 |
|
|
|
The Jelly Belly ExperimentSeptember 21st, 2011
They are allowed to use any abbreviations or slang commonly used on Twitter, Facebook, IMs or other social media/online chat rooms. However, they need to get their points across so that these users can easily understand them. And: They need to craft interesting, accurate descriptions. Creativity counts. I wanted them to post here so they could all read one another’s reviews. They will have a few minutes at the end of class to complete the assignment, so it’s a tight deadline too. On your mark, get set… tweet! Back to life, back to reality…August 28th, 2011 Evening sky, from our Bar Harbor rental (With apologies to Soul II Soul) We’re back. Back from our glorious, six-week sojourn, back from spring sabbatical and summer break. Back to school — me at UGA’s Grady School of Journalism teaching magazine writing; Bill teaching painting and drawing at Carson-Newman. Back to schedules, deadlines, alarm clocks, cat feedings, trash-emptying, lawn-mowing, house-fixing. Back to work. With a deep, regretful sigh: No more daily adventure of the road ahead. No more long conversations in our traveling living room — the car. No more being together all day, every day. And every night. (Sniff.) Perhaps most tragically: No more room service. (Nooooooooo!) But also: Back to friends. Back to our crazy cat, Rocket. Back to our separate, but comfortable homes — the ones with the sofa seating curved to the shapes of our bodies. Back to looking ahead farther than the next bend in the road. Back to living from our closets and chests, rather than our suitcases. Back to knowing our way around. As wonderful as our trip was, we agreed — six weeks was a little too long to be away. As much as we loved each adventure, we started to get a little homesick. Still, we’re glad we did this long version of our annual Maine hajira. Who knows if we will have the chance again, much less the time, energy or funds? Our epic journey (click here if you want to see the whole crazy map in detail) began in Atlanta, stopped briefly in New Market, TN, continued up the East Coast to New York. Here was our big kickoff, planned for months (see previous post) to celebrate Bill’s 60th birthday in a pull-out-the-stops four-day stay in our favorite U.S. city.
We love NYC so much that our visits (we were last in town around Christmas, to see Pee-Wee Herman’s Broadway show) have begun to take a familiar pattern: We make a lot of plans, but not so much that we don’t have time for a lot of walking around. That’s our favorite thing – just walking around. (Besides eating, of course.) But as much energy as New York lends you, it also taketh away. On each of our recent trips, I’ve gotten sick, and we’ve both been so tired we’ve literally fallen down in the street.  At Lincoln Center, for Die Walkure. Oh well. We had to eliminate one plan – to see Al Jarreau at the Blue Note – because of my sheer lack of energy from a bad cold. But everything else went gloriously well: The five-hour opera (Die Walkure), the three-hour meal at Per Se, the discovery of ABC Kitchen, the back-in-time service and style of the traditional French restaurant, La Grenouille, even the the B-list celeb sighting of Jim Belushi at Minetta Tavern and overrated Bar Masa. We loved our small, but comfortable and well-appointed room (complete with tiny, noisy terrace) at the Gotham Hotel.  Amuse bouches, at Per Se, NYC. And that was just the first week. We continued from New York to Maine, crawling up the coast to a few days in Portland, relatives in Harpswell and our two-week summer rental in Bar Harbor. From there, across New Hampshire and Vermont, tracking lakes Champlain, George and Placid into the Adirondacks and beyond to the shores of Lake Ontario. From Buffalo, down through Ohio, and on to rural Pennsylvania and the Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece, Fallingwater. Several pieces of our trip were so extraordinary I’d like to take them one at a time in future posts: New York and the Per Se meal. Portland, Maine. The Adirondacks. Fallingwater. But the capper was a destination we added at Bill’s request: The museum and homestead dedicated to his favorite watercolorist, Charles Burchfield. I’ll be getting to those soon. Until then, a quick recap of our trip by the numbers: Days on the road: 39 Miles traveled: 4660 Hours in car: 90 Avg speed: 44 mph States visited: 15 (Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont, Ohio) Low temp: 41 degrees, Bar Harbor High: 92, Winchester, Va.  