Paris Review: LX

The Last Bite : The Poularde

Un Nouveau Chapitre 

Originally, this website was created to document meals, reviews, and whimsical musings. Today, it has evolved into more of an online inspiration board. It now serves the purpose of what Tumblr and Pinterest aspired to do, but what Instagram has excelled at. As Twitter and Vine and Path and Quora and Facebook and Google+ and YouTube and Vimeo and every other social-linking website continues to try to "connect" us with one another, let us not forget that there's a world of beauty just beyond the walls, windows and doors that keep us behind laptop, tablet, mobile and TV screens.

I've kept The Last Bite/La Poularde/The Poularde alive because it's a testament of the past ~6 years I've spent online. As the blog's content and thought evolved, the world of technology has expanded at an exponential rate. We now have hundreds of access points throughout the day that allow us to connect in ways our parents, grandparents and ancestors never had.

Experiencing life in a new form, approach, and outlet should always be exciting. As technology develops and affects the way we use our senses to interact with our surroundings, each of our own beautiful and mysterious paths will play out. How we balance it all is a winsome struggle. To read or not to read? To eat or not to eat? To speak or not to speak?

As a visitor of this website, you must acknowledge that you're quite lucky to have access to the Internet. Whether you intentionally sought La Poularde or merely stumbled upon it (see: StumbleUpon), I thank you for taking the time to get this far. Having breezed over thousands upon thousands of webpages and images in my life, to make it to paragraph 4 within any piece of writing requires a certain amount of commitment. Say, a bit of blind faith [that it's going to be worth it].

This online menhir acts as a symbol of the modern obelisk. We all digest content at such a rapid rate these days, one must ask themselves - does any of it sink in? Years ago, distractions and media came in far different forms. Were they any more concentrated than us? Will innovation foster with the manner we currently "teach" ourselves? Are all these blogs and likes and comments working towards anything greater?

Hopefully, yes. Hopefully, the good change will come. Hopefully, we will see the world differently and seek to better it. Now, whether this falls into the sea of other liquid crystals viewed yesterday or a year ago, depends on you. And me. And just about everyone else.

Thus, may we all continue to view the world with our own lens. But may we also be able to focus on the good. The areas to improve. The work to be done.

(Indeed, there's always more to be done.)

Cheers to what lies ahead.

-BJH

DCCL

Kallos

Chaka

K2

~

Like a small compressed flower resting in a palm, a gale drifts across. The delicate petals, transformed from their original state adapt into a new space. It is cold inside yet there are flames to burn. The clocks tick, slowly, quickly, frantically. Words are but sounds, touches but fleeting connections that hold nothing but brevity. My mouth knows not what it says or does not do. Closure brings new moments. Moments bring new days. The expanse within is deep. Full of pangs and turmoil. We are told that a lack of backbone will not rise. Yet how do we find the ones with potential that are too meek to solicit the greatness that can arise? Your idea of beauty is nothing more than the greatest common denominator championed for its ability to be swallowed on a second's glance or within the enclave of space that has formed itself in your psyche. English is no more effective than their language or their guttural sounds. Your worth is not decided by the innovation or the change you bring to the world. What is your worth. What is worth. What is the worth within your mind? Within. With, in. Does swarthy ambience characterize you any more than synthesized harmonies on loop? Pop is nothing more and nothing less. The decree is the reaction. The reaction marks nothing more than your compartmentalized solmization. Does it make you more or less of a person? Find the quant that works and smile as if there is no tomorrow. Your beauty is your mystery. Your ability to hide what does not affect others is strength. Subtle birds flutter each day without being noticed. Find the scene where your notes can sing. The way your feet move, the warmth your heart emits, the touch that says more than any element of speech. What is your prerogative. These are pebbles decorating the expanses we create. Move enough together and you form a stone. Collect enough stones and force them together with pressure and time. You relinquish a new creation. You garner value. You sell what value you earn. You relish in your ingenuity. You develop again.

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.

Convincing

Miel

Gambino

In Defence of English Cooking

By GEORGE ORWELL

We have heard a good deal of talk in recent years about the desirability of attracting foreign tourists to this country. It is well known that England’s two worst faults, from a foreign visitor’s point of view, are the gloom of our Sundays and the difficulty of buying a drink.

Both of these are due of fanatical minorities who will need a lot of quelling, including extensive legislation. But there is one point on which public opinion could bring about a rapid change for the better: I mean cooking.

It is commonly said, even by the English themselves, that English cooking is the worst in the world. It is supposed to be not merely incompetent, but also imitative, and I even read quite recently, in a book by a French writer, the remark: ‘The best English cooking is, of course, simply French cooking.’

Now that is simply not true, as anyone who has lived long abroad will know, there is a whole host of delicacies which it is quite impossible to obtain outside the English-speaking countries. No doubt the list could be added to, but here are some of the things that I myself have sought for in foreign countries and failed to find.

