Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2023 i Food & Wine

2022 FILLABOA ALBARIÑO ($25) Getting to Spain usually requires a flight, but I was transported there this summer by a glass or two of this citrusy-stony Albariño from Galicia’s Rías Baixas region and some excellent chorizo-spiced mussels from Top Chef alum Sara Hauman’s Portland, Oregon–based Tiny Fish Co. (thetinyfishco.com). 2021 DR. LOOSEN RED SLATE RIESLING TROCKEN ($18) Looking for a crisp fall white that’s also a total steal? This dry German Riesling from one of the Mosel’s most storied producers is so brightly flavorful it’s almost electric, with vibrant citrus and spice notes. It’s a perfect wind-down wine after a long day of whatever it may be that you spend your long days doing. 2021 FRATELLI ALESSANDRIA PRINSIÒT LANGHE NEBBIOLO ($32) This is a “baby Barolo” that really lives…

I’VE SPENT THE PAST FEW YEARS on a quest to figure out my ideal post-meal beverage. There are two boxes that it must check: First, the drink needs to be slightly bitter to help with digestion, and second, it should be something you want to linger over, letting the final bits of conversation gently unfurl as condensation forms on the glass. And now that I have crossed the threshold of a certain age, it can’t be caffeinated. (I value sleep!) I rotated through several amari and quickly learned that an after-dinner brandy was not for me. I love the flavor of espresso martinis, but they can be a bit fussy to make, and I have a visceral dislike for clunky martini glasses. The solution? The carajillo, more specifically, the decaf…

THE RESTAURANT UNIFORM is back and better than ever. Gone are the stiff, narrowly gendered cocktail dresses and bow ties of yesteryear. Restaurant owners are now collaborating with boutique designers to create custom outfits that are made for every type of body. JAC’S ON BOND New York City “The initial idea for the front-of-house uniform at Jac’s on Bond was to create something that blended old and new worlds, offering both comfort and mobility,” says Carlos Quirarte, partner at Authentic Hospitality. It made perfect sense for him to partner with his friend Angelo Baque, founder of the streetwear brand Awake NY (awakenyclothing.com). Together, they custom-designed a white rayon undershirt and short-sleeve button-down printed with the Jac’s on Bond logo. They’re paired with carpenter pants featuring a classic hammer loop and…

AT THE BETTY SUPPER CLUB IN ATLANTA, beverage director Darius Naderi infuses Aperol with seasonal strawberries, then swaps it for the cranberry juice in a crafty comeback of the Cosmopolitan. The result is the Retropolitan, an adult-style Kool-Aid: dangerously gulpable, yet sophisticated enough for thoughtful sipping. What adds the layers of salty earth and vanilla beneath the bitters and berries? The answer, believe it or not, is the vodka. Naderi uses Pennsylvania-based Boyd & Blair vodka, made with local potatoes fermented with Champagne yeast to draw out their rich, silky sweetness. It’s one in a rising wave of vodkas upending the spirit’s wallflower image. “In the 1980s and ’90s, I thought of vodka as the tofu of spirits,” says Naderi. “But newer vodkas come with nuance and depth.” (To be…

NIXTA TAQUERIA, AUSTIN IT WAS CLEAR FROM THE BEGINNING that Edgar Rico was going to be a chef. At the age of 11, after watching a few too many hours of Food Network, he decided he was going to make Thanksgiving dinner for his parents. For his high school graduation present, he requested dinner at Nobu in Los Angeles. He eventually started working at a steakhouse in his hometown of Visalia in California’s Central Valley before attending the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. Rico was in the middle of a six-month sabbatical, eating his way through Mexico, when he had a revelation. The trip was the first real break he had taken after spending years cooking in some of Los Angeles’ best restaurants, such as the…