At the Pierce-Arrow Museum, Buffalo. Oceans visited: 1 Great Lakes seen: 2 (Erie, Ontario) Adirondack lakes visited: 3 (Champlain, George, Placid) Ferry crossings: 1 Hotel stays: 13  Renaissance Pittsburgh. Weirdly coincidental hotel stay: 1 (in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire) Summer rentals: 1 Relatives crashed upon: 1 Restaurants visited: 49 Lobsters consumed: 8 Oysters: 13 Steamahs: 36 Chowder bowls: 5 Periwinkles: dozen Favorite breakfast: Cafe This Way, Bar Harbor Favorite lunch: ABC Kitchen, NYC Favorite dinner: Per Se, NYC Favorite hotel: Renaissance Pittsburgh Favorite inn: Mirror Lake Inn, Lake Placid, NY Worst meal: Summit Inn, Farmington, Pa. Worst hotel: Sagamore Inn, Lake George, NY Best discovery: Shelburne Museums, Shelburne, VT Best museum: (tie) Albright-Knox, Buffalo; Fallingwater, Mill Run, Pa. Favorite funky-weird store: Tool Barn, Bar Harbor Best record shop: Burlington Records, Burlington, VT  Fallingwater. Trip highlight: Charles Burchfield Homestead, Salem, Ohio Nerdiest museum visited: (tie) Green Bank Radio Telescope Museum, Green Bank, WVa; Pierce-Arrow Auto Museum, Buffalo, NY. Best quote: “I’d describe it as ‘Aspirational WASP.’” — Susan Percy, on the trying-too-hard decor of the Bar Harbor rental. New relationship catchphrase [in the rising falsetto of Bill's late grandmother]: “i donnn’t waaaannnNT IIIITT!” Birthdays celebrated: 1 Moose spottings: 1 Museums (nerdy and otherwise) visited: 8 Operas attended: 1 Live jazz: 2 Stupendous fireworks shows: 1 Celeb sighting: 1 Near altercations with obnoxious strangers: 1 Fingers closed in car door: 1  Me vs. car door: Car door won. Emergency room visits: 1 Facebook postings: 417 (OK, I made that up, but it has to be close) Cats retrieved from avuncular sitters: 1 Combined cash on hand at end of trip: $16 Back & ForthApril 23rd, 2011Bill and I are planning our annual trip to Maine, which is always a journey in every sense of the word — we always drive, and use it as an excuse to see parts of the country (or friends, or family, or anything) we wouldn’t otherwise be able to visit. We try to combine elaborate schedules with enough free time for discoveries. This year will be a spectacular jaunt, because we will be celebrating his 60th birthday on the way. Months of ‘net-crawling, calendar-consulting and financial figuring are finally falling into place to create Bill’s dream blow-out, a sort of nerd bacchanalia: The day before (b-day minus one), we’ll be in New York City, watching the new Metropolitan Opera staging of Die Walküre, a five-hour installment of Wagner’s “Ring of the Niebelung” cycle. Dinner that night will be at one of our old-school French favorites, La Grenouille. On the big day, we’ll hear one of my jazz-fiend husband’s favorite performers, Al Jarreau, at the Blue Note at 10:30. These three events alone check off a large portion of Bill’s bucket list. But where to dine before the show? Arranging his birthday dinner took the kind of dedication and coordination required of a true foodie acolyte — which, fortunately, I am.  Brunch at Bouchon, Las Vegas. We spent hours researching and discussing what kind of culinary analgesic could take the sting out of knowing you’ve actually hit 60. Like me, Bill loves high-end, food-as-art, chef-driven restaurants, and is willing to pay as long as the experience is worth it. We loved Daniel in NYC and Alain Ducasse in Paris, but we wanted to try something new. Bill is a sushi hound, but we’ve already been to Nobu and Morimoto in other towns. We narrowed it down to a select few, including Masa, Adour and Bouley, before finally zeroing in on our first choice: Per Se. Per Se’s Thomas Keller currently enjoys the reputation of being America’s top chef master, and he doesn’t have to face Tom Colicchio to prove it. We visited one of Keller’s restaurants, Bouchon, for a stellar late brunch in Las Vegas, and even though the food there is relatively prosaic brasserie fare, the meal and relaxed environment remains as distinctly memorable to us as a vivid desert mirage. I long ago declared his Napa Valley, California, restaurant, the French Laundry, as the place I’d most like to limp through my own 60th spin around the sun, a few years from now. Although Keller’s New York restaurant, Per Se, does not quite garner the reviews of the French Laundry, it’s still among the top recommendations for most serious