Restaurants

I like restaurants. You probably like restaurants. While I’m not as big on restaurant reviewing, I love to spot a good old-fashioned trend. That, and other distractions, is what these posts are about.

About this ghostwriting business

20 March 2012

Spring is here, and with it the 2012 spring cookbook season. Which means The Preservation Kitchen, a book I co-wrote with Paul Virant, is this close to hitting bookstore shelves. (April 3rd, to be exact.) There’s been more buzz lately than usual about cookbooks, or who actually writes them, thanks to Julia Moskin’s NY Times [...]

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10 Restaurant Trends for 2012

28 November 2011

At my old day job, I survived on food trends. 2006 was the year of burrata, 2007 the year of the gastropub, and 2008 the year of the fro-yo wars. 2009’s fascination with burgers and cupcakes gave way to 2010’s meatless Mondays and gluten-free everything. My fellow staffers and I witnessed curbside pick-up become eclipsed [...]

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Feeding Nostalgia

26 October 2011

Last Friday, I had the good fortune of tagging along to a friends-and-family preview of the new menu at Next. As it’s been well-documented elsewhere, Grant Achatz’s idea incubator of a restaurant composes one tasting menu based on a theme. Where it gets interesting is that these themes are more likely to emerge from episodes [...]

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That’s a wrap: final shoot for the Vie cookbook

19 September 2011

Whew. Three days of photo shoots for the Vie Cookbook, three days of running around with food, props, and people, not to mention goats, chickens, and bees. Our photo team, comprising Jeff and Susie Kauck, their daughter, Dana, and Jeff’s photo assistant, Aaron Corey, worked hard to capture the final plated food shots while Paul [...]

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Picture Day #1: Shooting the Vie Cookbook

4 May 2011

Photos make a book real, even when said book’s existence is limited to a rough word doc. At least that’s how I felt at Vie on Saturday after an all-day photo shoot. It was the first shoot for Paul’s cookbook, the first attempt at capturing the visual side of the story. Considering that I hadn’t [...]

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Sandwiching in Leftovers

10 December 2010

Why would anyone call anything a garbage salad? A garbage salad isn’t made up of garbage at all, but rather leftovers, those bits and bobs preserved in deli containers in the fridge. It tends to be a reocccuring component in a restaurant’s family meal. Sometimes, it came together like this: 3:00 p.m. “Adam, what’s for [...]

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New Cookbook: Canning with Paul Virant

19 October 2010

Signed, sealed, delivered. The contract, that is, between Paul Virant and Ten Speed Press. He’s working on a book. I’m the coauthor. This announcement has been a long time coming. In fact, a few weeks ago, I alluded to the project here. I’ve been talking with Paul, the executive chef and owner of Vie in [...]

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La Maison de la Casa House

8 October 2010

You can’t fault a restaurant for trying to appeal to everyone. Or can you? Calvin Trillin labeled any 20th-century restaurant with vague continental leanings with the descriptor “La Maison de la Casa House.” This was a restaurant that wasn’t quite French or Mexican or Italian or anything too different for the steak-and-lobster crowd. No, it [...]

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Trade Secrets

23 August 2010

Just yesterday, I fell down a path of indulgent nostalgia. I was digging through some old files  and pulled out a notebook filled with recipes, instructions, and general kitchen information that I had taken down when I was a line cook at Terra. It’s black and faded, with a few splatters of might have been [...]

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Bacon Beyond… Bacon? Curing beef, lamb, and goat bellies

18 August 2010

In the last few years, bacon has been just about everywhere. In BLTs, sure, but also in chocolate, in ice cream, and even set adrift atop martinis. But just as I thought we had eaten our fill, the market indicated otherwise: commodity prices for pork bellies–essentially, bacon in the raw—are up 57% compared with last [...]

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