The Golden Age

NYT: Daniel, 3-Stars

23 JULY 2013

Serving the Stuff of Privilege

By PETE WELLS

Your job may be worrying you, or your father’s health, or your own. You may have been up at 2 that morning drafting a better ending for a long-ago memory. But certain restaurants, if you can afford them, can knock down the barriers between you and happiness for a few hours. Every taste seems to transport you to another world, while every gesture of the staff convinces you that you live in the privileged center of this one.

Daniel, which turned 20 this year, can make you feel that way. Does chilled pea soup sound like the stuff of privilege? It is when it comes from this kitchen, where Jean François Bruel has been the executive chef since 2003, and which Daniel Boulud, the proprietor, watches over from a windowed perch above the saucepans and sieves.

Those sieves got a workout on this soup, straining it to a gliding smoothness. It had the clear, refreshing sweetness of the smallest peas eaten straight from the pod. Salty diamonds of smoked sable and a white ring of rosemary-infused cream helped the soup’s purity shine more clearly. This kind of exquisitely sensitive, profoundly seasonal, fundamentally French cooking helped lift Daniel to several four-star reviews in The New York Times, the most recent one by Frank Bruni in 2009.

Again and again, I have been startled by the excellence of Mr. Bruel’s ingredients and his talent for unlocking all they had to offer. I have never tasted more calmly flavorful veal tenderloin, or fresher and more gently handled swordfish, or a more skillfully roasted breast of guinea hen.

But some of these star ingredients were embedded in elaborate, multipart compositions that didn’t fully reward the attention they demanded. At times, the restaurant gave the impression that it was trying to garnish its way to greatness.

And while the service can be among the best in the city, with a supreme attentiveness softened by a surprising warmth and even chattiness, it is not always that way for everyone. When people who are known at the restaurant tell me about their meals, they look blissful. Others look disappointed or resentful as they tell me about cramped tables in the neoclassical arcades around the grand sunken dining room and hasty, perfunctory service.

One night I had a reservation 15 minutes apart from a colleague who wasn’t likely to be recognized, as I repeatedly was. We both ordered the six-course $195 tasting menu. (A three-course prix fixe dinner is $116.) Our meals were virtually identical. Our experiences were not.

The kitchen sent two amuse courses to my table. His got one. A few remaining sips of my wine, ordered by the glass, were topped off. His glass sat empty at times while he waited to be offered another.

We both ate extraordinary fried lollipops of filleted frogs’ legs on a long stick of bone, but only I was then brought a napkin-covered bowl of rosemary- and lemon-scented water for rinsing my fingers.

My servers were solicitous: Was this course, or that one, or that one, prepared to your liking? Was the pacing of the meal satisfactory? Could we interest you in a cheese course? Would you like your espresso with dessert, or after? Finally, as I neared the revolving door on East 65th Street: Can we help you find a cab tonight?

My colleague wasn’t asked any of those questions. Still, the next morning, he reported feeling very well taken care of. And a restaurant can’t be blamed for trying to impress a critic.

It can be faulted, though, for turning its best face away from the unknowns, the first-timers, the birthday splurgers, the tourists. They are precisely the people who would remember a little coddling at a place like Daniel for years.

And while a missing finger bowl won’t seriously mar anyone’s evening, missing Daniel’s cheese cart might. It is one of the finest four-wheeled vehicles in New York. Whenever I wondered if I really wanted cheese, a server would lay his knife on a soft wheel, pressing gently. The mounded top would fall for a moment then rise up again, gracefully and almost willingly. After that, the question was not if I should have some, but how many kinds could fit on one plate.

It was just as pointless to try to wave away the basket of Mark Fiorentino’s gorgeous breads, like a garlic focaccia, round and dimpled in the center. Rajeev Vaidya, the head sommelier, shepherded me past the many bottles that could land a weak wine lover in debt to more affordable ones. He has a 2007 halbtrocken from the German riesling maker Georg Breuer. Some buyers scoffed at the vintage, pushing prices down, but not Mr. Vaidya. A bottle can be yours for the princely sum of $25.

Recently, the title of executive pastry chef passed from Sandro Micheli to Ghaya Oliveira, and the dessert course, already exciting, has a little more energy. Ms. Oliveira’s approach is more modern and wide-ranging, embracing unusual spices and exuberant swipes of color. Her mint-scented strawberries are a giddy, flagrant essay in pink, with triangles of watermelon, columns of half-frozen strawberry mousse and ladyfingers tinted with powdered strawberry skin. It was a soft, lilting summer tune I won’t get out of my head before Labor Day.

The courses before dessert could be just as wonderfully haunting. I’d give a lot to recapture the happiness I got from slow-baked abalone, rich with creamed avocado and slightly tart with heart-shaped wood sorrel. I’m still transfixed by a peekytoe crab salad’s bravura variations on apple and celery, carried through to the juices in a walnut-oil vinaigrette.

And nothing quite prepared me for the untamed whoosh of intense green herbs in a bowl of olive-oil-poached cod teased into big, glistening flakes, then seasoned with za’atar and a bright cilantro sauce.

But the kitchen’s compulsion toward complexity could also result in a proliferation of dollhouse garnishes. Grilled sweet shrimp were outfitted with a heart of palm purée, microcubes of mango and cucumber, bok choy, tiny tapioca crackers, curls of shaved hearts of palm, among other things. The parts never quite gathered into a rush of flavor.

A variation on Mr. Boulud’s classic roasted sea bass with syrah sauce came with radicchio so bitter I wanted to slap it. A drum of sweet potato purée with a candylike crust of marrow on top only made the next bite of radicchio harder to take.

The kitchen loves to put two or three treatments of an ingredient side by side, when it might do better to focus on the one that works best. In a triptych of striped jack, a poached piece on a salad of mustard seeds with cubes of riesling gelée tasted as if the components were destined to be together. But there wasn’t the same inevitability about the lettuce-wrapped dumpling of striped jack tartare topped with caviar, or the smoky rillettes surrounded by crunchy carrot and asparagus.

Daniel built its fame on Mr. Boulud’s exquisite refinements on French peasant food. Over the years, the refinements have multiplied while the peasant food has been sent away to his many spinoff bistros.

