyad demonstrates this by preparing a foie gras appetiser. He cuts a section of the goose liver, places it in a hot pan without oil and walks away. Drawn back a short time later, he flips the foie gras without checking the underside, knowing it was seared like he wanted. “One afternoon, [Guérin] made me cook with a blindfold and a sauté pan,” recounts As Siyad. “‘Ok, what do you smell? What does this make you think of?’ he asked. I learned that flavour pairings don’t work on pretentious old ideas.” L’Incroyable’s tiramisu dessert with cocoa and roasted red pepper puree may be a new idea that’s tough for a more uptight set to digest, but it already has a following of regulars who swoon for it. “Who says you can’t have salty flavours in a dessert?” asks As Siyad, who also seems to be a born teacher. “If I put a lump of hot coal next to you and put a drop of oil on top, you’re going to think right away of barbecue, summer, sausages,” he says, another lesson learned from Guérin. “The French are educated on a grandma’s cuisine of maman and I like to play with that.”

This becomes clear when a friend of his stops by and As Siyad cooks up one of his desserts – a pair of Proust-worthy madeleines, accompanied by pink grapefruit wedges under a drizzle of raspberry reduction and a sprinkle of fleur de sel. Next to it is a tiny glass filled with goodness. “It‘s just melted Werther’s (caramels) with a little butter and cream,” he says, modestly jiggling the bait.

I try a spoonful and turn into a six-year old with a spoon in my mouth, a big, goofy grin and my legs dangling off the edge of a bench. As Siyad grins back, knowing he’s got me. “Just like one of grandma’s desserts, right?”

This is the 'French' half of a story on a pair of ambitoius chefs (the other chef is Australian Dan Hunter) To see the .pdf version of the complete story as it ran in American Express Centurion Magazine, click here

The Boston Globe - Travel - Sunday, July 27, 2008

A port city known for poetry, savory food, worldly influences, Valparaíso has created itself

VALPARAÍSO - Pablo Neruda would be proud. Mere moments after arriving in the city the poet and Nobelist once called home, we set out to track down a mysterious lead and find the heart of this place by starting with its stomach.

Though ostensibly writing about himself in his “Autorretrato,” Neruda might as well have been writing about the quirky charms of Valparaíso and its people.

For my part, I am, or believe I am . . .

invisible worker, persistently irregular . . .

With two friends, one a lifetime local, I head out to find an unmarked restaurant called Los Deportistas, named for its proximity to a soccer field. We buzz across the city’s ramshackle flat center in a pint-sized public bus, picking up the port’s dock and market workers along with uniformed grade-schoolers on their way home for lunch, getting an accidental slice of life as we go. Eventually we start the dizzying climb into one of the “cerros,” the hills that surround the center of town and create its distinct neighborhoods.

Up here, we find the homes that give the city its distinct look: beautiful, European-influenced architecture that often combines wood and brightly-colored corrugated metal. Perched on the hills, these homes - a little rusty, a little rickety - create a feeling that the city is held together with sticks and glue, yet that’s one of the keys to its beauty and charm.

While Santiago may be the business-centric capital (which can also be rather conservative and dull) and the country’s soul is reflected up and down its skinny, 2,600-mile strand of deserts, mountains, lakes, and farmland, Valparaíso is Chile’s beating Bohemian heart.

The rest of the country can be buttoned-up, tight, tidy, and even occasionally moneyed, but “Valpo” is none of that; if you have a creative urge to feed, this is your town.

Like San Francisco in its hippie heyday, persistently irregular Valparaíso is driven by the alternative and the artistic - a visual, cultural magnet for Chileans and centuries of adventurous expatriates who discovered the Pacific port city just before or after making their way around Cape Horn. While some world cities have corners that create a unique, authentic flavor, here, that magic is still blissfully spread across the entire town.

With a good dose of outside influence, a geography that forces creativity, and an atypical reputation that attracts a certain kind of Chilean, the city created itself on its own unique terms.

Back on the bus, the driver pulls over in the middle of residential nowhere, announcing our stop. The man who runs a newspaper and soda stand on the corner points us down the street to a two-story residential house that looks more like my Uncle Charlie’s old place in Des Plaines, Ill., than one of the best restaurants in town.

We stagger around in the street, looking upward, looking lost, searching for an outward indication that we are where we’re supposed to be: a sign hanging from the building, a plaque on the door - nothing. So I knock, wait, then open the door.

Jackpot.

A couple of school kids and a toddler in a Spider-Man costume, all of whom belong to the family that runs the place, swirl around at our feet. On a bar to the left are two trays of cooked tongue and a bottle of local honey liquor so thick, it’s tasted with a spoon. Across the room, two glass-fronted coolers house big, beautiful hunks of meat waiting to be grilled.

“How did you find us?” asks a kindly man who shows us through what could be called a “KGB supper club” atmosphere of partitioned rooms, white walls, fluorescent lighting, and tiny racks of flags that look like they’ve been pinched from a shelf at the old Pan Am airlines desk.

It’s all run by chef Ida Delgado, who is 80. Her kitchen is a rambunctious, oversized setup that takes up a room that may or may not have been the home’s original kitchen and spills out onto a partially-covered outdoor space where she does the grilling that makes the place famous.

“We have chicken and fish, but people come here for the meat,” says Delgado, making her way back to the coolers in the entryway. “This is my meat.”

She grabs a large chunk of beef with hands that, after a lifetime in the kitchen, look like custom butcher’s tools. “It goes fast,” she says, setting the meat on the table with a thud. “Chileans eat a lot of meat.”

Delgado is first and foremost devoted to her family and their restaurant, but she loves her town.

“On this side of town, I like the people, but on the other side, I don’t know,” she says, trailing off and making me wonder if I should be watching my back where I’m staying. Instead, Delgado is an extreme example of how tight and individual each of Valparaíso’s cerro communities can be.

Lunch at Deportistas is a long, delicious, and weirdly charming affair and what is served to our trio takes up the better part of a table for eight. Delgado’s steak, which she imports from Uruguay and cooks on a big, blackened flat-top grill out back, is one of the finest of my life. Crusty, tender, meaty, juicy, and, unfortunately, not mine. I’ve ordered the tongue (still very good) and had a bite or two of my sweetie’s “bisteca.” As we tuck in, Delgado’s son Renato prepares a special vinaigrette, tosses the salad at the table, taps grated cheese from a spoon onto one of our dishes, and arrives later with second helpings, somehow gently convincing us that we still have space in our stomachs.

The experience will be par for the course in Valparaíso only in that it is unexpected, strange, and wonderful.

After lunch, I retrace our path back across the town center, wander through labyrinthine streets and skinny stairways speckled with the town’s artistic graffiti murals, and end up at the bottom of the “ascensor” Cerro Alegre. In Santiago, about 70 miles away inland, it would be called a funicular, but with the near-vertical angle many of the cars climb and descend, Valparaíso’s hallmark method of transportation is known succinctly as an “elevator.”

Atop the hill, seeing an old, black VW bug in a driveway and glowing lights in the home next to it, I stop into an artist’s gallery on a whim, and quickly understand that engraver Jorge Martínez García is not aiming for the knickknack-seeking tourist crowd. García’s is a deep and moody art. He is in back, printing a poster-sized etching of a landscape where even the contrasts between black and white in the hillsides are full of emotion.

“It’s like composing,” García says of his craft, speaking as if we’ve met earlier and I have been there all day. Working with an assistant, he places a beautiful French paper over an etched, inked copper plate and turns a wheel to run a roller over the top, transferring the ink from one surface to the other.

“These aren’t copies, it’s different every time,” he says, gingerly lifting the paper to reveal the finished product, “Each one is a different interpretation.”

Although he’s presumably talking about his work, like Neruda, the lines between his life, his work, and his town never materialize.

“Each cerro is a barrio [each hill is a neighborhood]. They don’t exclude, but they give each neighborhood its own character - it’s improvised,” he says. “Here, you integrate into the geography you’re given. It forces a certain creativity. You’re obliged to create.”

Farther up the hill, I meet with Carolina Espinoza, who lives in Valparaíso but spends several days a week teaching Chilean history and geography a few hours away in Santiago.

Espinoza began calling Valpo home a year ago for reasons that seem to be strange bedfellows: history and chaotic inspiration.

“It’s cosmopolitan here. Valparaíso is built on this diversity,” she says, referring to the city’s expansive port, which made it an international shipping hub until the construction of the Panama Canal, and, after a period of adjustment, it remains so today.

This mix of cultures the city has attracted for centuries both contrasts with and parallels the geographic layout. Though the tiny downtown is on a grid plan like most other Chilean cities and towns, climb a few feet into the hills and that section of the city map looks like a cross-section of a rabbit warren.

“It’s always the most chaotic up here. The higher you go, the crazier it gets,” Espinoza says. Yet rising above downtown’s frenzy also has a calming effect. “People are cool - not too stressed out like in other cities,” she says of Valparaíso’s inhabitants, called porteños like other port city residents. “Personally, I love to see things less squared-off, with the buildings stuck into the hillside. . . . People here know how to create a place that fosters creativity. When I moved here from Santiago, my body relaxed. I could breathe, my mind opened.”

Later, at the top of the ascensor El Peral, I talk with its operator, or “machinista,” who uses a steering wheel to control its five speeds and a hand brake like those found on a San Francisco cable car.

“This ascensor started working in 1902,” says Christian Salazar, who has been at the wheel for 12 years. “We didn’t have taxis or buses then. These came before everything.”

With the exception of switching from vapor to electric power, the El Peral ascensor functions much like it did when it opened more than 100 years ago. The communication Salazar has with the station at the bottom relies on a system of lights - no phone, no radio. “When the lights are on, they’re ready to go,” he says.

“This belongs to the state, but it’s a part of the city,” he says, with downtown at his feet and several hills rolling up and down through the horizon as he gently brings the two cars to a halt (a ride costs about a quarter). “Up top is where you control it. Down below, you just shut the door and hit the light.”

There it is - top and bottom, foreign and local, old and new, all linked by an ascensor.

Farther up the hill, García agrees. “People know the city is special and open up and give it their own energy,” he says, “It opens people’s imagination. It resonates.”

IF YOU GO

What to do
Bring walking shoes, a sketchbook, and an open mind. The historic port city is made for wandering and often is best understood by simply enjoying the view. Many hotels will have walking maps for guests.

La Sebastiana Ferrari
692 011-56-32-256-606
fundacionneruda.org
One of Pablo Neruda’s three homes in Chile, as quirky as Valparaíso and the Nobel poet himself. Tuesday-Sunday 10 a.m.-6 p.m.

Jorge Martínez García’s studio
Lautaro Rosas
330 011-56-32-249-8784
jorher.com
See the artist’s moody engravings, paintings, and monotypes and watch him work at his gallery-studio in the Cerro Alegre.

Where to stay
B&B La Nona
660 011-56-32-249-5706
bblanona.com
There’s no sign for this bed-and-breakfast. Low-key and friendly, with great feel-at-home touches like an old, red radio playing in the bathroom. About $25 per person per night.

Zero Hotel
Lautaro Rosas
343 011-56-32-211-3113
Terraces, gardens, views of the bay, and only nine rooms in this trendy and well-thought-out “homescape.” $170-$265 per night.

Where to eat
Los Deportistas
1217 011-56-32-237-5159
Lunch daily 1-4 p.m., dinner Wednesday-Friday starting at 8 p.m. About $20 for a huge meal, including one of the best steaks of your life and a tasty house wine.

Delicatessen Emporio
383 011-56-32-233-9373
The front edge of food in Chile. One dish combines local clams with Spanish chorizo. $20-$40 for a full meal.

Read the PDF version of the story here: page 1page 2.

July 13, 2008 - Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Lyon, France — The design on the door to Jojo’s wine shop says it all: It’s a line drawing of owner Georges “Jojo” Dos Santos locked in a very passionate embrace with a bottle of wine.

With a flipped-up haircut and a spunkiness reminiscent of the cartoon reporter Tintin, Dos Santos, and his shop, Antic Wine, are two of the most recognizable icons in Lyon. Only two minutes after my arrival, he exclaims, “Let’s go!”

Apparently, the “Lyon by Jojo” tour does not begin with wine.

Something of a walking Rolodex, Dos Santos, 37, leads me in and around the city’s historic Vieux Lyon neighborhood. Doing so, he not only shares some of Lyon’s best addresses, but also shows me a hidden path to the city’s notoriously hard-to-reach inhabitants.

Luckily, Lyon is the gastronomic capital of France, and if there’s a secret passage to the soul of a Lyonnais, it goes through the esophagus.
We start by walking into Boulangerie St. Vincent, and the bakery’s tiny size seems to amplify the smell of yeast in rising dough and the buttery odor of croissants still in the oven. It gets me so worked up that I’m willing to go on the record as calling it the best-smelling bakery in France.

Dos Santos walks across the tiny floor, grabs a baguette a mais - something like a multigrain baguette made with fresh corn kernels - breaks it open and stuffs his face inside.

Several fresher-than-fresh kinds of bread await customers at Lyon’s postage-stamp-size Boulangerie St. Vincent. Photo by Joe Ray

“Ahh, smell this!” he exclaims, emerging from the torn loaf with a huge smile and flour on the end of his nose. If you could get drunk on the smell of bread, this would be the baguette.

We scoot around the corner to the Halle de la Martiniere market and Dos Santos makes a beeline for his favorite cheese shop, Le Jardin de la Martiniere. Owner Virginie Messad gives us a taste of some seriously good Morbier, with a perfect creamy texture and raw-milk flavor, as she and Dos Santos discuss the market as one of the neighborhood’s pillars, far from the hubbub of the city’s ritzy and touristy Les Halles de Lyon market.

Dos Santos’ tour has already brought us past a beautiful butcher shop, his favorite place for ice cream, a furniture-restoration workshop that looks like it’s been pulled from the early 1900s and a pristine bakery, but when Messad asks me what I think of the city and its people, I realize we have been moving so fast, nothing has sunk in.

We hit the brakes when Dos Santos introduces his photographer friend Frederic Sonier, who goes by the nom de plume of Frederic Jean.

“We’re bad at making people feel welcome, and we’re closed,” says Sonier, describing the typical Lyonnais. “But that mentality is changing. People are becoming more open and sympathetic.

“It takes a while to discover their richesse - they’re like the traboules,” he says, referring to Lyon’s easy-to-miss pedestrian passageways that link one street to another, often hiding a beautiful courtyard.

“I can’t speak for everybody,” concludes Sonier, “but I share what I love.”

A nighttime view of the Notre-Dame de Fourvire basilica seen from the riverbanks in downtown Lyon. Photo by Joe Ray

Challenge to authenticity

The soul-baring - and a state of the union for Lyon’s cuisine - comes from a pair of unlikely sources. Dos Santos stops for lunch at Les Adrets, a few doors up from Antic Wine on the Rue du Boeuf, and introduces chef Jean-Luc Wesolowski, 57, and cheese-maker Francois Maire, 42. Dos Santos immediately gets a “Cheers”-esque welcome as he makes the rounds through the restaurant, saying warm hellos to everyone in the kitchen and half the customers.

Wesolowski sits down after the busy lunch service to describe the slow change that’s happening to Lyon’s revered cuisine.

“Bouchons are like museums,” he says, referring to the bouchon Lyonnais, Lyon’s version of the bistro that focuses on hearty food like coq au vin, straying often into offal dishes like tripe, and serving it all up with plenty of wine. Today, the authentic bouchon Lyonnais is wildly outnumbered by knockoffs, and finding a real one in Lyon isn’t easy.

Wesolowski modestly describes his own cuisine with a nonchalance that makes it sound like the simple dinner he prepares in the restaurant’s kitchen almost every night for his wife, but others might say his cooking is the perfect evolution of a bouchon.

