A classic lamb dish reinterpreted for the 1906 Paris menu at Next

JUST INSIDE THE FRONT DOOR of Next, a restaurant in Chicago’s burgeoning Fulton Market district, is a stripped-down dining area that reminds one of a waiting room. With vaguely brown décor and not much in the way of frills, it seems like a place you’d pass through en route to somewhere more exotic rather than a destination unto itself — which is entirely the point. Once seated, diners embark on a journey to a place that is decidedly not Fulton Market.

Other than being helmed by Grant Achatz, the three-Michelin-starred chef of the world-renowned Alinea, Next is most notable for its high-concept dining experience: Every three months, the prix fixe menu changes completely, down to the region and even the era of the cuisine. The first dishes were an interpretation of Paris in 1906. Then came Thai street food, followed by a more abstract “childhood” theme. Guests buy a ticket from the restaurant’s website in advance (if they can get one), and are rewarded with a selection of dishes that is as immaculate in execution as it is singular in vision.

Since debuting last April, Next has been a boon for foodies who both adore Achatz’s cooking and require a steady stream of new experiences. Diners who sampled decadent truffled egg custard and caneton Rouennais à la presse (a whole duck fed through a silver press and served in its own juices) from the Paris menu were able to taste braised beef cheek in a curry of peanut, nutmeg, coconut and lemongrass during Next’s Thai period. By the arrival of the childhood menu, some guests had gotten into the restaurant’s spirit, wearing Scout uniforms as they spooned up high-end mac and cheese.

But as much fun as Next is for patrons, it’s even more fun for the chefs, offering them the opportunity to “open” a new restaurant four times a year. Each theme requires a different strategy, Achatz says. “When we’re doing Escoffier [the chef who inspired the Paris menu], we’re literally cooking out of a book,” he says. “When we approach something like Thailand, it’s more of a broad exploration: What do we want to show people about Thai cooking?”

Where will Next go next? Kyoto and post-World War II Sicily are in the queue, and Achatz has been tinkering with a menu that duplicates the first night he worked at the French Laundry, Thomas Keller’s revered California restaurant. “I think we’ve established the fact that we can really be chameleons,” he says. Critics and discriminating diners seem to agree. When it comes to crossing the final culinary frontier, Next is well on its way. To sample the best of Windy City cuisine, check out Chicago Restaurant Week, Feb. 17-26.

BAR SMARTS
Chicago’s bartenders give chefs a run for their money

IF YOU’VE SEEN one bartender, you’ve seen them all: Scrappy, kind-eyed and quick with a quip, they’re often more knowledgeable about human foibles than they are about foodstuffs. And that’s the way it should be. Or is it?

In Chicago’s craft cocktail world, as one observer recently noted, “knowledge is the new vodka.” In part because of pressure from the cocktail renaissances in New York and San Francisco, and in part because of the world-class chefs who call Chicago home, local liquor slingers have begun a collaboration between bar and kitchen that’s already yielded such delicacies as mezcal with smoked ice (at Michelin-starred Boka), a bacon and egg brunch drink (at the Bedford) and even an old-fashioned served inside an ice cube (at Aviary).

“Five years ago, the bartender wasn’t allowed in the kitchen,” says Debbi Peek, head of the Chicago chapter of the U.S. Bartenders Guild and a mixologist at Bristol Lounge. “But now, bartenders aren’t afraid of the chef anymore. A lot of times, the chef will ask us, ‘Hey, what can you do with this?’”

Founded in 2006, the USBG’s Chicago chapter now has more than 100 members, who convene regularly to take field trips to local distilleries and breweries. Members can also sign up for advanced classes, with topics ranging from how to pair cocktails with food to knife-handling skills (“We have to cut up a lot of garnishes,” Peek says). With such flavorful cocktails on the line, it’s safe to say that bartenders with more skills are good for everyone — as long as we still have someone to complain to about our bosses. — W.C.

PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRISTIAN SEEL

OAXACA, MEXICO

RESIDENTS OF THE MEXICAN state of Oaxaca may live in a natural breadbasket — tomatoes, corn, beans, sweet potatoes, chilies, vanilla and cacao all grow here — but they have an admirable habit of building meals around whatever they can find. Crickets, grasshoppers, ants and agave worms have long been dietary staples, as has a famous dish called simply “stone soup.” And while braver restaurants in Mexico City and the U.S. have started catering to bold travelers with such fare, few can match the offerings of eateries in this picturesque coastal region.

“People don’t always realize it, but a lot of the dishes in Oaxaca are pre-Hispanic,” says Oscar Carrizosa, chef at Casa Crespo, a restaurant and culinary school in the city of Oaxaca. Before the Spanish arrived with their pigs, cows, wheat and cumin (and certainly before the French brought cream sauce), Oaxacans enjoyed duck taquitos; bu’pu, a beverage made from creamed corn and topped with cacao; and sopa de milpa, a soup of squash blossoms, mushrooms, sweet corn and chipotle — all dishes you can find in Carrizosa’s restaurant.

But possibly the most celebrated pre-Hispanic culinary creation is caldo de piedra, or stone soup, a ceremonial meal eaten by the indigenous Chinantec people. In the springtime, when the soup’s ingredients were most abundant, men made it as a tribute to the women and girls of the village. After collecting the necessary tomatoes, cilantro, chilies and fish, they heated a bunch of river stones in a fire, created huge bowls in the sand and added the hot stones to cook the soup.

“We grew up with caldo de piedra,” says Cesar Gachupin de Dios, head chef at, fittingly, Caldo de Piedra in Tlalixtac de Cabrera. “I learned to cook it at the age of 9. In my village, it’s still eaten on the banks of the river every spring.”

While Gachupin de Dios’ restaurant is very much about preserving tradition, there’s also a broader movement thrusting pre-Hispanic food into the international spotlight. “Oaxaca was always known as a poorer area,” Carrizosa says, “but now that Americans have gotten into eating seasonal and local foods, tourism’s been good here.”

As for Carrizosa’s favorite dishes, he says he prefers those associated with certain times of the year. He particularly favors salsa de chicatanes, a spicy number made with flying ants that’s about as seasonal as it gets: The main ingredient appears for just a few days each May.

HOLY MOLE
Outside Mexico, there’s only one sauce known as mole, and it’s a savory, cocoa-y revelation. But in Oaxaca, the locals claim not one but seven signature varieties:

MOLE NEGRO: The mole that’s made it in the world at large derives its flavor from a blend of chili, cinnamon, chocolate and sesame seeds.

MOLE AMARILLO: This local favorite gets its yellow color from masa (corn dough) blended with chili, cumin, tomatillo and tomato.

MOLE COLORADO: Similar to mole negro but less chocolaty, colorado’s rich flavor comes from tomato, clove and allspice.

MOLE COLORADITO: This ruddy sauce is also based on chocolate and chili, but achieves a sublime texture with help from peanuts and raisins.

MOLE CHICHILO: Harder to find than the other six, chichilo has a smoky, almost ashy flavor that comes from roasted chili peppers.

MOLE VERDE: Most moles have a dark hue that comes from their many spices; verde gets its bright green color from a purée of fresh herbs and pumpkin seeds.

MANCHAMANTELES: The name means “tablecloth stainer,” and it’s an accurate one. While other moles are usually thin sauces, this one is basically prune and tomato stew. Bring napkins… —LAYLA SCHLACK

IN MEXICO, the official party line is “For everything bad, mezcal — and for everything good, too,” but when it comes to Oaxaca’s revived mezcal production, it’s almost all good.

Though the smoky spirit has been around for centuries, bar luminaries like Jim Meehan of New York’s award-winning cocktail den PDT have started crafting menus around it in only the past few years. In 2009, 50,000 people turned up to the annual Festival of Mezcal in Oaxaca. And just last year country singer Toby Keith released his own line of Oaxacan mezcal called Wild Shot. It’s safe to say the spirit has arrived.

This surge of interest in mezcal didn’t come from out of nowhere, however. It wasn’t until 1995 that regulations to define mezcal (80 percent agave spirit, as opposed to just 49 percent for tequila) were put into place by the Mexican government. Over the next decade, as labeling conventions were established and boutique distilleries earned licenses, North Americans began to learn more about the spicy south-of-the-border spirit, and a movement was born.

Aficionados will tell you that the only mezcal worth drinking is the small-batch stuff, which is produced almost exclusively by independent agave plantations/distilleries called palenqueros that slow-roast the agave hearts in underground ovens, which gives the spirit its peppery flavor. Most towns in Oaxaca have several family producers, such as Del Maguey, Los Amantes and Ilegal, and they’re happy to share.

The traditional way to drink mezcal is to place a mix of salt, chili powder and fried moth larvae on your tongue and then sip a shot. The strong kick will help you forget everything bad — though, if you’re not careful, some of the good, too.

Fried chicken at the America Eats Tavern in Washington, D.C.

TIME WAS, if you wanted to sample the inimitable Civil War–era stew known as Kentucky burgoo, you had to go round up the squirrels and blackbirds and cook it yourself. Now, thanks to chef José Andrés, you don’t have to (for the record, his version is made with rabbit, squab and lamb). The chef-owner of Jaleo in Washington, D.C., and The Bazaar in Beverly Hills has teamed up with the National Archives to open the America Eats Tavern, a pop-up restaurant in D.C. It’s part of “What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam?,” an exhibit that looks at how government initiatives have influenced the nation’s eating habits over the years.

At America Eats, each of the 40 or so menu items — which run the gamut from fried chicken nuggets to lobster Newburg — comes with information about its origins. For instance, “Vermicelli Prepared Like Pudding,” a precursor to mac and cheese, dates back to 1802, when one of America’s first commercial pasta makers distributed the recipe to boost sales. “ We provide the stories of people and places that have inspired what we eat,” Andrés says. “Many guests come in and share their own stories on the dishes we’re offering. That’s exactly what we hoped for.”

The U.S. has a rich culinary heritage, with waves of immigrants adapting their favorite recipes to the resources of their new home, creating an ever-evolving national cuisine. But while American museums have preserved more antique butter churns and tea sets than you can shake a rolling pin at, recently more have begun offering visitors a chance to actually try the dishes themselves.

