Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2024 i Food & Wine

2023 TIBERIO PECORINO ($27) This is my “Come Over October” wine. What’s that, you say? Launched by wine writer Karen MacNeil this year, it’s a simple concept: Wine is about spending time with people, so this October, have some friends over, open something no one’s had before, and celebrate. Pecorino—a grape, not a cheese—from Italy’s Abruzzo region is lemony-almondy, brisk, and irresistible. LUXARDO BITTER BIANCO ($29) I abandoned the classic Negroni a while back for the Negroni bianco, or white Negroni, and I’ve never looked back. The herbal-citrusy sweetness in Luxardo’s Bitter Bianco, mixed 1:1:1 with a good London dry gin and lightly sweet Dolin Blanc Vermouth, stirred in an ice-filled shaker, and poured over a single big cube, makes for an alluring cocktail, as complex as it is…

CUT OF THE YEAR Prime Rib Old-school prime rib is back—but don’t expect a white tablecloth. BY AUDREY MORGAN RICH WITH BEEFY FLAVOR AND CLASSIC VIBES, prime rib swept back onto menus this year. At Murray’s Tavern, which opened in 2023 in Austin, limited cuts are served every night. Owner and longtime bartender Travis Tober was inspired by the opulence of Vegas buffets and New York City taverns, he says: “Everything old is new again.” That’s especially true at Fox’s Lounge, “the darkest bar in Miami.” Shuttered in 2015, the restaurant was recently resurrected with the same Thursday prime rib special that lured patrons when it first opened in 1946. These modern prime ribs are a little more affordable than what you may remember, but they’re unapologetically classic—they’re all the…

DISTILLER STIG BAREKSTEN FORAGES most of the 26 botanicals for his gin from Norway’s wilds himself. He hangs rhubarb, arnica, elderflowers, rosehips, mint, and citrus peels in a basket in his still, their fragrant essential oils captured in swirling vapors. He infuses the remaining ingredients—including astringent juniper, bitter orris root, lingonberries, and blueberries for sweet viscosity—directly into the potato-based distillate, his small copper pot running a full nine hours, slowly building flavor and a weighty mouthfeel, augmented by his country’s silky glacial water. For this alchemy, Bareksten, cohost of PBS’ People of the North, takes inspiration from the hulder, wood nymphs who are said to live among the roots of ancient oaks in Norwegian forests. “If you ask me, I’d say they are real,” he says. That’s the kind of…

OUTSIDE OF MURAL CITY CELLARS, red brick row houses replace rolling green vineyards. In the back of the converted auto body garage in Philadelphia’s Fishtown neighborhood, rosé and skin-contact Pinot Gris are aging in hulking steel tanks while up front, the bar buzzes with locals sipping glasses of plum-colored pét-nat and pale gold Sauvignon Blanc made with Pennsylvania grapes. Decorated with vintage leather couches and contemporary neon chandeliers, the city’s first independent urban winery feels cool but unstuffy, making wine that’s spirited but serious. It’s part of a new era for Philly wine. Philadelphia’s wine landscape had long lagged behind its celebrated restaurants, held back by a tangle of state restrictions and red tape. Restaurant and bar liquor licenses can cost upward of $200,000, and state-run wine shops flood…

THE MUSKET ROOM & RAF’S NEW YORK CITY TOGETHER, EXECUTIVE CHEF Mary Attea and executive pastry chef Camari Mick oversee two of the most arresting restaurants operating in New York City—that couldn’t be more different. There’s The Musket Room, offering an intricate, elegant, and border-hopping fine-dining menu with dishes that are works of art. And then there’s Raf’s, with a menu that bounces between France and Italy in a whirling decadence that all but demands that you stay late and order all the desserts. At these two distinct concepts, Attea and Mick demonstrate shape-shifting versatility as chefs. Everything they do feels so effortlessly precise and is done with bravado and style. Attea began working in restaurants while studying forensic psychology in New York. She attended culinary school, interning at 2001…

BOMB BISCUIT CO. ATLANTA “My whole life, I’ve had a sense of how you can use cooking as a way to help the people in your community.” BISCUITS HAVE ALWAYS SHAPED Erika Council’s life. The first time she tried to bake a batch as a child, she burned them pretty badly. (Her grandma graciously ate them anyway.) But Council is persistent. Over the years—via trial and error, researching out-of-print cookbooks by Black authors, and consulting family recipes—she figured out how to make phenomenal, flaky biscuits. That led to her opening Bomb Biscuit Co., a perpetually slammed breakfast and brunch restaurant in Atlanta, where towering biscuit sandwiches gleefully defy all known laws of gluten structural physics. Council comes from a formidable culinary lineage: Her maternal grandmother ran a church kitchen, and…