critics. We loved the sound of the chef’s tasting, a progression of small, extraordinary tastes in Keller’s distinctive style: clean, beautiful American seasonal ingredients, often proffered with a Japanese devotion to simplicity and a classic French twist (and I don’t mean the hair braid). His signature dish is “oysters and pearls”: a translucent raw oyster with caviar “pearls” and tapioca “sabayon” (a kind of rich, eggy foam). The prices at both restaurants — close to $300 per person for the full chef’s tasting, including service but not wine — do nothing to abate the throng of eager diners. Getting a reservation at Per Se is famously difficult and tricky (unless, apparently, you posses an American Express black card). As at a select few other restaurants, reservations are taken exactly one month in advance, and phone lines open precisely at 10 AM. If you wait more than two minutes, you’ll get an impenetrable busy signal. More than 30 minutes on hold also spells doom. We’ve had our hearts broken before with this kind of system [silently shakes fist at José Andrés' Minibar in Washington, DC], so I knew we couldn’t count on getting in. Yes, and I do mean at any time — more than likely, even with the best of luck, as a party of two, rather than four or more, we’d be offered only very late or very early slots. Still, I was hopeful. Perhaps it was a sign of the economic times that Per Se had recently shortened its advance for reservations from two months to one. Also, I’d experimented on Open Table to see if reservations ever turned up at the last minute — and indeed they do, although with no rhyme or reason except that snowstorms accompanied a better chance of openings. So I knew we might still happen to get in even if this first effort failed. But “happening to get in” isn’t what you want to have to rely on for your beloved’s 60th birthday. On the 30-day advance date, I set an iPhone alarm to remind me. As the 10 AM witching hour approached, I dialed the number in advance, set it to speaker, and watched my Atomic Clock app tick away the miliseconds, finger poised over “redial.” I pounced on it as soon as the digits flicked to 10. First sign of hope: Not a busy signal, not an announcement that the restaurant’s reservation desk was closed, but a recording directing me to hold on for reservations. The on-hold recording offered up information about a dress code, an elevator and other tantalizing insider tips. But as I heard the second, then third, then fourth loop of that maddeningly cheerful voice, my little hope balloon developed a slow leak, deflating ever so steadily as the wait stretched on. Just short of 30 minutes on hold, even after I’d tired of mockingly chanting the loop along with Rita Restaurant-Info, I began to wonder whether I should just hang up. Then someone picked up. And spoke to me. And listened when I asked about reservations on the magic day. And offered me two seatings: 5:30 and 9:45. Maybe this doesn’t sound like a triumph to you, but I was ready to tap-dance. An early seating would allow us to get to the show later, and it would likely be the only time we’d eat that day, except maybe for some little nibbles of toast and coffee after sleeping in late. We could easily count on staying three hours. I gleefully gave our credit card number for the 5:30 spot, and acknowledged that a cancellation without more than three days’ notice would cost us dearly. I debated whether to surprise Bill with the good news after we arrived in New York, but in the end, I printed out our emailed confirmation, tucked it into a birthday card and set it out for my husband that same day. “Your birthday celebration has begun,” I told him. He was as overjoyed as I about our luck, and like me, he set off on a fit of Googling about Per Se’s menu, reviews and photos. We will spend the next month salivating.  