The Indiana State Museum has re-created the carpet, the chandeliers and even the view of the city from the Tea Room at L.S. Ayres — a landmark restaurant in an Indianapolis department store that operated from 1905 until 1990 — but it’s the menu, featuring chicken velvet soup, lemon pound cake and potpie, that gives guests a real taste of what it was like to while away an afternoon at the fabled establishment.

And over at the Gettysburg National Military Park Museum in Pennsylvania, the Refreshment Saloon is modeled on eateries where volunteers prepared food for Union soldiers during the Civil War. There’s nothing fancy about the grub — dishes like chili with cornbread, “sheet iron” crackers with peanut soup and “slippery” potpie (made with noodles instead of a crust) were designed to satisfy hungry, homesick men — but with every bite, visitors can imagine a life different from their own in a way that transcends the display case.

Steven Lubar, an American studies professor at Brown University who moonlights as a museum consultant, says the trend also has a practical side. “As audiences shrink, museums are having to get more creative,” he says. “But when you have good food and a good story, people are willing to pay for it.”

Editor’s note: The America Eats Tavern has extended its run through July 4, 2012. For more information, visit americaeatstavern.com.

PIE PIPER
A fourth-generation baker hooks new customers with a plethora of pies

IN MANY TREND-OBSESSED urban centers, pies, as you may have heard, are the new cupcakes. But in some parts of the country, the pastry that’s as American as baseball has never gone out of style.

In Little Rock, Ark., there’s a restaurant known as Hunka Pie, where for nearly a decade owner Chris Monroe put in about 15 hours a day baking apple, peach, cherry and pear pies that honored his mother’s, grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s recipes. Then suddenly he had a vision: 100 different pies. One day. One buffet.

Also: a cherry pie with hot peppers.

The event that followed, Hunka Pie’s inaugural 100-pies-in-one-day buffet, was a smash. “I cut pies for five and a half hours straight,” Monroe says. The line snaked out the door and pie fiends dug in until the very last crumb was gone, prompting Monroe to schedule his next pie-a-thon a mere two months later. “People just love the idea of that many pies,” he says.

Coming up with all those new recipes took more than a little ingenuity. “With the cherry-chipotle pie, it definitely got a bit edgy,” Monroe says. “I wouldn’t call them the 100 greatest pies I’ve ever made,” he laughs. But still, it could be the start of something big: “My fantasy would be to have a 100-pie buffet and bring it to Vegas.” —DAN SOLOMON

GREAT PLAIN
A celebration of the unadorned cheeseburger

IT WAS AT Cherrywood Coffee House, an Austin, Texas, eatery that claims to make “real food,” that I found it: two succulent slabs of meat stacked with a thick slice of cheddar cheese, a lettuce leaf, a tomato slice, a dollop of ketchup and not a thing more. The perfect burger — smoky, juicy, unadulterated.

I’m all for reinventing culinary traditions, but there’s something to be said for a simple sandwich that can take an entire nation back to summer barbecues and Little League practice with not much more than a whiff of charcoal smoke and the ting of sesame seeds hitting a plate. More than a sandwich, a plain cheeseburger is an iconic American treasure — like a ’57 Chevy or a Ted Williams rookie card. There may be newer, fancier or cleverer versions out there, but in the end, they’ll never quite stack up to the original. —DAN SOLOMON

TURKEY BREAST WITH MERGUEZ STUFFING
From chef Micah Wexler, formerly of Joël Robuchon’s L’Atelier, who recently opened his first restaurant, Mezze, in L.A.

ROASTED BRINED TURKEY BREAST
1 bone-in turkey breast
1 c. kosher salt
½ c. brown sugar
1 tbsp. black peppercorns
4 garlic cloves
6 c. water
2 bay leaves
10 sprigs thyme
1 sprig rosemary

Combine all ingredients except the turkey in a pot and bring to a boil. Allow the liquid to cool completely, then place the turkey in it to brine for 36 hours.

Remove the turkey from the brine and allow to dry on a rack in the refrigerator for at least six hours.

Place the turkey on a roasting rack in a 350-degree oven and roast until its internal temperature has reached 155 degrees. Allow to rest for 15 to 20 minutes before carving.

MERGUEZ STUFFING
1 lb. merguez
4 c. stale bread, cubed
2 onions, diced
3 tsp. parsley, chopped
1 c. chicken stock
4 tsp. butter

Melt half the butter in a sauté pan and sauté the onions until soft. Add the merguez in chunks and cook until browned.

In a separate pan, melt the remaining butter and toast the bread. Add the onion and sausage mixture to the bread along with the chicken stock, and cook until softened. Add the parsley.

Place the stuffing mixture in a baking pan and bake in a 350-degree oven for 25 minutes.

]]> http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/2011/12/01/merry-makers/feed/ 0 http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/2011/11/01/lean-cuisine/ http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/2011/11/01/lean-cuisine/#comments Tue, 01 Nov 2011 06:00:40 +0000 admin http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/?p=5486

AMONG THE CONSTRUCTION sites and dockyards of Hamburg’s waterfront, the Oberhafen-Kantine crouches under a set of elevated train tracks, sinking noticeably into the ground. Inside, diners steady themselves in creaking wooden booths and dig into dishes of venerable culinary reputation, such as labskaus, a traditional seaman’s meal made of corned beef, red beets, pickled herring and potatoes and topped with a fried egg. Labskaus may lack a certain visual appeal, Kantine cook Stefan Classen admits, but the hearty hash with the subtly fishy tang is sought out by those looking for “a true taste of the Hamburg harbor.” And you’d be hard-pressed to find a more suitable setting than the Kantine in which to give it a try.

The Oberhafen-Kantine opened its doors in 1925 on the banks of the Elbe River, in what was then Hamburg’s industrial shipping port, joining other canteens serving coffee and beef patties, or frikadellen, the quintessential dockworker’s breakfast (believed to be the inspiration for the modern American hamburger). In the early days, the friendly face behind the counter was Anita Haendel, the 12-year-old daughter of owner Hermann Sparr. She quickly became the heart and soul of the Kantine, and worked there until she died in 1997 at the age of 83.

The Kantine’s now-trademark tilt is the result of 86 years of wear and tear, including wartime carpet bombings, railroad construction and regular floods. Today, the building that houses it is one of the few original structures left in an area recently dubbed HafenCity, the site of a major redevelopment effort that will bring glossy hotels and office buildings to the once-scrappy industrial zone.

Preserving the physical structure and the culinary traditions of the Kantine is a top priority for restaurateurs Tim Seidel and Sebastian Libbert, the duo behind some of Hamburg’s hippest eateries, who took over from former chef-owner Thorsten Gillert earlier this year. In addition to the labskaus and frikadellen, the Kantine will continue to feature such classic Hamburg staples as eel soup; matjes, soused North Sea herring served with onions and pickles; pan-fried scholle, white fish accompanied by sliced potatoes fried with cured pork; and weisswurst made from herring.

While Seidel and Libbert did convert the former customs office building next door into an open space, dubbed Zollamt, for exhibitions showcasing the work of young Hamburg artists, not much will change with the Kantine itself. “We didn’t want to make it chic, like our other restaurants,” Seidel says. “Blemishes add character.”

Have It Your Way
Curry Queen lets Germans dial up the spice

GERMANY’S FAVORITE fast food, currywurst, is synonymous with grab ’n’ go. So when Curry Queen’s lamb, bison and kobe-style beef sausages dressed in a choice of eight curries — all created by former Michelin-starred chef Ingo Holland — showed up in the esteemed Gault Millau culinary guide last year, foodies’ tongues started wagging.

Whether or not critics agreed with the inclusion, the 3-year-old restaurant, which has a deli outpost elsewhere in Hamburg and a university cafeteria in Karlsruhe, has certainly spiced things up on the German culinary scene. Its curries ascend from the mild “Purple Curry,” a violet-colored mix of hibiscus, cardamom, cumin and cinnamon; to the “Curry Mumbai,” with jasmine, vanilla and orange peel; to the “Curry Anapurna,” a hotter offering with garlic and turmeric.

At the very top of the piquancy scale, however, is the notorious “King Chili Killer,” a dish so hot that the elderly and anyone younger than 18 are strongly advised against ordering it. Made with the bhut jolokia, an Indian pepper considered one of the hottest in the world, this concoction sent Curry Queen owner and head chef Sascha Basler out dancing in the streets the first time he tried it. He’s probably not the only one, either. “You can tell what kind of curry diners have ordered by the mood at the table,” he says. “The spicier the chili, the more animated the customer!”

WHEN DIANE FLYNT decided to escape her air-conditioned workaday life as a banker, her first thought was to get some land out in the country, maybe a picturesque vineyard somewhere. But when it came time to make her move, the property she fell in love with was a farm 3,000 feet up in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. The climate was too cold for grapes, but it was perfect for apples, so Flynt, long an amateur horticulturist, began testing different varieties of apple tree, cut her work as a financial consultant down to 40 weeks a year and began spending the rest of her time on the orchard. Eight years later, she unveiled her first hard cider. “The farm told me what to do,” she says.

Today, the six varieties of Flynt’s Foggy Ridge Cider are emblematic of a recent renaissance in American cidermaking. Over the last year alone, the industry’s sales jumped 23.5 percent to $44.2 million. That’s 1.3 million cases, up from just 145,000 in 1990. “I haven’t seen this kind of interest since craft beer started to boom in the 1970s,” says Bump Williams, a beverage industry consultant. There are now dozens of cideries dotting apple-producing states from coast to coast.

At Foggy Ridge, there are currently three orchards, including a 300-tree test grove producing 30 different kinds of apple. In her apples, Flynt looks for the same traits that winemakers do: sugars, acid and, most important, tannins, which give a cider body and layers of flavor. Foggy Ridge’s First Fruit, for example, uses early apples such as Hewe’s crabapple, known for creating a syrupy juice, and the dark, complex Harrison, to create a rich, fruity taste. The Sweet Stayman cider blends the tart Stayman with Grimes Golden and Cox’s Orange Pippin for a sweet drink that pairs well with spicy food. Flynt also makes two fortified ciders — Pippin Gold and Pippin Black — to go with cheese and dessert.

Needless to say, none of them tastes much like the stuff you’ll find in the supermarket. But contrary to what you might think, Flynt has nothing but kind words for her mass-market counterparts, particularly one featuring the visage of a certain oversize rodent. “I think of Woodchuck as a gateway cider,” Flynt says. “If it brings you to the cider world, that’s wonderful.”