MENYA RUI, ST. LOUIS I DIDN’T THINK IT WAS POSSIBLE to eat four bowls of ramen in one sitting, but as I surveyed the counter in front of me, strewn with splashes of broth and puddles of vinegar, I had clearly proven myself wrong. It’s easy to push past your limits at Menya Rui, chef Steven Pursley’s 24-seat altar to ramen, where nearly every component is made from scratch, including the noodles. The tsukemen was one of the best I’ve ever had: cold, thick noodles with almost as much bounce as a trampoline, served with a bowl of concentrated scallop-infused broth for dipping that bursts with gentle, sweet, oceanic flavor. I followed that with a comforting bowl of chicken shoyu that featured a tare, or seasoning sauce, made with three…

DAME AND LORD’S, NEW YORK CITY AT THE AGE OF 11, Ed Szymanski decided that he was going to be an investment banker. He spent his childhood in South West London studying mathematics, eventually finding himself at the prestigious London School of Economics. Bored, Szymanski, a self-described foodie, decided to get a job working in a professional kitchen when one of his favorite restaurants posted a tweet looking for help. Little did he know, that tweet would change the course of his life. At the time, he had no cooking experience. “I didn’t even know how to hold a knife,” he says. But the restaurant agreed to let him work for free, so Szymanski learned to pull pork and mash potatoes when he wasn’t in classes at university. When graduation…

NEARLY HALF A MILLION ORDERS of black cod with miso are sold annually at Nobu Matsuhisa’s eponymous restaurant, Nobu, at its 56 locations from Melbourne to Milan to Miami. The sweet and savory miso-marinated cod is the restaurant’s most famous dish, its tenure made possible in part thanks to its surprisingly simple DNA: A lengthy dip in an umami-filled miso marinade brings rich, savory notes through the entire cod fillet. Under the broiler, the fish’s sugary surface develops a satisfying, stick-to-your-teeth bite and a caramelized sweetness. The dish made its first appearance on Matsuhisa’s menu at his restaurant Matsuhisa, which opened in Beverly Hills in 1987. “It was a huge hit with our customers and soon became our signature dish,” he says. Matsuhisa didn’t anticipate that such a simple dish,…

Maestro De Ceremonias SOME OF THE WARMEST and most emotionally resonant hospitality in the country right now is being shared nightly at the Mexican American cocktail bar Superbueno in New York City. Go when the sun sets over the northeast corner of First Avenue and East 1st Street in Manhattan—it makes the room glow. Order one of the exceptional drinks, like a puckery green-mango martini, and snack on tacos made with heirloom blue corn tortillas and grilled skewers of juicy pork shoulder, pineapple, and charred spring onion. Or go later, when the bar glows deep red. When the energy builds, the bartenders push the pendants so they sway like pendulums over the bar to the rhythms of salsa, reggaeton, and cumbia from all over Mexico, Central America, and South America.…

LATELY, getting into the restaurant you want, when you want, feels like a blood sport. Hospitality spending and demand for reservations continues to rise. Resy has become a hunting ground for bots programmed to scoop up two-tops, and a host of new apps and platforms hock seats for a premium. Some, like the members-only platform Dorsia, work directly with restaurants. Others—Appointment Trader, ResX, and Cita—scalp seats at Carbone like it’s a Taylor Swift tour. Here are a few things a diner can do to score that impossible table. 1 KNOW WHEN RESERVATIONS DROP Call your target restaurant to find out when they release reservations. I wanted to dine at a new Manhattan restaurant on a Friday night and, two weeks out, logged onto Resy just four minutes after they opened…

AMANDA SHULMAN EDGAR RICO AISHA IBRAHIM ISABEL COSS STEVEN PURSLEY  NANDO CHANG & VALERIE CHANG HANNAH ZISKIN ED SZYMANSKI EUNJI LEE EMMANUEL CHAVEZ FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 2020, it feels like the restaurant industry has finally been able to put the grueling fight for survival firmly in the rearview mirror. Gone are the days of constant pivoting to keep the doors open. Instead, chefs are focusing on the reasons they had for wanting to open those doors in the first place. But it would be a mistake to think that restaurants are the same as they were before the pandemic. This year, as I traveled the country looking for the 35th class of Food & Wine Best New Chefs, I heard, everywhere, a change in vocabulary: Instead of “how” to…