First of all, kippers, Yorkshire pudding, Devonshire cream, muffins and crumpets. Then a list of puddings that would be interminable if I gave it in full: I will pick out for special mention Christmas pudding, treacle tart and apple dumplings. Then an almost equally long list of cakes: for instance, dark plum cake (such as you used to get at Buzzard’s before the war), short-bread and saffron buns. Also innumerable kinds of biscuit, which exist, of course, elsewhere, but are generally admitted to be better and crisper in England.

Then there are the various ways of cooking potatoes that are peculiar to our own country. Where else do you see potatoes roasted under the joint, which is far and away the best way of cooking them? Or the delicious potato cakes that you get in the north of England? And it is far better to cook new potatoes in the English way — that is, boiled with mint and then served with a little melted butter or margarine — than to fry them as is done in most countries.

Then there are the various sauces peculiar to England. For instance, bread sauce, horse-radish sauce, mint sauce and apple sauce; not to mention redcurrant jelly, which is excellent with mutton as well as with hare, and various kinds of sweet pickle, which we seem to have in greater profusion than most countries.

What else? Outside these islands I have never seen a haggis, except one that came out of a tin, nor Dublin prawns, nor Oxford marmalade, nor several other kinds of jam (marrow jam and bramble jelly, for instance), nor sausages of quite the same kind as ours.

Then there are the English cheeses. There are not many of them but I fancy Stilton is the best cheese of its type in the world, with Wensleydale not far behind. English apples are also outstandingly good, particularly the Cox’s Orange Pippin.

And finally, I would like to put in a word for English bread. All the bread is good, from the enormous Jewish loaves flavoured with caraway seeds to the Russian rye bread which is the colour of black treacle. Still, if there is anything quite as good as the soft part of the crust from an English cottage loaf (how soon shall we be seeing cottage loaves again?) I do not know of it.

No doubt some of the things I have named above could be obtained in continental Europe, just as it is possible in London to obtain vodka or bird’s nest soup. But they are all native to our shores, and over huge areas they are literally unheard of.

South of, say, Brussels, I do not imagine that you would succeed in getting hold of a suet pudding. In French there is not even a word that exactly translates ‘suet’. The French, also, never use mint in cookery and do not use black currants except as a basis of a drink.

It will be seen that we have no cause to be ashamed of our cookery, so far as originality goes or so far as the ingredients go. And yet it must be admitted that there is a serious snag from the foreign visitor’s point of view. This is, that you practically don’t find good English cooking outside a private house. If you want, say, a good, rich slice of Yorkshire pudding you are more likely to get it in the poorest English home than in a restaurant, which is where the visitor necessarily eats most of his meals.

It is a fact that restaurants which are distinctively English and which also sell good food are very hard to find. Pubs, as a rule, sell no food at all, other than potato crisps and tasteless sandwiches. The expensive restaurants and hotels almost all imitate French cookery and write their menus in French, while if you want a good cheap meal you gravitate naturally towards a Greek, Italian or Chinese restaurant. We are not likely to succeed in attracting tourists while England is thought of as a country of bad food and unintelligible by-laws. At present one cannot do much about it, but sooner or later rationing will come to an end, and then will be the moment for our national cookery to revive. It is not a law of nature that every restaurant in England should be either foreign or bad, and the first step towards an improvement will be a less long-suffering attitude in the British public itself.

1945

THE END

Guten

Overhaul

ADAM RAPOPORT
By Joshua David Stein, Eater

2 February 2011

When Adam Rapoport, 41, was tapped to become the editor-in-chief of the newly New York-based Bon Appétit, eyebrows raised into their upright and locked positions. Was he not, some wondered, the Style editor at GQ? What right had he in the hallowed position held before him by eminence gris Barbara Fairchild? Mr. Rapoport was, indeed, the style and fashion editor at GQ, but before that he was the restaurant editor at Time Out and an editor and writer for the James Beard Foundation's publications office. But make no mistake, Mr. Rapoport is still a dude. I recently met him at Keen's Chophouse, literally an old boy's club, for steak hash and seltzer. Mr. Rapoport was very proud of his new jacket. "It's a Gloverall duffel coat. This is some sort of collaboration with Fred Perry. It's got a nice plaid hood!"

How is it going?

It's going well but my life is one long series of meetings and emails.

You would be in Milan now for the men's shows?

I would be in Milan and then have just gone to Paris.

Do you ever close your eyes and glimpse the life that once was?

There are a lot of elements about the fashion world that wear on you like going to eight shows a day. And every time you walk it into is like walking into a high school cafeteria, who is wearing what and who is talking to whom and who is sitting where.

Has the food world, thus far, felt less Heathers?