” ‘Bouchon’ is exploited,” says Maire, who is slowly orbiting toward our table after citing a mistrust of journalists. “People want to sell authenticity where there is none. It’s a great idea, but it’s too clean. Food is made to make you dream.”

Wesolowski would probably be a bit more upset by the slow death of one of Lyon’s icons if he didn’t understand why it was fading away.

“Before, people here were manual laborers who worked very hard - they needed heavy food,” he says. “Now, road workers have machines to dig their holes - it’s logical.”

“Here, the menu changes every day,” counters Wesolowski. “I go to the market in the morning, and if the fish is beautiful and the fishmonger gives me a good price, I’ll buy it.” He passes these prices on to his customers, particularly at lunch, when a prix fixe menu is all he offers and the three-course meal with wine and coffee is a bargain at 14 euros ($22).

“Now, with [today’s] lunch over, there’s nothing left,” says the chef. “This is the principle characteristic of a neighborhood restaurant.”

That said, it’s not over for the bouchon. Wesolowski enjoys winking at Lyon’s historic cuisine, occasionally making bouchon standards like pork with lentils, fish dumplings known as quenelles and a salad made with pigs’ feet.

“He’s unique,” says Maire, “he still works with his heart.”

After lunch, at the Cafe de la Cathedral, I get Dos Santos talking about wine while he sips on a San Pellegrino mineral water served in a Perrier glass, but even that becomes something of an indirect ode to the character of the Lyonnais. He begins by talking about the semi-regular wine tastings he runs at Antic Wine, where anything from reasonably priced wine to an expensive magnum might be served with some wonderful charcuterie, all for a ridiculously cheap 10 euros ($15.75).

“The tastings are a lot of fun, but we certainly don’t do it for the money,” he says.

Case in point, he’s got two empty bottles from previous tastings left on a shelf at the shop - one from Chateau Haut-Brion and the other from Domaine de la Romanee-Conti - each worth a couple of c-notes.

“I’m generous - I don’t do this for free, but I love working with food and with people. Wine has got to be accessible to everybody,” he says. “There’s always money, but you’ve got to have magic, too.”
Later in the evening, Dos Santos plays waiter at Les Adrets for a private wine-tasting dinner he has organized with chef Wesolowski. The consummate host, here Dos Santos is clearly in his element. He skates around the floor, making jokes in the kitchen and with the clients who try several wines over the course of the evening. He’s all smiles, simultaneously running the show, charming everyone in his path and, at the end of the night, sharing a drink with them.

Lyon wineseller Georges Dos Santos, standing, talks wine with a group of diners during a wine-centered private dinner at restaurant Les Adrets. Photo by Joe Ray

At one point he stops at a waiter’s station to test a burgundy he’s just opened, pokes his nose in a glass, inhales deeply, then takes a sip. Then, like an aside to the camera, he turns to me, tingling with enthusiasm, and finally talks about the wine.

“Ca,” he says, flicking the glass with his finger and making it sound with a sharp, satisfying ding! “C’est magnifique!”

A former cook, Joe Ray is a freelance journalist and photographer based in Paris. He can be reached through his Web site, joe-ray.com.

IF YOU GO

Getting there

Expect to pay about $1,500 round-trip airfare for one-stop service from Atlanta to Lyon, France .

Where to stay

Artelit, 16 rue du Boeuf. Frederic Jean runs this beautiful, cozy bed-and-breakfast. More central, you cannot be . . . and for a reasonable price (90-120 euros - $142-$189 - per night). 011-33-4-78-42-84-83, 011-33-6-81-08-33-30; http://www.dormiralyon.com, http://www.likhom.com; e-mail .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Cour des Loges (2,4,6,8 rue du Boeuf. Go high-class, Lyon style, with beautiful decor, lush rooms, stunning atrium courtyard. 240-600 euros ($377-$944) per night. 011-33-4-72-77-44-44; http://www.courdesloges.com; e-mail .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Gourmet stops

Antic Wine, 18 rue du Boeuf. The wine shop is a veritable Lyon landmark. 011-33-4-78-37-08-96; http://www.anticwine.com; e-mail .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Boulangerie St. Vincent, 49 quai St. Vincent. The pain de mais - bread made with corn (but not corn bread) is to die for. 6:15 a.m.-8 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays, Mondays-Tuesdays; 6:15 a.m.-1:30 p.m. Sundays. 011-33-4-78-29-34-23.

Jardin de la Martiniere, Halle de la Martiniere, Rue de la Martiniere. 8 a.m.-7:30 p.m.; closed Mondays. Killer Morbier and goat cheeses, but ask owner Virginie Messad what’s best at any given time. 011-33-4-78-29-56-24.

Where to eat

Les Adrets, 30 rue du Boeuf. Dos Santos’ favorite place to dine in Lyon and a prix fixe lunch at an unbeatable 14 euros. Noon-1:30 p.m. and 7:45-9:30 p.m. daily; closed Saturdays- Sundays; closed in August. 011-33-4-78-38-24-30.

Le P’Tit Bouffon, 73 rue de Seze. Stop feeling like a tourist and go to this friendly, no-frills restaurant with a Basque influence. Dinner, with wine, around $40 per person. Open for lunch Mondays-Saturdays, dinner Tuesdays-Saturdays. 011-33-4-78-24-00-16; e-mail .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Information

Official site for the city of Lyon: http://www.lyon.fr/vdl/sections/en.

July 11, 2008 - Agence France Presse

CRAIGELLACHIE, Scotland (AFP) - A spring drive through the Scottish Highlands could melt the frost from the crustiest curmudgeon.

This far north, quiet towns such as Lossiemouth, Craigellachie, Dunkeld and Dufftown are connected by lonely roads that pass through an addictive balm of rolling hills, mountains covered in heather, loud shocks of yellow rapeseed flowers, and, more discreetly, tall pergola roofs that poke up from glens like church spires.

While the latter aren’t exactly churches, they do represent something nearly as vital—they are the quiet and distinct outward hallmarks of Scotland’s whisky industry.

The change, expansion and consolidation that Scotland’s top export has undergone over the past few decades has left most distilleries owned by giant corporations. Yet here, creating whisky still borders on religious devotion.

One of the biggest signs of change is gently moving Scotch whisky away from the cigar-smoking boy’s club image that it has long maintained both inside and outside industry ranks.
“Now that we’re doing so well in the US and Asia, you can have whiskies with a completely different flavour profile,” said Stephanie Macleod, one of the first female master blenders in Scotland and only the seventh master blender (male or female) in the history of Dewar’s, a major brand.

Sure enough, several words she uses to describe the whiskies she creates—honey, floral, vanilla, waxed lemons—are not what one would typically associate with a masculine drink.

“People look for differences in wine and now expect similar things from their whisky,” she says. “People are appreciating flavour more.”

Up on the coast, just outside of the town of Tain, the Glenmorangie distillery has developed a range of whiskies that almost completely eschew the earthy, smoky and even antiseptic characteristics that come from drying barley over a peat fire.

Mash house operator Jimmy Mackay checks vat temperature at the Glenmorangie distillery near Tain. The change, expansion and consolidation that has characterised the Scotch whisky business over the past few decades has left most distilleries owned by giant corporations. Yet creating whisky still borders on religious devotion.(AFP/File/Joe Ray)

Bill Lumsden, Glenmorangie’s head of distilling and whisky creation, uses techniques such as aging whiskies in barrels previously used for everything from bourbon to fino sherry and Cote de Nuit.

“The flavour from oak is nice,” he said. “The flavours from Brazilian cherry are not nice—it tastes like marzipan with dishwasher detergent.”

The diversity of product created by aging in different barrels made of different woods for different lengths of time, is appealing to more and more markets around the world. “I go to Asia three or four times a year,” Lumsden said, referring to clients in Singapore, Taiwan, and China. “It’s my second home.”

Two standouts in this vein include The Glenlivet’s 16-year old Nadurra single malt whisky, which is golden in colour (as opposed to a deeper amber colour) thanks to aging in oak casks that contribute smells of vanilla, ginger and dried fruit, especially bananas and orange peel.

The Aberfeldy 21-year-old single malt is almost church-like with waxy, spicy smells, along with heather, honey, orange and vanilla scents.

For Scotch whisky purists, Robert Hicks, master blender for the Ardmore distillery, provides the antidote for those worried the drink is moving away from what they know and love.

His whiskies are peaty affairs that tend to put hair on your chest. But underneath the big flavours are more delicate notes like biscuit, pear, hay, cream and marmalade that give them complexity, something Hicks believes is the result of a very human process.

“Analysis is a good guide,” he says, referring to the growing amount of technology used by the industry as a whole, “but I do it by nose.”

(L-R) Ardmore distillery manager Alistair Longwell, Laphroaig distillery manager John Campbell and Ardmore support manager Gordon Grant. The change, expansion and consolidation that has characterised the Scotch whisky business over the past few decades has left most distilleries owned by giant corporations. Yet here, creating whisky still borders on religious devotion.(AFP/File/Joe Ray)

Though most distilleries are now run by large corporations, the soul of the industry seems to have survived intact, with the distilleries still central parts of communities or whole communities to themselves.

John Campbell, manager at the island of Islay’s Laphroaig distillery, has whisky-making in his blood. He grew up only a mile and a half (2.5 kilometres) from where he now works and is the third generation in his family to work for Laphroaig.

“To someone who’s not from Islay, it might be the national drink or a bunch of sales figures,” he says, “but on the island, Scotch whisky is part of the fabric. It’s just life. It just is.”

This article also ran with: 
Yahoo News, Silobreaker, IOL, The Smart Set, iAfrica.com, SAWF, France24.

June 2, 2008 - brandchannel.com

Piero Incisa della Rocchetta is the export manager for the Tuscan wine brand, Tenuta San Guido, known for its Super-Tuscan (Sassicaia) wines that go for hundreds or thousands of dollars a bottle. In our interview, he discusses how he goes about branding Tenuta San Guido on a worldwide scale and how that compares to his small, family vineyard.
     


 
You had left the family business for years—why did you come back?

I was asked to. There was a need for a family member to be in the US market and the sales, in the relationship with the distributor—someone to see what’s going on.

Why a family member?

Sassicaia is a global company that’s owned by a very small family—it’s not a corporation. As for any family business, there’s no one better than family who understands complexities and subtleties. No one understands the historical landscape and no one from outside of the family has such a deep understanding of the terroir. After 40 years (Incisa della Rocchetta’s age), chances are you’ll have a pretty good understanding of the product.

What’s the external perception of Sassicaia?

It was the first cult wine (as a Super-Tuscan), mainly because it was drunk at home for years before it was released. It’s quintessentially Italian.

How many years in a row has your production sold out?

We have been sold out every year since the very first release in 1968. We do not implement a system of sales “en primeur” (selling wine before it is produced) as they do in Bordeaux.

If you’re sold out, why is it so important to keep pushing ahead with the branding?

It’s not because your product is sold out that you should not work. The large part of my work is to get together with collectors on a global scale and to taste the old and new vintages of Sassicaia, so that people can understand how the wine ages and evolves throughout the years.

Sassicaia has a very rare characteristic, it ages better than its peers, and when you drink an old bottle of Sassicaia it becomes a religious experience. It is important to share this with our collectors and consumers, and in doing so, it is important to do it right. My job is also to make sure that the old vintages of Sassicaia are served in the right order and coupled with the right dishes, drank in the right stemware. These things that might seem like irrelevant and annoying details to most, but they are pivotal to preserve the integrity of the brand.

Who do you market to most—end clients or wine sellers?

Our emphasis is always geared a bit more toward restaurants, as we believe that a wine should be drank, and drank with its best companion, food.

You mentioned that you repositioned the brand a few years ago. Why? What did you do? How successful was the transformation?

It seemed to me that Sassicaia was a victim of its own success, as it is one of the very few wines that sells itself. In other words, you do not have to offer Sassicaia—people ask for it. This phenomenon had some negative repercussions, as the right placement or perfect fit was diluted. In other words, as the wine sold itself, the sales force was not focusing on the right placement, but simply on the sale itself, which for Sassicaia was never a problem.

On the surface, looking at balance sheet and sales reports, it all seemed to be fine. However, there are a lot of things that sales and depletion reports do not show, but if you dig deep they become bluntly obvious. So the job was simple, get back in the marketplace, talk to the collectors, customers, consumers, sommeliers and chefs and get a feeling for what were the perfect homes (restaurants and wine stores) for Sassicaia.

The transformation was very successful—our sales accelerated dramatically, exposure was further enhanced and our distribution partners asked for more products… which we did not have. (He grins.)

I don’t know what created this need. I had a gut feeling at first, then I tried to measure it by collecting facts. When the facts coincided with my gut feeling, we created and implemented a very effective strategy with our distribution partners that paid off.

How will high-end wine branding change in the next ten years?

It’s difficult to speculate—we are witnessing new phenomena in which very wealthy individuals are getting into the wine industry simply because they sit at the very top and need social acceptance, which makes them spend a great deal of money in the effort of selling their wines.

I never think about branding. For me it is more about the integrity of the wine and the message, if you get this right, branding becomes a byproduct. We are also veering away from the old model, in which most wineries were family owned; today it seems that the big corporations are dominating the market, so I’d guess that we will see an enhancement of branding efforts.

You mentioned that you spend a lot of time with the collectors who buy your wine, which doesn’t seem like it happens in many other industries (or even the wine world). Why is this so important?

I believe that it’s important to be close to your customers, but maybe not in the conventional way. I do not care about their demographics or spending habits, what I care about is their passion, and that is an element that is common to all of our consumers.

Wine seems to have a very different effect on people than most other products. Being with our collectors gives me the ability to share with them what we do, why we do it and how we do it. It also gives me the opportunity to constantly try older vintages, which I have the privilege to drink with them, and most of the time they are the ones bringing the older bottles, as at the estate we have practically no inventory left.

Are there parts of the branding process that take care of themselves? Which parts do you have to work on most?

There are elements and events that come to play an unexpected role, which in turn seem to have an exponentially positive effect on the brand. I believe that we have one of the most beautiful estates in the wine industry. Our place in Bolgheri is far larger than any other wine estate that I know of, and its sheer beauty is so pure and pristine that it seems to be constantly impressing our clients, collectors and business environment. Quite frankly, I get very impressed every time I get back home… as we have a 3,500 hectare (8650 acre) estate, on the coast, and we never had the temptation to do a real estate development or any other monetary speculation, this I believe, transcended in to the brand.

Outside of the wining and dining, what are the parts of your job that have to do with branding that we don’t see?

Very simple: maintaining the integrity. This is not a job, it’s a way of life, integrity towards the land, respect for your community, those are the things that people do not see. And passion, passion, passion, because without a consuming passion, it is very difficult to love what you do and to be successful at it.

Is your brand bulletproof?

Nothing is bulletproof; however, it is hard to kill the goose with the golden eggs.

How is what you do for your Italian operations different from your branding work with Bodega Chacra?

I have had the privilege and the luxury to be born into a very special family with deep roots in the Italian historical landscape. Witnessing what the two previous generations have done was the best school one could ever dream of having. My uncle Nicolo Incisa (who runs the estate), in particular, had a very strong impact in my life. Our Italian operations have an historical landscape which is difficult to change, which is fine because I think that we are headed in the right direction. Bodega Chacra (in Argentina) is still in its birth, but I have been lucky to witness the birth of Sassicaia and integrity is once again what will help on the road ahead. Being a family-owned business, we do not have to post double-digit returns which give us the ability and luxury to make the right decisions at the right time for the right reasons, so there is really no difference between the two.

Ever met wine critic Robert Parker?

