April 25, 2006

Calling all Chefs & FOH Managers! Important & informative event!

The American Institute of Wine & Food

Tags:   aiwf, culinary professionals, human resources, law

April 25, 2006

Street Report – Food and Film in New York

Street Report – Food and Film in New York

One of the great things about New York is that there is always something interesting happening somewhere – we just have to keep our eyes open and actually read the emails that we get. Or, we just have to read. There’s nothing worse than someone asking you to tell them what you put in email because they didn’t have time to read it. But that’s a different rant. Everyday, there are tons of interesting goings on all over town, most of which fly under the radar of major publications. Yet, they are often just as interesting.

Case in point: Yesterday I got a message from a friend inviting me a screening of his new short film, Raw Rorret . The screening was to take place at Pão, a Portuguese restaurant on Spring at Greenwich. Wine was on the house.I did not miss that detail.

I arrived at 9:30 to find the place buzzing with the sound of Portuguese, which for the untrained ear sounds nothing like its Latin cousins Spanish, Italian and French. But being a Lusophile (a lover of the Luso – what the indigenous Portuguese were once called), I could hear the strains of mainland Portuguese, Azorian and Brazilian. What a delight!

I ordered some codfish cakes right away, and a glass of vinho verde, a special white wine from Minho in northern Portugal. When a good vinho verde is on hand, try it. It exists somewhere between a Spanish cava and a Chardonnay, although just where is part of its mystery. But it pairs well with Portuguese seafood dishes, as well as spicier Brazilian cuisine. I settled in and watched the goings on.

A crowd of young and hip Portuguese guys pushed in through the door and swarmed the filmmaker, Miguel da Silva, who was working the room like a pro, pouring wine here and answering questions there. I knew it would take a while to get to the screening, so I ordered some pan seared scallops with tomato compote – a wonderful butter- tender dish perfectly in balance with itself and with the vinho verde. Often, when one orders scallops, one gets two or three. My plate had four lovely specimens, perfectly seared and arranged around the compote with a few discreet dollops of a vinaigrette-based salsa. This dish also paired well with the male pulchritude gracing the dining room. Cameras began to flash as patrons struggled with the intricacies of the new digital world. Sometimes, a gadget can be very trying.

One of the endearing qualities of the Portuguese is that they don’t rush into things – they are simply not in a hurry. Everyone had time to say hello and make the
appropriate introductions. This is a something that money can’t buy.

I had a few moments to chat with Miguel, just as my stewed lamb shanks arrived in their clay pot.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“A little nervous,” he replied.“I’ve seen
this film so many times that I can’t talk about it anymore. It is what it is.”

“I know,” I answered, not really knowing, since I have never made a film, but I have written a dissertation, so I know what it is to be supersaturated with something. “Well, congratulations.And thanks for inviting me.”

“Thanks for coming out to support me,” he said.“More wine?”

“Yes, thanks.”

Finishing a project, no matter how great or how small is always such a satisfying feeling, and while we might question ourselves throughout the process and indeed well after it finished, there is some satisfaction in the completion itself. The being and the non-being of the creation – oops!I don’t want to get too existential here.

Finally, the film screening began. By this time, I had moved on to a nice old tawny port. As the film began to roll, everyone in the crowd read out loud “Final Cut Pro”, leading me to believe that there were several covert filmmakers in the room. Maybe in fact I was trapped in a film of the trauma of a film screening. But no, that was just the port talking.

Film Review: The film begins with a montage of images of a soon-to-be martyr who reads from the Old Testament.Right away I realize that this short film deals with uncomfortable topics.The color red is everywhere.A character seemingly paints his own visceral emotions, maybe with his own blood.A Rambo-esque character collapses;a would-be Harrison Ford-like character plots revenge from a high rise. All the while, we see ourselves as the man on the screen, pushing the snooze alarm and falling back to sleep, as the heartbeat of time brings us round and round again to another nightmare. It is the theater of the absurd for the modern age of terror.

This experimental film deals with a collective and unspoken response to the tragedies of the recent past in a way that is not sentimental, jingoistic or apologetic. The events, without being shown, are understood, and they provide the absurd background into which the characters have all been placed. For some of us, the absurd is the only point of view from which we can reflect upon what we saw, felt and tasted on that tragic day.

Experimental films often aim to break out of convention and to make us uncomfortable, or to have a sort of time-delay effect on our psyche. The snooze alarm made me think how we sometimes postpone the important things, those issues that are the most terrifying to deal with.On the micro scale, we wait and wait to get to our taxes; on the macro scale, we wait and wait to deal with an issue until it becomes a catastrophe.

Raw Rorret – an experimental short film

Written,Produced and Directed by: Miguel da Silva

Music by: Joel Ananias

Specialthanksto: Andrea Braganolo, Nuno Garcia, Bruno de Almeida, Marco Alves, Mario Tri idade.

Tags:   codfish, film, miguel da silva, pao, scallops, terror, war

April 19, 2006

Brunch Season in New York - The Where & What of Brunching

Tags:   brunch, fat ass, jellyfish, williamsburg

April 10, 2006

Food & Fiction - A Great Event

Food & Fiction – A Great Event

Last Wednesday, four New York authors and an assembly of students, food enthusiasts, the curious and the inspired met for a panel discussion of food and fiction, at the College of Technology in Brooklyn. The readings and topics discussed could not have been more interesting.