The Crunch Heard Round the World

Monticello’s Peter Hatch picks up where Thomas Jefferson left off

DURING HIS FIVE-YEAR SOJOURN in Paris, Thomas Jefferson was entranced by French architecture, music and wine. And yet the City of Light couldn’t hold a candle to his Virginia home in one key regard. “They have no apple to compare with our Newtown Pippin,” he wrote in a letter home.

That apple, with its rich, balanced flavor, might have been largely forgotten if it were not for Peter Hatch, the director of gardens and grounds for Monticello, Jefferson’s Virginia home. Over the last 34 years, Hatch has served as a de facto historian, archeologist, landscape architect and a kind of colonial fruit and vegetable detective. Using Jefferson’s writings and sketches, he has painstakingly recreated Jefferson’s gardens, vineyards and orchards and made Monticello a go-to source for heirloom seeds.

Hatch, a humble 62-year-old with wild gray-brown hair, aspired to be a poet back in the early ’70s, but his real talent was for gardening. In 1977, he was hired to oversee Monticello’s 2,400 acres, and one of his first projects was the restoration of Jefferson’s south orchard, which today abounds with peaches, cherries, figs and about 14 heirloom apple varieties, including the Newtown Pippin. More recently, he helped Michelle Obama choose heirloom seeds for her White House garden.

During Jefferson’s time, apples “were written about with the same intensity that we now write about great New York restaurants,” Hatch says. To recreate that kind of enthusiasm, each fall Monticello stages an apple tasting featuring nearly two dozen rare varieties, such as Roxbury Russets and Esopus Spitzenburgs. This year’s will take place October 15.

How About Them Apples?

Artisan jam makers bring the flavors of long-forgotten apple varieties to grocery store shelves

In the days of Johnny Appleseed, America boasted about 15,000 varieties of apple with distinctive names — like Buckingham, Dula Beauty and Gloria Mundi — as well as flavors. Today, however, the perfectly beautiful and famously bland Red Delicious makes up 41 percent of the national apple crop. Eleven varieties constitute 90 percent of all apples sold in grocery stores.

Artisan jam makers are helping to turn the tide by using little-known apples in their wares. Each fall, June Taylor releases a new batch of her Gravenstein apple butter, which uses the signature apple of Sonoma County, while Laura O’Brien of Josephine’s Feast uses Newtown Pippins from a century-old tree on the coast of Shinnecock Bay in Southampton, N.Y., to make her heirloom apple butter with cardamom and heirloom apple compote cooked with French mustard. Brooklyn-based Anarchy in a Jar makes a cheeky “Apple Sass,” an apple butter made with Winesaps and Staymans, plus a spiced apple jelly that also features local Sixpoint Brewery’s beer — proving that apples can indeed fall far from the tree.

DRIVE 45 MINUTES SOUTH OF KNOXVILLE on Highway 321 and there, in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, you’ll find a boutique hotel that’s something akin to a sleepaway camp for foodies.

It doesn’t come cheap – one night, including meals, at Blackberry Farm starts at $795 per couple – but almost any culinary yearning can be catered too. There are six acres of vegetable gardens where guests can pick tomatoes and peppers; two award-winning restaurants with chefs happy to hang with patrons; an on-site forager who will guide visitors toward wild mushrooms; the Larder, where staffers explain how to make jams, jellies and sauces; and cheesemakers, butchers and bakers all primed to share their secrets. As this is a working farm, fall is prime time to get your hands dirty.

“In September we’re harvesting everything, and our preservation kitchen is going crazy making jams, jellies and pickles; our sausages are being made,” says Sam Beall, owner of Blackberry Farm. “It’s when we’re at our busiest.”

Beall’s parents purchased the 4,200-acre property in 1976 and ran a successful hotel there, but when Beall became proprietor in 2001, he’d spent a few years living in California, where he worked at The French Laundry. Naturally, he wanted to ramp up Blackberry’s gourmet offerings.

So the 35-year-old father of four increased the kitchen garden from a quarter acre to six and hired a team of gardeners to tend it. He bought chickens and a herd of sheep, which provide milk for the homemade cheese. He lured charcutiers, chocolatiers and preserving specialists. Around 100 employees work to produce the establishment’s edible offerings, including the high-end products — truffled quail eggs, onion jam — that are available at Williams-Sonoma. Up to 90 percent of the produce served in the two restaurants is grown on the farm; this month that means plenty of heirloom tomatoes, eggplant, shiitake mushrooms and black walnuts.

Beall has also enticed world-renowned chefs like Alain Ducasse to an 18th-century Amish barn on the property for three-day cooking demonstrations and feasts for guests. This month, Judy Rodgers, chef and co-owner of San Francisco’s famed Zuni Café, will be visiting.

Lazy gourmands can forgo the classes and outings and just eat. And this being a luxury resort, the pool and spa are popular hangouts. But most guests don’t sit still for long, Beall says.

“They no longer want to sit in a rocking chair — they want to be challenged and inspired,” he says. “These days, cheesemaking is as popular as the spa.”

WHERE PIGS FLY

America’s top chefs can’t get enough Tennessee hog

BACON AND OTHER PIECES OF PORKY GOODNESS have been having a moment in American cuisine of late (bacon-flavored ice cream, anyone?). And chances are good that if you’re eating pork in one of the country’s best restaurants, it came from Allan Benton, of Madisonville, Tenn.

Benton’s company, Benton’s Smoky Mountain Country Hams, has been smoking bacon and aging hams for the last 38 years. After a rough start, word spread about the taste of Benton’s hogs, and chefs from all over the country came calling. These days his protein graces plates at 80 restaurants in Manhattan (including Tom Colicchio’s Craft and David Chang’s Momofuku eateries), Absinthe in San Francisco, Chicago’s Table Fifty-Two and John Besh’s New Orleans spots.

Benton produces 14,000 hams and 35,000 bacon butts each year, all from Berkshire pigs mixed with heritage breeds like Tamworth and Red Wattle, which have more fat and marble. He sells his product online, too, so keen home cooks can get ahold of it wherever they are in the country.

With a staff of 10, Benton’s is a streamlined operation. “We’re embarrassingly small,” says Benton. “We’re a hole-in-the-wall business. It’s never been my goal to make a lot of ham or bacon; it’s to make exquisite ones.”

SHINE ON

Tennessee’s hidden hooch can now be distilled and sampled in broad daylight

Just over a year ago, Tennessee’s first legal moonshine distillery opened in Gatlinburg, and since then, Ole Smoky Moonshine has been churning out the same hooch that once had to be obtained on the sly.

It’s not for the faint of liver, that’s for sure. There are 100-proof varieties (and others that are made only seasonally), including the classic Corn Whiskey, made from a century-old family recipe that uses only corn grown in the eastern part of the state; White Lightning, which is distilled six times and is designed to be drunk with mixers because it packs such a punch; and Moonshine Cherries, which comes in a jar filled with maraschinos for snacking on while sipping. The liquor is distilled on-site and sold in the Ole Smoky store. You can buy it online too – but you don’t get the free tastings that come with visiting the source.

IN AN AGED BUILDING set in the town of Broadway, amid the rolling hills of west-central England, Russell’s feels a little bit like the setting of a pastoral novel from a century ago. The landscape is dotted with grazing sheep and honey-stoned cottages, and the keys to each of the property’s seven guest rooms are of the old-style skeleton variety. But the main attraction of this charming spot (the full name of which is actually “Russell’s, a restaurant with rooms”) is a dining experience, neither historical nor modern, in which local ingredients are used to provide a new perspective on countryside classics.

Russell’s is housed in the former workshop of one Sir Gordon Russell, a furniture designer of the Arts and Crafts school who was raised in this Cotswolds town more than a century ago, and who drew his aesthetic inspiration in part from his experiences on the front lines during World War I. He opened his workshop here in 1923. Years later, he recalled thinking that “my generation, which had destroyed so much lovely work, had a constructive duty to hand on to those coming after us good things of our own creation.”

It’s a charge Russell’s owner Barry Hancox and his business partner Andrew Riley took very seriously when they began refurbishing Russell’s derelict showrooms, workshops and offices in 2003. After more than a year of hard work, “we had a great feel for the property,” says Hancox. “It had a great vibe. Originally it was going to be a restaurant, but we had the rooms upstairs and it evolved into something greater than we ever anticipated.”

Hancox and Reilly enlisted the services of chef Matthew Laughton, described by Hancox as “a family chap who really loves food,” to oversee the menu, which features dishes like a roast Cornish pollock with clams and samphire emulsion, and beef and horseradish sausages with mustard mash and red onion gravy. Laughton also oversees the newly launched Workshop, a more casual venue offering decidedly throwback British culinary experiences. Menu items include a retro-style Canteen roast lunch, featuring a fish or meat of the day, a filet of haddock battered and fried and served on a bed of crispy chips, and vintage throwbacks like beef drippings and parsley on toast — a nod to resourceful men and women making the best of hard times. Laughton uses produce from nearby farms to create his dishes, along with tasty house-made condiments like spiced-apple chutney and chili jam presented plainly alongside local cheeses like Shropshire Blue and St. Oswald.

While the menu is stocked with nostalgic creations, the point of this so-called “comeback cuisine” goes well beyond the food itself. Russell once said of the Cotswolds, “I never cease to be grateful to the builders of these little towns and villages. They taught me to try to apply the searching test of honesty to all work and actions.” That’s a philosophy worthy of a comeback.

Rhapsody in Brew
Local beermakers concoct really real ale

CASK ALE — or real ale, as it’s come to be known, thanks in part to the U.K.-wide Campaign for Real Ale — is brewed from traditional ingredients, conditioned in casks, unpasteurized and free from added bubble-producing carbon dioxide. Unsurprisingly, few places have adopted the Real Ale ethos as avidly as the Cotswolds.

In Gloucestershire, a push by an alliance of brewers to get pubs to serve local beer made in small batches from organic, local ingredients has paid off, resulting in what is now known as the Gloucestershire Ale Trail (see map). Visitors looking to get real can swing by Battledown Brewery, Cotswold Spring Brewery, Festival Brewery, Nailsworth Brewery, North Cotswold Brewery, Severn Vale Brewing Company, Stanway Brewery and/or Stroud Brewery to sample the good stuff. Bottoms up!

