PALO ALTO, Calif. — Andres Pantoja, an up-and-coming Silicon Valley sous chef, spent his pre-pandemic evenings delicately preparing the $115 plate of lamb chops and deboning the $42 Psari Plaki whole fish at a fashionable restaurant here. It is frantic work serving 200 upscale meals a night. His new gig is proving way more chaotic,…
Drinking rosé this year does not feel like the usual sort of blithe summer pastime. It’s mostly a matter of the coronavirus pandemic and the protests against racism and police brutality, which overshadow what are really lighthearted pleasures. But other factors are taking a toll on rosé as well. Twenty-five percent tariffs imposed by the…
By far, the most popular wine in the United States is chardonnay. Yet the variety faced some skepticism among the small but select sample of readers who took part in our recent Wine School examination of Oregon chardonnays. Perhaps this should not have been surprising. Though it has been America’s white wine of choice for…
Even before my husband started baking his own sourdough loaves, I was already the kind of cook who made crumbs out of stale bread heels. But now that his once-in-a-while pursuit has become a weekly habit, we can eat our favorite pantry pasta with garlicky bread crumbs whenever we want. And we never tire of…
Welcome. I was talking to my colleague Kim Severson a few days ago about the strange rhythms of our lives before the coronavirus came, weeks cut up by work trips, a lot of nights away from home. “Do you miss hotel life?” she asked. I thought about it for a minute before responding, “I do,…
Good morning. Concentration is hard to come by these days, amid the nation’s strife. We are living through a tough and chaotic and wrenching time, filled with fury and an abiding sadness. We’re unsettled. We’re tense. We’re divided. The emotions arrange themselves in combinations that make it hard to work, to read, to watch, to…
The Los Angeles chef Josef Centeno woke up early Saturday morning, to find piles of smashed glass and scrawls of graffiti at his downtown restaurants. Like so many businesses, his Bar Amá and Bäco Mercat had been vandalized during protests overnight. Though home improvement stores were running low on plywood, Mr. Centeno tracked some down…
THE YAKAMA NATION, Wash. — For centuries, sturgeon the size of great white sharks swam the Columbia River. Its currents spread their eggs, scattering them across the bottom. Its waterfalls churned up food for them to eat. Some lived as long as 150 years and grew longer than 15 feet. But in the late 1800s,…
If Jessica Kramer didn’t already know that she had started to shop in a new way, the personal letter she got from the meat and poultry supplier D’Artagnan would have been a tip-off. After thanking her for her business, the company informed her that it would be happy to send a truck to make personal…
Headliner Forsythia A “soft opening” for a new restaurant once meant easing into business with limited reservations for friends, family and staff. But, in today’s world, it means starting with takeout. Such is the case for Forsythia at 9 Stanton Street. “In the middle of construction everything went on pause,” said Jacob Siwak, formerly of…