Kate Christensen read from her novel, The Epicure’s Lament , the story of a man whose relationship with food defines him in life and possibly death. I don’t want to spoil the novel for those who seek it out (and I do highly recommend it for those out there who love food and fiction, and who need a beach read). But I will say that those who love MFK Fisher will certainly love Christensen’s writing, especially the passages that connect the main character, Hugo Whittier, to the food he is preparing, or thinking about preparing. As a novelist, her prose has been compared to that of Nabokov,no light praise. It was a feast for the ears.

Paulette Licitra, author, chef and editor of Alimentum: The Literature of Food, read from a previously published, longer piece that again connected food and passion, in this case, the denial of food as part of the
denial of passion and therefore sin. In our fat/thin, excess/deprivation world, Licitra’s story took us back into the time when desire was a despicable state, and food was often to be blamed.

Tim Stark, farmer & author, read from his creative non-fiction essay recounting how he became NYC’s most famous purveyor of sublimely beautiful heirloom tomatoes. Not only are his tomatoes the best in town (really) , his essay was just as good as his tomatoes, his prose just as sublime. He is a great writer.

Fred Kaufmann, CUNY Professor of English and author of the upcoming non-fiction tome A Short History of the American Stomach, (due out in stores in May 2007) threw a wrench into the clockworks as he read from the chapter ‘Puritan Puke’. An avowed anti- foodie, Kaufmann took us into the digestive track of the American psyche, all the way to our Puritan roots. Dissecting the food we eat, don’t eat and often purge, he tied together the long history of “the American bounty” and how Americans from the time of the Puritans until the present day relate and consume that bounty.

A lively discussion ensued – what is it that we expect from
food? Why do we seemingly worship it and hate it at the same time? When is too much too much? Why do we eat the foods we eat? What is future of food? Who makes the food? Why are we so fat in America?

Kaufmann, who ties many of our current food habits, including gorging and purging, to the Puritan past was blunt. Like it or not, we all have a little Puritan in us. Body fat, once a sign of the sin of gluttony, is now a sign of poverty – yet both retain the notion that the individual is morally responsible for his/her condition. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, purge the devil and go on a diet.

Licitra countered that some of us enjoy food the way that others enjoy art and music, an idea that permeates her work. But the fact is that food is essential for living, and the way we write about it reflects how we think about it.

For Christensen, as part of her character’s ties to life, food is the staff of life, albeit a sometimes very dressed-up staff. All the writers agreed that food is part of the mystery of life and reflects our connection to something beyond life, even if we are not always aware of how we react to it.

For Stark, food is real and tactile and alive; after all, he grows it from seed, nurtures it, harvests it, transports it and then sells it – an ancient occupation that seems alarmingly modern when one is in the local grocery store looking at pink tomatoes and wondering why they are not red.

While many in the audience seemed comfortable about their relationships to the food they eat, for Kaufmann food remains a conundrum, a puzzling aspect of human social behavior that we in America use to telegraph our beliefs and our often schizophrenic social mores. And that is precisely why authors often turn to food as a metaphor for the time, as part of the rich tapestry of life, as though longing for a lost love or regretting a current one. Food evokes primal passions in all of us.

A Long History of Satire: Writers from the past, such as Petronius, used food to construct social satires; who can forget the descriptions of the food at an excessive Roman banquet, with its imported figs and stuffed dormice. Modern satires abound; in the animated film The Triplets of Belleville, the body types seen lolling and undulating about the metropolis are certainly a blunt commentary on what is now an acceptable body image in the US, those obese body types that are shocking to almost everyone else in the world. How did the Puritans get so fat, and how have writers dealt it over time?

As someone who comments constantly on the food habits of New Yorkers, I had to ask myself what is my relationship to food? I am obsessed . But why?Part of it stems from having once suffered from exposure severe enough to almost kill me, during which time I fantasized about tater tots and tacos and lemonade and roast chicken and chili and myriad other dishes. But part of it comes from the unnecessarily large family I am part of, which assembled always around the stove or the grill or the campfire and cooked food as an activity. We had gardens and fruit trees and sometimes a goat.Collecting and preparing the food were part of the process. We never ate pre- packaged snack food, unless we were at someone else’s house. That is, not until I was in High School and my parents, busy with work and now flush with more disposable income, began purchasing things in boxes and cans and cartons, items that we now know are filled with high fructose corn syrup, palm oil and sundry other nasty ingredients. I escaped unharmed, but my younger brother, who was practically raised on empty calories, ballooned one summer into a shape never before seen in out family. My grandmother put him on a “Mediterranean diet”, grilled meat, salads and water – no soda, no snack cakes, no French
fries.He regained normal size, but some of his friends weren’t so lucky.

The evening at the College of Technology taught us all that our food choices are complex and emotional and are determined by a variety of factors. Fiction writers use this to evoke in the reader deep, primal emotions. And we should all read more.Read, people!

Tags:   diets, fiction, fred kaufmann, high fructose corn syrup, kate chistensen, paulette licitra, stomach, tim stark

April 07, 2006

High Fructose Corn Syrup - What you need to know

Tags:   health risks, high fructose corn syrup, obesity, snack foods