Last Pastry in Munich

by Christina Waters | Aug 31, 2012 | Home | 0 comments

Even though it sounds like the title of a French film, that headline refers to one of the most satisfying pastry encounters of my food life.

I had just waded through a time-trip of northern Renaissance masters—Dürers, Memlings, Cranachs, van der Weydens, as well as the staggering wall of brilliant flesh that is the Rubens collection—and it was time to give my feet a rest.

The Alte Pinakothek contains a soothing tea room that overlooks the parks surrounding the city’s three main museums.

It was beginning to rain.

I sat with an over-sized cup of Assam black tea and a slice of freshly-made rhubarb and mascarpone torte. The perfume of the tea infusing each bite of tart fruit and voluptuously creamy cheese. This was the pastry I had come to Bavaria to sample.

And by the time I finished, the storm was over, the heat was back and there were a few more bits of monumental architecture to be savored.

Pilgrimage to Bayreuth

by Christina Waters | Aug 30, 2012 | Home | 0 comments

Here’s where I went — the opera house (Festspielhaus) in Bayreuth, Germany designed and built by Richard Wagner exclusively for the performance of his legendary operas.

And here’s why I went: the annual Bayreuth Festspiel performances of Wagner’s operas, a six-week orgy of music, champagne and over-dressed aficionadoes, which invades this handsome little town two hours northeast of Munich every July-August. Lucky enough to score tickets to three of this season’s five operas —Tristan und Isolde, Tannhäuser and Parsifal—I joined a refined herd of Wagnerites from all over the world last week to swelter in Europe’s blazing heat wave and feast at the high altar of Romantic opera.

It was the musical event of a lifetime, and from comments gleaned by longtime Bayreuth patrons, the operas I saw were definitive—especially the Parsifal I had most anticipated. The man next to me in the bespoke tuxedo expertly wielding an antique black fan—himself a veteran of 16 Bayreuth seasons—pronounced this Parsifal the best he’d ever heard. – to be continued

Is Fine Dining Dead?

by Christina Waters | Aug 4, 2012 | Home | 8 comments

I’m sure you have your opinions on this one, but the view from my wineglass tells me that we are way past the rococo period of the last few decades. You know, where every menu involved footnotes. Every server rattled off recitations of designer ingredients that might have been lifted from a Dean & Deluca catalog.

Dinners in which one felt like a philistine for daring to destroy the visual narrative on the plate—where perhaps genuflection would have been more appropriate than actually spearing the innocent hyper-mediated vegetables with a fork!

Oh I enjoyed the Late Baroque of dining chic as much as the next woman—and I have the track record to prove it. But I am beginning to think that the ever-more-precious approach to ingredients, presentation and culinary style has had its day.

Here was one moment when I glimpsed the fetid reality (more…)