Of course—I like him. We need 100 more of him!
 
 

Joe Ray is a Paris-based freelance journalist specializing in food and wine. He can be contacted via his Web site: www.joe-ray.com.

Platinum Magazine

This is not a drive for the faint of heart or the short on time. The spiritual, wild-eyed cousin to Route 66, Patagonian Argentina‘s Ruta 40 is a ‘Mad Max’-style dirt road to nowhere, skirting the Andes, connecting only north and south, with rib-like smaller roads reaching out to the major stopping points along the way. Here, “luxury travel” is a dependable 4X4 with plenty of clearance. Plan on dings in the windshield and the ride of your life.

The hit list is diverse: Cueva de las Manos, the mammoth Perito Merino Glacier which calves building-sized chunks of ice into Lago Argentino, some of the world‘s best hiking, fly fishing and outdoor activities. Even driving to parts of Patagonian Chile like Torres del Paine National Park with craggy granite peaks that reach 3000m, requires passing through Argentina; two countries share one road toward the end of the world.

The mammoth Moreno Glaciar meeting Lago Argentino near the Argentine town of El Calafate - Photo by Joe Ray

Get it while you can. ‘Progress’ is coming in the form of asphalt. The paving of Route 40 in Patagonia is a political promise supported by former President Nestor Kirschner along with current president, Cristina Fernandez, Kirschner’s wife. For now, however, Ruta 40 remains wild.

In northern Patagonia, Trevelin is one of a handful of far-flung Welsh settlements colonized here in the late 1800s. Hardship was commonplace, but settlers met for tea and tarts as a way to maintain their heritage. Today, Welsh tea houses are a Patagonian tradition. We stop at the Nain Maggie tea house for an afternoon tea, accompanied by a meal‘s worth of homemade breads, scones, tarts and cakes like the dark torta negra.

“We have no machines in the kitchen,” says Nain Maggie owner, Lucy Underwood, descendant of some of the town‘s founders. Save a stove, the kitchen where she works with her son and daughter is absent of signs of the industrial age. The closest thing to a measuring cup is a Tupperware mug used to scoop flour.
Mixing is done with wooden spoons and the kneading by hand– no small feat considering the number of locals and tourists who come through every afternoon. “The apple tart is apple, sugar, flour and eggs. The cream tart has cream and a little sugar. It’s simple,” she says. “This is the way my family ate.” If ever a weary traveller needs a taste of home, Underwood‘s tarts are direct links to grandma‘s kitchen table.

Heading south, the road dissolves into the nothingness of the steppe – no buildings, no lights, no other cars. For hours upon hours, it’s just you and the nandus (the ostrich-like rhea), deerlike guanacos and the occasional armadillo, all framed with tufts of grass, mountains and mesas, stars and sunsets.

Cholila is nothing on the map and after years of fast horses, robberies and life on the lam, this was a big part of the draw for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid who holed up here the early 1900s, looking to put hold-ups in their past and earn an honest living as ranchers. Their cabin is far from everything and even current-day fugitives would be wise to hide here.

Caretaker Daniel Sepúlveda, who though not “grogged out of his mind,“ as In Patagonia writer Bruce Chatwin described his father, is still off-kilter, like he’s been riled from a nap.

He meets us at the gate, now ironically adjacent to the Cholila police station, and drives the short distance to the cabin while we follow on foot.

Showing us through the slightly-refurbished cabin, he suddenly jerks one of the wooden window blinds open and, eyes wide, pokes his gun-shaped fingers out the window, Sundance-style, as he apparently mows down some Argentine police or bounty hunters. Perhaps he’s honing the presentation for a tour group of the future, but I lose interest, sacrifice my partner to him and wander off to snap photos and contemplate what life was really like here.

Outside of the ranch where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid holed up near Cholila in the early 1900s. Photo by Joe Ray

Outside an estancia along Ruta 40. Photo by Joe Ray

This isolation and unforgiving terrain has spawned a big list of standard supplies for a trip down La Cuarenta that include two full-sized, easily-accessed spare tires, camping supplies, extra food, fuel and oil.

Equipped with all of the above, we still learn the wisdom of preparedness in short order. Thick snowflakes begin falling seventy kilometers into the access road toward Perito Moreno National Park, famous for pristine steppe, glacial peaks, surreal blue lakes and a guanaco population that wildly outnumbers the
visitors. (A scant 1,200 people visit each year and in early spring, we are the first in weeks to sign the guestbook.) Our planned lodging – Estancia Menelik – one of thousands of lonely ranches that populate Patagonia, is still closed for the season. Caretaker Manuel Pardo, known as Don Manuel, generously invites us in
for a maté.

Sitting quietly as the snow falls, we talk and sip the herbal drink from a gourd for two hours. Time and conversation flow, contract and flow again.

Coming from the world of industrialized food and wanting to know more about what makes Argentine beef so famous, I ask what a cow’s life is like here and Don Manuel clearly doesn‘t understand. Finally, he gestures toward the window and the 10,000 lonely hectares that belong to the ranch. “That’s their life.”

Argentine gaucho Don Manuel Pardo, caretaker at Estancia Menelik near Argentina’s Perito Moreno National Park. Photo by Joe Ray

A scene at UNESCO-classified Cueva de Las Manos - Cave of The Hands. Photo by Joe Ray

We emerge to discover I’ve left the truck lights on and Don Manuel brushes a few inches of fresh snow from the hood of his truck to give us a jump.

We ask about the road.

“You’ve got four-wheel drive, right?”

“No.”

“Ah. Well, that’s ok. You‘ve got chains, right?“

“No.”

“Ah.”

Before we realize we’re stuck, he offers a place to stay.

Don Manuel is one of the last of a slowly-dying breed. Argentina‘s version of the American cowboy, gauchos tend to be solitary men whose understanding of the land and its animals comes from a lifetime of experience. There are traces of cowboy attitude, but gauchos are gentlemen ranchers, first and foremost.

By now, the inconveniences of driving La Cuarenta have become the charms. Separated by a lot of time on rough road known as ripio as the only practical means of getting around, each leg is a voyage into a vanishing point, each destination an island where function and beauty worked themselves out decades or eons ago. Though Chatwin’s approach to In Patagonia might strike the reader as a cubist-style set of unrelated vignettes, there‘s a reason: that‘s what it‘s like here.

Not far from a ghost town, tumbleweeds cross main street undisturbed at high noon in Gobernador Costa, population 2000. We wonder what it must be like to grow up so far away from everything, in these strangely nuclear places in the middle of all this space.

We picnic on the merry go round in an empty playground and a shy kid comes to play on the ailing swing set. We say hello and ask his name – Elias – before returning to our eating and swinging. His eyes rarely leave us. Ten minutes later, he holds his hand in the air and lobs a pair of tiny rectangles our way – Bazooka bubble gum.

Stratified hills surrounding the Petrified Forest near Sarimento. Photo by Joe Ray

Cinema in Sarimento. Photo by Joe Ray

He edges closer, hopping atop of a slide, staring, smiling – a quiet, playful curiosity for the outsider. Later, sensing our departure, he beckons us around the corner. “That’s my house!” he says, pointing. “You can come and visit me!” We pack up and Elias reappears with an old Kodak 110 camera to take our picture.

Memory captured.

Later, we visit the UNESCO World Heritage Site, Cueva de las Manos, named for the hundreds of hands painted on the walls 10,000 years ago by nomadic hunters who congregated here. A guide walks us through, explaining the art that also shows how hunters surrounded and killed guanacos and ñandús, but equally inspiring is having this place to ourselves. Except for the most popular sites, similar solitude is found in almost every national park we visit along the way.

For those seeking this disconnect, a paved Ruta 40 is a nightmare that risks drying up towns like Gobernador Costa and their quirky experiences, or turning them into awkward hubs focused on moving tour buses to the next Cave of the Hands-style monument. On the coast, Ruta 3 lurks like 40’s evil twin and a Ushuaïa and Buenos Aires, populated by antique, fume-belching 18-wheelers and long lines of cars, dying to pass.

Though there are still hundreds of unpaved miles north and south of El Chaltén, a big stretch of new pavement links it with the town of El Calafate and the Perito Moreno Glacier. Thrown together in 1985 during a border dispute with Chile, El Chaltén feels like a cross between a military base and a bourgeoning tourist draw.

Inside the grill at parrilla Don Pinchon in El Calafate, Argentina. Photo by Joe Ray

Though resident Paulo Gallego, a guide who specializes in bringing hikers into the nearby Los Glaciares National Park, profits from increased accessibility brought by Ruta 40, he‘s at odds with the rapid expansion it brings.

“There’s an amazing quality of life here, but the growth gets to be a disaster. It’s no good for us and no good for the tourists,” he says.

“Nothing is planned. All the streets are broken and when they fix the streets, they break the gas lines!”In early spring, the town sits deep in mud. Considering the town’s year-round population of 600, there’s an amazing amount of hotel and restaurant construction. Even a visitor could detect a whiff of chaos in the air. “Without pavement, it makes it so only the people who really want to get here come,” adds Gallego. “When you pave Route 40, you lose the essentials.”

Ahead is the slog north on Ruta 3. It will take a couple days to cover the same amount of ground we drove in a few weeks. The miles will seem unearned. Already, I miss the rumble of the dirt road and the slowing of time.

Joe Ray

Grilled lamb ribs on one of the grills at parrilla Don Pinchon in El Calafate. Photo by Joe Ray

Near Bariloche a road sign for La Cuarenta. Photo by Joe Ray

If you go…

LODGING
Helsingfors Estancia
Sitting equidistant between El Chalten and El Calafate, Helsingfors offers luxury accommodations on the Lago Viedma inside the Los Glaciares National Park. Horseback and foot expeditions head out regularly, as does a trip to the Viedma Glacier via Zodiac.
http://www.helsingfors.com.ar
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Buenos Aires office:
Av. Córdoba 827, piso 11, depto. „A“
C1054AAH - Buenos Aires
+54-11-4315-1222

Los Notros
Situated in the Los Glaciares National Park, the address given on their Web site simply reads, “Facing the Perito Moreno Glacier.“ Here, ‘the glacier‘ spills into the Lago Argentino, all framed by the picture windows in every room.
http://www.losnotros.com
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
+54-2902-499510

Hotel Indigo
In Chilean Patagonia, Puerto Natales is the launch point of the Torres del Paine National Park and luxurious Indigo was conceived as a place to begin or end several days of intense hiking.
http://www.indigopatagonia.com/uk/
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Ladrilleros 105
Puerto Natales, Chile
+56-61-413609

EXPLORING
Hielo & Aventura
This well-respected guide service based in El Calafate offers a “Big Ice“ journey (and small-group) journey atop the Perito Moreno Glaciar.
http://www.hieloyaventura.com
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Av. Libertador 935
El Calafate
+54-02902-492205

FLY FISHING
Guide Alejandro Leutgeb runs an exclusive fishing operation out of the northern Patagonia gateway town of Bariloche. Floating down the Limay and Manso rivers in the Nahuel Huapi National Park, fly fisherman chase several species of trout, landlocked salmon and native perch.
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
+54-92944-582473

DINING
La Tablita
Wildly popular and for good reason, El Calafate‘s La Tablita is one of the best parrillas (steakhouses) along Ruta 40. Reserve ahead or wait in line. For a more modern twist on the art of grilling, try Don Pinchon, just up the hill.
http://www.interpatagonia.com/latablita
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Coronel Rosales 28
El Calafate
+54-02902-491065

Kaupé
If you‘ve come to the end La Cuarenta, you may well want to continue to the city at the end of the world and have a meal at one of Argentina‘s best restaurants. Overlooking the Beagle Channel, chef Ernesto Vivian serves local seafood, including several variations of his specialty - king crab.
http://www.kaupe.com.ar
Roca 470
Ushuaia
+54-2901-422704

See the .pdf version of this story as it ran in American Express Platinum Magazine here

May 18, 2008 - The Boston Globe - Travel

PARIS - I have lived here for almost seven years. I saw the euro arrive and watched the dollar slowly lose ground. In the beginning, the pinch never felt too bad. Would I pay a couple of extra cents for my Saturday morning croissant? Bien sûr! But as the dollar continued to slide, I realized that if I paid with converted dollars when I went to dinner in Europe, I essentially would be paying a third more for the same meal my friends were eating. It adds up fast.

In South America for the past few months, I read every story I came across on how to save money in Europe. They were frustratingly similar and not very helpful.

My least favorite suggestion was a variation on “take a cruise/go to a spa/buy a prepackaged tour.” These can all be nice, but really, in terms of soaking up local culture, what’s the point? Then there is “go for a shorter time.” What, and go home, mow the grass, and lament what a poor schmuck you are because you can’t afford a week in Europe? As for “go to Eastern Europe,” tell that to the woman who’s had a lifelong dream of a romantic trip to Paris, Rome, or London.

Using Paris as an example, here are some tips that concentrate on what visitors do most - eat, go out, get around - that will help to save money across the Continent.

Rent a furnished apartment

Along with being cheaper than what you’d get for the same price in a hotel, renting a furnished apartment (check out the “Europe” section of the website Vacation Rentals By Owner, vrbo.com, for example) can make you feel like you live in a place. You catch the rhythms of the neighborhood, get to recognize some locals, and you can . . .

Eat in

One of the finest pleasures of being in Europe is going to food markets, but if you don’t have a kitchen, you can’t cook. Look for lodgings like bed-and-breakfasts and hostels (hostelworld.com) that let guests use the kitchen.

Picnic

Years ago, I was a student in France and my parents came to visit at the end of the school year. I have trouble remembering any of the restaurants we ate at, but I have vivid memories of a picnic in the Jardin de Luxembourg and a strawberry tart that nobody wanted to share on the Île Saint-Louis. Getting a chunk of cheese, some cold cuts, bread and wine, and dessert from the pastry shop isn’t skimping, it’s living. Bonus tip: Pack some cheap silverware, a good, sharp knife, and a corkscrew.

Eat out at lunch

A prix-fixe meal tends to be a better bargain than ordering à la carte. Unlike some restaurants in the United States, it’s not necessarily old food the chef is trying to move. At lunch, it’s even cheaper, which in fancier restaurants is even more pronounced. Don’t worry - you won’t leave hungry. Bonus tip: Eat out at breakfast, too. For less than the cost of an overpriced breakfast at a hotel, you can have a coffee and croissants at a cafe and watch the world go by.

Buy a bottle

If you’re settling in at a cafe while having an apéro with a friend or two, get a bottle of wine (or a pitcher of beer or sangria) instead of different drinks by the glass. With the world on parade in front of you and friends by your side, are you really going to have just one glass? Also, watch for wine in a carafe and keep an eye open for bars, cafes, and even restaurants with happy hour specials.

Don’t eat at the show

In all of my time in Paris, no one has ever said how great their dinner was aboard a “bateau mouche,” the excursion boats. Likewise, eating at the Moulin Rouge smacks of buying Playboy for the journalism. Dinner before a show is likely going to be dull and come at an inflated price, even as part of a package deal. Don’t bother.

Free days and special rates at museums

Museums often have reduced afternoon or evening rates, which can be the perfect time to visit, since the tour groups will have thinned out by then. Watch also for family rates and free days. The Louvre, for instance, is free on the first Sunday of every month and admission goes from nine euros to six after 6 p.m. every day. Much of this information can be found on each museum’s website.

Take the tube, but mind the gap

A one-day tourist pass for the Paris Metro costs 8.50 euros, but a single ticket (which has no expiration date) is 1.50 and the per-ticket cost of a 10-pack is 1.10. How many people actually take more than five rides a day to make the tourist pass worth it? Websites for the metros for most big European cities often list prices for all of their ticket offerings. If you’re here for a longer spell, watch for week- and monthlong passes.

