LONDON — “You ask me what life is,” wrote the great Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. “That’s like asking what a carrot is. A carrot is a carrot, and there’s nothing more to know.” Well, Anton, I think there’s a lot more that can be said and known about the matter. Almost everyone loves a carrot,…
Good morning. It’s Presidents’ Day and many of you, I hope, are free of work obligations and looking to cook one of those dishes that only three-day weekends seem to make possible. Like, for instance, Regina Schrambling’s amazing recipe for lasagna (above). “If there were central casting for casseroles,” Regina wrote nearly 20 years ago,…
I’ve long thought the human body was not meant to run on empty, that fasting was done primarily for religious reasons or political protest. Otherwise we needed a reliably renewed source of fuel to function optimally, mentally and emotionally as well as physically. Personal experience reinforced that concept; I’m not pleasant to be around when…
It looked like the typical New York restaurant — that is, real estate — story. In May, the chef Jonathan Waxman’s restaurant Barbuto closed after nearly 16 years as a treasured fixture of the West Village. The quirky building had been sold, and the landlord wanted the space for a different use. But on Feb.…
It’s tempting to call the author Richie Jackson’s new book, “Gay Like Me,” a memoir or an epistolary — but it’s really a manifesto, a 156-page letter from a gay 54-year-old father to his gay 19-year-old son, Jackson Wong, about what it meant to be gay when the writer was young in New York and…
Welcome to Five Weeknight Dishes, where I pass on the recipes we’re currently most excited about after work at NYT Cooking HQ. We have people who grew up on frozen chicken fingers and people who grew up on roasted tempeh and brussels sprouts, but somehow we all came around to the idea that Dinner Matters…
Do you have a desert island bean? Joe Yonan does, and it’s the chickpea. Mr. Yonan, the food editor of The Washington Post, adores all beans, so much so that he wrote an entire cookbook starring them, “Cool Beans” (Ten Speed Press, 2020). But he does play favorites, and the chickpea, with an earthy yet…
I don’t think of myself as a contrarian, but I am fascinated with wines that seem to have gone out of style. Our last subject, Rioja Gran Reserva, was one such wine, and so is our next, Valpolicella. Light, crisp, refreshing Valpolicella used to be a famous name among Italian reds, but it has been…
It’s been widely accepted in the wine world for years that people can no longer be expected to age wines as they might have half a century ago. For one thing, the wine-drinking public has changed enormously. Where once the market for wines that aged along glorious arcs was small, wealthy and dynastic, interest in…
Julie Wong, born in Queens, tasted her first banh mi under the Manhattan Bridge when she was 16. Incredulous that she’d never tried one before, her boyfriend, Chris Hui, dragged her to a tiny stall in Chinatown with no seats and a kitchen equipped with little more than a toaster oven. It was a meeting…