Traces of it are still around, as in the short rib braised in red wine, half of a beef duo. The last time I tasted it, I was sure it was the finest French beef stew in existence. I knew my servers were trying to make my night one I’d recall with a smile. And I wished everyone could be so lucky.

Daniel

★★★

Charlie Rose/Frank Bruni: Italian Food

Healing Our City

NYT 2-Stars: Hill Country Barbecue Market

An Homage to Texas, by the Pound

By PETE WELLS

The New York Times

3 July 2012

IN the line of duty, I’ve eaten food served on a curl of bark, food served on a slate shingle, food served on the end of a wire, food served in an antique silver caviar caddy and food served in a box of rocks.

But for sheer power to send ripples of anticipation through the pit of my belly, none of those vehicles beat the greasy butcher paper at Hill Country Barbecue Market.

Whenever I eat at this restaurant on West 26th Street, I head for the meat counter and ask for a pound of moist brisket. If a pound strikes you as too much, then you haven’t had Hill Country’s moist brisket. A counter worker with a long knife tears off a sheet of brown paper and proceeds to bury it under slabs of meat. Beef ribs, too, yes, and some jalapeño-cheese sausages.

A couple of those, please.

Let’s make it three.

When I stop at last, the counter worker grabs the ends of the butcher paper and scrunches them to form a basket filled with smoked meat and serpentine wisps of steam. I carry that basket to my table and set it down in front of my friends, casual as can be. They look amazed, and if they don’t, I rethink the friendship.

At the table, the paper is flattened into a communal plate, and I cover one patch of it with seasoned salt. Pink from cayenne and spotted with black pepper grains, the salt goes with brisket better than barbecue sauce. Paper, meat, salt: by now my stomach is in a riot and I am sure I should have ordered two pounds of brisket.

Moist brisket on greasy paper is not the only reason to eat at Hill Country, but it’s a convincing one. The term “moist brisket” is the restaurant’s euphemism for the deckle and tip of the brisket, upholstered in fat that will slowly render and baste the meat during the 13 or 14 hours it spends in the smoker. Carved just before serving, the meat is juicy throughout, but the parts that really get me going are the blackened edges that give way to a mahogany-tinted quarter-inch or so of smoky borderland between crust and interior.

The moist brisket, along with the beef and pork ribs that carry a similarly peppery, crunchy top layer, show Hill Country’s rotisserie barbecue pits at their finest. The restaurant is a state-of-the-art Manhattan homage to the preindustrial craft of Texas barbecue, particularly as it is practiced in the town of Lockhart.

The flavors Hill Country achieves in its pits are not precisely the ones I remember from meals at Lockhart’s legendary rivals, Smitty’s Market and Kreuz Market. At both places, the smoke was deeply entrenched in the meat.

Despite burning about 1,500 pounds a week of post oak shipped in from Texas, Hill Country doesn’t produce that kind of deeply smoky barbecue. It produces very slowly roasted meat with an echo of campfire around the edges. The low smoke quotient makes a spongy, beige pork chop a disappointment, and leaves the market chicken just another slightly dry rotisserie bird.

But it does no harm to the prime rib and the beef shoulder. They may not be great Texas-style barbecue, but they are still terrific slabs of roast beef, cooked medium-rare through and through and ringed with that salt-and-pepper crust. And the jalapeño-cheese links, shipped to Manhattan by Kreuz Market, are always full flavored and insistently spicy, though their juiciness varies from day to day.

When Hill Country opened, five years ago last month, it joined a wave of new restaurants that tried to coax more smoke into barbecue than had seemed possible on the tightly regulated shores of the East River. In a glowing $25 and Under column in 2007, the last time Hill Country was reviewed in The New York Times, Peter Meehan focused on the meat, especially the brisket. “No other barbecue place that has opened in New York in recent years has gotten it so right, right out of the gate,” he wrote.

Since then, Hill Country’s other virtues have become easier to notice, or harder to ignore. Year after year I am drawn back to the dessert case for another plastic cup of banana pudding, built upon a custard so thick with eggs and cream it brings Paris to mind, and not the one in Texas. And as New York has become cluttered with strenuously playful cupcakes, few make me smile as easily as the one at Hill Country that is filled with grape jelly and frosted with a fluffy turban of peanut butter.

According to hard-liners, the only permissible side dishes with barbecue are white bread and saltines. Anything else is as out of place as a yuzu macaron.

Hill Country takes a more liberal point of view, thankfully. When I can afford to surrender the stomach space, I will have some peppery corn pudding, which has roughly the same relationship to an ear of corn that an ice cream sundae has to a cow. And I am always grateful for the relief provided by crunchy, sparingly dressed coleslaw and a vinegary salad of black-eyed peas.

None of these dishes look like restaurant food; they seem like things packed for a church picnic by the best cook in town. The cook in this case, or at least the one whose recipes the kitchen follows, is the restaurant’s executive chef, Elizabeth Karmel. Named in her honor, EAK’s Bowl of Red is a ground-beef chili that could be a meal in itself, although it’s soupy enough that I wish Hill Country really did serve it in a bowl rather than in the same paper cartons used for all the sides.

In Texas, much of the atmosphere of a barbecue joint is provided by the employees and the customers. Since shipping live Texans across state lines can be complicated, Hill Country’s owner, Marc Glosserman, bought inanimate objects like battered butcher blocks, salvaged floorboards and an old Blue Bell ice cream freezer.

All this may be mistaken for the set dressing a big chain might use, but no chain would play Ray Wylie Hubbard and Reckless Kelly, or hire bartenders who mouth the lyrics as they tuck their bottle openers into the back pockets of their jeans.

Hill Country may not be the real thing. But it plays the part better than anybody else in town.

Sifton; Offline

The New York Times

18 October 11

THE REVIEWING LIFE

By SAM SIFTON

THE restaurant was Chinese in theory, with Continental accents, and wedged into a basement in Midtown. There was foie gras in the dumplings. The music was the sort one hears in elevators in cities far from home. One of my guests happened to be a dead ringer for the actor Matthew Broderick.

“I have waited on you many times,” the waiter said to him, excitedly.

“No, I don’t think so,” my guest said.