Don’t take taxis unnecessarily

I once blew my entire budget for a romantic weekend in London on the cab ride from the train station to my friend’s flat. Enough said.

Get out of town

Once you leave a city, food and lodging prices become more reasonable. Besides, who’s going to complain about a couple of days driving through the European countryside?

Rent a diesel

If you’re going to rent a car on your trip, request a diesel, which is far more common here. Friends in Paris used to stare at me openmouthed when I told them about gas prices in the United States. Remember a buck a gallon? They’ve been paying several times as much for a long, long time, but at least diesel here isn’t subject to taxes that make it more expensive than unleaded gas.

Don’t buy souvenirs for friends

Call me cheap, but is your grandmother really going to wear that Toulouse-Lautrec scarf while she’s out grocery shopping? Have you ever bought something for your dad that he liked? Write postcards from a cafe.

May 18, 2008 - The Boston Globe - Travel

It’s as if the tour buses that stop at the base of Montmartre keep their customers on a short leash. Most first-timers walk through the tourist trap above the Boulevard de Rochechouart and take the funicular to the Sacré-Coeur Basilica before making an inevitable U-turn and heading back down the hill.

Too bad. They’re steps away from a Parisian hot spot and a classic French debate on the death of the apéritif, the predinner drink known here as the apéro that is adored for its intimacy.
Wine glass in hand, the cafes and bars along the avenues of the hidden northern side of Montmartre are the perfect place to discuss the ritual’s importance and debate its demise.

“It’s a moment where we take the time to live,” says François Simon, food critic for Le Figaro newspaper (where his influential columns can make or break a chef or a restaurant) and author of several books and a blog called Simon Says! “The apéro has a very soft and unctuous rhythm.”

The keys to the rhythm are companionship, atmosphere, and a drink on the table, but curiously, there’s no drink of choice.

“I’ll have a glass of Pouilly-Fumé,” says Simon, commenting on his favorite apéro. “I’ll bring a bottle of white wine down to the garden. To spice up the conversation, I’ll open a bottle of Asti Spumante” - in the homeland of Champagne.

A pair of regulars catch up for an apéro on the leather banquette at Au Rêve café in Paris. (Joe Ray for the Boston Globe)

Here, he touches on the most important part of the near-daily ritual. The apéro - a derivative of the Latin aperire (“to open”) - is a consecrated time to talk, whether for an uninterrupted catch-up session with a friend or a flat-out flirtation.

Some say otherwise. “In Paris it has changed a little,” says Simon. “The apéro seems to be disappearing - we’re drinking less,” adding that it is losing out to “work, other leisure activities, and people on a health kick.”

This makes Simon a little upset. For him, the apéro is not just seduction, it’s a bit of “rebellion.”

Lending gravitas to a predinner drink in a way that only French philosophy can, Simon evokes Georges Bataille’s philosophy of the “accursed share,” where excess money is either squandered on luxury or channeled into bloodshed, to justify the small splurge of an apéro.

The man clearly prefers to make love, not war.

In the watering holes on and around the tree-lined Rue Caulaincourt on the hidden side of Montmartre, rebellion seems to be the winning choice. Here, starting in the late afternoon, work, to-do lists, and the stress of everyday life take a far back seat to devoting time to friends.

“It’s an excuse to drink!” says a wide-smiling Georges Chaillot, giving his take on the apéro’s social function to three friends who are soaking up some sun on the terrace of the Au Rêve café.
“No! It’s a time to see your friends!” scolds a grinning Simone Berghen. “Or you drink because you’re with people you like.” She pauses, deciding to split the difference with her longtime friend. “All the excuses are good.”

Over Campari-based Americanos, kirs, a tiny plate of charcuterie and half a baguette someone has smuggled along, Chaillot and his group of retirement-age friends are happy to debate the role and possible demise of the hallowed French tradition.

No matter what the subject, scenes like this play out every day all over the City of Light. Time stops, talking about work becomes taboo, and people work on the art of conversation. As a friend of mine says, “It’s where you plant the seeds for the discussion that will follow during dinner.”

“France is wine country,” explains Michèle Carlier, one of Chaillot’s friends who lives above a wine shop a stone’s throw from Au Rêve. “It was a way to see your neighbors. It’s very Parisian.” Sure enough, all of this group’s members live a short walk from the cafe and they became friends long ago because they were clients.

“Elyette, is the apéro still alive?” Chaillot calls out to someone inside the cafe.

“Less and less!” comes a response that I follow to the source, Elyette Planchon. She and her husband, whom she calls Bixou, are the third generation of her family to run Au Rêve. If you want to get off the plane and instantly feel like you’re in Paris, this is the place to go: There’s a beautiful stone bar where Planchon has run the show since 1965 (Bixou has retired), a bowl of 50-cent hard-boiled eggs on a stack of plates behind the bar, and people watching a-go-go. Through a door at the far end of the long kitchen you can even glimpse her living room.

Wearing an apron that reads, “Frenchmen! Learn the gesture that saves lives!” with an illustration of a beret-toting man sucking wine straight from the bottle, she gives her take on the demise of the apéro.

“The apéro was very popular in the ‘50s and ‘60s,” Planchon says, standing under a large black-and-white photo of her and her husband running the bar 30-odd years ago. “People didn’t have much money, so their apartments weren’t made for having one another over. Eventually, things changed. Now, it’s cheaper to be at home and [going out] is more occasional.”

Yet everything that happens seems to contradict her “less and less” theory. As she talks, a steady stream of customers of all ages is coming and going. She knows most of them on a first-name basis, greeting many with a kiss on the cheek. Many clients simply refer to her as “Madame Elyette.”
“There are 13 people in here now,” she says, pointing toward the terrace, “six regulars I know well, and the rest just like the place.”

Around the corner from Au Rêve on the Rue Marcadet, it’s hard to believe that the apéro could be in danger of fading away.

Arthur Jordan, 51, runs the Cave Café, perhaps the trendiest address for an apéro on the back side of Montmartre, serving about 10 natural-production wines on tap.

“It’s part of your social life and where you make your social arrangements,” says the American-born Jordan, addressing the cultural and sociological place of the apéro.

“People come home [from work], drop off their stuff, then come out right away,” says his bar manager, David Costa, 41.

“They’re not here to get wasted,” adds Jordan, making a thinly-veiled jab at the after-work habits across the English Channel. “The French don’t spend a lot of time at home and we cater to that.”

“Anglophones start drinking and don’t stop,” adds Costa. “They don’t really think about eating.” Unless you’re on a bad date and want to jump ship, chances are very good that you’ll end up going out for dinner with your friends after you’ve finished your drinks.

My epiphany doesn’t happen until later in the week. I’ve been staying with friends for several days without seeing them until we meet for a Thursday apéro. For an hour and a half, we consciously shut out the rest of the world, unconsciously working on becoming better friends.

There’s a Chilean Malbec involved and a snack of foie gras they’ve brought home from a family trip, but the drinks and snacks simply give the time together an excuse to happen.

A few days later at Au Rêve, Michèle Carlier, her chin barely clearing the bar, stops in to say hello to Planchon. Carlier invites me to have a glass of wine with her and when I inquire about her friends, she says, “They’ll be by soon,” knowing one combination or another will arrive shortly because they always do.

We ask Planchon about the slightly peculiar name of the bar and she grins.

“Ah. The difference between ‘Le Rêve’ and ‘Au Rêve’ encapsulates all the subtlety of the French language. ‘Le Rêve’ [the dream] is something you project. ‘Au Rêve’ is a place,” she explains, before modestly adding, “but you shouldn’t examine it too much.”

Carlier asks if the apéro is the favorite part of a Parisian’s day and Planchon offers a philosophical grin. “It flows,” she responds. “It’s like a smile.”

Or a dream.

Joe Ray can be reached at joe-ray.com.

If You Go
Where to go for an apéro

Au Rêve
89 rue Caulaincourt
011-33-1-46-06-20-87

Want to get that instant “I’m in Paris” feeling? This is the place for your first apéro. Little-known and worth the trip is owner Elyette Planchon’s (at right) bargain Wednesday lunch (about $15.50) - the only meal she serves all week.

Cave Café
134 rue Marcadet
011-33-1-46-06-29-17

One of the hippest spots in town for an apéro. Try one of 10 natural-production wines on tap at about $4.60 to $7 per glass. Reliable lunch and dinner served.

La Divette de Montmartre
136 rue Marcadet
011-33-1-46-06-19-64

Next door to the Cave Café (and a world away), shoehorn yourself in at the bar or have a cheap beer in one of the seats on the terrace.

Where to eat afterward

La Baignoire
151 bis rue Marcadet
011-33-1-53-41-63-04

Great steaks, nice salads in a fun and funky setting at “The Bathtub.” Dinner à la carte about $46.

Aux Négociants
27 rue Lambert
011-33-1-46-06-15-11

A bistrot à vins, this is food that features no-frills preparation of top-quality ingredients, washed down with a great selection of Loire Valley wines in a classic setting. Blue-plate specials start at $20 and glasses of wine at $4.60. About $46 for dinner.

What to do

Check out the street market on the Rue du Poteau that starts at the Town Hall for the 18th arrondissement. It’s home of the wonderful Quatrehomme cheese shop (at No. 9), one of the last horse butchers in Paris, and plenty of apéro-worthy cafés. Most vendors are open daily except Monday.

Where to stay

Terrass Hôtel
12-14 rue Joseph-de-Maistre
011-33-1-46-06-72-85

http://www.terrass-hotel.com/e/hotel/

At the end of the Rue Caulaincourt, a knockout view of Paris is one of this classy four-star hotel’s biggest selling points. “Classique” rooms for two start at about $400, but watch the website for special offers that can bring the price down to about $310.

Timhotel Montmartre
11 rue Ravignan
011-33-1-42-55-74-79
timhotel.com/hotels/us/montmartre.html

Not the most Parisian of hotels, but a combination of relatively gentle pricing and its location on Montmartre’s beautiful Place Emile-Goudeau is hard to beat. Depending on the view, season, and size of the room, rates run from around $100-$200 per night for two.

Centurion Magazine

Help from foreign sages can be seen as a sign of weakness. In Chile, however, the wine industry is being pushed forward with the help of outside winemakers. This is helping the reputation of wine in Chile to progress from good, solid stuff to wines that really solicit genuine emotion from the drinker.
“They‘re looking to find a soul,“ says Frenchman Jacques Begarie, chief viticulturist and winemaker for Chile’s Casa Lapostolle and its top-end Clos Apalta label, giving them a bit of what he calls the “French Touch”. Looking like the French version of Hollywood western actor James Coburn, Begarie enjoys the challenge of Chile, where wine country still has a frontier edge to it.
Though Chileans have enjoyed making and drinking wines for centuries, their wines have reached the world stage relatively recently. Right now might be the most interesting part of the story: winemakers are able to consistently create something good and some of the best here are beginning to stake their claim.

A Chilean cowboy - known as a Huaso - in the hills above Casa Lapostolle.Photo by Joe Ray

“Michel Rolland called me in 2004 and said he needed some help. I came for six months and have been here ever since,” says Begarie, referring to Casa Lapostolle’s star consultant – a controversial ‘flying winemaker’, who jets around the world and (depending on whose side you are on) helps or homogenizes wine offerings.

Begarie, the former technical director for Bordeaux powerhouse Vins Dourthe, came with his own take on things, such as stressing the vines to create better grapes. This is perfect for a lot of Casa Lapostolle’s land, which is a thick layer of granite topped with a sandy layer. Growing fewer grapes in tough conditions is hard on vines and production amounts, but makes for excellent grapes. “It’s much better if you produce less than more,” he says. This flies in the face of what has happened historically on most Chilean vineyards, where wine is produced and sold in bulk, but it is also bolstering the country’s reputation.

“We’re not used to drinking good wine,” says Diego Urra, Casa Lapostolle’s brand ambassador. “Chileans drink 16 litres of wine a year, and 15 of those are in Tetra Paks.”

“If Casa Lapostolle came to me and said, ‘We want lots of wine from this plot,’” counters Begarie, while lighting a Lucky, “I’d say, ‘Nice to meet you,’ and hit the road.”

There is reason for him to stay. Wineries in the Colchagua Valley are protected to the east by the Andes and by the Cordillera de Costa (the Coastal Mountain Range) to the
west. The region’s hot and bright days, cold nights and predictable rainfall make for ideal grape-growing weather.

Urra guides me through the Lapostolle winemaking process, showing that though the grapes are stressed in the fields, they are coddled the rest of the way to the bottle. Bunches are hand picked and hand de-stemmed, and in the winery, a gravity-only system completely eschews the pumps that can manhandle flavours out of the grapes.

The grandson of a French winemaker, Urra brings me into the cellar to preview the 2007 wines, drawing out a glass tube of Merlot from the barrel. Though tannins keep the strong berry flavours locked up, it already smells ready to roll. Next, we try a Carménère straight from the cask. “There’s a lot of coffee in it,” Urra offers. “My foot!” I think, smelling only what I want to smell. Until the second whiff. Call it the power of suggestion, but it is stronger when I take a sip. Keep an eye open in 2010 when the wines made with these grapes start hitting the shelves.

“If Casa Lapostolle came to me and said, ‘We want lots of wine from this plot,’” counters Jacques Begarie, while lighting a Lucky, “I’d say, ‘Nice to meet you,’ and hit the road.”  Photo by Joe Ray

The winemaking facility and vineyards at Casa Lapostolle.Photo by Joe Ray

Leaving the Colchagua, I head south into the Maule Valley and the Reserva de Caliboro winery, where producer Francesco Cinzano is determined to follow a similar path. “This was the first wine producing section of the country,” he says. “At harvest time, all you see on Ruta 5 [Chile‘s main north- south axis] are trucks full of grapes.”

Once we get off the highway, cross the Loncomilla River and head east toward Villa Alegre and the Reserva de Caliboro winery, the soil and air go dry and the hills turn gold. Half joking, Cinzano says: “We call this place the Serengeti.”

A member of the family famous for bringing vermouth to Italians and the rest of the world, the president of the Brunello de Montalcino consortium – and a real-life count – Cinzano found his perfect setting to make a boutique wine, a place where he could stress the vines, dry farm (watering only “when my son’s inheritance is in peril”) and create grape bunches that would make Japanese greenhouse-melon producers jealous.

“When I did my search in 1992, the Internet didn’t work so fast, so I’d look at military maps and talk to geologists,” he says of his quest for the perfect place to grow grapes. “The Chileans are very hospitable and they’d send me from one house to the next.”

A stout belly, slicked back hair, a penchant for Cuban cigars and a larger-than-life presence give him more than a passing resemblance to Hemingway.

“I’m very good at growing grapes with good, thick skins and lots of goodies in them,” says Cinzano. “Then I deliver them to the cellar and they‘d better not screw it up.” Photo by Joe Ray

“For my first job, I was 25 – I was a specialist in Coca-Cola,” jokes Alvaro Arrigada. “Nobody here drinks wine when they‘re 25.”Photo by Joe Ray

“My father pulled it off better, but without the gin,” says Cinzano, shrugging off the comparison. That said, you get the feeling that if you were in the mood to go on a big, expensive bender, he would be the perfect companion.

“I’m very good at growing grapes with good, thick skins and lots of goodies in them,” says Cinzano. “Then I deliver them to the cellar and they‘d better not screw it up.”

Chilean Alvaro Arrigada, chief oenologist and general manager at Casa Donoso, creates a striking contrast. Dressed in his trademark Australian cowboy hat (complete with what look to be shark‘s teeth and alligator skin), he is the symbolic precursor to the next generation of Chilean winemakers – one who has understood the outside world‘s lessons and is now applying them to his winery. “You open your mind and you understand that you need more influence,” he says.