Sign near a learning center named for my grandfather, Nathan Reese, on the former Sue Bennett College campus, London, Ky. This trip is something we look forward to every year, and we usually start planning the next one … well, even as we’re traveling, thinking about what we might like to do differently next time. The anticipation is nearly as much fun as the experience itself, but not as wonderful as looking back, knowing that in the context of your entire life, only a few moments stand out clearly. Just as it had for that Las Vegas brunch, time becomes an editor and magnifying glass, helping you lose unimportant details, and focus on what counts. Of course, time works the same way for much more important things, such as friendship, marriage, what kind of contribution you’re making to the world. In the large scheme of things, restaurants don’t matter very much. But we do love them, and I’ve been fortunate enough to evaluate them professionally for years. Looking back helps us sort out which stay with us, and why. Looking forward to Per Se, we begin to wonder how it will compare to some of the amazing restaurants we’ve enjoyed since we’ve been together these seven years, including our previous six Maine trips. Some coveted reservations, like those for Per Se, required careful, long-term planning. Others we stumbled upon, unknowing. Some disappointed, despite critical raves. Others simply blew us away as underappreciated gems. Like what? Glad you asked. Looking back as we look forward, only a few restaurants stand out as …. well, I’ll say it: Life-changing. They’re the kinds of places that pivot you on your heel, redirecting your understanding of food, of life, of creativity and what it means to eat and live well.  Bill, with Maggie Thatcher, at Rules in London.  Crab salad, with sea urchin, at Rules. Some are well-known, like the aforementioned Daniel and Alain Ducasse. These French masters gave us our first taste of truly important, world-class cuisine. The former Seeger’s in Atlanta must also be acknowledged. The Inn at Little Washington, where Patrick O’Connell forged his singular, self-taught cuisine, and created an empire. Philadelphia’s Le Bec Fin, where the chef himself gave us an understanding of his philosophical approach, which has allowed his restaurant to thrive. Le Bernardin, where we celebrated our hours-old marriage. Arbutus, in London, with its cheerfully socialist approach to keeping costs down for its incredible fare. Its opposite, which we enjoyed equally, was the gleefully Tory-ish hangout The Rules, London’s oldest restaurant, with breathtakingly fresh and contemporary versions of old-fashioned dishes, much of it from its sister estate in the High Pennines. Two places, however, stand out even more distinctly for their fearlessly creative approach, a kind of stunning audacity that had you constantly asking, “How did they do this?” even as you swooned over the pure deliciousness of every mouthful. It’s certainly enough for Bill and me to have good food, creative fare and decent service, but for us, taste is king. Bill particularly enjoys the kind of devoted old-world service you often find in great European restaurants and well-aged American steakhouses. But overall, we don’t care how beautiful the food or the room looks, or how good the service is — if the food isn’t great, we won’t be back. These two particular spots, however, achieved extraordinary flavors with strikingly unusual combinations, and presentations that looked more like abstract paintings — or sculptures — than dinner plates.  Cuttlefish, on squid ink, at Town House.  The aftermath of Bill's cuttlefish. He liked it. The first is a tiny restaurant in a tiny burg: Town House, in Chilhowie, Va. A few weeks ago marked our fourth visit since deciding to stop in on our way home from Maine several years ago. We read about it in a front-page story in the New York Times, and decided we had to visit the place where a daring restaurant owner advertised for chefs on Craigs List, offering carte blanche to create the restaurant of their dreams. The result is this incredible spot driven by married chefs John and Karen Shields and eerily prescient sommelier Charlie Berg, and behind a not-especially-well-appointed dining room, a kitchen full of state-of-the-art equipment. The chefs work not only to challenge their diners’ attitudes about food, but to reflect the attitude and beauty of their environment, in the shadow of the Blue Ridge mountains. One of Karen Shields’ desserts stands out starkly: a dessert of chocolate crumbs, mounded and peaked like the valleys and purple ridges around us, decorated with edible wild flowers and other handmade mountain flavors, like sorghum and caramel. The second place was perhaps even more remarkable because the unlikeliness of the surroundings. That year, we decided to begin our trip to Maine by visiting some branches of my family tree, traveling from Tennessee to Kentucky, where my parents were born, and on to Indiana to see my brother, niece and great-nephews and -niece. After our eye-opening tour along narrow, harrowing roads into the impoverished Laurel County, Ky., hollers where my folks had grown up, we saw my grandparents’ windblown, remote mountaintop gravesites. Traveling on via Daniel Boone’s trail, past Berea and the Boone Tavern, we made it into Louisville. I had already begun to think of this leg of our trip as the Ghost Tour, even before we stopped for lunch at the legendary Brown Hotel. We dug into their signature Southern invention, the hot brown sandwich, a desperate chef’s ploy to feed a crowd of hungry dancers when he ran out of ham and eggs in the wee hours of a morning in 1923.  