CULTURE SHOCK
Don’t miss out on these cheesy attractions

The cheesemakers of the Cotswolds, despite being few in number, have performed admirably at the annual British Cheese Awards.

Charles Martell, for instance, has ridden his Single and Double Gloucester, as well as his Stinking Bishop (a well-deserved name derived from the type of pear liquor used to wash the rind) to multiple honors. Martell has been instrumental in preserving the Gloucestershire heritage cattle used to make the cheeses, with the Single variety holding the coveted European Union’s Protected Designation of Origin.

Another local favorite, last year’s Supreme Champion, is Golden Cenarth, an organic soft cow’s milk cheese. This particular blend was an accident, discovered when cheesemaker Carwyn Adams found a mysterious culture growing on a wheel of Caerffili, a recipe passed down from his great-grandmother. Seductively pungent, the cheese ranges from soft in the summer months to firmer and more robust in the winter.

While these stinky newcomers are gaining ground, cheddar remains king, and visitors would be remiss not to try any of the local varieties, such as the Extra Mature Cheddar from JA & E Montgomery.

Wherever you go, make sure to bring sealable bags if you plan on taking some home, or the Bishop won’t be the only thing stinking.

THE WORLD OWES A LOT to the French, culinarily speaking, but champagne — that near-universal symbol of celebration and morning-a er headaches — tops the list. But if you think it feels a little too formal to just kick back with a glass of bubbly on a summer afternoon, you haven’t tried it with a scoop of sorbet.

Tami Ratliffe, owner of Cafe Chloe in San Diego, is here to help. She calls her sorbet champagne mimosa a menu staple and uses locally sourced fruits and berries to make sorbets in-house. So far she’s combined champagne with Meyer lemon, heirloom melon and strawberry. The chemistry is similar to that of the more typical root beer and vanilla ice cream float — the sweetness and the bubbles so en one another.

And Chloe’s French bistro vibe makes you feel that even though you’re halfway around the world and not enjoying the bubbles straight up, the Gauls would approve.

For a more exclusive quaff , speakeasy-style New York cocktail lounge The Bourgeois Pig offers seasonal champagne floats — often with champagne-flavored sorbet, for an intense bubbly experience, and topped with a strawberry. They make their own sorbet as well, and as of press time couldn’t tell us what would be on the menu this summer, except to say there would be a champagne float. Locals will tell you whatever is being served is worth the trek to the East Village.

The best part about this growing trend is you can make a champagne float wherever you are. If you want to impress a crowd, try this concoction — for which The Bourgeois Pig was able to divulge the ingredients but not the full recipe. They say it was one of their most popular floats: champagne, homemade champagne sorbet, coconut reduction, celery bitters and lime syrup. (Frankly, if you’re making your own coconut reduction or celery bitters, color us impressed with or without the champagne.)

A good alternative, if you can get your hands on a bottle, is Moët & Chandon’s Ice Impérial. It’s the first champagne crafted specifically to be enjoyed over ice, but a scoop of lemon sorbet would do just as well. Now find a hammock and enjoy.

WE ALL SCREAM FOR LUXURY

Chicago’s best ice cream makers converge

A quandary: You’re wandering around Chicago on a hot, sunny day in July and you could really go for something cool and creamy. Problem is, there are too many choices. Do you go for the award-winning goat cheese and caramel flavor at Black Dog Gelato? Nice Cream’s lavender vanilla ice cream made with Michigan lavender? Anything from the fantastically named Snookelfritz?

Splurge on all three at the Chicago Luxury Ice Cream Festival (July 9-10) at the Grand Piazza on Taylor Street. The $25 admission buys you tastes of treats from those purveyors, plus several others, including national brands Ciao and Via. Dessert artisans such as Michelle Garcia of Bleeding Heart Bakery and Jérôme Landrieu of the Barry-Callebaut Chocolate Academy will be hosting workshops teaching visitors how to make their own decadent concoctions. It all culminates in the Great Chicago Brain Freeze, which is much more pleasant than it sounds: Chefs compete to create the best ice cream, and you decide. Does it get any better?

BRAIN FREEZE The Chin Chin Laboratorists’ Valrhona chocolate ice cream, lost in a haze of liquid nitrogen

IF ITALY HAS GELATO and the Midwest has frozen custard, the future has “nitro ice cream” from The Chin Chin Laboratorists. Part theater, part delicious, Chin Chin opened last summer in Camden Locks as London’s first establishment of its kind. Husband and wife team Ahrash Akbari-Kalhur and Nyisha Weber cite molecular gastronomy bigwigs Ferran Adrià and Heston Blumenthal as inspirations but say that they wanted to do something a little more accessible. Their creation is priced around $6.50 for a scoop with one sauce and one topping — pretty reasonable for a show and a rich, velvety treat.

Here’s how it works: You step into a futuristic chemistry lab setup where you’re presented with a choice of liquid custards in Madagascar vanilla, Valrhona chocolate and a third flavor that changes every three days. (Past selections have included mango, Moroccan mint tea, and lychee and rosewater.) Once you’ve selected your flavor, Akbari-Kalhur pours a beakerful — they’re not playing around with the lab theme — into a regular old KitchenAid, where a blast of liquid nitrogen is piped in. A cloud of vapor rises as the mixer turns on. Then, voilà, a cup of ice cream emerges.

The fun doesn’t end there. Weber mans the toppings and sauce bar, where a range of similarly gourmet options are on hand. There are usually three sauces available, which will also be poured out of beakers. Sea salt and caramel is a safe bet for just about any situation, but if a fruity syrup is more your taste, go for it. Toppings include lavender sea salt, crystallized pretzels and cardamom, along with more traditional items like chopped nuts and chocolate candies. Everything is made in-house.

The couple run the entire operation themselves, and they say they enjoy explaining how their process creates a denser, smoother ice cream because the quick freezing doesn’t involve much air or allow ice crystals to form, as they do in traditional ice cream. They also offer coffee, hot chocolate and alcoholic beverages for the cooler months, as well as cupcakes. Although they can’t speak definitively to any plans for expansion — they’re just a year into this dairy adventure — they’ve got their sights set on U.S. shores, where they’ll no doubt be welcome. After all, they’ve devised a product that’s both novel and high quality. That ice cream lovers have responded in droves is pretty cool.

By Jiffer Bourguignon

IT WAS BACK IN 1980 that Pedro Gomez de Baeza, then a business student at the University of Pennsylvania, first noticed a baffling price discrepancy in his supermarket. “Stores sold Italian olive oil for $10 a bottle, but the same product from Spain was less than $5,” de Baeza recalls. “I knew we produced high-quality olive oil in Spain, and I wanted the world to know it too.”

In the 1990s, de Baeza, by then a prominent Madrid financier, turned his focus to his family-owned estate, La Amarilla, in the picturesque town of Ronda in southern Andalusia. An order of nuns had once produced olive oil there, and de Baeza decided to revitalize the property’s oil-making capabilities, turning the home into the headquarters for the newly formed LA Organic.

De Baeza worked with agricultural experts and developed a network of 56 organic olive farmers and cooperatives across five vast Andalusian provinces, a concept he’s dubbed “pagos asociados.” (Only three percent of Spain’s groves grow organic olives, but the small amount accounts for an astounding 25 per- cent of organic olive groves worldwide.) Then de Baeza re- cruited renowned Bordeaux-trained oenologist Michel Rolland as a blending consultant, and cre- ative genius Philippe Starck to design the packaging.

Third-generation olive oil expert Maximiliano Arteaga is one of the “noses” responsible for LA Organic’s blend. His creation has hints of apple and almond from the sweet arbequina olive, and it bears a likeness to avocado in the fruity, slightly bitter hojiblanca—both of which are mixed into LA Organic’s product. As though leading a wine tasting, Arteaga explains the subtle undertones of each olive, some of which are too nuanced for the novice palate.

Similarities to wine making don’t end there. De Baeza and Starck have set their sights on agro-tourism. “We’ll design an almazara,” says de Baeza, a traditional mill–cum–visitor center that offers tastings and background information about olive oil production and the history of Andalusia, where the rocky soil provides prime conditions to produce 80 percent of Spain’s olive oil.

Standing on his terrace, de Baeza surveys the motley crop of wild olive trees scattered across the sloping landscape. “If I can contribute in a very small way to the view that Spain produces incredible olive oil while making people aware of this beautiful place…” He trails off. So far, so good.

Sea, Food

Once the dark, damp home of Barcelona’s fishermen, Barceloneta is the center of a fresh fish revolution

YOU WOULD BE HARD-PRESSED to find fresher seafood anywhere in Barcelona than in the tiny port neighborhood of Barceloneta. Bordered by a beach and a marina, this once dingy burg a racts everyone from glamorati to sun-soaked local families. But the real reason to go is the food.

Ignore the prefab frozen-seafood paella joints on the waterfront and head to one of the eight restaurants that form Barceloneta Cuina, an association of restaurateurs and chefs who have vowed to defend this proud neighborhood’s cuisine. Having pledged to use only the freshest ingredients, including seafood caught by local fishermen, BC aims to revive traditional recipes of forgo en dishes and to educate the public.

Restaurant Can Solé, one of the oldest neighborhood establishments, has reintroduced zarzuela, traditionally prepared for bourgeois theatergoers after the opera. Served in a cast-iron skillet, the dish is brimming with fresh gambas (shrimp), mussels, squid and monkfish bathed in a fragrant, garlicky broth.

The movement that has vowed to reinvigorate tradition still has room for innovation, however. At Kaiku, which sits on the tip of the peninsula jutting out into the sea, chef Hug Pla Cortés uses local seafood that he personally selects from the commercial fish market across the street to create dishes like zamburiña, baby scallops sprinkled with sea salt and drizzled with Cortés’ own patent-pending elixir of ginger, lime, olive oil and black pepper.

“I love to see people enjoying real Barceloneta food,” Cortés says of his customers’ reactions to the zamburiña. “Sometimes they cry.”

WHITE HOT
Look in the refrigerator case for the next big rioja.

While most of the world quaff s red rioja, Spaniards have been gleefully sipping the white version for generations. Now, it’s going global: In 2007 the Rioja Regulatory Council allowed the planting of white varietals for the first time since 1925, so get your ice buckets ready.

