An (undocumented) visit from mother

A pumpkin cocktail at Tiny Fork

My mother was in town last weekend, and all I have to show for it are the two photos pictured here : a drink and a scene from Central Park. It's not that we just sat in her hotel room all day, watching the Real Housewives and drinking wine, snacking on hotel chocolates (though I did manage to scarf all of them). In fact, we shared a smoked salmon bagel from Russ & Daughters with everything on it within an hour of her arrival, wandered through Smorgasburg, made it to an oyster happy hour at Tiny Fork and a vegetarian dinner at Table Verte in the East Village, enjoyed the obligatory Sunday brunch at Prune - with the 20-minute wait and bloody maries it entails, met with an old friend for dinner at Café Mogador, slurped some much-needed pho at An Choi and even made it for Tuesday night champagne and moules frites at Jules Bistro. And in between, we roamed the streets of downtown for hours on end. But you won't find here any snaps of our veggie dinner, our hummus and tagine, or our pile of mussel shells.

I might argue that I was too busy enjoying these moments to photograph them. More probable is that the company I was holding does not own a smart phone and will never understand what Instagram is used for, which will put anyone's social media habits in perspective. Either way, a lack of photos does not make for a very appealing blog post. But! My friend is in town next weekend and her iPhone has been glued to her hand since the gadget hit the market. So he next "visit" post is sure to be more visually stimulating, I promise!

Fall is finally happening in Central Park!

Vintage food and beverage posters

 The New Potato reminded me in their post today just how much I love vintage advertising posters, specifically those related to food and beverage. It's not that these posters are particularly revolutionary in their marketing strategy, nor that the products they push forward are even the most appealing to me. But they never fail to conjure glamorously frivolous images in my mind, where women in gowns and satin gloves dance from one eligible bachelor to the next, never once putting their champagne flute down to rest. Call it nostalgia for a time and place I've never known, but it looks to me like a good party.

 

A favorite: "Rouy d'Or: Health Cheese."

More vintage posters on L'Affichiste.

Daniel Boulud and Jim Burke interview on Serious Eats

Courtesy of Brent Herrig for SeriousEats.

I love reading chef profiles.

I think it comes from working in restaurants where as a front-of-the-house staff member I would walk into the kitchen for some specific reason but end up staring at all the cooks who, just minutes before had been treating each other to towel whips and name calling, usually referring to somebody's mother in a derogatory manner, were now in a cold-blooded focus. No matter whether they were lifting fries out of the frier, swirling butter into a lemon-caper sauce or gently dropping micro-greens onto a plate of beets using tweezers (personally one of my favorite contrasts in mannerism), nothing else mattered at that moment.

This behavior was further explained to me by the head chef at a restaurant I worked at in California, who at a staff meeting reminded all the servers to quit busting into the kitchen demanding why table eight's chicken was taking so long and actually expecting an answer. He said that despite appearances, his cooks were not standing there staring into space, waiting for a server to come in and harass them. They were actually thinking of the many different dishes they had going on, the different temperatures requested for the steaks, the different sides that needed to be prepared. They were concentrated, their mind racing at high speeds while their hands moved at an extremely calculate pace.

The mind of a chef is a fascinating place, especially to someone like me who loves and appreciates food dearly and yet is totally incapacitated when it comes to culinary creativity. And that's why I love finding out what goes on in there. So when I saw the Daniel Boulud and Jim Burke interview on Serious Eats today, I clicked so fast on the link I thought my hand might cramp.

My favorite part of the interview is when Daniel Boulud comments on up-and-coming restaurants: "I think sometimes I should go out more to understand the trends, but I've been around long enough to see trendy chefs come and go. [...] The problem with eclectic, new, hip cuisines is, 'What is it going to be left from that and what is the core?' Does anyone understand it?" He is answering as the quintessential star chef : he knows there is room for growth, but understands what makes good cooking run the course to atemporality. He's an expert, but a modern one.

Read the rest of the interview here!