The fashion world is a scene. After ten straight days on the road you're ready to come home, order Chinese food, and turn on ESPN. In general the food world is easier going. It depends. I still think of Bon App as magazine geared more toward the home cook and what to make for dinner tonight.

Is that how you distinguish Bon App form, for instance, to Saveur and Food & Wine?

We'll see how it evolves when we relaunch in May. I do think the magazine can and should evolve and it should take on its own personality in the coming years. I want to make it a magazine that has some buzz, that is relevant but at the end of the day, it needs to be about recipes, cooking advice, and it needs to work.

What's some of the crossover from being a fashion editor to being a food editor?

Both fields are things that people are passionate about but they are also intimidating. I love fashion and I get stressed out about what to wear and I try on five ties and my wife tells me I look like an idiot. I'm supposed to look good and it stresses me out.

It's the same thing when friends come over for dinner. Having a dinner party can be an extremely taxing and stressful situation. The job of the editor is to strike a tone that says to the reader, "Listen, we're there with you. We get stressed out. We're never sure of ourselves but we've learned some things over the years and whet here are some tips that work well for us. Whether that means how to match the width of your tie to your lapels or that using rice wine vinegar is great for a vinaigrette.

But in fashion, you're not essentially sharing. The experience, however of cooking is that it is a communal activity.

There's something about cooking that is inherently generous. Fashion is all about yourself. That is one thing that I did tire of at the men's shows. Everyone over the years — after the Sartorialist took hold — worked so hard to put their look together for the day. It got embarrassing, with their hand-tooled boots, and bandana pocket square and turned up cuffs and your vintage Rolex and the trapper hat you're wearing. It's like, "Really, dude? You're doing all of that?"

What can we expect from the relaunch?
In May 
I'll know more once my design director and photo editor starts. I say that half jokingly. But they have not started yet. Alex Grossman who is the design director from Cookie and WSJ Magazine and Alex Pollack who was the #2 at New York magazine. I'm a firm believer that if a page doesn't look great, people aren't going to stop to read it. It needs to be a very visually driven magazine.

How much of the original team remains?

Not a heck of a lot. It's essentially an entirely new staff.

Did you want a clean sweep?

A lot of people weren't interested in uprooting and moving across the country. And I thought, yes, if we're going to make a new magazine, I wanted to hire people with whom I had a working relationship. Christine Muhlke from the New York Times, T Magazine, who is now the deputy editor, for instance, gave me my first assignment to write about food years ago, reviewing restaurants for Paper. I've hired Meghan Sutherland who was the managing editor at Teen Vogue as my deputy editor. She's my getcha-done editor.

Tell me about the May issue. What kind of stories have you assigned?
[Laughter]

I'm hesitant to talk specifically about the issue because we're very early in the pregnancy stage. It is somewhat of a travel-based issue. There will be ingredients but we're going to do our own spin on it. I want there to be a lot more voice in the magazine on the part of the editors and the columnists.

Who are the columnists?

We're bringing on Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton, who run The Canal House They were two of the founding editors of Saveur magazine. They'll be doing a seasonal cooking column. Jenny Rosenstrach and her husband Andy Ward, who was the executive editor at GQ and who is now a big shot at Random House. They'll be doing a sort of parenting/couple/family column. Jenny has a website called Dinner a Love Story. She used to be an editor at Cookie magazine and now she has a big book deal.

Are you only featuring couples as columnists?

Well Chris and Melissa aren't a couple. They are professional partners. But yes, it is odd.
Is it indicative of a larger project of trying to appeal to both men and women?

Food is gender neutral. Men love food. Women love food.
Yes but perhaps they love it in a different way and certainly the approach to food is different. 

Certainly there is less usage of the word bro in the magazine.

Are they all white for now, the staff? 

Yes they are for now. There's a great piece in the Village Voice called "The Unbearable Whiteness of Journalism" from years ago. It's definitely a thought and a concern. That's something always notice at Condé Nast in general but it is one thing to make note of it, and it's another to practice what you preach. That's something I should be questioned about. I think ultimately as a magazine staff you want to hire people like you but you end up with a homogeneous staff.

Is it always going to be food on the cover?

I'd like to think there are other sorts of ways to tackle the world of food other than putting a slice of pie or a roast chicken on the cover. But you know, if you don't put a turkey on the cover in November, you lose your job.

Grainy Grit

Hey you, simple clover of the sun
Your face so soft like ivory, hun
Dashing, Dashing, smooth as they ever come
Is that tweed, some herringbone, tartan

No, golden buttons tarnished like bronze
Copper that is hit, warm hot cross buns
Earls and Duchess, two silver peas
Talk Mayflowers and an R.M.S.

Is it Liverpool, no I.R.A.
Braveheart the Wallace, Henry the Eight
Spade it, hate it, take it, queens for you
Wild Martin never knew fire burnt