GOLDEE’S FORT WORTH, TEXAS “You keep changing tiny variables, and it all just equals into a big variable eventually. Like, ‘Oh yeah, all those little things finally change the outcome of this food.’”—JONNY WHITE IT ALL SEEMS SUPER CASUAL AT GOLDEE’S, a barbecue joint in a ramshackle building in southeast Fort Worth, Texas. But the standards here are high: You’re met with some meat-based fireworks so good the meal feels like it’s happening in slow motion. And that’s just the snap of the sausage. Friends since elementary school in Arlington, Texas, Jonny White, Jalen Heard, and Lane Milne—the trio behind Goldee’s—moved to Austin after graduating high school. Needing jobs, all three ended up working at some of the city’s great new-school barbecue restaurants, including Franklin Barbecue, La Barbecue, Micklethwait, Banger’s…

Scout’s Honor ONE OF THE RARE PLEASURES of this job is walking into a restaurant, sitting down to a meal, and discovering a F&W Best New Chef. Or two. So it was earlier this year when I ate at Kisser, a tiny, joyful Nashville restaurant from chefs Brian Lea and Leina Horii, who turn out soulful, sunny Japanese food—dishes like inari, little tofu skins stuffed with sushi rice and shrimp salad; ethereal beef tartare mounded on crispy-creamy rice cakes; and onigiri that I’d have for lunch every day if I could. In my rave to the Food & Wine editorial team, I tried to convey the electricity of the experience: “Their food has so much energy. It’s comforting and precise. Simple and technical. Super fresh!” It was thrilling to…

IN AN ERA when viral videos can send a rush of customers to a restaurant overnight, lines for tables, cocktails, or the next cool baked good have never been longer. But how can you know if what’s at the end of the queue is actually worth the wait? Here’s everything you need to know to ensure your time in line is quick and comfortable—and ends with a delicious bite. WHEN IS IT WORTH WAITING IN LINE? Your time is valuable, and if you’re going to spend at least an hour of it waiting in line, it had better be for something that’s either incredibly unique or known for being the greatest of its kind. Is the dish or drink something you’ve never seen before? Have you heard from multiple…

LAWRENCE “LT” SMITH MARY ATTEA AND CAMARI MICK KARYN TOMLINSON LEINA HORII AND BRIAN LEA ERIKA COUNCIL WEDCHAYAN “DEAU” ARPAPORNNOPPARAT NICOLE CABRERA MILLS JONNY WHITE, JALEN HEARD, AND LANE MILNE SILVER IOCOVOZZI MY FIRST TASK AS THE NEW RESTAURANT EDITOR AT FOOD & WINE WAS TO EAT, NONSTOP. It was time to figure out the 2024 class of F&W Best New Chefs, which meant hitting the road, traveling the nation, and checking out hundreds of restaurants. My best guess is that in total, over the course of a few months, I consumed around 25 pounds of butter, 20 heads of cabbage (the winter vegetable of the moment), and 38 bowls of mash-up pastas (the new hotness). It seemed like onion dip and ranch dressing just flowed freely from taps on…

MYRIEL ST. PAUL “Cooking for people, bringing them into your moments, that was just a part of the rhythm of life that I saw with my grandparents.” RESTRAINED AND PRECISE, Karyn Tomlinson’s food is brave in its minimalism. “It’s not showy,” she says. “But the technique is there to make simple ingredients as delicious as possible.” At Myriel, her intimate restaurant in St. Paul, Tomlinson gracefully combines provincial French–inspired cuisine; a hyperlocal, nearly neo-Nordic ethos; and traditions of economy and preservation gleaned from her Swedish farming heritage in Minnesota. There’s also a dash of church basement. She playfully calls her style “grandma cooking nouveau.” Myriel is named after a character in the novel Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, in which Bishop Myriel welcomes an ex-convict into his home with a…

HOLY BASIL LOS ANGELES WEDCHAYAN “DEAU” ARPAPORNNOPPARAT’S goal for his restaurant Holy Basil was simply to be “the best Thai takeout” in downtown Los Angeles—no small feat in a city with hundreds of stellar Thai spots. Yet his unabashedly bold take on Thai food—bright, pungent, fiery, and complex—proved to be a hit. Getting the takeout business up and running out of a stall at a food hall mid-pandemic could have been enough for another chef, but not for Arpapornnopparat, a curious, restless—and, by his own admission, easily bored—chef who’s always looking for the next big challenge. So he started serving his food on location. Once he got the operation rolling, the next step was to propel Thai cuisine into the future, inventing radically creative dishes, from a Thai/Mexican shrimp aguachile…