“Oh, yes, I understand,” the waiter said. “You wish to be quiet about yourself, I see.” The waiter pointed at me. I had just coughed a half-eaten dumpling into a napkin and was drinking water to get the taste out of my mouth.

“Like him! He cannot say who he is, either!”

Such is the life of the restaurant critic for The New York Times, a job I have held for the last two years. (On Monday, I joined the newspaper’s national desk, as editor.) Every night, dinner with friends, colleagues, sources, readers, acquaintances made on airplanes or on the road. And every night the possibility of greatness, or despair.

Between the two poles, I experienced an unrivaled view of New York’s dining scene.

All criticism is argument. Mine has been from the start that restaurants are culture, and that there is no better perch from which to examine our shared values and beliefs, behavior and attitudes, than a seat in a restaurant dining room, observing life’s pageant in the presence of food and drink.

What follows is an accounting of some of the highlights I experienced, as well as some of my favorite images and experiences at the opposite end of the scale. (Chief among those: Nello Balan spitting into the daffodils set out in front of his restaurant on Madison Avenue. So “Game of Thrones”!)

Sometimes I was recognized by a restaurant’s staff. Once, at the Four Seasons, a diner pointed me out to Julian Niccolini, who is one of the restaurant’s owners and its voluble host. Mr. Niccolini gaped as if he were a character in a Dickens novel, then appeared to turn into Groucho Marx, then disappeared from view. Within seconds he was at my shoulder, complimenting the women at the table, insulting some Daily News reporters across the dining room, and showering my pasta with shavings of truffle, unbidden. It began to grow thick, as snow does on the sidewalk. Some may have fallen on my shoulder. Oh, how he laughed.

Other times I dined in blissful anonymity — or at any rate with something uncomfortable on my head. I ate well and poorly in both situations. But every night I counted myself lucky. For those who choose to eat in restaurants, there is no city with a greater diversity of culinary excellence than New York.

Three nights in April: one in a comfortable booth at the Dutch, Andrew Carmellini’s terrific pan-American clubhouse in SoHo, where I ate crabmeat dressed in bloody-mary sauce, a rib-eye steak and some apple pie; another at a sticky table at La Joya de Ceren on Rockaway Beach Boulevard in Queens, where a fried pork chop came flanked by pupusas, rice and garlicky beans; and a third at Masa, the sushi temple in the Time Warner Center.

Masa is the most expensive restaurant in New York City. Masa Takayama, its owner and operator, is the reason most people book seats at the bar. But for me, it is Takahiro Sakaeda, one of Mr. Takayama’s lieutenants, who is Masa’s great draw. Smart and engaging, as much an instructor and artist as fish cutter or chef, Mr. Sakaeda used kinmedai and orange clam, tuna sinew, lime and Himalayan salt to etch that April night’s meal into my memory, where it remains among my favorite ever eaten.

The next evening: sweetbread tacos with maitake mushrooms at Empellón in the West Village. (Not bad!)

It wasn’t all airlifted Japanese grouper and huge lobes of foie gras, though, out there on the restaurant trail. Sometimes the job was a grim, depressing business, enlivened only by comedy.

Take an abysmal meal I had one night at Hotel Griffou, a warren of rooms below a town house on West Ninth Street: nasty, brutal and short. Worst of all was an entree of chorizo-stuffed squid that tasted of rubber and sawdust, as if it had been fashioned at a sex-toy factory. My guest pushed at the thing with his fork. It repelled his efforts. It was the first and only time as restaurant critic for The Times that I did not at least try to finish my food and experience a full meal. (There is now yet another chef at the restaurant.)

Instead, my guest and I hustled over to the John Dory Oyster Bar, where April Bloomfield cooks a similar dish, but brilliantly. My guest was nervous from his earlier experience. But when he bit into the food, his eyes went wide and he started to woof that way that people do when they want to talk and they want to keep eating at the same time because it is so delicious. I felt a surge of love for the city that can provide such antidotes to misery, and so easily.

Speaking of, here is a fruit of eating 700 or more meals in restaurants that generally have extensive wine lists put together by people who know about 700 times more about wine than you do: When considering what to order, ask for the sommelier. (At the John Dory, she is the cheerful, energetic, wicked and trustworthy Carla Rzeszewski.)

Sommeliers are as rare and amazing in the general population as albino squirrels. They taste and smell things in wine that are only obvious to others once they have been told about them. They know vintages and grapes and earth and humidity as some know baseball statistics or the provenance of antique model trains. And far more often than not, what they offer in return for your mild interest is information and guidance about amazing, unfamiliar and exciting wine — often of a sort that you have never even heard of, much less considered.

The king of the game, Chris Cannon, who ran the cellars and the floors at Marea, Alto and Convivio, is not currently in a Manhattan restaurant. But among the best and most helpful who are: Michael Madrigale at Bar Boulud and Boulud Sud; Josh Nadel at the Dutch; and Emilie Garvey, now of Ai Fiori, formerly of SHO Shaun Hergatt. They sell by teaching.

One of the most interesting and enjoyable is John Slover, the antic wine director at Ciano, Shea Gallante’s haute-rustic Italian restaurant. Not for Mr. Slover the occasional bit of advice about this Barbaresco or that petit Chablis. Instead, wine service at Ciano has something of the quality of a trading floor, and Mr. Slover stalks it with all the attention and fuzziness of an approachable lion. He has hustle and flow. He teaches by selling.

Not all restaurants do. At Roberta’s in Bushwick one night, looking for a wine to pair with a salad, before the arrival of a pizza, I asked the server for advice. “Red, maybe?” he said. “Or white?” (I went with beer.)

No matter: the meals I had at Roberta’s were probably the most fascinating, thought-provoking experiences of my professional dining career. Most notable: an aged duck I had as part of a tasting menu that the restaurant’s chef, Carlo Mirarchi, offers at the restaurant two nights a week. It was as close to cheese as fowl, rich and unctuous and tangy, and it captivated my senses in such a way as to neatly encompass both art and vice, risk and reward. It looked like an abscess, frankly. It tasted like godhead.

