Sergei Potekhin will not disclose how he and his wife, Lena, create their chocolate menagerie, mainly many breeds of dogs. Mr. Potekhin calls it a “proprietary technique,” though it looks like the figures in milk, dark and white chocolates are sculpted; some might also be molded. The couple started in Russia, where Ms. Potekhin worked…
Angie Mar, an owner and chef of the Beatrice Inn in the West Village, has long looked up to culinary giants like André Soltner, Jacques Pépin, Jacques Torres, Alain Sailhac and Julia Child. Now, to honor them, she has organized a series of dinners where some of their signature dishes will be served, and each…
ELMORE, Vt. — When Blair Marvin started making and selling bread 15 years ago, she promised herself three things: She would never preslice it. She would never bake it in a pan. And she would certainly never sell it in plastic. But three years ago, as she was helping out in the one-room schoolhouse where…
LONDON — The young woman at the next table didn’t take off her shirt during the high-speed guitar riff of Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain,” but it wasn’t for lack of trying. It was another raucous Saturday-night service at the North London restaurant Black Axe Mangal, and the music wasn’t even the loudest thing in the…
The Queens neighborhood of Richmond Hill is far from Lima both geographically and atmospherically. This has not stopped Peruvian restaurants from sprouting up there. They line Jamaica Avenue under the shuddering elevated tracks of the J train, which by the time it gets here is nearly at the end of the line. Most are modest…
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…