Arrigada’s foreign influence started far from wine country. He spent a high-school exchange year in Yellville, Arkansas, “Home of the Razorbacks!” [the university sports team] he says, with a bit of pride for the Natural State, the nickname for Arkansas. “It was my first time out of the country. I was in the track-and-field team – when you play a sport and aren’t that bad, people love you.”

He is modest about his beginnings as a winemaker. “For my first job, I was 25 – I was a specialist in Coca-Cola,” he jokes. “Nobody here drinks wine when they‘re 25.” A vertical tasting (tasting wines from one winery, but different vintages) of his boutique blend, D, gives a clear view of what he has done in his time at Casa Donoso. In a sense, we are drinking Arrigada‘s work and seeing him come into his own. The 1997, which was designed to be drunk around 2000, still holds up. It has a nicely concentrated fruity smell, particularly pear, in its cabernet sauvignon and carménère combination. We taste 2003 and 2005 versions of D, the latter with the addition of cabernet franc and malbec, which lend depth and complexity.

Back at Reserva de Caliboro, I ask Cinzano for five minutes by myself with his wine – a request that feels like I am asking for time alone with his daughter.

He sends me out the back with a bottle of 2003 Erasmo and a big glass. I sip the cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc and merlot mix, noting its deep and rosy red colour, medicinal cherry and liquorice smells and subtle oakiness. It is both a personal wine and a larger symbol of the growing quality of Chilean wines – a scribble on the side of my tasting notes reads: “Where is my lover to drink this with?”

“This project is to show what Chile is capable of,” says Cinzano. “I know what it means to make millions of cases at low margins and I’ll never do that again.”

“It’s like you’re after the Holy Grail,“ concludes Casa Lapostolle winemaker, Begarie. “You know you’ll probably never get there, but it’s a good path. If you can put pleasure into a bottle, you’ve done great.”

See the .pdf version of this story as it ran in American Express Centurion Magazine here

April 6, 2008 - The Boston Globe - Travel

From vine to vat, trying new ways to raise the bar
Click here to see my full photo shoot that ran with the story

CENTRAL VALLEY, Chile—In a dirt hole with what appears to be a tarantula, I inspect the root structure of wine vines through a plexiglass pane while Jorge Castillo holds the trap door open and laughs. “Don’t worry,” he says, “It’s just a chicken spider!” I suppress visions from “Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom” and back away calmly.

Who knew that a greater understanding of Chilean wine involved sitting in a hole with a furry, saucer-sized arachnid?
Wines produced on this side of the Andes tend to be reliable at a good price, but they rarely knock your socks off. As one winemaker here says, “Chilean wines are like a Volvo.”

Despite centuries of growing experience, Chilean wines are historically a bulk product. When wine consumption dropped some years back, many farmers in the Colchagua Valley simply ripped up their vines and planted kiwis and apples. This quicker buck and a “wine by the kilo” mentality trumped any commitment to growing the old vines that make the best wines.

That said, a growing number of winemakers are leaving their comfort zone to forge anew the identity of Chilean wines. The Andes rise sharp, snow-capped, and spiky to the west and the Coastal Range protects the valley to the east. The two mountain chains create a largely predictable climate known for hot days and cool nights - idyllic wine country.

Agriculture manager Jorge Castillo out among the vines at Casa Lapostolle in Chile’s Colchagua Valley. The winery is in the process of a complete changeover to making biodynamic wine - a strict version of organic production. (Joe Ray for The Boston Globe)

Castillo, the agriculture manager at Casa Lapostolle winery, is unfazed by the “What’s Chilean?” question. “You can make good wine around the world, but there are many roads to Rome,” he says.

Castillo’s road has chicken spiders; he believes they’re part of growing good grapes. “The farm is an organism,” he says. “The work is done by the animals in the hills. If you fertilize or use pesticides, you do it to the whole organism and the people who work there.”

Lapostolle is in the middle of the years-long process of going biodynamic: organic farming with practices like using quartz powder buried inside a cow horn as a pesticide and other practices that are often laughed at by industrial farmers and winemakers.

“I didn’t think it would work; it took me two years to believe,” Castillo explains as we bang through the fields in his truck.

Among the vines, we pass vegetable gardens that provide diversity for the farm and food for the winery’s small restaurant. Sections of steep vines are maintained by using horses instead of ground-crushing tractors, and there’s an 18-wheeler-sized hump of rich soil used for growing two kinds of earthworms that aerate and fertilize the soil.

Castillo stops to look at some vines with a few tiny red bugs on the leaves, which he examines by pulling a tiny magnifying glass from his pocket.
“You treat it [with pesticides] and they die off for a bit, but the same chemical used to kill the bugs kills its predators. But if you don’t use it, the equilibrium restores itself,” he says. “The pesticide vendor comes around every couple weeks to see if we’ve cracked, but I just smile and wave him off.”
While their approach is green, it isn’t 100 percent local. Casa Lapostolle uses the outside expertise of consultant Michel Rolland. A “flying winemaker,” Rolland was roasted in the documentary film “Mondovino” for zipping around the world, homogenizing wines and making important decisions for his wineries in the space of a couple of days. What’s Chilean about that?

“When you see a Chanel dress, it’s not like Coco sewed it,” counters Andrea Léon, oenologist for Casa Lapostolle’s high-end Clos Apalta label. Léon gives me a wine blending primer.

We start by tasting a merlot and a carmenère, Chile’s signature grape. The merlot has a strong berry smell but a flavor that vanishes quickly. The carmenère seems locked inside its tannins; alone, this wine would need some aging before it’s ready to drink.

Léon creates a 50-50 blend in a beaker and pours it into a wine glass. I imagine each grape helping the other to create something better than either of them alone.

Winemaker Sergio Silva’s production is so small, he uses his Santiago hardwood supply store as an ad-hoc distributor. (Joe Ray for The Boston Globe)

“Blech!” proclaims Léon after one sip.

None of the positive qualities from either grape have made it into the glass. “Sometimes, one plus one is not better,” she says.

She tries 75-25 mixtures. The merlot blend picks up some of the nuances of both wines while the carmenère-heavy blend has a flat smell, good flavor, and serious potential down the line.

“Sometimes, you’re blending for something immediate, sometimes, it’s for two or three years from now,” she says. “It helps if you think about what you’re working toward.”

Something nice to have with lunch seems a noble goal, so we steer toward the merlot mix.

Lips and tongue purple, Léon forges ahead, pulling out a pipette. “Change just 1 percent and the difference can be unbelievable.” The berry smells and flavors build, the chocolate and coffee flavors stretch through a long aftertaste. Eventually, we end up with a 72-18 blend.
Farther south at Gillmore Winery & Vineyards in the Maule Valley, it’s another world, a hot and intensely dry climate with golden hills reminiscent of California wine country. Here, the vineyards are refreshingly forward-thinking, an attitude apparent in the fantastic complexity of some Maule Valley wines.

Andrés Sánchez, Gillmore winemaker and former Kendall-Jackson consultant, gives me an impromptu lesson on the importance of acidity in wine.

“A high pH [low acid] wine gives you instant satisfaction. It’s like Pamela Anderson,” he says. But over time, the fruits drop, the oak-barrel flavors get too big, and the complexity that you’d expect from a great wine never develops.

“Chilean wines try to copy a model that doesn’t work,” he says, adding to his idea that Chilean wines are like Volvos. “People are heading places to stress the wines more, but that’s not enough, you need your own vision.”

“A low pH is a longer and more complex burn,” adds Sánchez. “It’s like Isabella Rossellini.”

His lab, a former bulk wine vat made of cement, is one of the least idyllic settings imaginable for tasting wine. We taste several excellent ones, including a cabernet that’s one of the best Chilean wines I’ve had.

Andrés Sánchez, winemaker at Gillmore Winery & Vineyards in Chile’s Maule Valley, takes a break. “Chilean wines try to copy a model that doesn’t work,” he says, adding to his idea that Chilean wines are like Volvos. “People are heading places to stress the wines more, but that’s not enough, you need your own vision.” (Joe Ray for The Boston Globe)

Excellent garage wine turns up with an unlikely producer. I find Sergio Silva sipping strawberry juice in the backyard of his Curicó Valley summer home at Santa Hortensia vineyard.

Silva bought the vineyard as a fixer-upper vacation home in 1991, not caring much for winemaking and letting the neighbor run his 75 acres of vines in exchange for use of his tiny winemaking bodega.

“The money I made from the wine [sold in bulk] paid for the whole property, but it was awful,” he says, “It was like that for years, but in 1997, the neighbor sold and gave me the keys back.”

He modernized his facilities and started making some good stuff on the side. Silva now sells micro productions of seven kinds of bottled wine to local restaurants and distributes it out of his Santiago hardwood supply store.

We have a glass of the chardonnay, which has picked up a pair of local awards in its first year of production. Though it’s not knock-your-socks-off stuff, it’s good wine.

I ask about the Santa Hortensia name and Silva grins.

“Hortensia was my mom’s name,” he says with a dose of Chilean sentimentality.

“And Santa?” I say.

“To me, she’s a saint.”

Joe Ray, a freelance writer and photographer, can be reached through his website, joe-ray.com.

What to do

Valle del Maule Ruta del Vino
Talca
011-56-71-246460; valledelmaule.cl
The visitors center located in the beautiful Villa Cultural Huiquilemu can be a great help to set up visits to Maule Valley wineries.

Casa Lapostolle/Clos Apalta
Santa Cruz
011-56-72-321803; casalapostolle.com
Tour and tasting $40. Private guest houses for two with breakfast tour and tasting $500 November through April, $400 for the rest of the year (closed June 15-Sept. 14). Meals with wine around $100 per person and up.

Gillmore Winery & Vineyards
San Javier
011-56-73-197-5539; gillmore.cl
Some of the best wines coming out of Chile are from this family-run winery.

Santa Hortensia Winery
Curicó
011-56-75-328-972; santahortensia.cl
(Spanish only)
An accidental garage wine made for all the right reasons.

Where to stay

Hotel Santa Cruz Plaza
Plaza de Armas, 286 Santa Cruz
011-56-72-209-600; hotelsantacruzplaza.cl
Reserve online at a discount; doubles start at $212. The hotel’s restaurant, Los Varietales, has one of the best reputations around. A la carte is about $35 per person. During the week, a prix-fixe menu is about $22.

Hotel Colonial Maule
Cancha de Carerras Villa Alegre
011-56-73-381-214; hotelcolonialmaule.com
(Spanish only)
Room for two near Gillmore Winery with double bed and breakfast, about $60.

See the .pdf version of this story as it ran in the Boston Globe : page 1,page 2

April 2008 - Platinum Magazine - Australia

BUENOS AIRES: On a ranch in the Argentine version of the middle of nowhere, I ask the gaucho in charge what a cow’s life is like. His eyebrows draw slightly closer as he takes a contemplative sip of mate (a stimulating infusion of yerba mate leaves) drunk through a silver bombilla (straw) and, without a word, gestures out the window at the 10,000ha of farmland that surround his modest cabin.

If I were a cow, I’d be pretty happy here… The sea of green surrounding Buenos Aires for hundreds of kilometres is the grazing ground for the grass-fed beef that forms the cornerstone of Argentina’s gastronomic reputation. Driving toward to the city hungry and curious to know more, a guided food tour of the city with one of its finest chefs is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

At the El Pobre Luis parrilla in Buenos Aires, a portrait of Julio Sosa “The Baron of Tango” hangs among signed soccer jerseys from around the world. Photo by Joe Ray

Chef Martín Rebaudino of Oviedo restaurant adopts me for this gastronomic initiation. He tells stories of the famous beef, places curious emphasis on Italian food (including divine gelato), and enthuses about fantastic wines. Needless to say, I am ready to eat.

For an immediate sense of place, I go to the grill. Parrillas are far and away Argentina’s most popular restaurants, centred on grilling meat in all its forms. I push through the horde of local Porteños [the Spanish demonym for the inhabitants of Buenos Aires – literally ‘people of the port’], spilling out of the door of the El Pobre Luis parrilla and meet owner Luis Acuña. “People who know how to eat come here,” he says, matter-of-factly, as he presides over a pair of grills the size of Cadillac trunks and puffs absently on a cigarillo. Why this parrilla, though, among the thousands in the country where grass-fed beef is king and the right to grill and eat it several times a week might as well be written into the constitution? “I drive 200km to choose each side of beef,” explains Acuña.

LOCAL ARGENTINE colour and authenticity is always at the forefront with the low-tech, but high-charm cash register at El Pobre Luis. Photo by Joe Ray

He also dry ages his beef for 20 days at three degrees Celsius – no small feat considering the time, technique, space and equipment necessary to produce this nuttier flavour and better texture that Acuña wants. Beneath it all, there’s good wood, in this case Argentina’s dense and hot-burning quebracho, which is reputedly one of the hardest of woods and imbued with powerful spirits according to native wisdom. The name alone is rich in meaning, stemming from the Spanish quiebra hacha, roughly translating as ‘axe breaker’. Before grilling, he also brings his cut-to-order steaks to room temperature, which gives rare steaks a crisp sear and keeps well-done cuts from becoming briquettes. “Nothing,” he says, underlining the word in the air with a set of tongs, “goes from the fridge to the grill.”

Using his utensils like they’re an extension of his arms and giving everything a liberal shake of salt, Acuña gives me tastes of slow-grilled menu items as he works: higado a la tela – a sausage made with liver, along with earthy and primal tasting bites of kidneys, tripe and sweetbreads. If you’re wary about eating variety meat, this is the kind of place to give it a go.

LOCAL ARGENTINE colour and authenticity is always at the forefront, whether with the low-tech, but high-charm cash register at El Pobre Luis (above), or the same parilla’s idiosyncratic, but appealing wall display. Photo by Joe Ray

First timers to Argentine beef, however, have no choice but to get a steak. Try Acuña’s ojo de bife (a rib-eye style cut) or a lomo con hueso, a bone-on tenderloin, which he describes as “like a T-bone cut in half.” This is the good half.
The nearby Oviedo is an entirely different experience. Waiters walk discreetly among a mix of regulars that includes businesspeople and gastronomes, along with those eager diners who have heard it’s the best place in town for fish. Chef Rebaudino and owner Emilio Garip are a pair of rare birds, specialising in seafood with Spanish flair in a country where meat is king.

“When my wife’s parents came to the restaurant for the first time, I sent out a pan of mussels,” says Rebaudino. “Years later, they told me that it was the first time they had tried them.” The soft-spoken Rebaudino shows me around his kitchen until orders start piling up then dives into the lunch rush. Working several plates at once, he begins prepping a codfish brandade for dinner. He violently shakes a pot the size of a table for two over the stove, occasionally switching back to the line to plate delicate dishes like fresh fish loin with crisp cured ham and parsley oil.

Though he offers a few top-level steaks to hedge his bets, Rebaudino shines most with his more adventurous offerings like baby squid cooked two ways with a squid ink and caper sauce or a salad of alternating layers of toasted eggplant ‘chips’ and eggplant caviar.

He may be tempted to serve a few inevitable steaks, but chef Martín Rebaudino (above) is happiest producing more adventurous offerings such as the one below. Photos by Joe Ray

“We have to work hard to convince customers. You can make extraordinary dishes and the Argentine people will say, ‘No, no, no,’” he says, miming a kid pushing away a plate of asparagus, “but then they taste and understand.”