Other dishes that will haunt my memory include the spinach garganelli that Mark Ladner cooks at Del Posto, and the stuffed rotisserie duck available at Momofuku Ssam Bar only by reservation (it took me two months of trying), and the wild mushrooms you get at Craft, glistening with butter. There was a lentil soup at Veritas. A plate of pork ribs at Fatty ’Cue. A small pile of shaved razor clams with caviar at Le Bernardin.

I can call up the flavor of the split-pea soup at La Grenouille just as some can see a turkey and remember what Thanksgiving smells like. Likewise the veal chop at Ai Fiori, with its sweetbread choux farci and sauce Périgueux; and the chili lobster at Marc Forgione (with Texas toast!); and the barbecued fish at Hunan Kitchen of Grand Sichuan; the lamb ribs atDBGB; the codfish fritters with lamb ragù at Recette; the chicken adobo at Purple Yam; the crisp pork belly at Daniel — all my friends.

Restaurants are about so much more than food, though. They are about the mood created by the people who run the space. They are about experience.

I sat one winter’s night in a tall seat at the Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare. Cesar Ramirez, the restaurant’s chef, was that night cooking primarily for a group of six regulars led by a gregarious Westchester retiree originally from East New York. He dominated discussion at the counter as the smart guy can at the sports bar. This might have been uncomfortable. It was not. And at meal’s end he offered everyone in the place glasses of a 1948 port he had brought along. (Chef’s Table has no liquor license.) Michele Smith, the elegant manager and sommelier-without-portfolio, poured it out as if it were molten gold.

“To Cesar,” the man said, toasting Mr. Ramirez. “Been following him tight since he was at Bouley.”

But the best meal I had on the job? It was in the garden of Frankies 457, on Court Street in Carroll Gardens, on a summer evening with my wife, my children and my brother. We had what everyone always has at Frankies: crostini and some romaine hearts, beets, cold rib-eye salad, cavatelli and sausage and brown butter, meatballs, braciola marinara. The kids hovered while the adults talked family over cold red wine, and a little breeze moved through the trees, and around us other people did the same.

There was bread as we needed it, water, more wine. The food was simple and elegant. The children behaved as they do when they are starving, and in love with what they are eating. Nothing was wrong. Everything was right. It would have been nice if it could have gone on forever.

Cheers, sir.

Hetherington, Hondros

The New York Times

‘Restrepo’ Director and a Photographer Killed in Libya

By C. J. CHIVERS

BENGHAZI, Libya — Tim Hetherington, the conflict photographer who was a director and producer of the Afghan war documentary “Restrepo,” was killed in the besieged city of Misurata on Wednesday, and three photographers working beside him were wounded, one fatally, when they came under fire at the city’s front lines.

Chris Hondros of the Getty Images photo agency died within a few hours of devastating brain trauma. A third photographer, Guy Martin, suffered a severe pelvic wound, according to Andre Liohn, a colleague who was at the triage center where the photographers were rushed by rebels after they were struck.

Mr. Hondros suffered an extensive loss of brain tissue and was revived twice. He spent several hours in a coma and died after 10 p.m., Mr. Liohn said.

Mr. Martin, a British citizen, underwent vascular surgery on Wednesday night, according to the same account. As the night progressed, Mr. Liohn said that Mr. Martin’s bleeding had been stopped and that his prospects had improved.

The fourth photographer, Michael Christopher Brown, suffered shrapnel wounds to his left shoulder, but his life was not in danger. He was resting Wednesday night.

Misurata, Libya’s third-largest city, has been cut off by land from the rest of the country by military forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. It has been the scene of intensive, close-quarters fighting for weeks. Hundreds of Libyans have been confirmed killed.

Two other journalists were killed last month in the Libyan conflict, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists: Mohammed al-Nabbous, the founder of the online Libya Alhurra TV, who was shot as he was streaming audio reports of the fighting in Benghazi, the rebel capital; and Ali Hassan al-Jaber, an cameraman with Al Jazeera who was shot when his crew was ambushed near Benghazi.

The photographers killed and wounded Wednesday had reached the city by sea from Benghazi. The early reports said they had been working together near the front lines when they were struck by a rocket-propelled grenade. Mr. Liohn said they were covering the rebels on Tripoli Street, one of the city’s main battlegrounds. It was not immediately clear how Mr. Martin and Mr. Brown might be evacuated.

The Ionian Spirit, a vessel chartered by the International Organization for Migration, was in port in Misurata to evacuate migrant workers, having just completed a third relief trip from Benghazi.

Human Rights Watch, a New York-based organization whose staff members know the photographers, contacted the vessel and found that it was prepared to evacuate the two wounded photographers back to Benghazi. But Mr. Martin was not deemed fit for travel, especially on a voyage that could last 20 or more hours.

Arrangements were being made late at night to move Mr. Hetherington’s remains to the vessel for the journey to Benghazi, to be carried by air back home.

The prospects for moving Mr. Hondros’s remains were not certain, as he died later in the night. Human Rights Watch said it had asked the Ionian Spirit’s commander to accept Mr. Hondros’s remains, too.

The death of Mr. Hetherington reverberated in many circles, including among the journalists, aid workers, soldiers and victims of war he had befriended in a distinguished career. A British citizen who lived in New York, he had covered conflicts with sensitivity in Liberia, Afghanistan, Darfur and, in recent weeks, Libya.

“This is a devastating loss to many of us personally,” said Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch. “But it is also a devastating loss to the human rights community. His work has raised the visibility of many of the world’s forgotten conflicts. May the legacy of his exceptional photographs serve to inspire future generations.”

His family released a brief statement: “Tim was in Libya to continue his ongoing multimedia project to highlight humanitarian issues during time of war and conflict. He will be forever missed.”

As the vigil ended for Mr. Hondros, his friends expressed pain, grief and respect for him and his body of work, built over a career of two decades. Tyler Hicks, a photographer for The New York Times who worked alongside Mr. Hondros in several wars, paid a tribute in an e-mail.

“Chris made sacrifices in his own life to bring the hardships of war into the public eye, and that dedication created award-winning photographs that shaped the way people viewed the world,” he wrote. “He was a close friend for nearly 20 years. The tragedy of his death had brought so many memories to the surface, and I’m grateful to be among the many people who were lucky enough to know him. He will be missed.”