Hot brown sandwich, at the Brown Hotel, Louisville.  Red Hill Cemetery, Laurel County, Ky.  Seelbach Hotel, Louisville.  Seelbach Ballroom, site of the Gatsby wedding.  The Seelbach's Rookwood pottery-lined Rathskellar.  Chef Bobby Benjamin, at the Oakroom. I wanted to stay somewhere else: The Seelbach, another grand old historic Louisville hotel, where for decades thousands of flappers, zoot suiters and Derby partiers crowded into its ornate marble lobby. Like the Brown Hotel, it reopened after a long closure, and still struggles to attract a small slice of the clientele who once made this spot so mythical. Some of the ghosts here are family — we sipped bourbon in the bar, where my dad celebrated while on leave from nearby Fort Knox before shipping off to the Philippines in WWII. Some are fictional — we danced in the beautiful, deserted ballroom, where F. Scott Fitzgerald had set the wedding of The Great Gatsby‘s Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Another is legendary — The Lady in Blue is said to be spotted near the elevator in which she plunged to her death. Others are simply imaginary — the gorgeous Rookwood pottery-lined basement which once housed a lively Rathskellar, another likely haunt of my dad and his WWII buddies, is today empty and eerie. I took a peek back at the Lady in Blue’s elevator as we were escorted into the Seelbach’s Oakroom for our dinner reservations late that night. Only one other couple were seated in an enormous, hand-carved dining room entirely crafted of oak. They soon left, the Dockers-clad husband clapping a cellphone to his ear on the way out, his wife’s flip-flops echoing behind him. We nervously eyed the cavernous space, now feeling embarrassingly overdressed. The Oakroom has earned an impressive number of dining accolades, but we’ve experienced sudden reversals many times before. An empty room is never a good sign. All those ghosts seemed to hover in the dark corners, laughing at us. My family ghosts — self-sufficient, no-nonsense Appalachian Baptists who scraped a living from the rocky, wind-blown knolls we’d just visited — were probably doubled over.  Beef with black truffles and toasted marshmallow, the Oakroom, Seelbach Hotel, Louisville. The dinner we embarked upon was shocking in its daring, even more so considering the lack of diners. (A private room held a group of diners that had jetted in from Nashville — without benefit of a glimpse or clue, we decided they must be Tim McGraw and Faith Hill with some friends.) We still talk about the dish that turned us on our heads, the one I’d ordered on a dare: filet of beef with truffles and toasted marshmallow. I know, I know — that sounds crazy. And horrible. That is what made it even more magnificent — the meltingly tender beef, amplified by a rich brown sauce, with just a touch of caramelized sweetness from the house-made marshmallow. It was the culmination of a series of small, amazing plates that had been like, would be like, our Maine trip every year. A journey. That culmination, of course, wasn’t about the destination. It was about everything we did along the way, and that exclamation point just reminded us that it’s all about the discovery. Of our past ghosts, our present tense, our future itineraries. We can’t wait to get started. Vietnamese Bistro, KnoxvilleMarch 12th, 2011
Our group included a vegetarian, and the menu offered him several veggie and “fishetarian” options, including tofu or veggie alternatives of the meat-centric dishes. We started with summer rolls, served with fish sauce (they call it “citrus sauce”) and sweet-savory peanut sauce. The kitchen sent out a complimentary goi ga salad they’ve just added to the menu — tender, pulled white chicken with thinly shredded cabbage and a mild, sweet-vinegar dressing, flecked with fresh basil and finely ground peanuts. We made short work of it.