When the new riojas hit shelves, they’ll have gotten a flavor face-lift of sorts. As a result of new technology and shorter aging times, the modern style is fresh and fruity. Harder-to-find traditional whites have complex notes of marzipan and nutmeg owing to aging process that sometimes takes as long as a decade.

Cervantes Institute wine expert Helio San Miguel prefers the traditional white riojas like López de Heredia Vina Tondonia but also recommends moderns including Cune Monopole, Vivanco and Palacios Remondo La Montesa.

BY ANDREW O’REILLY

IT’S BEEN nine long years since Russia slapped a ban on sturgeon caviar exports from the Caspian Sea. The country was acting in the interest of the fish—its population was in precipitous decline— but that was cold comfort for gourmands who had to fork over $100-plus an ounce for the pearly black fish eggs. This year, with farm stock at a healthy level, the ban has been li ed, and 330 pounds of sturgeon caviar are now being exported to the European Union.

Like black truffles, what makes this caviar so prized is its rarity. Ninety percent of the world’s sturgeon reside in the Caspian Sea, and the fish don’t lay eggs until they are 15 years old. Of the three types of caviar derived from sturgeon, beluga is the largest and most expensive; osetra has an assertive and nu y flavor; and sevruga—the most affordable, at around $50 an ounce—has a briny taste and small eggs.

Purists say caviar should be served in a nonmetallic bowl filled with ice to prevent oxidation, and then consumed with toast or crackers. But there’s no wrong way to eat it. To feel more Russian, try it with sour cream, blini and a shot of ice-cold Russian vodka.

BARBARIANS AT THE PLATE
Moscow’s rebel chef Anatoly Komm defies the notion that Russian food lacks sophistication
By Jay Cheshes

Moscow chef Anatoly Komm is best known for transforming peasant fare into avant-garde cuisine that no self-respecting babushka would recognize. At his flagship restaurant, Varvary, he’s served capsules of borscht, deconstructed pelmeni and black bread that’s so dehydrated it’s got the appearance and texture of dirt. It’s exactly the fare one might expect from a former Soviet geophysicist using cosmonaut cooking equipment. And the tourists who dine there—90 percent of his customers—eat it up. And yet, many of Moscow’s wealthiest local diners don’t quite get what he’s doing.

“Russians understand what it means to have a big boat, jewelry, a good car,” he says. “But to understand art, you need more than just money.”

The 43-year-old enjoys being the bad boy of the Moscow dining scene. (He’s turned away a cigar-chomping oligarch and his bodyguards for being too…oligarchish.) The name of his three-year-old restaurant means “barbarian,” and it’s a cheeky acknowledgement, he says, of the way much of the world still views Russian food. To help change those perceptions he’s been hitting the road, his luggage stuffed with Russian ingredients like black bread, sunflower oil, smoked fish and pickled herring. In the last year he’s been to Cannes for a three-day chef conference and done guest chef stints in Switzerland, Austria and New Zealand.

Eventually some of the diners he serves make it to Moscow, where Komm conjures his reservation-only all-night “gastronomy show”—10, 12 or 14 courses of intricately plated new Russian cooking. Though his techniques were first inspired by a visit to El Bulli in Spain—birthplace of so-called molecular gastronomy—his ingredients dogmatically put the motherland first, eschewing imported luxuries favored by the country’s moneyed class. “I know the map of Russian products,” he says. He sources the crawfish in his “Russian carpet” dish from the Don River on the outskirts of Moscow. The crustaceans are served on a bed of smoked salmon and celery gelée with lemon foam and bright green and red “caviar.” “It’s my gastronomic joke,” he says. The bubbles are artificially conceived by adding droplets of pureed herbs and Tabasco to a chemical bath, a process known as spherification, once used by Soviet food scientists to transform liquefied fish heads into fake sturgeon caviar.

In fact, many of the high-tech gizmos now deployed around the world in cutting-edge restaurants had industrial uses back in the U.S.S.R. Komm’s freeze-drying machine is the same sort once used by the cosmonaut program to prepare foods for outer space. It’s just another quirk of the chef whose geophysics career ended when he became a Versace importer at the suggestion of his girlfriend. The career shift opened him to international travel. In 1991, on a visit to Hong Kong, he decided on a whim to learn Chinese cuisine, convincing a cook with a stall near the seafood market to take him on as an unpaid apprentice. That monthlong stint led to others in Germany, Spain, the Caribbean, Italy—vacations spent slaving in restaurant kitchens for fun.

Eventually a friend convinced him to put all that food knowledge to use, bankrolling Komm’s first Moscow restaurant, the Palazzo di Spaghetti. That led to a grill-house called Green, which finally gave way to Varvary, often described as the first truly Russian haute cuisine restaurant.

“In Moscow, people are beginning to understand the difference between the good products and the bad,” he says. “But it’s changing slowly. And so I push it.”

GEORGIA ON THEIR MINDS
Moscow’s elite pack the Tatler Club for a taste of the neighboring country.

The exotic foods of Georgia are as beloved in Moscow as Indian curry is in London. The following springtime recipe for a simple grilled chicken tabaka comes from the Tatler Club, a Moscow hotspot notable for its highflying clientele.

Chicken Tabaka Ingredients:

1 Cornish hen, deboned (Ask your butcher to do this.) 2 cloves garlic, minced 1 tsp. finely chopped fresh rosemary, plus 2 sprigs for pan 2 Tbsp. olive oil Lettuce leaves and homemade adjika sauce (recipe follows) for serving

Rub hen with garlic and rosemary and lightly salt. Heat olive oil over medium-high heat in a grill pan until it shimmers. Add rosemary sprigs. Fry hen under press until it is cooked through and develops a brown crust, 5-7 minutes per side. Serve atop lettuce leaves with adjika sauce spooned generously over hen.

Adjika sauce Ingredients: 3 tomatoes, blanched and peeled

1 bell pepper, chopped Pinch of finely chopped fresh horseradish, garlic and chili pepper

Chop peeled tomatoes and press with the back of a spoon, reserving juices. Add chopped bell pepper and spices, plus salt to taste. Mix well.

—JAY CHESHES

Local flavor: Portland, Oregon
By Layla Schlack

ON THE FIRST episode of Fred Armisen’s new sketch comedy show, IFC’s Portlandia, there’s a bit about a couple going to a restaurant and inquiring about the provenance of the chicken—not an altogether unusual request in Oregon’s most haute city. The server tells them that should they order the free-range chicken, they’ll be served Collin, who roamed four acres of woodland 30 miles south of the city. Not convinced that Collin lived a good enough life, the pair heads to the farm just to make sure.

Armisen, a Saturday Night Live veteran and frequent Portland visitor, may have created Portlandia to poke gentle fun at the Rose City’s hyper-conscientious, locavore- obsessed, über-politically-correct culture, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t like to eat well when he’s in town. “Whatever I’m eating, I want it to be fresh, and I want it to be good.” And Portland is good for that. “I also like to eat very quickly, so the food carts are perfect for me,” he says. “There’s a cluster of them near the Jupiter Hotel. One of them, Slow & Low, serves really good barbecue. They’ve only got a few things on the menu, and they’re all good. I love that.”

In addition to shooting Portlandia there, Armisen says he visits the city about once a year. If you want to catch him, “I always eat at Clyde Common,” he says. “It’s centrally located next to the Ace Hotel, and it’s got really, really good food.” A hotspot among the city’s hipsters, the restaurant has communal seating and such quirky takes on classic bar foods as pimenton popcorn and harissa french fries. No word on where its chicken is from.

Lord of the Wings

Chef Andy Ricker’s southeast Asian take on an American bar classic has turned Portland on to a new type of Thai food. // By Jay Cheshes

STEEP ASCENT
After founding (and selling) big-label teas Stash and Tazo, Portland’s Steven Smith has a go at small-batch blends.

“I couldn’t find things I really wanted to drink,” says Steven Smith when asked how he got into the tea business. After the natural food store he co-owned closed, Smith started Stash Tea in 1972, which he sold to a Japanese tea company in 1993. His next venture was Tazo, which he sold to Starbucks after five years. After dabbling in early retirement, Smith got restless and founded Steven Smith Teamaker in 2009. This venture is a labor of love, and Smith is fanatical about the quality of his product. “We only make what we think we’re going to sell in three to four weeks,” he says. “We also encourage people not to buy very much, so they can enjoy it while it’s fresh.”

If you’re in Portland, you can stop by Smith’s shop for a tasting. Don’t miss the Bungalow Darjeeling brew. “I’m pretty enamored with it,” Smith says. —LAYLA SCHLACK

WHY IS CHEF Andy Ricker buying every package of pig intestine in an Asian supermarket? “We had a distributor selling us chitlins,” he says, “but the quality was crap.” He tosses a few packages of pigs’ ears into the cart (“We stew them, slice them and fry them”) and takes big slabs of beef liver (“for our tom saep, spicy sour soup”).

With offbeat ingredients slipped into so many dishes, diners rarely know exactly what they’re getting at Pok Pok, Ricker’s Thai restaurant. “If you go into detail, people will stay away,” he says. Maintaining some mystery has helped the place become Portland’s hottest destination and has earned Ricker a James Beard nomination.

He first warmed to Thai cuisine in the late ’80s while bumming around Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand. Although he didn’t know it at the time, the food Ricker discovered in Chiang Mai would define his career.

He opened Pok Pok in 2005 as a takeout shack in front of his house. There were only eight things on the menu, including green papaya salad made with a wooden mortar and pestle, and lemongrass-scented game hens cooked in an upright rotisserie he’d imported. Within weeks of opening he had lines down the block. Ricker transformed the shack into a full-service restaurant, which eventually subsumed his whole house.

Now with three restaurants open and a fourth in the works, Ricker pushes crispy fried pig stomachs and fermented black crabs on an increasingly adventurous public. But while the edgiest dishes helped build a daredevil following, his real claim to fame is a Southeast Asian riff on a classic American bar treat. Portland diners can’t get enough of his chicken wings with fish sauce and hot chilies. “Off the hook,” swooned Guy Fieri on Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives. “The wings paid for my condo,” says Ricker. “They paid for my car. I can’t complain.”