NENG JR.’S ASHEVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA SILVER IOCOVOZZI’S RESTAURANT, NENG JR.’S, in Asheville, North Carolina, radiates unabashed, colorful, queer joy. From the open kitchen with gleaming emerald green–tiled walls to the brilliant red countertop to the massive, glamorous painting of his mom, the vibrant 18-seat restaurant offers what Iocovozzi describes as “the intimacy and the comforts of home”—if your home belonged to, say, an exceptionally fabulous aunt with a penchant for live fire and hand-pulled noodles. With a riotous, freewheeling menu effortlessly veering between Filipino and Southern food—sometimes lumpia and kinilaw grace the menu, and other times a slow-cooked Brunswick stew—there’s nothing else quite like it in the world. A second-generation Filipino American raised in the Carolinas, Iocovozzi explores how these cultures he grew up with overlap. “Filipino generosity correlates with Southern…

“We’re trying to fuse a new idea of what California food is and what soul food could be.”—Geoff Davis STEPPING INTO BURDELL feels like stepping back in time, as though you’ve been welcomed to a cheerful Sunday supper. At this Oakland, California, restaurant, chef-owner Geoff Davis cooks soul food in a bright and modern way, catapulting it into the future. Combining vintage-inspired design, heirloom recipes, reverence for local ingredients, and some serious culinary technique, Burdell radiates nostalgia like a beacon made of amber textured glass—of which there is plenty at the restaurant. With reimagined classics (like the hearty okra stew, superb smothered pork chops, or robust barbecue shrimp made with Worcestershire, brown butter, and a housemade fermented hot sauce), the food at Burdell is grounded in the past, forward-looking,…

Meet the 2024 class of Best New Chefs on p. 99. TAKE TOSTADAS OVER THE TOP EDGAR RICO, NIXTA TAQUERIA, AUSTIN 2023 F&W BEST NEW CHEF “THIS TOSTADA recipe highlights the beauty of carrots and shows their versatility outside of a salad. With tostadas, the key is quality over quantity. It’s a recipe where you don’t need a lot of things to make it taste delicious, but procuring quality ingredients will make the dish shine. Don’t skimp on the good stuff!” Grilled Carrot Tostadas ACTIVE 35 MIN; TOTAL 45 MIN MAKES 12 TOSTADAS Grilled carrots dressed in smoky salsa macha (see Note) and sweet date molasses sit atop crispy corn tostadas smeared with an herbaceous cream cheese mixture. Save those carrot tops! The leaves get transformed into a vibrant topping,…

DAYS BEFORE MY TRIP TO SEOUL, I finally heard from Kihyun Lee, known as Kiro, the founder of megawatt brand (and 2024 F&W Game Changer) Hand Hospitality. For over a decade, I had been following his work at the New York City–based restaurant group, which is behind some of the country’s most exciting Korean American restaurants, including Ariari and Hojokban, as well as Atoboy and Atomix—both Michelin-recognized collaborations with 2019 F&W Best New Chef Junghyun Park and operator Ellia Park. After declining multiple interview requests over the past 10 years, Lee was finally granting me an audience at his classic tofu restaurant Cho Dang Gol in Manhattan’s Koreatown. Over bubbling bowls of kongbiji jjigae (blended soybean and kimchi stew), we had a deep conversation about Korean food’s rapid evolution…

CHILTE PHOENIX LAWRENCE “LT” SMITH IS ALWAYS CHASING that feeling, going for that brain tingle, trying to light up people’s synapses. And it’s not just with the spicy native chiltepin chiles that end up in a lot of his dishes. At his lively “new-wave” Mexican-inspired restaurant, Chilte, at the retro Egyptian Motor Hotel in Phoenix, he conjures a free-roaming whirlwind of a menu that transcends borders, nations, and even continents. A college football player whose NFL career fizzled, Smith turned to cooking. When he enrolled in culinary school, the parallels between sports and cooking were plain to see. “The brigade system, getting a ticket, calling a ticket. It was just like getting a play and running the play,” he says. “The difference is that every day is game day, so…

PÊCHE NEW ORLEANS LASER-FOCUSED ON GULF SEAFOOD with an approach that blended live fire and raw bar, Pêche, from chefs Donald Link and Ryan Prewitt, opened to immediate acclaim in 2013. Originally a line cook on the opening team, Nicole Cabrera Mills was promoted to chef de cuisine in 2019 and gradually made the food her own in a transformative, high-wire balancing act that shrewdly introduced bright, pan-Asian flavors, resulting in a hypnotic firecracker of a menu that appeals to locals and tourists alike. Mills grew up in the Philippines and was raised by powerful women in the restaurant industry. Her grandmother owned a bakery business, and her mom ran a dumpling store. “She had a chile-garlic sauce for shumai that people wanted to buy by the jug,” recounts Mills.…