These are not the blow-your-hair-back flavors you’ll find on Atlanta’s Buford Highway, but thoughtful, balanced dishes that serve well as introductory Vietnamese. To be fair, our choices were entry-level, compared to the more complex and novel items also available — crab-stuffed rainbow trout, free-range chicken with mashed potatoes, green beans and peanut sauce, soft shell crab, and even quail with a port reduction sauce. You can even get steak and mashed potatoes — with a mushroom demi-glace, no less. The cappuccino creme brulee had a tasty custard, but the burnt-sugar crust was so thin as to be barely detectable. Still, in all, the meal was more than enough to ensure we’d return, for lunch (when prices are even more affordable), or back for dinner next time we go to the movies. Please, Knoxville — give Vietnamese Bistro a chance. You’ll be doing yourself a favor. Vietnamese Bistro, 11605 Parkside Drive, Farragut, TN 37934 865-675-1310 Prices: Under $10 for lunch; $10-$12 for most dinner entrees, up to $20 for specialties Kitty & KristaJanuary 28th, 2011Kind of like Julie & Julia… get it? Yesterday, I was honored to be the guest of Carson-Newman College’s family and consumer sciences dean, Dr. Kitty Coffey. She and her faculty arranged an event in which their nutrition and dietetics students prepared recipes from my cookbooks and served them to a group of faculty and guests. Later, I spoke to a group that included the Student Dietetics club, as well as faculty and students, followed by a book signing.  Carson-Newman students prepare apple crisp from Atlanta Classic Desserts. What a revelation! In addition to the students’ thorough professionalism, I also admired their courage. They carefully tested and retested several recipes before settling on our menu — vegetable paella and apple crisp with ice cream. Both were delicious, but these budding food scientists, focused on healthy, nutritious eating, were also game enough to test the deep-fried Oreos recipe from Atlanta Classic Desserts, before deciding that serving such a time-sensitive dish in that setting would be too risky. (Good decision, students — it would have been like parceling out cold Krispy Kremes.)  Students working in C-N's test kitchens. If you’re my age, you remember when classes like these were called “home ec.” Under Dr. Coffey’s direction, her students are exposed to professionals in their fields, from interior design to food writing. She says she wants to show them they have career options apart from health care and institutional work. In addition, she teamed with former CN adjunct Dr. Beverly Hammond, now an engineer and designer at Thermador’s factory in nearby La Follette, Tenn., to equip her department’s building with an astonishing array of Thermador professional stoves, Bosch dishwashers and refrigerators — a donation valued at about $250,000. These kitchens — with beautiful cabinetry and countertops donated by Knoxville cabinetmakers — would make Martha Stewart salivate. Carson-Newman’s food lab and test kitchens (they also evaluated stoves and ranges for Thermador before they go on the market) are the only such beneficiaries of Thermador’s largesse in North America. A word here about Dr. Coffey, a woman I deeply admire. She is the best kind of powerful Southern matriarch — her love for the students, and theirs for her, is palpable. Petite, stylish and well-mannered as I am gangly and blunt, she has garnered influence and recognition for her own work, but always uses it to her students’ greatest benefit. When we met her before the event, she was red-eyed after reading an student’s moving essay. By the time we sat down to dinner at the beautifully set table, with Dr. Coffey at one end of the table, Dr. Hammond at the other, my art professor husband nearby (placed by strict etiquette rules apart from me) and students between us, the event had the feel of a real dinner party, from the students’ pearls and chic clothes to the yarns we all told. After the students served us, they sat rapt through my short, and somewhat rambly talk, before asking several smart questions. They seemed pleased with the event overall, but couldn’t possibly have enjoyed it as much as I did. If any of you read this, and you ever need restaurant recommendations in Atlanta, please send me an email and I will make some suggestions for you. You students have some important work ahead of you — educating and feeding America as it begins to unlearn decades of unhealthy, unsustainable practices. I’m excited that these talented, capable, passionate students will be working toward changing our foodways for the better. Bad blogger! Bad! Bad!January 5th, 2011 Soba noodles, at Restaurant Nippon.  Monkfish and calamari, at Aquavit.  Smoked trout, at Gramercy Tavern.  