No self-respecting Argentine would push away a glass of wine, however, and Alejandro Audisio is convinced Argentine wines rank among the world’s best. At Terroir Casa de Vinos, the high-end wine shop he co-owns, he begins by stressing what a bargain Argentina’s offerings are. “The bang for the buck ratio compared to US wines, for example, goes from three to one on the low end to six to one in the cult wines,” he says, pouring a 2003 Azul Reserva from Bodega La Azul. “The best of the current vintage release in Argentina is about 120 to 130 US dollars,” he adds, hammering his point home and exhibiting the mix of the businessman he used to be and the wine enthusiast he’s always been. “Stuff like this in the US can be 800 bucks!”

As he talks, he offers me an impromptu version of the wine tastings that are the brunt of his business. Typically, customers call Audisio to set up a paid, private tasting based around their wine knowledge and tastes. For these, he’ll decant bottles hours ahead or the night before to highlight a wine at its peak.

Audisio is quick to acknowledge Argentine wine’s shortcomings. “It’s easy to have a hit with one vintage and have a dud on the following one,” he says. This is where he steps into the picture; he’ll buy entire productions of limited-run wines – ones he knows are good – and sell them exclusively

A few days later, I meet Rebaudino for lunch. Darting nimbly through nerve-wracking traffic and avoiding drivers who could challenge Sicilian road warriors, we cross town for lunch in the appropriately-named La Boca district. The birthplace of tango, La Boca is known for its brightly coloured façades and dodgy backstreets. “Drive or take a taxi,” advises Rebaudino, pulling into a garage around the corner from the family-run Il Matterello restaurant.

Going Italian on a quest for typical Argentine food is curious without a bit of background, but Liliana (Lili) Stagnaro with her vibrant personality, corresponding shock of bleachblonde hair and steely blue eyes, sets me straight.

Argentine wines should not be underestimated, argues Alejandro Audisio, owner of Terroir Casa de Vinos and a passionate advocate of local vintages. Photo by Joe Ray

“Nothing in this restaurant is typically Argentine, but there are lots of people from Italy,” she says, referencing the huge numbers of Argentines with Italian roots. Her mother was born in Modena and her father was born in Argentina to Italian parents. “We learned all of this at home,” she says, gesturing at Il Matterello’s kitchen. “We transmit what we know.” And working with her family doesn’t drive her crazy? “Unless we’re fighting, everybody shows up every day,” she says, cleverly straddling the line between truth and humour.

Rebaudino and Stagnaro explain why eating Italian in Buenos Aires is nothing to scoff at by debating the merits of their favourite Italian haunts – Pizzeria Pirillo for standing-room-only fugaza (a focaccia descendant) and El Cuartito for the town’s best slice. For gelato that would make even Italian mouths water, they suggest three city staples; Un’Altra Volta, Freddo and Persicco. I’d later conclude that Freddo has the market cornered on dulce de leche flavours, Persicco has a stunning bitter orange and mango flavour while Un’Altra Volta’s bitter chocolate may be my overall favourite.

A living, breathing example of local colour is Lili Stagnaro of Il Matterello, who cites ‘feeling’ as a key ingredient. Photo by Joe Ray

As the plates come out at Il Matterello, we tuck in and eating Italian in Argentina suddenly makes total sense. Il Matterello highlights include fantastically deep flavoured stuffed olives, spinach croquettes (a favourite of Rebaudino’s daughter), stuffed tortelli, known as nuns’ hats, served with a brown butter sauce and green lasagna made with arugula (rocket), capped off with a homemade limoncello (lemon liqueur).

The olives are so good that I stop Lily from running around on the floor to ask just what is inside. “Ham, chicken, eggs, mortadella and onda.”

“Onda?” I ask, flipping through the food dictionary in my head and coming up blank. “Feeling!” she says, flashing a big smile and dashing back to the kitchen.

See the .pdf version of this story as it ran in American Express Platinum Magazine here

April 2008 - Centurion Magazine - Australia

PARIS – How to choose? Hepburn or Monroe? Porsche or Ferrari? Here in the City of Light, lucky diners can select between Alain Ducasse and Pierre Gagnaire for two completely different versions of the meal of a lifetime. Normally, the choice would be a tricky one, a matter of mood and taste, but this time it’s easy; the two legendary chefs have collaborated to create one mouthwatering menu exclusively for Centurion Magazine.

The pair have opted for three emblematic and truly French products, chosen, as Gagnaire says, “to create a single theme”. For their collaboration, Ducasse had the honour of selecting the products at the heart of the menu: appetizers with truffles (bien sûr!), main courses using vin jaune – a dry ‘yellow wine’ from the Jura made from savagnin grapes – and desserts featuring quince.

The combined résumé for the two chefs reads like a laundry list of some of the best restaurants around the world. Gagnaire, based in Paris where he runs his eponymous Michelin three-star restaurant at the Hôtel Balzac and the fish-centric Gaya, also runs high-end restaurants in London, Hong Kong and Tokyo. Most recently, he opened the Hôtel de Charme les Airelles in Courchevel, France and the Reflets par Pierre Gagnaire in Dubai.

Along with what he calls his high-end ‘signature’ restaurants in Paris, Monaco and Tokyo, Alain Ducasse runs other restaurants in Hong Kong, Mauritius, Saint Tropez, New York and Las Vegas. Add to this the November 2007 opening of Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester in

London and the January opening of Adour in the St Regis hotel in New York, and the total is well over twenty. Perhaps the most interesting news, however, was the January reopening of Le Jules Verne in the Eiffel Tower, now under the auspices of Ducasse and his team.

When discussing this menu, Ducasse plunges directly into his produce choices and in the end, it’s the people who supply his produce that he counts on the most. “A great product is never something from an industrial group. It’s the work of individuals,” he says. “Without them as a base, you can’t do anything.“

“Without [great produce] you can’t do anything,” says Alain Ducasse. (Photo: courtesy Bureau Alain Ducasse - (c) Benoit Peverelli, photographer).

“You might find truffles elsewhere in the world,“ he adds, returning to his home country, “but they are perfectly integrated in the spirit of French cuisine.”

Looking like a brightly-coloured ingot, his Bresse chicken with black truffle and foie gras jelly is a modern combination of three classic French ingredients. “Vin jaune is uncommon,” he says, referring to the wine’s intense aromas that can range from minerals to nuts and honey. “It’s something very specific and very French. It makes a unique sauce that reduces very well and you can add a little bit more at the end to make it shine.”

“Quince has a very particular flavour and I love the unique taste, but you’ve got to give it a ‘boost’,“ he adds, borrowing the last word from English. “There are fruits and vegetables which don’t have ‘talent’ on their own, but it’s a great accessory.” His boost comes in a tart with grapefruit and a caramel tea cream.

Speaking with both chefs, I get the sense that whether they are in Paris, Hong Kong, the US or elsewhere, Ducasse and Gagnaire are ambassadors for French cuisine, yet Ducasse always defers to the product. Were they to make the menu on another continent, the dishes would be completely different. “First, we look to see what’s around us,” says Ducasse. “We try to import as little as possible. In the US we import nothing. The sea bass (thought of here as a French staple) are caught on long lines off of New York.”

“The French system is more based on the savoir faire of how to deal with flavour,” he says, making a direct reference to the French flair for sauces and an indirect one to his poached, roasted red emperor (a white-fleshed snapper found primarily near Australia), mashed and crispy black Congo potatoes and vin jaune sauce. “With a code and a feeling, there’s alchemy.”

Then Ducasse spices things up a little: “Italian food has a more specific taste,“ he says, grinning with the knowledge that the comment would raise the hackles of his French colleagues if he didn‘t explain. “The real ‘French touch,’” he adds proudly, “is method, professionalism, rigour and organisation.”

For Gagnaire’s part in the diplomatic process, he uses a similar alchemy to remind the French (and the rest of the world) what makes their cuisine great. “We’re in a country that’s wondering about itself,” he says, referencing everything from politics and social issues to food and wine. “I want to show that we still know how to do it.”

A mix of haddock, artichoke, truffles and celery root? “Why not?” replies chef Pierre Gagnaire, “It’s not logic, it’s my personal taste,” (Photo courtesy Agence 14 Septembre - (c)Jacques Gavard, photographer)

His secret to rejuvenating l’art de vivre? Do what you love. “Do it honestly and with energy,” he says. Wherever he is or whatever he’s working with, Gagnaire has a clear vision of how this should come together. “My style is joyous, immediate and tries to tell a story. I want to make people dream and bring them somewhere they don’t know.”

This becomes clear even before the Centurion menu is set and Gagnaire begins brainstorming for his recipes, reeling off some of his favourite products like oysters, game and cauliflower with a childlike enthusiasm. It almost seems like he pulls certain combinations out of thin air, but listening to him, he’s clearly reaching into his soul. I ask about the combination of haddock and truffles, artichoke and celery root that he’s proposed and he replies with a quick “Why not? It’s not logic. It’s my personal taste.”

Perhaps the most interesting and challenging part of the story Gagnaire is trying to tell with the Centurion menu is what he calls his “Liebig”. Named after a 19th century German scientist, a Liebig is one of the fruits of Gagnaire‘s monthly collaboration with French molecular gastronomist Hervé This, who describes it as a “physically gelled emulsion” based on nothing but oil, water and gelatin.

“The taste?” asks This on Gagnaire‘s website, “It‘s clearly pathetic if it‘s just water and a neutral oil, but if the ‘water’ is a lobster bisque, and the oil an olive oil marinated with ginger and orange? Mmm! That could be good.” Inspired by his friend, Gagnaire proposes a Liebig made with vin jaune served with grilled scallops, salsify and Jerusalem artichokes. Mmm, indeed.

“People like Ducasse and me, it’s up to us to show these good things,” concludes Gagnaire. It seems to be working. “In Asia, they are very interested in l’art de vivre. Particularly the French style.” I swear that even over the phone, I could hear him crack a smile.

-fin-

See the .pdf version of this story - with recipes - as it ran in Centurion Magazine here

February 3, 2008 - The Boston Globe

BUENOS AIRES—It’s every male wallflower’s dream: walk into a hall of beautiful people, choose the woman you would like as a partner, nod confidently in her direction, and watch as she meets you on the dance floor. One caveat: In this country, when you take her hand you had better know how to tango.

With the goal of understanding my fascination with the dance and maybe learning a few steps, I introduce myself to Edith Paez, a tango instructor in Buenos Aires.
“It’s OK to be a beginner in an all-level class?” I ask.

“No problem,” she says.

“Good, because this is my first tango lesson.”

Her face drops.

“Suerte!” Paez quips, exhibiting some Argentine pluck. Good luck.

My obsession with the dance began in Paris where, weather permitting, a tango group meets a few times a week in an amphitheater on the banks of the Seine. The music caught me first: somehow light, sultry, and full of longing, with the accordion-like bandoneón grabbing my heartstrings as I rode by on my bicycle. I watched, entranced, trying to understand it all, but it seemed beyond me - everyone was doing different steps, forcing me to watch one couple at a time, and even then, I couldn’t figure it out. No matter. Simply watching and listening was a beautiful way to spend an evening.

Instruction is followed by open dancing a few days a week at the Glorieta de Barrancas de Belgrano in Buenos Aires.(Joe Ray for The Boston Globe)

In Buenos Aires, tango fanatic and area native Silvia Guzmán agrees to be my guide and immediately puts a finger on what fascinates me most about the dance.

“It’s three minutes of connection,” she says as we watch dancers go ‘round in counterclockwise circles at the Salon Canning “milonga,” or tango hall. “You’re always right in front of your partner, never next to each other.”

The sensuality is delicious. We watch instructors call out a few steps - “uno, dos, tres” “apart, together, apart” - as his feet scissor in and out between hers, which flare in circles. When the class ends and the floor fills, people aren’t just connecting, they’re smoldering. I zero in on one couple and while their feet flit about, cat-and-mouse style, their heads touch, and their chests are pressed together. I might as well be staring through a bedroom window.

Nothing this exciting will be happening for me anytime soon. Guzmán steers me toward websites and tango magazines that list courses happening at almost any given hour around town. There are so many that it’s like looking up movie listings in the States: Starting around noon, pick the time you want to go and there’s a class or three happening, broken down by skill level.

Guzmán and many other people also counsel the following: Once you find a place you like for lessons, stick with it. Luck and word of mouth had led me to the tango school run by Paez in the very hip Torquato Tasso Cultural Center in the San Telmo neighborhood. The benefit here is that Paez, a former master ballerina, both teaches and recruits a set of very capable instructors.

“In the past five or six years, tango has become our national hallmark. It’s like a cultural renaissance,” she says. “People wanted to connect again. It was a return to the city’s cultural roots.”

At Edith Paez Tango in Buenos Aires’ Torquato Tasso Cultural Center, instructor Edith Paez demonstrates a tango step.(Joe Ray for The Boston Globe)

Like anything else that has been around more than 100 years, tango’s popularity has waxed and waned, but the French capital played a key role in cementing the dance as the Argentine capital’s calling card. Though the dance’s humble beginnings were in 1880s Buenos Aires (often in bordellos), Paris being Paris, the City of Light transformed it from something vaguely sleazy into a global phenomenon in the early 1900s.

At my first lesson, Paez teaches our group to walk again. About 10 of us stride in a circle as she guides us - “uno, dos . . . uno, dos, tres,” she says as we step in a matching short, short, fast, fast, fast cadence. There’s no smoldering; we’re not even holding partners, but it’s curiously gratifying just to put one foot in front of the other.

When Paez pairs us with other dancers, I am matched with a well-dressed, gracious 60-year-old Argentine, and for the first official tango step of my life, I stomp on her stilettos.

I go to the next course with my girlfriend and, out of politesse, I make it to our second step before I tread on her toes. A travel writer, she refers to me as a “lumbering Frankenstein” on her blog - a link I conveniently forget to send to family and friends. During the course, however, we learn a similar uno, dos, tres step, this time with a crossover that actually feels like tango. I crush her toes and squeeze the blood from her fingers, but once in a while we get it right. No one would be impressed, but to simply do a few steps correctly with each other is exhilarating.

For course number three, I sit in on a class given by Dante Sánchez, 20, the 2007 salon-style world champion (tango is broken into several styles). He practically gives his time away, charging 13 pesos an hour for group lessons - the rough equivalent of getting passing lessons from Tom Brady at four bucks a pop.

I ask Sánchez what the connection means to him and it’s simple: “the music, the woman, and the floor.”

“The floor?” I say, thinking my Spanish is failing me.

He responds by doing a stiff, hokey jig where he hops around on the floor like a marionette, before switching to tango steps and sliding his feet as if in a trance. “You glide over it - it’s beautiful.”

“Like ice skating?” I venture.

“Claro.” Clearly.

“In my parents’ house and at fiestas, we listened to the music as kids,” Sánchez says. “When I hear it, I think of when I would listen with my father. When you listen, there’s an emotion that runs through you. It’s hard to explain, but it’s like being in love.”

Quang Bobrowski, also a former professional ballet dancer, is visiting from Germany for a few weeks of tango immersion at Paez’s school, sometimes taking a couple of classes a day, then going to milongas at night.

It’s easy to see his progress. At one point, something clicks and he gets so excited, he breaks rank and does a ballet-style split jump.

“Taking the class, something has changed,” Bobrowski says, catching his breath. “I could feel another muscle working. Suddenly, you feel another part of your leg that gives you a power to lead.”

“You can dance with less tension,” he says. “It’s like dancing heart to heart.”

A few nights later, I meet Guzmán under a giant outdoor gazebo in the tourist-free Belgrano neighborhood at the beautiful Glorieta de Barrancas de Belgrano milonga. Here, a few nights a week, tango courses are followed by open dancing, and Guzmán has promised to explain her connection and get me out on the floor.

