Culinary passion and art-making can flourish together in the right hands, such as those of Rirkrit Tiravanija, who has explored meals-as-art-medium, and the artist-founded restaurant Food, started in SoHo in the early 1970s by Gordon Matta-Clark and others. Now, the Whitney Museum of American Art is rebooting its restaurant spaces with commissioned artworks by two…
So you’re at a classy party and you approach the bartender. You adjust your tie and ask for an old-fashioned. The charismatic bartender smiles knowingly and reaches for his finest bourbon. But no, you interrupt. You’d like it with brandy. You are either A. a contrarian. B. wrong. or C. from Wisconsin. If the answer…
Sal, Aaron and Big Country (given name: Jesse) were my chef-brothers in that kitchen. We talked everything through, every day, over cereal bowls and test recipes and, eventually, finished dishes. I learned how to make Sal’s father’s salsa in that kitchen, and Big Country’s mama’s oatmeal bread, a recipe he wrote down for me as…
Headliner Café Carmellini The chef Andrew Carmellini’s trajectory has been a steady climb, not a rocketing blastoff. Now, having reached cruising altitude after 30 years at the stove in New York, a city where his family has roots, he’s finally putting his name on a restaurant. It’s in a first-class building, formerly a bank and…
Everyone has comfort food. Here’s mine: juicy meatballs done Italian American style, served with homemade tomato sauce or piled on top of a spaghetti heap. I used to make a pot of meatballs when friends came over for dinner because it was cozy but not frumpy and everyone loved it. It was also very easy.…
On a sunny October afternoon in the London neighborhood of Bermondsey, a cool breeze surprised me with the winy smell of apples. It brought on a sudden sharp craving for a nice chunk of Cheddar, the fruit and the cheese together being a favorite after-school snack when I was growing up in Connecticut. This was…
Tieghan Gerard was busy lighting pumpkin spice-scented candles when I arrived at her sunlit studio last month. After more than a year of negotiations with the representatives who guard her schedule and her image, she’d agreed to cook two recipes I’d chosen from the thousands on her immensely popular recipe site, Half Baked Harvest. Small,…
Chile crisp or crunch has become as ubiquitous in the kitchen as peanuts on a bar. Depending on whose jar you’re opening, there are slight variations. A new one that’s densely packed with soybeans, fava beans, yellow split peas and pumpkin seeds doubles down on the crunch factor. The fire component is moderate. It’s from…
With Halloween jumping out at us tomorrow, and Thanksgiving waiting around the corner, the season is sporting its brightest colors. The trees are rubicund with turning leaves; the farmers’ market ruddy with apples and pumpkins; the impulse rack in the supermarket checkout line ablaze with beckoning bags of candy corn. What better match for this…
Good morning. Chili season gets underway in my house after the first day I am well and truly chilled on my daily bike ride north along the harbor, wind whistling out of the west as if to knock me over. That sure wasn’t yesterday, not in New York! But as Mr. Martin wrote, “Winter is…