KINGSTON, N.Y. — More than 40 years after buying Eng’s, a Chinese-American restaurant in the Hudson Valley, Tom Sit is reluctantly considering retirement. For much of his life, Mr. Sit has worked here seven days a week, 12 hours a day. He cooks in the same kitchen where he worked as a young immigrant from…
In place of cassis for a kir, turn to a blackberry liqueur from Heimat New York to add sultry richness to a glass of white or sparkling wine. (It’s also good for trifles.) It’s the latest flavor from the year-old company in Mamaroneck, N.Y. Ute Londrigan, who makes the liqueurs, has plumbed her German grandmother’s…
Few of the myriad wine books that fill the shelves give an illustrated, step-by-step guide to opening a bottle of wine with a standard waiter’s corkscrew, showing what to do if the cork breaks. “It happens,” says Aldo Sohm, the wine director at Le Bernardin, in his new, very practical book about wine. There’s information…
These cookies are suited to a cocktail party. Top Shelf, by the Canadian company Real Treat, is a line of four cookies: Salted caramel shorties with fennel would go well with an aperitif; double dark chocolate, with candied lemon peel, is buttery and spiced — suitable for a dunk in milk. There’s also a savory…
In A.D. 79, a baker in the Roman town of Pompeii placed some loaves of bread in his oven. While they were baking, Mount Vesuvius erupted, raining down layers of hot ash and stone that would both extinguish life from the town and enshrine its final moments. In excavations some two millenniums later, the loaves…
Though the restaurateur Keith McNally has tended to look to France and its brasserie style for his greatest hits, he is now taking his cue from his native England with the introduction of a proper afternoon tea at Augustine. Offered daily from 3 to 5 p.m. at his restaurant in the Beekman, a hotel near…
Since 2013, Donna Lennard, the owner of Il Buco and Il Buco Alimentari & Vineria in NoHo, has been selling country-style Italian tableware and home accessories from a loft near the restaurants. Now, Il Buco Vita has a new permanent home nearby. Earth tones dominate the pottery, glass, dinnerware, pitchers and serving pieces. There are…
The chocolate bar has supplanted the luxury truffle or box of assorted bonbons in the world of chocolate. Bars from companies across the globe are now labeled according to country of origin, percentage of cacao, added ingredients, style and even how they’re supposed to affect your well-being. At La Maison du Chocolat in Paris, the…
Good morning. Gabrielle Hamilton wrote a lovely piece for The Times this week, about end-of-year extravagances — caviar sandwiches and homemade Boston cream doughnuts and the like — and particularly about the whole roast suckling pig (above) she has at one holiday party a year — “with its crackling skin so crisp it sounds as…
IWAKI, Japan — The overpowering earthquake and tsunami that ripped through northern Japan in March 2011 took so much from Tatsuo Niitsuma, a commercial fisherman in this coastal city in Fukushima Prefecture. The tsunami pulverized his fishing boat. It demolished his home. Most devastating of all, it took the life of his daughter. Now, nearly…