Though he would never call his food authentic—the word, he says, is too loaded—Ricker is obsessive about details. He adds limestone paste to his sticky rice to mimic the hard water in Thailand; he brought a coconut press back to squeeze his own milk; and the drinking water at his restaurants is often perfumed with pandanus leaf, as it would be in Chiang Mai. At Pok Pok, cooks are pressing fresh sugar cane for cocktails, and a heap of wings glistens sticky-sweet. “We have a crew of people in here from eight a.m. until midnight every day,” says the chef. “We bend over backward to get this stuff right. There’s no other way to do it.”

REGAL MAY NOT BE THE FIRST WORD that comes to mind when you think of potatoes, but in Peru, the tubers are colored a bright shade of purple inside and out—a look that earned them a place on the plates of the Incan kings for whom they were specially cultivated.

These beautiful little fingerlings have a creamy texture, but they’re firm enough to stand up to baking or roasting. And for the health-conscious, purple potatoes are colored by the same enzyme that gives blueberries their tint, which means they’re chock-full of the same antioxidants. These “Gems of the Andes” are typically harvested January through April, so brush off a couple for papa a la huancaina (potatoes with spicy cheese sauce), and eat like a king.

Something Fishy

Foodies are falling for nikkei—japanese-peruvian fusion cuisine—hook, line and sinker. // by Layla Schlack

IN 1899, A SHIP carrying 800 Japanese laborers docked in Peru. Like so many immigrants, these newcomers struggled to adapt to their new culture (and the Peruvians, it should be said, didn’t exactly welcome them with open arms), but in time the transplants and their adopted countrymen found common ground in one key area: food. Along with rice and squash, the Japanese and Peruvian diets feature fish—and lots of it. From that

commonality, a new cuisine evolved. Now there are about 90,000 people of Japanese descent living in Peru, and nikkei food—the fusion of Japanese and Peruvian—is everywhere.

Emily Shaw is an English and Canadian expat who runs a company called Eat With Me that takes visitors on food tours in and around Lima. “I always introduce some comida nikkei to my groups, because it’s such an amazing part of the culinary scene here,” she says. One of the best restaurants is Maido, a high-end place that opened about a year ago. Maido’s chef, Mitsuharu Tsumaru, is best known for fusions like miso with Peruvian potatoes, pork belly with pumpkin and a sake sauce, and of course, the original nikkei dish, tiradito: a hybrid of ceviche and sashimi in which the fish is sliced thin and served in citrus sauce.

Aside from the requisite trip to Maido, Shaw likes to stay off the beaten path at local cevicherias, like Ah! Gusto, a cevicheria in Callao, the coastal district west of the city proper. There, the nikkei influence comes through in the stuffed peppers with soy- infused sauce. Another favorite is El Encuentro de Otani, for nikkei-infused ceviches like snails in soy sauce and chili, and tacu tacu (rice and bean patties) with shrimp. “I love taking people to the little huariques so they can really taste how nikkei is everywhere,” Shaw says. “Mitsuharu told me a great story about how the Japanese influenced Peruvian technique. With ceviche, Peruvians thought it needed to sit for at least an hour so that the citrus could cure the fish all the way through. When the Japanese started working in the restaurants, they said ‘But the fish is so much more delicious raw!’ And now ceviche is made to order.”

Indeed, ceviche’s made to order all over the world these days, with tiradito hot on its heels. And with nikkei joints popping up in Miami, Madrid and New York, don’t be surprised if you find ají pepper in your maki or yuzu in your ceviche next time you hit up a trendy eatery. It’s been a long time coming.

SOUR GRAPES

A look at pisco—beyond the sour.

Classic cocktails have been enjoying a comeback in the U.S., but in Peru the only thing classic is the name of the spirit: pisco. A new generation of fine pisco makers is marrying 400 years of tradition with modern technology to turn out liquor smooth enough to drink straight up, like Qollqe, a boutique pisco created by mad obsessive Cecila Ledesma. The top-shelf spirit is also eminently mixable. At Mayta, a swank spot in Barranco, chef Jaime Pesaque Roose makes macerados (infused piscos) of rainforest botanicals and uses them to stunning effect in chilcanos—pisco highballs that hip Limeños are choosing over the dated pisco sour.

At Cala, a restaurant with glass walls overlooking Lima’s famous surf breaks, Enrique Vidarte Morales may be the world’s most inspired new-school pisco mixologist. Try his Key Lime Pisco, a mound of soft green lime sherbet in a lake of pisco mosto verde. It is cool and sharp, perfectly balanced and beautiful, which is how you’ll feel sipping it.—GREGORY DICUM

ITALIAN FOOD MAY HAVE PUT BASIL on the map in the Western world (the Romans believed the plant could be used to ward off basilisk fire-breathing dragons), but the purple-stalked Thai version is the oldest type of basil plant and serves as much more than a garnish. Siam Queen—or, in Thailand, bai horapa—is known for its distinct anise taste. It has smaller leaves than Italian basil, and those leaves, along with the reddish-purple stalks and flowers, are often cooked together and served like a vegetable.

But Siam Queen is just common Thai basil. If you really want to up your foodie credentials, try bai kra-phao (Thai holy basil)—a small, spicy leaf often used as a main flavoring in stir fry, as well as in Ayurvedic health remedies—or bai maeng-lak (lemon basil), a key curry ingredient, with seeds that can be soaked in water and used in desserts and drinks, similar to tapioca pearls. Try all three, and you’ll wonder why they didn’t all get the “holy” moniker.

Thai Score

The best new restaurant in Bangkok is helmed by a brash australian import. // by Kirsten Matthew

WHEN AUSTRALIAN CHEF David Thompson opened Nahm in Bangkok last September, The New York Times reported that he was “on a mission to revive Thai cuisine.” Needless to say, this sparked an uproar. Local chefs did not appreciate the suggestion that they needed help with their own food—from a foreigner, no less. “I was misquoted,” the infamously candid Thompson says, standing in Nahm’s kitchen. “I can understand such umbrage, but thankfully it’s settling down now.”

That’s because Thompson, who is now a fixture in Thailand, knows his green curry from his pad Thai. He’s been cooking Thai food ever since he discovered it on his first trip to the country 30 years ago. His first restaurants in his hometown of Sydney were Darley St. Thai and Sailors Thai; in 2001 he opened the first Nahm in London. It earned the only Michelin star for a Thai restaurant in Europe, and Thompson, who is charming and self-deprecating as well as being brutally honest, was anointed an authority on Thai food.

He had planned to open a second London eatery, a seafood spot, but held off because of the flagging economy. Then an opportunity to open a restaurant in Bangkok came up. “My life is littered with accidents. I don’t plan very well,” he explains. “Here in Bangkok, the economy is booming, despite the political strife of the last several months.”

The new Nahm isn’t a facsimile of its English namesake, though Thompson runs it with a similar hands-on philosophy. “The menu items are not the same,” he says. “I let each restaurant evolve on its own.” The food is high-end, but the prices are low: A four-course meal costs just 1,500 baht ($50). The menu changes based on what’s fresh and might include minced pork simmered with fresh prawns in coconut milk and served with cabbage, rose apples and cured fish. Or frog. “We’re getting some nice frog at the moment. I stir- fry it with a ridiculous, insulting amount of chili. It’s really spicy, really delicious, really simple,” he says.

Misquotes aside, is Thompson indeed reviving the Thai food scene? At the very least, he’s injecting an infectious level of devotion and enthusiasm into it. He doesn’t eat Thai food outside of Thailand, and he never tires of the traditionally salty, sour, sweet and spicy dishes of his adopted country. “I could go on and on about the recipes, the fish sauce, the basil, the extra ingredients,” he says. “But the bottom line is it just tastes bloody good.”

New York–based writer KIRSTEN MATTHEW often eats Thai food outside of Thailand— specifically, in Astoria, Queens.

GIRVAN, SOUTH AYRESHIRE, is a tiny fishing port in southwest Scotland with rolling, bright green bluffs stretching back from a quaint harbor. There’s a castle visible in the distance, tempting visitors to fancy themselves barons sitting in that rambling gray structure sipping scotch by the fireplace, watching the ships roll in through the fog. It’s such a quintessentially Scottish scene that you may be surprised to learn that the drink of choice in Girvan isn’t scotch but gin. And a local gin at that, one made with…cucumbers.

That’s not all. Unlike most gins, this one is served in a corked squat black bottle meant to resemble an apothecary jar, hearkening back to when gin’s botanicals were used medicinally. The Victorian flourishes don’t end there. The label announces, “EST. 1886,” suggesting to the uninitiated that this drink had been wrung from the very turf of Scotland, when in fact it was created in 1999 by a former pharmaceutical chemist.

This is Hendrick’s Gin, and it’s arguably the most interesting liquor success story in recent memory. Hendrick’s is produced by William Grant & Sons, a family business in South Ayreshire since 1887 best known for Glenfiddich, Balvenie and Grant’s Scotch Whisky. Since it hit the shelves in 1999, Hendrick’s has won the hearts of gin drinkers, non-gin-drinkers, bartenders and the press. In 2003, it was named “The Best Gin in the World” by The Wall Street Journal.

Hendrick’s is the brainchild of Lesley Gracie, one of only three people on the planet who know the recipe (it’s closely guarded so that no one can duplicate the unusual taste). The 54-year-old master distiller received a degree in chemistry from the University of Hull in Yorkshire and worked in pharmaceuticals for 12 years before relocating to South Ayreshire in 1988 to marry her Scottish beau. The big business in town was the local distillery, so she applied for a job as a chemist there. “Alcohol was a different medium,” Gracie says. “It was a totally different set of rules, but really interesting.”

In 1999, the company decided to create what the industry calls an “ultra-premium” gin, one that retails for $30 a bottle. Gracie went into the lab and emerged once she had created a delicate blend of standard gin ingredients like juniper berry, aged Angelica root, coriander and orris root, along with more idiosyncratic additions such as chamomile and an infusion of cucumber and rose, meant to evoke eating a cucumber sandwich in a rose garden. (Rumor has it that the gin gets its name from the gardener who tended the Grant family’s rose garden for 30 years.)

