Last week, I digested a year's worth of eating. To recap, here are my six best meals of 2008, in no particular order, and one in memorium addition:
1) Le Bernardin, Manhattan. Eight or nine or ten courses, with the menu personally chosen and assembled by Eric Ripert and wines paired by Aldo Sohm, the best sommelier in the world.
2) Beatrice & Woodsley. One beautiful night full of pork and pork and pork and chainsaws.
3) Osteria Marco. While I was in New York, home of some of the best Italian
Peking Tokyo, which I reviewed this week, was a weird little joint, no doubt. The name was strange, the space bizarre. And yet, it was an excellent neighborhood player and the kind of place one might well thank the food gods for should one find one's
self in the area and hard up for spring rolls, spaghetti and egg foo young all at the same time.
It is with that in mind, that I have assembled this week's list. All of these are places which -- due to neighborhood pressures, shifting
This summer, Cook Street School of Fine Cooking, 1937 Market Street, celebrates ten years of teaching idiots, pretenders, professionals, iconoclasts and everyone in between the tricks and tools of the cooking trade. To mark the anniversary, it's holding a series of events, including a recipe contest (in conjunction with the Food Network) that comes with a pretty cool prize package for the last cook standing. Here's what you need to know to enter: Submit an original recipe using no more than 10 i
Two years of history in one box
While cleaning my desk last week, I discovered that one single packing box could hold a couple hundred menus. Mostly take-out menus and dozens of single sheets stolen from fine dining joints, but also a few sleeved menus still in their fancy folders as well as entire press kits.
So one box of menus = 300 menus, give or take. That box in the picture above? That's one in a series of four. That's roughly 1,200 menus I've collected over seven years on thi