CANLIS, SEATTLE IT ALL STARTED WITH A BET. At the age of 19, Aisha Ibrahim experienced a serious knee injury that sidelined her from her college basketball team, and she was feeling unmoored—until a teammate presented her with a challenge: “I bet you can’t cook anything out of this cookbook,” she told Ibrahim, pointing to a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child. “I’m such a hardcore person; that’s the last thing that anyone needed to tell me,” says Ibrahim today with a laugh. Ibrahim pulled off Child’s crêpe recipe. A roommate showed her how to zest an orange for the batter, and she was hooked. “I remember how perfumed it became. I thought to myself that cooking was this magical world.” At the end…

ITAMAE, MIAMI THE MOST IMPRESSIVE ITEM in Miami’s Design District—essentially a large outdoor mall packed with luxury stores—is not the $30,000 watch at Bulgari or the $5,000 purse at Dior, but a $28 plate of squid at Itamae, a restaurant run by siblings Nando and Valerie Chang. Their bigfin reef squid are arranged like a flower, floating in a pool of vivid orange sauce dotted with mesmerizing puddles of verdant green oil. The dish is a shock to the system, ripping with acid and tongue-encompassing heat thanks to the ají limo leche de tigre made from fermented chiles and yuzu. The green puddles are a housemade huacatay (black mint) oil that lends the dish herbaceous and citrus notes. To call it a roller coaster of flavor would be an…

LYSÉE, NEW YORK CITY IF YOU EVER NEEDED PROOF that manifestation works, just take a look at the notebook of 18-year-old Eunji Lee. “I wrote that I hoped to open an edible gallery one day,” says Lee. “My mom still has the notebook.” In 2022, the pastry chef opened the doors to Lysée in New York City’s Flatiron District. In many ways, the two-story space is exactly as teenage Lee envisioned: The top floor, with its soaring ceilings and dramatically minimalist white space, feels like a museum. A selection of Lee’s stunning pastries—from a crispy mille-feuille oozing with thick vanilla cream and sticky caramel to a mesmerizing pile of conjoined croissants whose laminated layers coil around each other—is displayed along the back wall and on a long table that…

BIRDIE’S IS THE RESTAURANT that everyone wants in their neighborhood. There’s a long list of reasons why a line wraps down the restaurant’s stretch of East 12th Street in Austin before the doors open at 5 p.m. Many will say they line up for the restaurant’s famed beef tartare served with a dramatic carta di musica, or the wonderfully caper-heavy chicken piccata that appeared on the menu for their Italian pop-up, Aiello’s. Both are prime examples of chef Tracy Malechek-Ezekiel’s deftness with seasonal ingredients and unfussy-but-finessed approach to food. It’s definitely worth braving the line for whatever pasta Tracy decides to showcase on the menu that week, like her crushable, perfectly bouncy gnocchi sardi in a tomato sauce with a shower of pecorino and crunchy breadcrumbs. The same can…

FRIED HEN-OF-THE-WOODS CANLIS, SEATTLE 2023 F&W Best New Chef Aisha Ibrahim (see p. 111) turns mushroom porridge on its head by serving a starchy, koji-packed chestnut porridge with a fried mushroom sidecar coated in her “bulletproof” tempura batter. “It took me and my partner three years to develop,” Ibrahim says. CRISPY MAITAKE PLACE DES FÊTES, BROOKLYN Since black maitake mushrooms contain a lot of water, chef Nico Russell steams them and presses out all the liquid. They’re then dredged in a potato flour mixture, dunked in tempura batter, and fried until golden brown. Each mushroom is served with black garlic fudge made from the reserved liquid. CRISPY CHICKEN OLIVIA, LOS ANGELES The “chicken” in chef Mario Alberto’s dish is actually tender, masa harina–battered oyster mushrooms served with a gochujang…