Mr. Martin had sent his work to Panos Pictures, a photo agency in London, said Josh Lustig, an editor there, but no clients had been formally lined up.

“We’re all praying that he pulls through,” Mr. Lustig said

The Libyan conflict has proved deeply perilous for journalists, both local and foreign. Besides the four who have been killed, the Committee to Protect Journalists has counted 49 detentions. Among them are Clare Morgana Gillis, an American freelancer for TheAtlantic.com and USA Today; James Wright Foley, an American writer for GlobalPost; Manuel Varela de Seijas Brabo, a Spanish photographer; and Anton Lazarus Hammerl, a South African photographer. At least six local journalists are missing amid speculation they are in the custody of security forces.

One international journalist and two media support workers are also unaccounted for. Mr. Hetherington, 41, was between assignments at Vanity Fair when he was killed. He had traveled to Libya on his own to work on a multimedia project while he and his editors in New York tried to figure out what his next series of photos for the magazine would be.

Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair’s editor, said the sudden death had left the staff stunned. “Another two or three days and he’d probably have had the assignment,” Mr. Carter said. “We’re just devastated here. But he lived for this.”

“It’s what gave him life,” he said, “and it’s what took it away from him.”

Mr. Hetherington last contacted his editors on Tuesday, by e-mail. “Am currently in misrata — would have made interesting article with SJ,” he wrote. SJ referred to his friend and fellow Vanity Fair contributor Sebastian Junger. The two had chronicled the Afghan war for the magazine, and were partners on “Restrepo,” which followed a company of American soldiers from May 2007 to July 2008 in the Korangal Valley, a particularly dangerous part of northeastern Afghanistan.

Mr. Hetherington had posted rarely on Twitter this year, but on Tuesday, he sent this from his iPhone: “In besieged Libyan city of Misrata. Indiscriminate shelling by Qaddafi forces. No sign of NATO.”

Mr. Martin was working on his own when he was wounded, and the agency he was communicating with before the attack said they knew little about his well-being. Mr. Martin had sent pictures to Panos Pictures on Wednesday, said Mr. Lustig, an editor.

“He’s a young, ambitious photographer with a lot of talent,” Mr. Lustig said. “He always pushes to get the best images from the most difficult circumstances. We’re all praying that he pulls through.

Libya

The New York Times

22 March 11

Uncertainty and Cruelty Followed Times Journalists Held in Libya

By ANTHONY SHADID, LYNSEY ADDARIO, STEPHEN FARRELL and TYLER HICKS

As the four of us headed toward the eastern gate of Ajdabiya, the front line of a desperate rebel stand against the advancing forces of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, a car pulled up alongside.

“They’re in the city!” the driver shouted at us. “They’re in the city!” Lynsey and Steve had worried that government soldiers might encircle the town, trapping us, but Tyler and Anthony discounted it. We had covered the fall of two other rebel-held towns — Ras Lanuf and Brega — and each time, the government had bombed and shelled the towns for days before making a frontal, methodical assault. When they did, rebels and journalists fled in a headlong retreat. If Ajdabiya fell, Colonel Qaddafi’s forces would be on the doorstep of Benghazi, the opposition capital, and perched on a highway to the Egyptian border, from where we had entered Libya without visas.

No one really knows the script for days like these, and neither did we.

As we left the town’s last traffic circle, heading for Benghazi, all of us saw the checkpoint in the distance.

“I think it’s Qaddafi’s soldiers,” Lynsey said.

Our driver, Tyler and Anthony shook their heads, but within seconds, the reality dawned on us. Unlike the rebels in their mismatched uniforms, track suits and berets, these men were uniformed. Their vehicles were a dark army green, and they lined in the street in military formation.

By chance, we made it through the first line of soldiers, but not the second.

“Keep driving!” Tyler shouted at Mohammed, the driver. “Don’t stop! Don’t stop!”

Mohammed had no choice, and a soldier flung open his door. “Journalists!” he yelled at the other soldiers, their faces contorted in fear and rage. It was too late.

Tyler was in the front, and a soldier pulled him out of the car. Steve was hauled out by his camera bags. Anthony crawled out the same door, and Lynsey followed.

Even before the soldiers had time to speak, rebels attacked the checkpoint with what sounded like rifles and medium machine guns. Bullets flew around us, and the soft dirt popped. Tyler broke free and started running. Anthony fell on a sand berm, then got to his feet and followed Tyler, who, for a moment, considered making a run for it.

Lynsey instinctively clenched her cameras as a soldier pulled at them. She let them go and ran behind us. Soldiers tried to get Steve on the ground next to the car, and he pointed at the gunfire. They made him drop his camera, then he ran, too.

We made it behind a simple, one-room house, where a woman clutched her infant child. Both cried uncontrollably and a soldier tried to console them. When we got there, soldiers trained their guns on us, beat us, stripped us of everything in our pockets and forced us on our knees.

Tyler’s hands were bound by a strip of a scarf. A soldier took off Lynsey’s gray Nike shoes, then bound her with the shoelaces. “God, I just don’t want to be raped,” she whispered to Steve.

“You’re the translator!” a slight soldier screamed at Anthony. “You’re the spy!”

A few seconds passed, and another soldier approached, demanding that we lay on our stomachs.

All of us had had close calls over the years. Lynsey was kidnapped in Falluja, Iraq, in 2004, Steve in Afghanistan last year. Tyler had more scrapes than he could count, from Chechnya to Sudan, and Anthony was shot in the back in 2002 by a man he believed to be an Israeli soldier. At that moment, though, none of us thought we were going to live. Steve tried to keep eye contact until they pulled the trigger. The rest of us felt the powerlessness of resignation. You feel empty when you know that it’s almost over.

“Shoot them,” a tall soldier said calmly in Arabic.

A colleague next to him shook his head. “You can’t,” he insisted. “They’re Americans.”

They bound our hands and legs instead — with wire, fabric or cable. Lynsey was carried to a Toyota pickup, where she was punched in the face. Steve and Tyler were hit, and Anthony was headbutted.

Even that Tuesday, a pattern had begun to emerge. The beating was always fiercest in the first few minutes, an aggressiveness that Colonel Qaddafi’s bizarre and twisted four decades of rule inculcated in a society that feels disfigured. It didn’t matter that we were bound, or that Lynsey was a woman.