Huevos rancheros, at Norma's. If a writer is a person who hates to write, is a blogger a person who hates to dash off unpolished, but timely posts? I’ve been awful about keeping this blog up to date, especially considering the fabulous dining (and other) adventures experienced in the last few months. Here in the early days of the new year, hindsight (and increasingly faulty memory) allow some details to fall away and provide crystalline vignettes of others: A fall visit to Blackberry Farm, with its new restaurant and dining room; a delicious chicken, lentil and sweet potato soup for our Sunday supper club, with a chocolate-and-vanilla buttercream with crushed candy cane birthday cake dessert; another great dinner at our favorite Knoxville-area restaurant, the Foothills Milling Co., in Maryville, and above all, incredible NYC meals, including a crab-and-coconut milk soup in the dining room of the Modern, at the Museum of Modern Art, overlooking the sculpture garden; a transcendant meal of Scandanavian delights at Aquavit, in a teak-appointed dining room that was as spare and clean as a sauna; fantastic people watching at Le Grenouille (full-length minks, expensive hair); “21″ (old-school NYC families gathered around the bar fireplace); Ruby Foo’s (the Times Square parade of humanity just outside our window); Norma’s (the in-crowd digging in to hearty pancake-and-egg breakfasts at Le Parker Meridian). We also stumbled into a wonderfully old-fashioned family-run Japanese restaurant, Restaurant Nippon, which serves barley and other produce from its Canadian farm. We were thoroughly thrilled, delighted and exhausted — so much so that I can barely remember anything except a fantastic smoked trout at a late-night Gramercy Tavern dinner. Other great memories have nothing to do with food — the massive crowds, the store windows, the tree at Rockefeller Center, and laughing our heads off from the third row at Pee-Wee Herman’s Broadway show. Fortunately, we missed the blizzard that wreaked travel havoc for so many; still, that trip and the Christmas travels since then took so much out of us we’re still not up to speed — and we’re getting ready for our annual group trek to Asheville. So stay tuned for further reports! Like a Butterfly in the Whirlwind Social Scene of Nouveau Marché, TennesseeSeptember 1st, 2010 At the signing. The book signing and dinner at the Minnis House was a smashing success, thanks to the hard work and creative effort of the Stapleton family. This tiny, beautifully restored inn, across the highway from where my husband has lived his entire life, managed to attract some 50 people for a dinner that sold out about a week after the Morristown paper ran a story about it. The Jefferson City paper also previewed the event, and sent a photographer so they could run a photo afterwards. Finally, I was astonished to open the Knoxville News-Sentinel and find that food writer Mary Constantine had used her story about the event as the section centerpiece, with three recipes from Atlanta Kitchens. More touching, three good friends from Atlanta came up to help for the weekend to help out and cheer me on. My friend and editor Susan Percy stepped in as hostess with the mostest. Bestie-bud Rich Eldredge posted an item to Atlanta magazine’s dining blog, making this event in New Market, Tenn. (population 1200), by far the biggest publicity-magnet I’ve ever been associated with. Bill and I have decided to start up-selling the place as “Nouveau Marché.” Despite the inn’s eentsy kitchen and the sheer massiveness of the task she took on, Kim wowed the crowd with her cooking. Fan favorites included beef brisket, Linton Hopkins’ succotash, and the melocoton salad of peaches and tomatoes with ham (pictured, below). I met so many wonderful people who had known Bill and his family for years, and some who had known my dad. My mom and many of her friends turned out too. I so wish I could have met Bill’s mom — she came from a difficult background (what was then called “a broken home”) to become an accomplished and polished survivor, raising Bill alone after his dad died when he was 12. One of her old friends brought the photo of Bill pictured below, from the Lewiston, Maine, newspaper — the hometown she visited every summer. I love this photo, taken in her family’s back yard, which Bill and I still visit every year, now occupied by his aunt, uncle and cousin, the Lewises. She looks so beautiful and happy, and 5-year-old Bill is beaming as she holds his hand. My favorite memory of this entire event was her friend telling me that “Dotty would have been well pleased.” As exciting as it all was, you could hardly blame Rich’s friend Charles, who in a charitable post-mortem of the weekend, concluded it was a lot of fun, but allowed that in the future, he didn’t think he would want to stay in New Market “for more than three days.” Oh, come on, Charles — you know you loved your breakfast at Hillbilly’s Cabin!  Dottie & Bill, in Lewiston, Maine.