Porteños (Buenos Aires natives) of almost every age and walk of life are here to dance. There are 70-year-olds in their Sunday best and a twentysomething couple of a dressed-to-kill woman in purple pumps and a guy in a track suit and black sneakers, all creating a near-perfect cross-section of the city. The big, glitzy tango shows downtown make for great spectacle, but here under the gazebo it feels like staring into the heart of the city and its inhabitants.

“It’s a wonderful dance to learn about the relationship between a man and a woman,” says Guzmán. “Having a man hold you is like a lesson in letting life take you somewhere and not trying to control it all the time.”

“Dancing is a place where people are alone, then they meet someone, they’re held,” she says. “It’s very sensual. It’s like a drug.” At this point, her attention floats away into the crowd in front of us, or perhaps she’s daydreaming of some tango connection in the past. “There’s passion,” she says, floating back. “It is passion.”

Suddenly, she grabs my hand and commands, “Put down the pen!” pulling me onto the floor so I can, um, strut my stuff. I show her the uno, dos . . . uno, dos, tres and the crossover step I’ve learned, along with one that sympathetic locals have taught me.

“That’s it?” she cries, giving my limited repertoire a good-hearted tease. I turn three shades of red, but she graciously sticks it out with me, as people literally dance circles around us. When she catches me regressing into “lumbering Frankenstein” mode, she squeezes my hand and says, “Follow me,” breaking into a bit of a wild freestyle. It’s probably tango heresy, but it’s perfect.

Later, I join Guzmán and some friends for a drink at a crowded sidewalk cafe, but in my head, I’m still under the gazebo with the sun going down, watching people dance, hearts pressed against hearts.

Joe Ray is a Paris-based food and travel writer and photographer. He can be reached through his website, joe-ray.com.

Click here to see my full photo shoot that ran with the story.

If you go…
What to expect

Dedicating yourself to lessons and milongas for a week will help you get out on the floor with confidence, but even a couple of classes can be fun.

Where to learn

Edith Paez Tango
Torquato Tasso Cultural Center
Defensa 1575, 011-54-15-5524-8396
florenciadittrich.com.ar/paez eng/
Group courses run an hour to 90 minutes for about $4.
Dante Sánchez was a 2007 world tango champion and gives group lessons at Paez’s school. He also gives private lessons for about $33 an hour. If there are language concerns, his brother sits in on lessons to translate.

Information

El Tangauta magazine
eltangauta.com
An easy-to-find tango reference with course listings and (limited) content in English.

Milongas
Even if you have never danced in your life, come to the dance halls known as milongas, have a drink, and get to know tango and its intricate customs. Lessons start at around 9 or 10 p.m. and open dancing begins as late as 11 or midnight.

La Catedral (a.k.a. Parakultural)
Sarmiento 4006
Ring buzzer number 5, then follow the music up one floor. Minimal cover charge.
Tango fanatic Silvia Guzmán’s favorite. A funky, underground milonga in the Almagro neighborhood. Best on Tuesday nights.

Glorieta de Barrancas de Belgrano (“La Glorieta”)
11 de Septiembre at Echeverria (look for the large gazebo)
Located in a park in the beautiful, residential Belgrano neighborhood. Lessons and dancing in the warmer months on two or three weekend nights.

Salón Canning
Scalabrini Ortiz 1331
011-54-11-4832-6753
A classic and a great starting point to get the fever. Sparse in detail, you are here to dance (or at least watch).

Where to stay

Gurda Tango & Winery Hotel
Defensa 1521
San Telmo
011-54-11-4307-0646
gurdahotel.com
A stone’s throw from where Edith Paez runs her school. Rooms $121-$190, breakfast included.

Caserón Porteño
Ciudad de la Paz 344
Capital Federal
011-54-11-4554-6336
caseronporteno.com
A low-key option in the funky Palermo neighborhood in a tango-centric, 10-room B&B. Doubles $58-$85 with breakfast, a kitchen, and free tango lessons.

Where to eat

El Pobre Luis
Arribeños 2393
011-54-11-4780-5847
elpobreluis.com
A Buenos Aires landmark in the Belgrano neighborhood. About $20-$30. Closed Sunday.

Oviedo
Beruti 2602
011-54-11-4822-5415
Though Argentina has an enormous coastline, seafood is a curious rarity. Oviedo is one of the few exceptions and one of the city’s best restaurants and wine cellars. $60-$100 plus wine.

Il Matterello
Martín Rodríguez 517
011-54-11-4307-0529
Argentines do Italian right and this family-owned restaurant is one of the best in town. Located in a sketchy neighborhood (take a cab). About $20-$30. Closed Sunday night and Monday.

See the .pdf version of this story as it ran in the Boston Globe : page 1, page 2

January 1, 2008 - The Star-Ledger - PAGE 1

PARIS—Many thought it would never happen. But France, a country that has had a long, loving relationship with the cigarette, is banning smoking in all bars, cafes and restaurants beginning today.

“It’s crazy,” said Pierce Siebers, 20, a Michigan native who was visiting Paris with his family for the holidays. “Everyone smokes here. It seems like part of the culture, even the dining culture.

“I started smoking in Michigan, but France doesn’t help,” he added with a smirk, referring to his half-pack-a-day habit. 

Jake Levy-Pollans, 20, a friend of Siebers, had just finished his fall semester in England, where a similar ban went into effect July 1. “In London, people were complaining, but they were adapting,” he said. “They’ll get used to it here.”

Siebers disagreed. “I don’t think they’re going to obey.”

Money is likely to do the talking. A smoker caught in the act will be fined 68 euros (almost $100), and if a proprietor is found with a smoker or an available ashtray in his establishment, the café could pay a fine of 750 euros ($1,077).

“Today is the last day of smoking at Café Titon,” co-owner Joël Blein said last week as he got ready to close for the holidays.

“I even took pictures of some of our clients who smoke, so in a year I can show everyone how ugly they were,” he said. “It sounds like even if you have an ashtray out on a bar, you can get a fine.”

People in other countries around Europe certainly love to light up, too, but France is very philosophical about the freedom, pleasure, even politesse involved with smoking.

With the historic switch, debate is raging about whether this is a good thing for France.

“I’m looking forward to the ban,” said Blein, who kicked his half-pack-a-day habit in October. “We’ll probably have to play police for a week and the philosophers will complain that it’s turning into a fascist state, but it makes for a good debate.”

Across town, restaurateur François Briclot, who runs a great-find wine bar and restaurant called Les Gorges Rouges, talked about the loss of liberté.

“I’ve run the restaurant for 20 years. When I opened, I had people who smoked like crazy,” he said, batting away imaginary smoke. “When I’d come home at night my hair would stink. But it was a choice.

“I’m worried about the society becoming a little phobic.”

He recalled an instance of being harassed in the streets of New York for smoking, and he recounted how, in his restaurant, a well-kept Parisienne of a certain age mused that someday even lovemaking would be outlawed. (Ah, France!)

“I respect people who smoke, and like smokers who respect nonsmokers,” Briclot said. “I smoke cigars—only once in a while, once or twice a week, but it’s part of the pleasures of the table. It’s a moment of serenity.

“There must be courtesy and elegance in how we act about smoking, so people can live together. I opened my restaurant because I like people. I don’t want to divide them.”

CULTURAL FLIP-FLOP
This sort of respect for both smokers and nonsmokers took a long time to arrive.

“There’s a change in people’s mentality in the last 10 or 20 years—it used to be good to smoke,” said Jean-Baptiste Valentini, a Parisian who smokes 1-1 1/2 packs a day. “There was an image of normalcy to it. It used to be that nonsmokers were strange for not smoking. Now it’s the reverse.”

Valentini attributed the shift to a long, slow government anti-smoking campaign. Before last February, when smoking was banned in most public places, the government campaign consisted mostly of regularly raising the tax on a pack of cigarettes.

Buying a pack of Luckys in the City of Light will now set you back an impressive eight bucks, 68 percent of which the government pockets in taxes.

“The other day I had lunch by myself in a restaurant where the seating was very tight. Nobody around me was smoking,” Valentini said.

“So I waited, then had one with a coffee at the counter.”

Politesse—politeness—or no, many here see the smoking ban as a good excuse to kick the habit.

“It will help, but it’s going to be hard,” said Café Titon regular Sylvian Cabouat, 32, a “15-cigarettes-a-day” smoker. “For those who don’t smoke, and even for those who do, the change will be nice.”

As the last day of smoking at Café Titon wound down last week, the regulars gathered around the bar and puffed away while they could.

Stéphane Morlet, Café Titon’s other owner, smiled, took a marker, wrote the date on an ashtray and signed the back for posterity.

“Barn Sale! Auction!” he said, holding it in the air. “Who wants to buy an ashtray?”

Joe Ray is a food and travel writer based in Paris. He may be reached via his Web site, www.joe-ray.com.

This story also appeared with:  The Sun-Journal

December 23, 2007 - The Boston Globe - Travel

LYON - The design on the door says it all: a line drawing of owner Georges “Jojo” Dos Santos locked in a passionate embrace with a bottle of wine.

Dos Santos’s flipped-up haircut and spunkiness are reminiscent of the cartoon reporter Tintin, and he and his shop, Antic Wine, are two of the most recognizable icons in Lyon. Only two minutes after my arrival, he exclaims, “Let’s go!”

Apparently, the tour of Lyon by Jojo does not begin with wine.
Something of a walking Rolodex, Jojo, 37, leads me around the historic Vieux Lyon neighborhood. Doing so, he not only shares some of the city’s best addresses, but also shows me a hidden path to its notoriously hard-to-reach inhabitants. Luckily, this is the historic gastronomic capital of France and if there’s a secret passage to the soul of the Lyonnais, it must include the esophagus.

We start by walking into the postage-stamp-sized Boulangerie St. Vincent. The bakery’s tiny size seems to amplify the smell of yeast in rising dough and the buttery odor of croissants in the oven. It gets me so worked up I’m willing to go on record and call this the best-smelling bakery in France.

Dos Santos walks across the floor, grabs a baguette à maïs - something like a multigrain baguette made with fresh corn kernels - breaks it open and stuffs his face inside.

Wine merchant Georges Dos Santos leads a discussion during a wine-centered private dinner at Les Adrets in Lyon.(Joe Ray for The Boston Globe)

“Ahh - smell this!” he exclaims, emerging from the torn loaf with a huge smile on his face and flour on the end of his nose. If you could get drunk on the smell of bread, it would happen with this baguette.

We scoot around the corner to the Halle de la Martinière market, and my guide makes a beeline for his favorite cheese shop, Le Jardin de la Martinière. Owner Virginie Messad gives us a taste of some seriously good Morbier, with a perfect creamy texture and raw-milk flavor, as she and Dos Santos discuss the market’s stature in the neighborhood, far from the hubbub of the city’s ritzy and touristy Les Halles de Lyon market.

The tour has already brought us past a beautiful butcher shop, Dos Santos’s favorite place for ice cream, a furniture restoration workshop that looks like it belongs in the early 1900s, and a pristine bakery, but when Messad asks me what I think of the city and its people, I realize we have been moving so fast, nothing has sunk in.
We hit the brakes when Dos Santos introduces his photographer friend Frédéric Sonier, who goes by the nom de plume Frédéric Jean.

“We’re bad at making people feel welcome, and we’re closed,” says Sonier, describing the typical Lyonnais. “But that mentality is changing. People are becoming more open and sympathetic.

“It takes a while to discover their richness - they’re like the ‘traboules,’ ” he says, referring to Lyon’s easy-to-miss pedestrian passageways that link one street to another, often hiding a beautiful courtyard.

“I can’t speak for everybody,” Sonier says, “but I share what I love.”

The soul-baring - and a state of the union for Lyon’s cuisine - comes from a pair of unlikely sources. Jojo stops for lunch at Les Adrets, a few doors up from Antic Wine on the Rue de Boeuf, and introduces chef Jean-Luc Wesolowski , 57, and cheesemaker François Maire, 42. Los Santos gets a “Cheers”-esque welcome as he makes the rounds of the restaurant, with warm hellos to everyone in the kitchen and half the customers.

Chef Jean-Luc Wesolowski of Les Adrets prepares dishes for a private dinner party. “People want to sell authenticity where there is none,” he says. “Food is made to make you dream.”(Joe Ray for The Boston Globe)

Wesolowski sits down after the busy lunch service to describe the slow change that’s happening to Lyon’s revered cuisine.

“Bouchons are like museums,” he says, referring to the bouchon Lyonnais, the city’s version of the bistro that focuses on hearty food like coq au vin, straying often into offal dishes like tripe, and serving it all up with plenty of wine. Today, the authentic bouchon Lyonnais is wildly outnumbered by knockoffs and finding a real one isn’t easy.

Wesolowski describes his own cuisine with a nonchalance that makes it sound like the simple dinner he prepares in the restaurant’s kitchen almost every night for his wife, but others might say his cooking is the perfect evolution of a bouchon.

“Bouchon is exploited,” says Maire, who is slowly orbiting toward our table after citing a mistrust of journalists. “People want to sell authenticity where there is none. It’s a great idea, but it’s too clean. Food is made to make you dream.”

Wesolowski would probably be a bit more upset by the slow death of one of Lyon’s icons if he didn’t understand why it was fading away.

“Before, people here were manual laborers who worked very hard - they needed heavy food,” he says. “Now, road workers have machines to dig their holes. It’s logical.”

“Here, the menu changes every day,” he explains. “I go to the market in the morning and if the fish is beautiful and the fishmonger gives me a good price, I’ll buy it.” He passes these prices on to his customers, particularly at lunch when a prix-fixe menu is all he offers and the three-course meal with wine and coffee is a bargain at $20.

“Now, with [today’s] lunch over, there’s nothing left,” says Wesolowski. “This is the principal characteristic of a neighborhood restaurant.”

That said, it’s not over for the bouchon. Wesolowski occasionally makes bouchon standards such as pork with lentils, fish dumplings known as quenelles, and a salad made with pigs’ feet.

“He’s unique,” says Maire. “He still works with his heart.”

After lunch, at the Café de la Cathedral, I get Dos Santos talking about wine while he sips on a San Pellegrino mineral water served in a Perrier glass. Even that becomes something of an indirect ode to the character of the Lyonnais. He begins by talking about the semi-regular tastings he runs at Antic Wine, where anything from reasonably-priced wine to an expensive magnum might be served with some wonderful charcuterie, all for a ridiculously cheap $15.

“The tastings are a lot of fun, but we certainly don’t do it for the money,” he says.

Case in point are two empty bottles left from previous tastings on a shelf at the shop, one from Château Haut-Brion and the other from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, and each of them worth a couple of C-notes.

“I’m generous - I don’t do this for free, but I love working with food and with people,” Dos Santos says. “Wine has got to be accessible to everybody. There’s always money, but you’ve got to have magic, too.”

Later in the evening, Dos Santos plays waiter at Les Adrets for a private wine-tasting dinner he has organized with Wesolowski. The consummate host, here Dos Santos is clearly in his element. He skates around the floor, making jokes in the kitchen and with the clients, who try several wines over the course of the evening. He’s all smiles, simultaneously running the show, charming everyone in his path, and, at the end of the night, sharing a drink with them.

At one point, he stops at a waiter’s station to test a Burgundy he has just opened, pokes his nose in a glass, inhales deeply, then takes a sip. Then, like an aside to the camera, he turns to me, tingling with enthusiasm, and finally talks about the wine.

“Ça,” he says, flicking the glass with his finger and making it sound a sharp, satisfying “ding!” “C’est magnifique!”

Click here to see my full photo shoot that ran with the story.

Joe Ray, a former cook, is a freelance journalist and photographer based in Paris. He can be reached through his website, joe-ray.com.

If you go…

Where to buy wine

Antic Wine
18 rue du Boeuf
011-33-4-78-37-08-96
anticwine.com
The wine shop of Georges dos Santos is a veritable Lyon landmark. Closed Monday.

