More than a year ago, I was on the verge of reviewing Del Posto when the news intervened. The restaurant had changed significantly since the last time it had been evaluated by a Times critic: Sam Sifton promoted it from three stars to four in 2010, when Mark Ladner was the executive chef and Brooks…
“You may attend school in America,” my mom regularly told me and my brothers when we were kids in our native San Diego, in the 1980s, “but when you come home, you’re in Iran.” Accordingly, we spoke Farsi, and attended Persian school on Saturdays to learn to read and write the language; we listened to…
Most dinner customers at Del Posto choose the menu that costs $154 for five courses. Two of those courses are pasta. The pastas at Del Posto — including a plate-spanning, herb-filled, mussel-topped raviolo called a fazzoletto — are worth doubling up on.
San Francisco was the North American city that first embraced pisco, the Peruvian grape spirit, and drank it from the Gold Rush to Prohibition. It seems fitting that a new, clear, unaged brandy, inspired by pisco, comes from the area (it’s bottled in Ukiah, to the north). Punningly called Frísco, it is distilled in copper…
SOUR IS A FLINCH, the taste that betrays. Only the most stoic among us can keep a straight face, mouth unpuckered, after a suck of lemon, say, or a piece of umeboshi, Japanese salted sour plum — which can contain as much as three times a lemon’s citric acid, more than any other fruit —…
Rirkrit Tiravanija, an artist whose interactive works cover social, political and food experiences, will have an exhibition starting this month at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., that includes servings of curry. Called “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Green,” the installation features murals, documentary films and free servings of red, yellow…
Four years ago, Dan Giusti was arguably at the top of the cooking world. Born in New Jersey and trained at the Culinary Institute of America, he was the head chef at Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant that perennially lands on lists of the world’s best. On his watch, Noma received two Michelin stars and drew…
HONG KONG — A man in a white protective suit parked a dump truck at the edge of a dusty pit and unloaded a pile of pink carcasses. They tumbled to the ground just as a second truck arrived with another batch. The scene at a Hong Kong landfill this week was part of a…
They’re listed on the menu as a side dish, but the corn fritters at Wayan, the new Indonesian restaurant co-owned by Cédric Vongerichten, deserve marquee billing. Crunchy, sweet, spicy and irresistible, this side dish is a typical Indonesian snack, according to Ochi Vongerichten, Mr. Vongerichten’s wife and a partner in the restaurant, who is from…
With cottage cheese no longer sidelined as a diet food, there are now many examples that are better quality, without gums and additives, made from milk from small farms and often organic. Good Culture is a brand that fits that description. The four-year-old California company uses milk from pastured animals in the Midwest and has…