That only about 200,000 cases are produced a year has put the stuff in short supply (Beefeater, the leading premium gin, exports more than a million cases a year to Spain alone), but Gracie won’t budge from her distillation method—one born of a 1966 auction purchase by Charles Gordon, William Grant’s great-grandson. Gordon bought a Bennet copper-pot still made in 1860, and a 1948 Carter- Head still and restored them. Today, they’re integral to Gracie’s process. She steeps grain alcohol, local spring water and botanicals in the Bennet still for 24 to 36 hours, then gradually heats the mixture to create distillate. Meanwhile, in the Carter-Head, alcohol vapors wash over a mix of raw botanicals. The distillates are combined, and then the cucumber and rose flavors are infused. This complex process—most gin makers use only one still—gives Hendrick’s its distinctive taste; Gracie tests each 120-gallon batch by nose to make sure the balance is just right. She admits she might be able get the same result with an automated still, “but the old stills have worked so well and the gin notes are now inherent in the still,” she says. “It gives us control over the product.” Xavier Padovani, the brand’s global ambassador, says that’s typical of Gracie’s style. “She’s a bit different,” he says. “She doesn’t work on a computer much; she keeps everything in her head. She’s rock ’n’ roll.”

Of course, the hands-on approach would all be for naught if no one were enticed to try the product. This most unusual drink needed a most unusual marketing scheme, which U.S. marketing director Caspar McRae calls “madcap Victoriana.” A trip to HendricksGin.com reveals illustrations of men and women in 19th century garb, chess pieces, butterflies, clocks, trumpets and subtle roses and cucumbers, all under a banner welcoming you to “Hendrick’s Curiositorium.” Hendrick’s print ads sport the same Victorian-style illustrations and come emblazoned with such messages as “Somewhere between ‘Oh’ and ‘My,’ he realized he’d never drink any other gin again.”

Augmenting the marketing effort are the company’s “brand ambassadors,” a band of men and women dispatched to all 60 markets where the gin is sold. They host dinners and cocktail classes with chefs, mixologists, members of the media and historians. They even host croquet matches between bartenders. A select few get to drive the “Cucumbermobile,” a 1961 Rover P4 80 sedan painted cucumber- rind-green, with a winged cucumber hood ornament.

Next year, Hendrick’s will be launched in Argentina, Colombia and Brazil, with Gracie on hand at Girvan to oversee production in her beloved antique stills. It’s a busy life, and that extends to her hours away from work, when she tends to her four grandchildren, her golden retriever, Anya, and about 50 orchids; she has also been known to enjoy a Hendrick’s served with soda and a splash of elderflower cordial on occasion. “That fetches out the flower notes,” she says with a smile. “I like gin.”

Like a cucumber, KIRSTEN MATTHEW always makes her surroundings cooler.

BIRD’S EYE VIEW BY JIM RYAN

1 1/2 oz. Hendrick’s Gin
1 1/8 oz. Lillet Rouge
1 1/8 oz. dark simple syrup
4 leaves mint
4 blackberries
3 dashes yuzu concentrate
2 oz. brut champagne

In a mixing glass, muddle mint, berries, yuzu and simple syrup. Add Hendrick’s and Lillet and stir. Add ice, shake well.

Strain into an iced rocks glass. Add champagne and garnish with a sprig of mint and a blackberry.

ATTENTION, PADMA LAKSHMI: I have been turning out Michelin star–quality food at home for a month now. Why hasn’t anyone from Top Chef called?

Relax, Padma, no need to apologize. How could you have known? After all, until recently I was just a decent home cook whose food never really got beyond “rustic.” Then I discovered the space-age sous vide (pronounced “sue veed”) system, made famous on shows just like yours. French for “under vacuum,” sous vide is a simple system. It requires a vacuum sealer to remove the air from the thick plastic pouches chefs use to package the raw food; a large pot filled with water; and an “immersion circulator” with a built-in pump to heat and move water so it stays at a set temperature when the sealed food enters the little Jacuzzi.

Spurred along by the technique’s ubiquity on TV shows and in the open kitchens of America’s most haute restaurants, I’ve endeavored to test some precision gadgetry that promises exquisite results. Not to trample all over Grandma’s low-and- slow recipes, but this techno-cooking style leads to superior consistency and flavor without having to heat up anything but that pot of water. In the past year, home-kitchen-friendly ways to sous vide have become available, so I tested two leading products: the $800 Sous Vide Professional, a true immersion circulator with digital LCD thermostat that clamps onto and sits in a pot of water, made by PolyScience (the manufacturer preferred by the pros); and the $450 Sous Vide Supreme, which looks like a stainless steel rice cooker and doesn’t circulate its water, although its digital display tells you that it keeps it at a precise temperature.

Of course, there are also various home sous vide “hacks,” as food geeks would call them, which involve things like beer coolers and candy thermometers. But I want to see how the experts do it, so I stop by the highly regarded Craigie on Main in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Award-winning chef Tony Maws runs a casual high-end eatery, helped along, in part, by some serious sous vide strategy.

“Remember dropping that bag of Green Giant frozen vegetables in a pot of water?” Maws asks me. “That wasn’t about paying attention to exact temperatures the way we do today, but it was preserving color and flavor and finding ways to cook food prepped and vacuum-sealed ahead of time.”

Maws trained with French sous vide pioneer Bruno Goussault, a food scientist who worked with chef Joël Robuchon to adapt the method for the train from Paris to Marseille. Like other chefs, Maws treats sous vide as just one tool in his arsenal; it’s a way, say, to slow-cook pork shoulder (24 to 48 hours at 154 degrees) before crisping up the skin in a pan so that it looks and tastes better than something rotating on a spit in Sardinia.

Without a professional chef’s vision, time and planning resources, it’s unlikely that a home cook could produce something of Maws’ caliber. When I unwrapped my sous vide machine, I figured I could at least get a simple tenderloin done medium-rare, wall-to-wall, so it wouldn’t have that gray-brown-red color gradation you’d get from a grill.

I followed the directions, ensuring my fillet was well seasoned and drizzled in oil before vacuum-sealing it, then I dropped it into a large pot fitted with the Sous Vide Professional. While I waited close to 45 minutes for the water to heat, the machine blew a fuse in my apartment. So I turned off the air-conditioner, lights and television and sat, sweating and hungry, illuminated by my battery powered laptop, for another 45 minutes. When it was time to remove and pat dry the very gray, positively ugly hunk of cow muscle (this cost $26 a pound?), I ripped the machine’s plug out of the wall and gave each side of the fillet a nice sear in a hot pan, setting off my smoke alarm— and improving the slab’s aesthetics considerably.

The result? A perfectly medium- rare piece of meat that was a deep pink-red from edge to edge. It tasted great. Had I grilled it—which would have been much faster and easier— I’d have had to settle for one or two centimeters of the steak’s perimeter cooked closer to well done and a center of straight-up red rareness.

The more affordable Sous Vide Supreme wasn’t as consistent, although it was slightly easier to use; I didn’t have to buy a big pot or tank, or clamp anything to it. This device took a little longer to heat the same amount of water, though, and the meat came out less perfectly done. Undeterred, I dried and seared it, and guess what? It tasted like a nice, tender steak too.

Head to head, both machines expertly tackled short ribs, corned beef and coq au vin, with the PolyScience product often producing slightly better results, but I can’t say that I felt right about leaving the house empty with something simmering away, or that I was able to focus on much more than my cooking experiments during those few weeks I played with the technique.

“Sous vide isn’t the be-all end-all,” Maws tells me when I describe my experience. “It’s just another technique.” He likes it best for tough cuts of meat that take a long time to cook. “If the internal temperature of cooked meat is a hundred twenty-four degrees Fahrenheit, and if you braise it for three hours at three-hundred degrees in your oven, you’re still overcooking it. There are still delicious reasons to braise—it’s a classic technique. But with sous vide, the meat stays moist and very flavorful. You get the best of both worlds.”

Progress? Sure. But as a rustic home cook, I’m just not certain I have enough time in my life to plan regular meals that take 48 hours to cook. I can see how sous vide would elevate a special dinner to another level, and I respect that food-science geeks love the democratizing power of technology—to say nothing of buying all their protein at once, each week, portioning it out, vacuum-sealing it and having perfect, flavorful, inexpensive and often low- fat meals every night. But I’m already under pressure, living and working in this hectic universe at a somewhat consistent internal temperature of 98.6 degrees, 24 hours a day. Moreover, I guess I’m just a simple country boy at heart.

If my home-testing taught me anything, it’s that I’m grateful for the Mawses of our world. So, with that, I leave the technique to them. But Padma, if you’re still reading, I’d be happy to give your Top Chef contestants some pointers.

L.A.-based writer ADAM BAER can make a mean salmon in minutes—in a pan.

TONY MAWS’ SLOW-ROASTED CHICKEN

1 chicken, 3-4 pounds
3 Tbsp. rendered chicken or duck fat
Salt and pepper to taste

BRINE

2 liters water
6 grams salt
6-inch sheet of kombu kelp
1 star anise
1 Tbsp. fennel seed
1 Tbsp. coriander seed
1 Tbsp. black peppercorns
1 clove
1 tsp. chili flake

Cut chicken into five pieces: legs and thighs, breasts on the bone, and back. Reserve the back for future use. Brine the other four pieces for two hours in the refrigerator. Remove and pat dry.

Season the chicken with salt and pepper. Place the legs and thighs in one bag and the breasts in another. Add a tablespoon of fat to each bag. Seal bags on medium high and cook at 151° F until internal temperature of the breasts reaches 148° F—approximately an hour and a half. Remove breasts and raise the temperature of the water to 169° F and cook until legs and thighs reach an internal temperature of 158° F. Heat a cast iron pan on medium. Remove chicken from bags and gently pat dry with paper towel. Add one tablespoon fat to pan and quickly sear chicken pieces, skin down, until well browned.

I’VE GOT TIME to perfect it before Thanksgiving, but the puff pastry for the chicken pie is not even close to thin enough. And I’m still toying with other ingredients-a little country ham, a few sautéed mushrooms. But what I’m leaving out is as important as what’s going in. Forget potatoes and carrots, those drab staples of frozen pot pies. And while you’re at it, forget turkey. This is going to be a different kind of holiday. With this one flaky, delicious pie, I’m going to commit the grievous impiety of shaking up my family’s Thanksgiving menu-one of the stodgiest holiday spreads out there.