But moments of kindness inevitably emerged, drawing on a culture’s far deeper instinct for hospitality and generosity. A soldier brought Tyler and Anthony, sitting in a pickup, dates and an orange drink. Lynsey had to talk to a soldier’s wife who, in English, called her a donkey and a dog. Then they unbound Lynsey and, sitting in another truck, gave Steve and her something to drink.

From the pickup, Lynsey saw a body outstretched next to our car, one arm outstretched. We still don’t know whether that was Mohammed. We fear it was, though his body has yet to be found. If he died, we will have to bear the burden for the rest of our lives that an innocent man died because of us, because of wrong choices that we made, for an article that was never worth dying for.

No article is, but we were too blind to admit that.

Captors in the Same Plight

We probably shouldn’t have lived through the night.

Even before the sun set, another gun battle broke out, almost as fierce as the first one. We were trapped in trucks in the open. Tyler stretched the binding of his handcuffs, allowing him to open the door. Anthony yelled for help, trying to open the door with his teeth. A soldier finally let Tyler crawl around the pickup to let Anthony out. For a moment, our captors were in the same plight as us. As the hours passed, they offered us food, drink and cigarettes.

“These are the morals of Islam,” one said to Anthony. “These are the morals of Qaddafi. We treat prisoners humanely.” For a few hours they did. They offered blankets and mattresses, then put us in a car. As rebels attacked every so often, we all barreled out of the car and dove to the ground, until the firing subsided. They put us back in, and we dove to the ground again.

They eventually let us lie behind a pickup.

Lynsey asked for her shoes. She got a bullet-riddled pair of Tyler’s, taken from his bag.

At 2 a.m. on Wednesday we were woken.

“The rebels are massing,” one officer shouted. That day, and the ones that followed, we never really understood the command structure. No one wore rank; authority seemed to come from the pitch of a barked order. In hindsight, the rebels and the army, or militia, didn’t seem separated by all that much. They were really gangs of young men with guns, each convinced of the others’ evil.

The rebels’ story was more familiar: They were fighting nearly 42 years of dictatorship, wielded by a man whom the vast majority in opposition-held Libya deemed insane. To the soldiers around us, they were fighting Al Qaeda or homegrown Islamists, and they couldn’t understand why we, as Americans, didn’t understand their battle. And none of the men around us, all born after Colonel Qaddafi seized power as a young lieutenant in 1969, could imagine Libya without him.

A new group seized us, and they were rougher. They blindfolded us, tied our arms and legs and beat us. They then stuffed us into an armored car, where Lynsey was groped. She never screamed but instead pleaded. A soldier covered her mouth, tracing his hands over her body. “Don’t speak,” he warned. Another soldier tried to shove a bayonet into Steve’s rear, laughing as he did it.

A half-hour later, we arrived on what we thought were the outskirts of the other side of Ajdabiya. A man whom soldiers called the sheik questioned us, then began taunting Tyler.

“You have a beautiful head,” he told Tyler in a mix of English and Arabic. “I’m going to remove it and put it on mine. I’m going to cut it off.” Tyler, feeling queasy, asked to sit down.

We were finally put in a pickup where a soldier taunted Lynsey.

“You might die tonight,” he told her, as he ran his hand over her face. “Maybe, maybe not.”

From the moment of our arrest, the soldiers said we would be delivered to a man they called the doctor. Some referred to him as Dr. Moatasim, one of the more vicious of Colonel Qaddafi’s sons. Each has his own militia, and each seemed to operate on its own, with its own rules.

At 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, we were thrown blindfolded and bound in the back of a pickup truck and driven along the Mediterranean coast toward Colonel Qaddafi’s hometown of Surt, a six-hour drive.

Libya was never much of a state. In theory, that was Colonel Qaddafi’s idea. The Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab State of the Masses was supposed to be perpetual revolution. At its best it was dictatorship, at its worst chaos, and what we saw from one end of the country to the other was the detritus of an experiment whose own people lamented had lasted far too long.

We felt like trophies of war, and at a dozen checkpoints, we could hear militiamen running to the car to administer another beating.

“Dirty dogs,” men shouted out at each stop.

Over the years, all of us had seen men detained, blindfolded and handcuffed at places like Abu Ghraib, or corralled after some operation in Iraq or Afghanistan. Now we were the faceless we had covered perhaps too dispassionately. For the first time, we felt what it was like to be disoriented by a blindfold, to have plastic cuffs dig into your wrists, for hands to go numb.

The act is probably less terrifying than the unknown. You don’t know when it’s going to end or what comes next. By late afternoon, we were taken to a jail in Surt. Our captors led us to a basement cell with a few ratty mattresses, a bottle to urinate in, a jug of water and a bag of dates. As night fell, we wondered whether anyone knew — or could know — where we were.

Graffiti of devout prisoners was etched into the wall, testament to an insurgency that was crushed in eastern Libya in the late 1990s. “God bring us relief,” one line read.

At one point, Anthony was taken out of the cell for questioning. He never saw the captors.

“How could you enter without a visa?” the man asked him. “Don’t you know you could be killed here and no one would ever know?” Anthony nodded. The man went on to denounce the rebels he said they were fighting — Qaeda fanatics, he said, and gangs of armed criminals.

“How could they ever rule Libya?” he asked.

They sent Anthony back to the cell, and we knew that no one had any idea where we were.

Camaraderie and Brutality

The next afternoon was perhaps the worst beating. As we stood on the tarmac in Surt, waiting for a military plane to Tripoli, Tyler was slapped and punched, and Anthony was hit with the butt of a gun to the head. We were blindfolded and bound another time with plastic handcuffs, and Lynsey was groped again. As we sat in the plane, we asked a question that came up at every stop: “Is everyone here?” Hearing a familiar voice seemed to encapsulate everything that camaraderie came to mean. As long as were together, we probably stood a chance. Nothing ever felt more generous to Anthony than a handcuffed Tyler managing to reach into the pocket of Anthony’s jacket, pull out a cigarette and light it before handing it back to him.

The flight lasted 90 minutes and, again, we were dealt a gesture of kindness.

“I’m sorry,” a sympathetic air crew said to each of us.

