Good morning. There aren’t many menu descriptions less appetizing than the “blanched lettuce” available at Tim Ho Wan, the Hong Kong dim sum chain that opened its second New York City store in Hell’s Kitchen in 2018. But it’s one of the restaurant’s great options: hot tender-crisp iceberg lettuce doused in soy sauce. I make…
Headliner El Quijote Its signature red neon sign has not changed, nor have the references to Don Quixote, the Spanish tilter of windmills, on its painted walls, frosted glass, ceramics and more. Now, this restaurant in the Hotel Chelsea on West 23rd Street, one of the city’s oldies — it first opened in 1930 —…
For several miles along Roosevelt Avenue between Citi Field and Woodside, Queens, it is hard to walk more than a block or two without running into a taco. Around the 103rd Street stop on the No. 7 train, though, the taco density goes off the charts. In a small oblong park beside the elevated tracks,…
Nestled between a bubble tea cafe and a three-star hotel in Berlin’s bustling Schöneberg neighborhood is an 860-square-foot flower shop, its front window crowded with monstera leaves and birds of paradise. There’s no sign or website, but the store, which was founded by Thi Oanh, 50, and is now owned and operated by her daughter,…
There are few transformations in cooking as miraculous as turning an egg into a meringue. With only some sugar, air and a small amount of effort, a bowl of modest egg whites can become extravagantly glossy and puffed, ready to dress up all manner of swoopy, fancy confections — festooned on cakes, piped into pavlovas…
Humble and mysterious, an unbroken egg is “one of the most private things in the world,” the food writer M.F.K. Fisher wrote. But once cracked open, it reveals itself to be a flamboyant shape-shifter. Depending on how you handle them, egg whites can metamorphose from a dense, viscous liquid into various altered states: soft and…
IZU, Japan — For three decades, Mitsuyasu Asada has proudly tended the same lush mountainside terraces where his father and grandfather grew wasabi, the horseradish-like plant with a fluorescent green hue and head-clearing pungency that unmistakably connotes Japanese cuisine. Yet at the age of just 56, Mr. Asada is already thinking about retiring, worn down…
Loel Phelps, a design director for The Sims, said his team uses consultants, research and input from employees with diverse backgrounds to decide which foods, and elements of cooking and eating, best fit the spirit of the game. “The Sims is about real, lived experiences, so once we have a theme or setting, I like…
In regions where coffee is grown in mineral-rich volcanic soil, the complexity of the beans receives a boost. Volcanica Coffee, a roasting company based in Suwanee, Ga., focuses on just that, with more than 100 mostly single-origin coffees from dozens of locations around the world where volcanoes loom. It recently introduced several so-called “natural” coffees,…
Louis Catizone, an owner of the Brooklyn distiller St. Agrestis, has entered the busy nonalcoholic field with a drink that gets right to the point: the phony negroni. The garnet-red drink comes in the same conical bottle as the company’s well-made spirited negroni and has the same herb and citrus formula. It retains the bitterness…