AS PART OF THE 12-COURSE TASTING MENU at Delta in Athens, diners are presented with a magical sunflower trompe l’oeil. The flower might have a center of preserved mustard seeds with a fermented blackberry glaze over grilled sweetbreads, surrounded by “petals” of pickled and crisped saffron-stained leeks. Or it might feature aged beef tartare, or sole poached in seawater with a haunting hint of mastic, the latter hidden beneath a heart of Greek caviar. The dish has been a signature of Delta’s co-chefs George Papazacharias and Thanos Feskos since they opened their thrillingly inventive restaurant inside the landmark Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in 2021. A lyrical ode to the Greek landscape, the edible flower was conceived by Papazacharias late in 2020 during the pandemic, as he drove from Oslo…

HER PLACE, PHILADELPHIA WHILE MOST COLLEGE KIDS were doing keg stands and eating instant ramen, when she was an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania, Amanda Shulman would go to the Italian Market in Philadelphia to buy a whole pig. She would spend a weekend breaking the animal down and transforming it into five courses of pork for a dozen paying dinner guests. Shulman may have been majoring in journalism and political science, but all of her free time was devoted to food. There was the food blog she published, the food writing class she took, and, most importantly, the supper club she ran. “I used to post these Facebook statuses that read, ‘$35, four courses. Message me if you want to come,’ and I would put together a group…

LUTÈCE, WASHINGTON, D.C. NOTHING IS AS IT SEEMS on Isabel Coss’ dessert menu at Lutèce. Take the cheese plate of 18-month-aged Comté and honeycomb: Coss transforms the honey into a velvety, but not too sweet, semifreddo that arrives crowned with thick curls of salty Comté. It’s not exactly the cheese plate one might expect from a charming French restaurant in D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood. Then there is the dessert labeled simply “Canelé.” Although it’s made using silicone canelé molds, it’s a far cry from the temperamental French pastry. For her version, Coss creates a liquid ganache from caramelized white chocolate that she infuses with fig leaves (plucked from her neighbor’s trees) to form the luxurious shell for a filling of rum caramel ice cream so silky you’ll contemplate immediately ordering…

QUARTER SHEETS, LOS ANGELES THE BEST SLICES OF CAKE in Los Angeles are found not at a bakery, but at a modest-looking pizza spot in Echo Park. But don’t walk into Quarter Sheets expecting pastry chef and co-owner Hannah Ziskin to serve you pedestrian flavors like vanilla, chocolate, or funfetti. Her brick-shaped slices, lovingly referred to as “slabs,” are layered feats of tender, delicate cake and seasonal fruit in unexpected combinations that might include ginger chiffon cake with puckery yuzu Bavarian cream and blackberry-Lambrusco jam, or polenta olive oil chiffon with crème fraîche Chantilly cream and rose-geranium preserves. Ziskin’s meticulous desserts are playful, too: Take the slab known as Gâteau Dirt, which features a light cocoa chiffon, dark chocolate Bavarian cream, jammy roasted black cherries, and salted dark chocolate…

TATEMÓ, HOUSTON THERE IS LITTLE THAT MATTERS more to Emmanuel Chavez than maize. The chef nixtamalizes 80 pounds of masa a week at his Houston restaurant Tatemó, and corn is everywhere on the menu. For the restaurant’s fluffy pancakes, Chavez dehydrates masa before turning it into a flour and mixing it with buttermilk. For the kampachi ceviche, the chef tosses pieces of the fatty fish with lime juice, fish sauce, white soy sauce, and gently sweet corn milk (the liquid released from a fresh corn cob). A plate of enmoladas features maize two ways: first in the lissome tortilla that arrives packed with oyster mushrooms, and also in the mole negro that drenches the dish made with blackened leftover tortillas, dashi, several types of chile, and galletas María, a beloved…