Our destiny may have been decided at the airfield in Tripoli.

We were put in a police wagon, reeking of urine, that resembled so many Interior Ministry vehicles in so many Arab capitals. Guards stripped of us our shoes, socks and belts. One then yelled in Anthony’s ear, “Down, down U.S.A.!” He did the same to Steve. “But I’m not American, I’m Irish,” Steve answered.

“Down, down Ireland!” he shouted back.

We were moved to two more vehicles, and an argument raged for a half-hour over us. We suspected the fight was between the vicious Interior Ministry and other branches of the government. That kind of fight is waged by the logic of a dictatorship: The spoils go to whomever can muster a greater threat. We were moved to another vehicle but not before a soldier, perhaps from the losing side, drove the barrel of his rifle into the back of Tyler’s head.

‘Protection of the State’

Within a half-hour, we were in a military compound, in the hands of military intelligence. We collapsed on the floor, accepting milk and mango juice. We saw our bags unloaded, though we would never get them back. A gruff man struck a sympathetic tone. You won’t be beaten or bound again, he told us. You will be kept safe and, although you will be blindfolded if you are moved anywhere else in the compound, no one will mistreat you.

From that moment, no one did.

We were taken to a detention center that looked more like a double-wide trailer. On the shelves were a two-volume German-Arabic dictionary and five of Shakespeare’s plays. (Colonel Qaddafi once famously quipped that Shakespeare, or Sheikh Zubeir, was actually an Arab migrant.)

The men were given track suits. Lynsey was brought a shirt that read, “Magic Girl,” emblazoned with two teddy bears. Her new underwear read, “Shake it up.”

At the late hours of night, we were blindfolded to receive visitors.

“You are now in the protection of the state,” a Foreign Ministry official told us.

Official after official made excuses for what happened to us. One said we had to understand the difference between militias loyal to Qaddafi and the actual army. Another asked whether Anthony had seen any rebel unarmed — the presence of guns deployed against the state seeming to justify any crackdown. Officials asked Lynsey whether she had been raped.

The more they talked, the clearer it became: This semblance of a state was not a state.

In the four days that followed, we fought boredom more than anything else. Tyler finished “Julius Caesar.” Lynsey started “Othello.” If it went on much longer, Tyler jokingly suggested we perform the plays. As the hours passed, we replayed each moment of the preceding days in detail, trying to piece together what had happened to Mohammed. We wondered whether we would be delivered into more sinister hands. After the no-fly zone was imposed and we heard volleys of anti-aircraft fire, we thought that a desperate government could make us human shields. Weighing over all of us was guilt for what we had put our families and friends through.

In the end, it was the trappings of diplomacy that delayed our departure.

Foreign Ministry officials, clinging to a prestige they may have never had, insisted that our handover be formal, between two sovereign states. At one point, they insisted an American or British diplomat had to travel to Tripoli in wartime. In the end, Turkish diplomats served as intermediaries and delivered us to the border.

As we left, we saw the billboards of a crumbling regime. “Forty-one years of permanent joy,” read one slogan superimposed over a sunburst. But the words that lingered with us as we left were quoted to Steve by an urbane Foreign Ministry official speaking idiomatic British English.

As we sat in an office, he murmured two lines of Yeats.

“Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love.”

The Boss

8 March 2011
New York Times

Cook From It? First, Try Lifting It
By MICHAEL RUHLMAN

DESCENDING this week on the culinary scene like a meteor, “Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking” is the self-published six-volume masterwork from a team led by Nathan Myhrvold, the multimillionaire tech visionary who, as a friend of mine said, “decided to play Renaissance doge with food.”

As scientific as it is gastronomic, it is virtually an encyclopedia of cooking, a visual roller coaster through the world of food and cooking tools, as well as a compendium of 1,500 recipes.

Ultimately, it is a manifesto declaring that the new form of laboratory-inspired cooking — led by Grant Achatz in the United States; Heston Blumenthal in England; and Ferran Adrià, the father of this cuisine, in Spain — is a cultural and artistic movement every bit as definitive as Impressionism in 19th-century France or Bauhaus in early 20th-century Germany. It proclaims a revolution “in techniques, aesthetics and intellectual underpinnings of gastronomy.”
At last we can dispense with ill-fitting terms like “molecular gastronomy” and just call it “modernist cuisine.” Thanks, Dr. Myhrvold.

His vision drove the project, and his involvement has been a cause for healthy skepticism and admiration. No chef could have created it and no publisher would be crazy enough to produce and distribute this 40-pound monster.

We now have a definitive work about this cuisine, how and why it works, and the tools and ingredients it could not do without. What it all means, well, I hope to know one day before I die.

For nearly two weeks I lived with this extensively hyped work — immersion circulators humming on my counters, a pressure cooker hissing, food sealer and grinder hot from use beside them — and I remain frustrated that I lack so many tools and ingredients required to actually use this behemoth.

I was left wondering how a book could be mind-crushingly boring, eye-bulgingly riveting, edifying, infuriating, frustrating, fascinating, all in the same moment. Every time I tore myself away from these stunning pages to emerge for air, I had to shake my head so hard my cheeks made Looney Tunes noises.

This work was composed over several years by a team of dozens of chefs and assistants — led by Chris Young and Maxime Bilet — in an 18,000-square-foot warehouse, the laboratory of Dr. Myhrvold’s company, Intellectual Ventures, including a large machinist area and about 4,000 square feet for the kitchen and photo studio. To do it critical justice would require numerous reviewers, versed in physics, chemistry, microbiology, nutrition, mechanical engineering; a chef who practices this rarefied spectrum of the craft; a traditional chef, and a food journalist.

I’m a member of the last group. I have a culinary education and have worked in and reported from many kitchens; I’ve written about chefs considered the best in modernist cuisine; I’ve written numerous books, many of them referenced in this volume. And still I am not qualified to review every aspect of this encyclopedia.

I will get this out of the way fast. The text, and there is a lot of it, is proficient and as compelling as my high school science textbooks. But artful prose is not the point. While the quantity of aspirin required to read this straight through can be measured in thousands of milligrams, the goal was clarity and thoroughness, and the information is indeed clear, sound and, if anything, too thorough. Buried in the verbiage is a treasure of insights, some truly original, some familiar but described from new and compelling angles. Sometimes overly proud of itself, at other times it is recklessly (and admirably) opinionated.