To be honest, the pie isn’t even my idea. I’m just following the lead of the mother of modern Thanksgiving, Sarah Josepha Hale. In her 1827 novel Northwood, Hale described a gut-busting holiday dinner that began with roast turkey, set in a “lordly station,” but also included a sirloin of beef, a leg of pork, a loin of mutton, a goose and a pair of ducklings, along with an array of pickles, preserves, custards, cakes and, of course, pies both sweet and savory. Pumpkin was essential and occupied the “most distinguished niche” among the desserts. But chicken pie was even more important. Hale wrote that it should be “wholly formed of the choicest parts of fowls, enriched and seasoned with a profusion of butter and pepper and covered with an excellent puff paste.” Gracing the feast’s center, it was “an indispensable part of a good and true Yankee Thanksgiving.”

If that description were Hale’s lone contribution to American culinary tradition, I’d be grateful enough-it did, after all, lead to my learning to make puff pastry. But Hale also waged a long campaign to transform Thanksgiving from a New England tradition occurring anytime in October or November into a national celebration. Every year from 1846 to 1863, Hale wrote editorials in her popular magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book, urging others to observe the holiday. During that same period, she composed letters to Presidents Polk, Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan and Lincoln.

As the Civil War approached, Hale’s call for a national feast reached fever pitch, and in 1860 she wrote hopefully that a national observance might “be a good omen for the perpetual union of the States.” Poignantly, Lincoln’s proclamation making Thanksgiving a national holiday did not come until three years later-the same year as the Emancipation Proclamation. But the holiday would long outlast the war.

Hale also had strong opinions about what people ought to eat, and Godey’s played a leading role in shaping the traditional Thanksgiving menu. The magazine featured recipes for apple and pumpkin pie, cranberry sauce, roast turkey and potatoes, as well as recipes we rarely see anymore. Turkey was sometimes stuffed with oysters, then steamed; cranberry tarts were as widespread as cranberry sauce.

Just as important, Godey’s published stories about how families were celebrating. One such article told of the Murrays baking pumpkin, apple, grape, mince, lemon, custard and chicken pies in homage to a son serving in the Union army. “Thankfulness and pies,” the author wrote, “seemed indissolubly connected in Mrs. Murray’s mind.”

Indeed, Hale also wrote that “the size of the chicken pie usually denot[ed] the gratitude of the party who prepare[d] the feast.” Some hosts seem to have been exceedingly grateful. One recipe called for six chickens, with six pounds of flour in the puff pastry. But whether modest or vast, a chicken pie was always opulent.

My own chicken pie recipe is a proud amalgam. I’ve simmered and deboned the chickens. Godey’s heartily endorsed my filling of ham and mushrooms (sliced hard-boiled eggs were another common addition). The gravy is butter and stock, with just a bit of flour. As I pour it over the filling, I remember the contemporary Ohio cookbook Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, which says “there can scarcely be too much gravy.” We’ll find out-there’s enough here to buoy up the puff pastry. At last I slide the pie into a hot oven. After an hour, the crust is high and golden. Gravy bubbles along the edges. When I spoon it out, the crust flakes beautifully, crackling over the choice, Hale-approved chicken.

Not all historic dishes sound as appetizing as the pie. Stewed eels, for instance, probably won’t be set in a lordly station this holiday season, and putting oysters in a steamed turkey sounds like a sad misuse of both oysters and turkey. But any holiday dinner can draw on old American flavors and skills. So this Thanksgiving, consider oysters in the stuffing (in roast turkey, they’re fabulous). Use a handful of cranberries to brighten the gravy; use more in a cranberry tart. And don’t forget the chicken pie.

ANDREW BEAHRS sampled raccoon in Arkansas while writing Twain’s Feast, so he says bring on the stewed eel.

THANKSGIVING CHICKEN PIE

• 3-4 lb. chicken, cut up
• 4 oz. country ham, finely chopped
• 1 lb. mushrooms, sliced
• 6 tbsp. butter
• 4 tbsp. flour
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Puff pastry

PREHEAT oven to 400 degrees. Place chicken in a pot with five cups water, bring to a boil, then cover and simmer until tender and cooked through, about 45 minutes. Remove chicken from broth and let cool. Simmer broth, uncovered, until reduced to three cups. Meanwhile, sauté ham separately in two tablespoons butter for a few moments. Add mushrooms, and cook until liquid evaporates.

MELT remaining butter in separate saucepan over medium heat; whisk in flour. Little by little, add the stock, whisking continuously. Bring gravy to a boil, then simmer 10 minutes or until it thickens.

PICK meat from chicken and tear into bite-size pieces. Mix in the ham and mushrooms, then add enough gravy to just cover. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

POUR filling into greased baking dish and cover with puff pastry. Bake until the pastry is high and flaky and the filling bubbles around the edges, 45 minutes to an hour. Serves six.

THE MEGACITY OF MUMBAI has no shortage of restaurants. In fact, there are an estimated two million of them, even some top-flight options, such as Morimoto’s excellent Wasabi, and Ziya, which serves nouvelle Indian cuisine and is run by Michelin-starred chef Vineet Bhatia. But in a city that can feel overwhelming, sometimes diners crave simple, tasty food. In this region of India, that means going to a middle-class venue specializing in thali—robust fare that’s home-cooked and served on big silver platters also called thali.

Few restaurants have mastered the art of the vegetarian thali meal like Panchavati Gaurav. Located in the heart of south Mumbai, between a recently spruced-up Art Deco cinema and the no-nonsense Marine Lines business district, where wholesalers hawk everything from bicycles to custom eyeglasses, Panchavati mostly serves the area’s buyers and sellers, as do the handful of other nearby thali restaurants, such as Rajdhani and the quaintly named Friends Union Joshi Club. They all offer 25 to 30 preordained dishes to satisfy businesspeople’s appetites.

You eat what you get, but it’s okay because you’re in able, experienced hands. And while there’s no question that the explosion of culinary options in Mumbai has cut into the popularity of the thali—especially among the affluent youth, who don’t want to be seen at the restaurants where their parents dine—Panchavati’s owner, Rahul Chandak, isn’t worried. “Our food is tasty and consistent, with no unpleasant surprises,” he says. “There’s something to be said for the familiar.”

The masses who flow in on weekdays are a testament to that. Late Saturday afternoon, when there are no crowds, is the best time to get the full experience. A plate is placed on your table no more than 15 seconds after you take a seat, and the procession commences: A small army of upbeat servers ensure that the thali is filled with silver bowls, which are constantly topped off with an array of gravies, curries, chutneys, pickles and sauces; snacks, salads and desserts (often fresh fruits in custard) are added to the mix. You’ll get perfect tasting portions of dal (lentils), kadhi (spicy yogurt sauce), samosas (deep-fried dumplings), pakoras (fritters) and vegetables such as okra, yams and tomatoes. The empty sections of the platter are filled with roti (Indian flatbread) moistened by generous portions of ghee (clarified butter), then fortified with a helping of aromatic basmati rice. Wash it all down with chaas, a buttermilk drink, or sweet lhassi, and don’t let the fact that the meal is vegetarian fool you— this is not light fare.

The staff has a sixth sense for the amount of food on your plate, and the moment a server intuits that any of the little silver bowls is running low, it’s promptly replenished. Servers hover unabashedly, offering ever more tamarind sauce or pickled mango. If you say you’ve had enough, they may look hurt as they walk away. A safari-suited Chandak will likely stroll up to the table in their wake, greet you with a “Namaste” and instruct a server to fill your plate immediately while you look on helplessly. Chandak makes sure diners are served as if they were family, for better or worse.

It was Chandak’s uncle, Radhakisan Chandak, who started the eatery in 1982 and made customer service as much a priority as good food. “Our staff is trained to stay pleasant no matter how busy it is, and to keep smiling,” he says. “Our customers have to feel good while eating, feel pampered,” he adds. Part of that was eschewing the look of thali house as spartan space lined with creaking wooden benches under whirring ceiling fans, in favor of a loungy, air-conditioned restaurant where customers relax on couches while soft Indian music plays in the background. The change has helped transform the thali houses’ image as cafeterias for visiting traders— mostly single men in search of home- cooked fare—into go-to lunch and dinner spots for Mumbai residents of every stripe.

“A good thali works nicely for a quick business lunch or a meal with family,” says Raj Singh, the creative director of a large advertising agency who has been a Panchavati regular for the past decade. “It’s like an eat-all-you- can buffet, but with pleasant people serving you, urging you to eat as much as you can.” It’s this gentle prodding, the personal touch by the servers that customers say they find most endearing about thali culture.

Another reason for Panchavati’s success lies in the quality of the ingredients its chefs use. While it has become trendy for restaurants to tout the local sourcing of their ingredients, this is the real deal. The Chandaks own wheatfields in a bordering state, as well as flour mills near Mumbai, where they process the grain. They grow all the spices used in the kitchen. But, unlike the Michelin-starred restaurants on the gastronomy circuit that emphasize terroir and the sanctity of their local produce, Panchavati’s procurement methods are not marketed aggressively. Using the highest-quality ingredients is just part of carrying on the family tradition. And besides, true thali connoisseurs are most interested in the finished product.

“There are plenty of reasons why I come back here almost every week,” says Singh, while a waiter serves him yet another helping of dal. “But the most important one is that the food always tastes amazing.”

Mumbai-based writer C.J. KURRIEN wishes that all his food was served to him on a silver platter.

TYPICAL WEEKEND MENU AT PANCHAVATI GAURAV:

SWEET

Puran poli: fried flatbread; mixed fruit salad

SAVORIES

Methi tikki: potato and fenugreek patties; deep-fried lentil balls

VEGETABLES AND CURRIES

Vatana: sauteed cabbage with peas; baingan ki bhaji: eggplant with pepper sauce; rassa aloo: potatoes in spiced gravy; matki ki ussal: curry moth beans

LENTILS

Gujarati dal: mild yellow curry; gujarati kadi: sweet and sour yogurt curry

ROTIS AND RICE

Round flat wheat bread; millet bread; steamed basmati rice; spiced vegetable rice

CONDIMENTS

Mango pickle (spicy); lime pickle (sweet and tart); papad: thin cracker; spicy green pepper paste; tamarind sauce; garlic chutney; fried peppers; fresh lime slices

PRICE

250 rupees, or about five dollars