The World’s 20 Best Restaurants 2050: DA’ SOLO – Italian Chef Giuseppe Ciabolongo’s remote one-seat restaurant, nestled away in the hills of the Marché, has the distinction of being this year’s top restaurant. Reservations must be made ten years in advance since Da’ Solo only serves a single diner per night—a solitary feast which often lasts over fifteen hours. Eager gastrophiles must be patient since the restaurant is only open four days a year, on the Summer and Winter Solstice and the Vernal and Autumnal Equinox.
Michelin: A Friendship That Went Sour: “Hi Rogelio (Rogelio Enriquez), my wife and I are going to spend five days in Asturias. Any restaurant we should not miss?” It does not have to be Asturias, of course. Substitute Loire Valley, San Francisco, Galicia, Puglia, Piemonte and what not. My wife and I always rely on our trusted friends, such as Rogelio; on the chefs of restaurants we value; on the native and discerning palates whom we meet accidentally while dining in favorite restaurants; and on our own intuition. The restaurants that we pick hardly coincide with those highlighted in the guide. In fact, we are often disappointed when we dine at three star restaurants because it is often the case that no single dish stands out. Moreover, the cuisine seems to follow a formula proven to be effective with Michelin inspectors, but lacking in character.This was not always the case: I started serious dining out in 1986 when I had a fellowship to study for a year in France and lunch menus in three star restaurants were affordable.
UK’s billions of takeaway cups could each take ’30 years’ to break down: Coffee-addicted Britain is leaving a mountain of toxic waste for the next generation as scientists warn it could take decades for paper cups from Starbucks, Pret a Manger and other chains to decompose. The environmental cost of the coffee-to-go culture has been highlighted amid growing concerns that much of the public wrongly believe the cups are recycled, when in fact they are dumped in the green bin in the office or the recycling bin on the street.
5 Foods That Owe Their Existence to Dan Barber’s Army of Agriculturalists: Farm-to-table cooking is no longer just a trend — at any restaurant worth its salt, it’s an assumption. This is thanks, in part, to Dan Barber, the chef/co-owner of Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills, New York. But for Barber, this process starts even earlier than sourcing locally grown ingredients — at the genetic level. “It’s just another way of looking at a recipe,” he says.
How Bibendum Finally Plans to Win a Michelin Star: Claude Bosi, the French-born chef who won two Michelin stars at Hibiscus in London, is moving into one of the city’s most famous restaurant buildings, Michelin House. The flamboyant Art Nouveau landmark in South Kensington was originally commissioned by Michelin Tyre Co. as its British headquarters in 1909. It became home to Terence Conran’s Bibendum restaurant after the French company moved out in 1985.
The exotic history of British fish and chips: Each afternoon at 1.45 last week, Radio 4 gave tips for anyone thinking of opening a chippie. This might seem a strange ambition to encourage on our most middle-class radio station, but as we learn from a book to be published later this month, Fish and Chips: A History by Panikos Panayi, supplying fish suppers to the British people has always been a means of upward social mobility. Although the French allegedly still call the British les rosbifs, for centuries the emblematic dish of the United Kingdom has been the nutritionally unbalanced, deep-fried meal of fish and chips. Yet there’s something historically weird about the link between our chief takeaway delicacy and Britishness.
Wine shipping costs – ask Decanter: I know that tax is a large part of the cost of wine, but what about shipping? Surely it must be more expensive to ship wine from Australia than from, say, Italy? Or are the quantities so enormous that shipping costs are negligible? There are several factors that influence final shipping costs. It is not a simple matter of distance: for us, the cost of shipping a case from Chile is exactly the same as shipping from Chablis. This is partly because Chilean wine travels by container loads (volume is important) and by water (ships use significantly less fuel per bottle), so the mileage difference is effectively cancelled out.
Bring on the Natural Wines: When people describe their first encounters with natural wine, it can sound like a conversion experience — or like the euphoria of turning a corner and bumping into a wildly beautiful stranger. For the New York wine director Justin Chearno, what followed when he first dipped into a Lapierre Morgon, an unfiltered red, was an internal shift that changed the way he experienced his favorite drink. From then on, he says, natural wine “became my obsession.”
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