“Saturated fat isn’t associated with heart disease anywhere, in any large study,” the authors write, and go on to malign high-fiber and low-salt diets for people who are otherwise healthy.
Government suggestions for temperatures at which chicken and pork are safe to eat seem “to have been based not on science but on politics, tradition, and subjective judgment.” There is no single safe temperature that kills salmonella, for instance, but rather times that food must maintain specific temperatures to kill it. The authors provide the time-temperature tables.

Several pages are devoted to how to wash your hands and there is a brief foray into the Timurid dynasty of Central Asia; the book includes the equation required to calculate the radiant heat of a gas grill (which is not nearly as effective as a charcoal grill, it says, explaining why). Not sure how to balance your centrifuge? Look no further. On sous vide equipment, the Pacojet, ultrasonic baths, gelling agents, hydrocolloids and emulsifiers, the text is astonishingly thorough.

There are also some exciting reports from the testing kitchen on what is happening to a roast in the oven as the skin dries out and the water just below the surface hits boiling temperatures; why braised food tastes better the next day and dried beans sometimes never seem to get tender (try cooking them in distilled water); the crucial role of humidity in the oven and its impact on baking; and the real reason to rest meat (because dissolved and degraded proteins thicken the juices, not that the juices redistribute, chefs’ stock answer).

The authors occasionally overreach: shocking vegetables in ice water doesn’t halt the cooking, they announce — which may be true (the core temperature of hot food in an ice bath continues to rise, the book shows), but it’s not a distinction to trumpet, since the authors advise doing it anyway because it “pulls heat away from the surface evenly and with remarkable speed.”
Much of the cooking requires ingredients most people haven’t heard of and equipment few can even afford. A rotary evaporator costs thousands of dollars. A not atypical recipe step reads “Cavitate in an ultrasonic cleaning bath for 30 minutes.”

“Modernist Cuisine” is not for most home cooks. For the professional chef, modernist or not, it will be an invaluable reference. For the cooking geek with $625 to spare ($467.62 online), it will be endless fun. As a physical object it is remarkable; sometimes I found myself simply staring at the block of books.

Dr. Myhrvold, the chief technology officer for Microsoft until 1999, spent millions of dollars (more than one, less than 10, he says) to create this. Nothing seems to have been spared on the quality of the photo reproduction, on heavy stock with solid binding.

The food photography is excellent, but even more compelling are the 36 illustrated photographs using kitchen tools and appliances (a pressure cooker, a wok, a barbecue grill) that have been cut in half using an “abrasive water-jet cutter, an electrical discharge machining system, and other machine-shop tools,” the authors write, to help readers visualize what is happening inside a cooking vessel.

And I hope that much of what they’ve compiled filters down through cookbook publishing and into everyone’s cooking.

All the recipes are in metric weights, the easiest and most exact way of measuring. These recipes are laboratory precise, often measuring ingredients to the 100th of a gram. And — unprecedented outside technical baking books — all ingredients are listed as percentages, to scale them up or down as you need. Recipe formats are likewise innovative and, once you get the hang of them, are efficient and effective. As techniques are described, recipes exemplifying those methods are given, some original, many inspired by chefs as varied as Alice Waters, Tetsuya Wakuda and David Kinch, even some from books I’ve been involved with.

Among those worth the price alone for cooking professionals are the scores of parametric recipes, tables giving recommended times and temperatures for a variety of techniques, everything from how long to sous vide different cuts and thicknesses of meat to how long to microwave various vegetables. The table for custard lets you pick your desired consistency based on what percentage of egg you use and the temperature you cook it to, to create a thick Anglaise-style sauce or a stand-alone custard. I tested it, it’s brilliant, I’ll use it forever.

Cooking sous vide, shorthand for vacuum-sealing food and heating it to precise temperatures well below the boiling point, is a foundation technique of modernist cuisine. I saw not a single recipe involving meat where the meat is not cooked sous vide (other than beer-can chicken, roasted at 175 degrees, which gets a whole page treatment).

The book builds from an overview of food history, microbiology and nutrition in Volume 1; to traditional and modern techniques in Volume 2, the science of cooking meat and plants in Volume 3, and the use of thickeners, gels and foams in Volume 4 (which also has a detailed chapter each on wine and coffee). Volume 5 is devoted to recipes for finished dishes, wherein all these chemicals and tools come together to create elaborate modernist meals.

Since these dishes often require returning to tables in earlier volumes, the authors have included a sixth, spiral-bound kitchen manual on paper that could probably go through a dishwasher cycle no worse for wear, though I found its lack of indexing frustrating. (The index for Volumes 1 through 5, crucial for using this book, is superb.)

What few recipes I could actually cook were mainly solid: sous vide time and temperatures were on the money, the recipes clear. Volume 5 includes fabulous barbecue sauces and dry rubs with no unfamiliar ingredients.

The book’s pressure cooker stocks are a miracle: clear, clean and flavorful in a fraction of the time required for traditional stocks. I’ll never make small batches of stock any other way.
The only cooking discipline they do not cover is pastry (perhaps because you can’t cook a pie crust sous vide).

The progenitors of the cuisine have hailed this work as the most important cookbook since Escoffier’s. “The cookbook to end all cookbooks,” the culinary phenomenon David Chang is quoted as saying in its promotional material.

But can this truly be the food of the future, or simply an interesting style practiced by a splinter group of passionate chefs who care about this difficult and expensive form of high-end cooking? Much of this revolutionary cooking is based on ingredients and techniques long fundamental to the processed food industry. Are we to embrace the ingredients and techniques of modernist cuisine at the very moment industrially processed food is being blamed for many of our national health problems?

I have no desire to make Pringles in my spare time, but I wouldn’t stop anyone who did. Dr. Myhrvold and company tell you how. When I finish work, I relax by cutting and chopping and cooking a simple dinner for the family. Dr. Myhrvold has been relaxing by repairing to a cooking laboratory.

In the end, I can only smile, shake my head and bow to him and his crew for their work of unprecedented scope and ambition.

Yes.