Brew-heads might want to make plans to spend next Thursday, March 8 upstairs at Red, in the old Santa Cruz Hotel. Food prepared by 515 and Red chefs, Caleb Hanscom and Erin Danielson will be paired with four selected beers from Lagunitas Brewing.
Beer lovers always complain that wine tasting gets all the coverage. So here’s an evening just for you. Make reservations by calling Red at 831/425-1913.
In a word, “yes.” But I already knew that, having been lucky enough to dine in the original Paris version of Le Bernardin, as well as the Manhattan one twice before. Perhaps only Jules Verne has done more for seafood than Le Bernardin chef Eric Ripert. But then the Michelin people also know that. Three stars.
My dining partner was a Le Bernardin devotée and longtime Manhattan artist and she was as thrilled with the meal as I was. Armed with a glass of Puligny-Montrachet more costly than most bottles of wine I have in my house, I plunged into a beautiful world of flavors.
It began with an amuse fit for the angels. In a shot glass, lavish morsels of Maine lobster, sweet and moist, sat suspended in a warm lobster foam. My appetizer of yellow fin, pounded thin enough to read through, was layered over a frosting of foie gras, over a paper-thin slice of baguette toast. Each bite moved down through the sparkling tuna, the creamy foie gras and into the crisp toast. Sensational.
Next came a course of warm peeky-toe crab, (more…)
Manhattan – where the national color is black and the diversity is abundant. You can tell the tourists immediately – they are not wearing black, and they aren’t wearing one of those big, cashmere mufflers that are required in the City. In an effort to stretch my culinary dollars I lived a schizophrenic food life last week, ranging from lunches of trail mix to 3-star Michelin dinners. In between, I walked as far as the snowy, slushy streets would allow and inhaled great architecture and even greater artworks. In a nutshell:
The Met also offered my wonderful final meal of the trip. I went on Friday evening — the Met is open until 9pm on Fri & Sat – and found a string quartet filling the graceful lobby rotunda with music. At a table along the upper mezzanine balcony, I enjoyed a trio of cheeses, with crostini, grapes and figs – plus a McLaran Vale Shiraz 2Up, 2005, filled with berries and earth-tones. Incomparable ambience, nice food, for $21 – including bubbling water. When you go to New York, by all means visit the Met on a weekend evening. Lots of action, and fewer crowds.It was, other than the trail mix, the cheapest meal I had in the City.
The Modern: MOMA, despite its hefty $20 admission, delivered the goods. The Jackson Pollack room alone is worth the twenty bucks. But then so were a few choice Diebenkorns and DeKoonings. I always visit the Terrace Cafe at MOMA, on the 5th floor. Seriously beautiful food, served in an austere white room (really smart, since your eyes need a break after feasting on all that modern art), and for reasonable prices.
My lunch consisted of sliced duck, fanned out on a salad of Yukon gold potatoes bathed in aged goat sheese and horse radish ($15). A fluff of infant cabbage spouts sat at the top of the plate. A slick of Port glaze went nicely with the duck — but then, they knew that — and a little mound of fruit that had been simmered in the Port sat on the side. Raisins, cranberries, sultanas, oh my. Conceptually perfect. Add a pot of herbal tea, absolutely right for the cold weather (the high that day was 24 degrees!), and you have heaven for twentysomething dollars.
Another night I dined at Lupa Osteria Romana — another one of Mario Batali’s loud, exciting, to-die-for food palaces in Greenwich Village. (more…)
The half-hour film works, in classic Landau style, by means of wry, engaging images and interviews, to show us the real casualties of first world greed — the hard-working poor of Mexico. Comprising a trio of educational vignettes, the film opens with a withering dismissal of plans to put a full-on golf course and country club in the town of Tepoztlan, whose environmentally-savvy citicizens mocked the planned corporate disaster. “We don’t want this type of progress,†notes the newly-elected Tepoztlan mayor.
Another segment takes aim at Boise Cascade’s take-over of logging in Guerrero, complete with tales of torture endured by Mexican peasants who attempted to stop the clear-cutting of local forests. The filmmaker captures painful confessions of former Levi Strauss factory workers whose El Paso jobs were abruptly terminated in favor of the cheaper labor pool of China.
Landau’s eye sees it all – toxic waste, loss of jobs, eco-disasters, and the irrationality of capitalism. (more…)
Yes, it was snowy in Manhattan last week! Beautiful, crisp and COLD. But that didn’t stop me from devouring all the food and art the law would allow.
Central Park, as you can see (that’s the Dakota, where John Lennon lived, in the background) looked gorgeous. I drove through it on my way to breakfast at the Neue Galerie‘s decadent Cafe Sabarsky. Pastries lined up like it was Vienna 1923 all over again.
The Neue Galerie, art lovers will recall, is the
jewelbox mansion on 5th Avenue (at 86th) that Ronald Lauder (Estee’s son) transformed into a home for Austrian and German artwork. The current exhibition includes four rooms of furniture, textiles, wallpaper – the works – designed by the Wiener Werkstatt’s Josef Hoffman (the Viennese equivalent of Charles Rennie MacIntosh). (more…)
A book of sensory adventure: The rituals, passions and discoveries of an engaged life.