Where to stay

ARTELIT
16 rue du Boeuf
011-33-4-78-42-84-83, 011-33-6-81-08-33-30
dormiralyon.com
Frédéric Jean’s beautiful, central, cozy B&B. Reasonably priced at $132-$176. The bed’s in a loft, however, leaving you with little headroom.

Cour des Loges
2-4-6-8 rue du Boeuf
011-33-4-72-77-44-44
courdesloges.com
Go high-class, Lyon style: beautiful decor, lush rooms, stunning atrium courtyard. $351-$878 a night.

Where to shop

Boulangerie St. Vincent
49 quai St. Vincent
011-33-4-78-29-34-23
The pain de maïs (bread made with corn, but not corn bread) is to die for.

Jardin de la Martinière
Halle de la Martinière
Rue de la Martinière
011-33-4-78-29-56-24
Killer Morbier and goat cheeses, but ask owner Virginie Messad what’s best.

Where to eat

Les Adrets
30 rue du Boeuf
011-33-4-78-38-24-30
Dos Santos’s favorite place to dine in Lyon and a prix-fixe lunch at an unbeatable $20. Closed in August.

Le P’Tit Bouffon
73 rue de Sèze
011-33-4-78-24-00-16
Stop feeling like a tourist and go to this friendly, no-frills restaurant with a Basque influence. Dinner with wine around $40 a person.

Glacier Nardone
26 quai de Bondy
011-33-4-78-28-29-09
glaciernardone.com
Closed Jan. 1-March 10 Get in your licks . . . at Dos Santos’s favorite place for ice cream.

Information: lyon.fr/vdl/sections/en/

See the .pdf version of this story as it ran in the Boston Globe : page 1, page 2

December 21, 2007 - Agence France Presse

Want a real taste of Wales? While some might hop a plane to Cardiff for rarebit, others can head to the end of the world for tea and cakes in Patagonia.

Welsh emigrants landed in Argentina more than 150 years ago but their heritage and language have endured unchanged, largely thanks to tea houses.

“The traditions of our ancestors are now practiced here more than they are in Wales,” boasts Susanna de La Fuente who runs the Nain Maggie teahouse in the town of Trevelin with her family.

Each year, a Welsh cultural festival known as an “eisteddfod”—Welsh for “to sit”—which includes singing, poetry and lectures and dates back to 1176, is held here and in other Argentine Patagonian towns.

While the annual eisteddfods are popular, the teahouses with their homemade goods are the real Welsh cultural hubs.

In 1865, Welsh settlers fled British rule for a mix of historic, economic and political reasons that included the right to speak their native language. After the first came to what is now the city of Puerto Madryn, it took years and the help of Tehuelche natives for them to settle in as farmers and ranchers.

Lucy Underwood prepares torte dough at the Nain Maggie Welsh teahouse in Trevelin, Argentina. Welsh emigrants landed in Argentina more than 150 years ago but their heritage and language have endured unchanged, largely thanks to tea houses.(AFP/Joe Ray)

“When women got together, they’d share what they had at hand, which are the ingredients for these,” says de La Fuente, pointing out trays of homemade tortes, breads, jams and scones along with a big pot of black tea being prepared for Nain Maggie customers.

Though the Welsh culture’s popularity waned during heavily nationalist periods such as the Peron governments in the 1940s and 1950s, and again following the Falkland Islands War, it is now on the rebound. The younger generations, particularly in the smaller Welsh strongholds, are becoming more interested in their background and language courses are flourishing again.

But some of the most important traditions revolve around the table.

“This is how my family ate,” says de La Fuente’s mother and Nain Maggie founder, Lucy Underwood, referring to the two generations that preceded her in Patagonia.

She, her daughter and son Javier still do all the mixing for tarts and cakes served at the teahouse by hand, around the table. “The apple tart is apple, sugar, flour and eggs. The cream tart has cream and a little sugar. It’s simple,” Underwood says.

“It’s an excuse to get together. It’s a social occasion,” says de la Fuente.

Ana Chiabrando Rees prepares a plate of tortes in the kitchen of the Plas y Coed Welsh teahouse, which was opened by her great-grandmother in 1944, in Gaiman, Argentina. (AFP/Joe Ray)

Fernando Coronato, president of the Asociacion Punta Cuevas which runs a museum at the original Welsh landing site in Puerto Madryn, says ironically “there is no teahouse tradition in Wales”

But “for us, it’s important because restaurants and gastronomy have always been a way to transmit culture. Thanks to our teahouses, many people have learned about our culture.”

“In five or six generations, Welsh blood has spread widely across Patagonia,” Coronato said. In the Chubut province where the population is well over 400,000 he estimates about one person in four has a pure-blooded grandparent and some 5,000 people speak the Welsh language here.

The Welsh heritage and the language revival are most evident in the town of Gaiman, which is well known for a large number of low brick or stone buildings and quiet streets lined with a large number of teahouses.

Ana Chiabrando Rees(R) pours tea to customers at the Plas y Coed Welsh teahouse, which was opened by her great-grandmother in 1944, in Gaiman, Argentina.(AFP/Joe Ray)

One called Plas y Coed run by Ana Chiabrando Rees was opened by her great-grandmother in 1944.

“Nobody makes a lemon tart like mine!” she says, before deferring to the past. “My grandmother made a lemon tart for Bruce Chatwin. Page 31!” she adds proudly, pulling out a Spanish-language copy of Chatwin’s “In Patagonia” and opening to the part where he visits Gaiman.

“My mother didn’t speak Welsh, but I learned from my grandmother and great-grandmother,” says Rees, who now teaches Welsh in Gaiman and made her first trip to Wales a year ago.

For Rees, it is baking at the teahouse that connects her to her Welsh heritage.

“I was always running around here as a kid,” she says, gesturing in a zigzag pattern across the kitchen. “When my grandmother died last year, I took over.”

“The language almost died here,” she says. “But now the Welsh descendants are learning again.”

November 19, 2007 - brandchannel.com

 
Tourists re-define brand PatagoniaThe Patagonian brand—one of desolate desert steppe, jagged peaks, and mammoth glaciers that look like crushed cities—is both growing and undergoing a shift. Though many people first learned of Patagonia from the outdoor clothing line, more and more tourists are becoming interested in Patagonia the region, and it now finds itself caught between catering to the expectations of tourists and maintaining its authentic rugged identity and lifestyle.

In Puerto Natales, one of the region’s busiest cities, two leaders of the tourism industry are curiously uninterested in giving their clients a taste of the local culture. Hotelier Hernan Joffré and restaurateur Max Salas are Santiago transplants who don’t think their customers travel great distances for the indigenous culture, either.
 
“A traveler comes [to the hotel] for two or three days and they go away,” says Joffré, the unintentional mastermind behind Indigo Hotel & Spa. “They are more interested in the beauty of nature. People don’t come to see Puerto Natales. We have a casino here,” he says, referring to a dive that’s a favorite hangout for locals. “Do you believe tourists want that? If you want a casino, go to Las Vegas.”

And he feels his colleagues clearly haven’t caught on to the concept of customer service, which is important if the local economy wants to attract tourists.

Though tourists can get a good night’s sleep in most typical Patagonian lodgings, and some can be pretty good, most of them haven’t had an aesthetic update in 20–30 years. This may and may not be part of their charm.

Joffré, who tends to wear hip, rugged clothes and a rather smart ball cap, learned as he went, one step at a time. “I studied commercial engineering (a mix of business, marketing and engineering), but after that was finished, I came to climb.”

“It was like a ghost town here,” he says, gesturing toward the mountains across the sound. “We rented [the house] and made a pizzeria/pub downstairs with rooms upstairs. It was the one hip place for climbers,” he says.

The business started growing and from the makeshift hotel, they began offering guided trips into the park. In 1999, he bought the building.

Just over a year ago, the hotel underwent a major remodeling masterminded by noted Chilean architect (and Santiago native) Sebastián Irarrazaval. Compared to what is typical here, Indigo nattily bucks the doily and tea cozy trend. The way Joffré looks at it, who’s going to say no to a beautiful room, a firm bed, and three rooftop Jacuzzis after a week of intense hiking?

Intentional or not, it was a clear plan. He wooed investors while building a base of scruffy young climbers that became well-booted clients; though still adventurous, they were increasingly fond of creature comforts. He also split the hospitality and trekking into separate ventures, giving visitors all the Patagonia they could take with his Antares Patagonia tour company and tucking them in stylishly at the beginning and end of their trek at a hotel initially called Concepto Indigo.

“The people coming through town began to change,” he says. “They didn’t have any trouble sleeping in a tent [while they where hiking and climbing], but they loved coming back into town and spending money for a good room and a good meal.”

The potential to grow was easy to see for Joffré, but convincing Chilean investors wasn’t as simple. For the investment money necessary for last year’s mammoth remodeling, he had to go abroad. The locals didn’t see what the foreigners had in mind.

“I started looking for investors in Santiago, but they thought tourism was a weird idea and Patagonia too far away,” he says. Instead, he found a Spanish/French couple (Spain has historical ties here, and French singer Florent Pagny went on a Patagonian kick a few years back and the region has since become a trendy destination for the Parisian jet set) who ponied up the cash.

Listening to him, it’s easy to understand why he chose to veer away from the typical Patagonian hotel experience and why he’s taking advantage of his perspective as an outsider.

“A local guy told me I had to have a karaoke pizza bar. I said ‘No.’ My target was not locals.” Instead, he put himself in the traveler’s boots and concentrated on the little details. “I don’t drink coffee, but I know people do. I don’t like oily food and there’s no smoking here,” he says, adding, “In a hostel, it used to be that they would serve you food and be smoking to you at the same time.”

The bar and restaurant attached to Indigo (but under separate ownership) serves fresh, local fish and mean espresso (rare in the area), but the management has a similar take on tourism at the bottom of South America.

“Tourism is still part of an alternative lifestyle,” says Max Salas, who runs both the Pez Glaciar Sea & Food restaurant and the Pisco Sour bar. Like Indigo, the bar and restaurant have a sleek, modern design that, for better or for worse, could be found just about anywhere.

Among other dishes, Salas’ team serves up five different ceviche preparations along with sesame seed-encrusted conger eel (he uses the more marketing-savvy name “kingclip”), and several presentations of the strong-flavored silverside.

Yet, is this experience authentic? Is this what people want when they come to Patagonia? If tourists want the complete Patagonian experience, one where the locals feed them meals and they sleep in one of the bedrooms rented to travelers, Indigo and Pez Glaciar probably aren’t for them.

“Is it authentic?” asks Joffré, “I’ve been asking myself that for 11 years. I don’t know how many travelers are looking for that, as opposed to something comfortable.”

It’s an outsider’s vision of tourism in Patagonia and for better and for worse some might say it’s the wave of the future—and Patagonia’s brand of the future, too.
 
 

Joe Ray is a Paris-based freelance journalist specializing in food and wine. He can be contacted via his Web site: www.joe-ray.com.

October 29, 2007 - ASAP / Associated Press

USHUAIA, Argentina

Growing up in New England, one of my favorite food experiences was eating oysters with my dad in Boston’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace. He’d wait for an opportune moment when my mother and sister were shopping, grab my arm and we’d scoot over to the raw bar, promising the ladies we’d be back soon.

Dad would order a cheap draft beer and half a dozen beauties that were shucked under our noses, and I’d watch it all from the barstool, fascinated by the spectacle that, in retrospect, was simply about doing it right, over and over again.

It would drive most chefs crazy, but here in Ushuaia, the end-of-the-world city that dangles off the bottom of South America like an earring, doing the same thing over and over again is a big enough challenge to keep Ernesto Vivian satisfied.

Ernesto Vivian, the seafood chef at the end of the world.(AP/Joe Ray)

“It’s a big problem to be a good chef in Ushuaia. Sometimes, it takes all morning to find 10 good tomatoes,” says Vivian, 52, who gestures out the window at the Beagle Channel and the snow-capped peaks that surround the city.

Although spring has technically sprung on this southern side of the equator, the snow is still flying, often pushed horizontally by the wind. It’s hard to imagine how far any tomato, let alone a good one, would have to travel to get here.

His work pays off. He’s won national and international culinary awards, including the 2005 Academia Argentina de Gastronomía prize for the country’s best restaurant, which is no mean feat considering he lives in what most would consider a culinarily deprived area. Running the restaurant, Kaupé, with his wife Tessy and son Santiago, theirs is one of the few places in town that’s consistently full before the summer tourist season officially begins.

BOILED AT THE SOURCE

Vivian is a peculiar man. He wears trendy glasses over a floppy moustache that would make a walrus proud, and though this is the country of the grilled steak as big as your head, he prefers to cook seafood. You also tend to have all or none of his attention—but if you’ve got it, he talks about food with a combination of love, philosophy and sense of purpose that seems innate in some of cooking’s greatest minds.

To understand why the chef at the end of the world broke the mold that holds 99 percent of the chefs in his country, it’s best to concentrate on his connection to what lurks in the deep, frigid water below town. Vivian and his restaurant are as close to the source as you can get to his specialties, like giant Antarctic king crab and Antarctic scallops.

A caricature of chef Ernesto Vivian on the refrigerator of Kaupe.(AP/Joe Ray)

A far cry from the carb-flavored crab on my plate a few days prior, Vivian’s is another story. His version arrives adorned with only a lemon wedge, and it tastes nothing like bread. It’s served cool, has a slightly firm texture from living in the Arctic depths, and has a delicate flavor that needs only a drop of lemon juice. At this point, I figure the guy’s got a top-secret recipe from God.

“We don’t boil the crab ourselves,” he says, apparently admitting culinary blasphemy while mysteriously pointing toward the sink.

“You need to boil them while they’re alive,” he explains. “I’d rather my fisherman does it. Plus, he boils them in sea water,” which, as I slowly warm to the idea, sounds a lot more authentic than the water from his sink.

Logistically, it makes sense, too. Unlike a relatively compact New England lobster, live king crab has a “wingspan” of a couple of feet. Storing the quantity Vivian needs alive before cooking them to order would require more space than his tiny kitchen allows. Plus, with the beds where Vivian’s fisherman pulls them from the sea a short 23 nautical miles away, they don’t need to be frozen.

___

SIMPLICITY IS KING

Despite menu options that say otherwise, Vivian insists that first tasting his undecorated version is the only way to understand the king crab.

“People come and ask for the King Crab Kaupé,” he says, referring to his thick, chowder-like concoction made with crab and spinach and his king crab crêpes with saffron sauce, “but I ask if they’ve tried the real thing first.”

This sort of product-first simplicity flows through his tasting menu: he lightly marinates Antarctic scallops and tops them with a finely diced onion that’s been marinated separately until it releases a sweet flavor. He also makes a mean tenderloin steak that’s simply seared in a skillet and topped with a cream sauce. Cooking the latter at a slow point toward the end of the evening, he seems to pause to ponder its beauty.

It’s a “Wax on, wax off” purist approach that would confound other chefs in his league, but here at the end of the world, it works.

“Young chefs try to imitate El Bulli,” he says, referring to the famous restaurant outside of Barcelona where superstar chef Ferran Adria creates dishes that smear the line between science and cuisine. “That’s stupid ... There’s only one Dali in the world.”

Taking nothing away from his top-notch colleagues around the world who create dishes with sums greater than their parts, it’s refreshing to meet a chef content to leave a good thing alone, doing it right, over and over again.

“If you eat something that’s the best food of your life,” says Vivian, “you never forget it.”

I should bring dad here.
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Joe Ray is a Paris-based food and travel writer and photographer currently researching the food and culture of Patagonia. He can be reached via his Web site, www.joe-ray.com.