 Taking in the local color.
 Charles, in perhaps his happiest moment of the trip. Minnis House Dinner and SigningJuly 18th, 2010 The Minnis House and innkeepers David and Kim Stapleton So much to report since my trip to Maine! First and foremost, I need to start getting out the word about an upcoming event at the Minnis House, a newly opened B&B near our house in New Market, TN. Kim Stapleton and her husband David have done a great job renovating this charming, 150-year-old Arts & Crafts brick house. More exciting: We are working together to host a special dinner, featuring dishes from my two cookbooks, and a signing, Aug. 21 from 5-8 p.m. Please click here for all details, including menu, prices and contact numbers. Sign me upApril 26th, 2010Two more Atlanta Kitchens signings for the month of May, likely the last until July, when I’ve got another tentatively arranged. Please come by and say hello, and I won’t argue with you if you want me to sign a book for you. (And I promise: This time, no blue wig.)  With Eagle Eye's George Scott (who thinks he is the Man in the Yellow Hat). Saturday, May 1, 1:30-3 pm: Eagle Eye Bookshop 2076 North Decatur Road (at Clairmont) If you don’t know this excellent little indie bookstore, you should. Its staffers are true readers and lovers of books. Hope to see you there!  At Eagle Eye, with Deborah, for last year's signing of "Atlanta Classic Desserts." Saturday, May 8, 1-4 p.m. Urban Cottage 998 N Highland Avenue Northeast (near Virginia) This clever home decor store has several items that would satisfy the most demanding mom for her day’s gift (May 9) — including this cookbook. Stop on by and pick something up, guaranteeing absolution for your misbehavior over the last year. Yaayyyy! and Bleccchhh!April 19th, 2010It’s been a while. The past couple of weeks have flown by, a blur of taxes, Tennessee/N.C. wanderings, with a soupçon of acute flower-dust poisoning. Yes, I am a member of Pollen Nation. Never had any kind of allergy until I moved to Atlanta, but apparently my love of spring (“Again we have survived!”) is unrequited by those beautiful, but spiteful azaleas, dogwoods and jasmine now bursting into bloom. I came back home in a buoyant good mood, deeply breathing in the glorious open-window season. And then…. powie. You know those X-rays of people with stuff like screwdrivers and unexploded ammo in their brains, who are inexplicably still breathing? Felt a little like that.  Basil martini and bloody mary at Laughing Seed Cafe, Asheville. Bill and I had a great time roaming around eastern Tennessee, with a quick jaunt into one of our favorite towns, Asheville. Bill got to meet an old friend of mine who’s now back in Knoxville, and we made a couple of good restaurant discoveries in this neck of the woods: The Foothills Milling Co., in old downtown Maryville, and the Crown & Goose, a pleasant little gastropub in Knoxville’s Old City. Asheville remains one of our favorite dining destinations in the country, and I’ll be adding reviews from there as well. (We’re also glad to hear that President Obama and his family like Asheville too — but Michelle needs to pry herself loose from the Grove Park Inn spa and come downtown and check out TOPS for Shoes! Plenty of cute stuff for Sasha and Malia too.) |
|
