Paris is a place with many destinations: food, fashion, glamour, hotels, places, restaurants and so on.
My memories from Paris will always be not from a place but from a state of mind.
French start very young to learn how to enjoy all the best in life – specially food.
You not been in Paris if you didn’t stop at Rue Cler.
There you can taste and buy everything to turn your lunch or dinner in a banquet.
Buy a ticket, go to Paris and tell me later…..
By Jonathan Gold
December 27, 2009
If you are to believe the glossy food magazines, the American restaurant of the year is Bazaar, an overdecorated Beverly Hills hotel restaurant that blends avant-garde Spanish cooking, gaudy French design and old-fashioned American showmanship into a kind-of Cirque du Soleil of food — a place where it is nearly impossible to figure out where the dining room ends and the gift shop begins.
Bazaar is a place where olives are liquid and puffs of cotton candy have fattened goose liver at their core; it is a screaming, postmodern critique of an overheated consumer moment that at the moment seems very far away.
Yes, the economy tanked. But there have been more high-profile Los Angeles restaurant openings in the last year or so than we saw in the previous five. There’s Rivera, featuring the modern Mexican cuisine of John Sedlar; the opulent Italian restaurant Drago Centro; the zillion-dollar bistro Bouchon in Beverly Hills; the mammoth Bottega Louie in the former Brooks Brothers store downtown; and the dozen-odd restaurants in the L.A. Live complex, among others. Tony cocktail bars like Tar Pit, Copa d’Oro, the Roger Room and the Varnish now seem so well-integrated into the fabric of the city that it is hard to remember that none of them existed a year ago.
Culinary trends are fine. I’m as ready as the next food writer to proclaim pig’s trotter the new pork belly, or to predict the ascendance of vadouvan, fingerling potatoes and violet liqueur. But in 2009, something truly new was going on that may fundamentally change the way we look at restaurants. But you had to look for it.
It could be found in a barren parking lot in Rosemead, where 600 people shivered in the cold, glancing at their iPhones and awaiting the arrival of a food truck bearing Korean tacos and kimchi quesadillas. Kogi, whose chef came to the universe of food trucks after years leading the kitchens at the Beverly Hilton, broadcasts its location on Twitter, causing immense crowds to materialize in otherwise deserted locations, inspiring dozens of knockoff trucks.
It could be found at a recent gathering of four dozen strangers in a loft for the one-time appearance of an underground vegan chef. And at the Culver City art gallery that became the white-hot center of haute cuisine for a couple of weeks when Ludovic Lefebvre, a protege of three-star French chefs Pierre Gagnaire and Alain Passard, and former chef at Bastide and l’Orangerie, opened Ludobites as a pop-up restaurant, also publicized on Twitter. Lefevbre’s dishes include foie gras beignets, sashimi with sushi-rice ice cream and cod smeared with a complex mole sauce he was taught to make by a food blogger’s mom.
An Eastside gathering of street vendors, forced from their spot by the complaints of nearby brick-and-mortar businesses, scattered all over Boyle Heights. But they’re still findable. When you check the Twitter feeds, you learn not only what chalupa masters will be where on a Thursday night, but what kind of tamales might be on the menu and whether they are serving their delicious walnut atole. They’re not just tacos — they’re tacos that tweet. In the next few years, the scrawny kid hunched over his Android may become as important to the success of a restaurant as the chef.
While nobody was paying attention, food quietly assumed the place in youth culture that used to be occupied by rock ‘n’ roll — individual, fierce and intensely political, communal yet congenial to aesthetic extremes: embracing veganism or learning to butcher a cow; eating tofu or head cheese, bean sprouts or pigs’ ears. I could happily go the rest of my life without hearing about another celebrity potato farmer or rock-star butcher, about 15-year-old cheddar or 150-year-old Madeira. And I am not alone.
Jonathan Gold is the Pulitzer Prize-winning food writer for the LA Weekly.
ON a July afternoon in the Chilean port city of Valparaíso, in the middle of the South American winter, I sat in the sunlit dining room at La Concepción, drinking a tart-sweet pisco sour and cutting into a perfectly seared and salted piece of grouper.
A meal this good was hard to come by when I first visited Valparaíso, just seven years earlier. Back then, Porteños, as residents are called, made great snacks: fried empanadas stuffed with shrimp and cheese, for example, or the glorious bar dish known as chorrillana, a rock-heavy, grease-slick mess of French fries, sautéed onions, chopped meat and fried egg.
But sit-down meals usually meant stiff service and overcooked meat. I recall smuggling green hot sauce into restaurants to covertly enliven whatever brown dish appeared before me.
Those hot sauce days are over. Unesco made Valparaíso’s historic quarter a World Heritage Site in 2003, and the dining scene has since evolved to match the romantic allure of the city, with its battered cobblestones and crumbling 19th-century mansions.
In its storied days before the construction of the Panama Canal, Valparaíso attracted wealthy European immigrants as the principal port of call for ships rounding Cape Horn. Much later, in the 1950s and ’60s, its decadent night life was legendary. Now Valparaíso, on Chile’s central coast, is becoming fashionable again, attracting Chilean visitors from the nearby capital of Santiago, as well as foreign travelers and expatriates.
During the past six years, about 40 new restaurants have opened in the traveler-friendly hill neighborhoods of Cerro Concepción and Cerro Alegre, according to Carlos Reyes Medel, a Chilean food critic and author of a dining guidebook to the city, “Valparaíso a la Mesa.” Entrepreneurs are lovingly restoring hundred-year-old homes and giving them new life as reasonably priced restaurants and bars, a surge of activity that Mr. Reyes Medel called “a small culinary revolution.”
So this July, determined to experience the city’s changes, I made a circuit of some of the hill neighborhoods’ best restaurants, basing my destinations on Chilean newspaper and magazine articles, Internet food forums and Mr. Reyes Medel’s advice.
My tasting spree — spread over 48 hours and easily accomplished on foot — began with a crisp glass of viognier (1,600 Chilean pesos, about $2.90 at 557 pesos to the dollar) atPoblenou, a tiny, candle-lit spot focusing on Spanish-style tapas, Chilean wine and cocktails. The husband-and-wife owners, Rodrigo Asencio, an architect, and Anke Gerris, who is Dutch, opened the business six years ago on a dark and lonely street.
“Everyone said, ‘No one is going to come here,’ ” Ms. Gerris recalled.
The street is still dark, but these days she sometimes has to turn customers away. It’s easy to see why: wood furniture made by Mr. Asencio, and a fireplace, invite lingering.
But I had reservations at Pasta e Vino, which, like Poblenou, opened in 2003 as a sort of culinary pioneer. It has generated national acclaim ever since.
I found it packed and noisy, even on a dreary winter Thursday, forcing a threesome of young waiters to rush about with baskets of house-made bread. The warehouse-chic dining room — high ceilings, white walls, poured concrete — is in what used to be a dirt-floored corner store.
The owners, Verónica Alfageme, a Chilean raised in the Canary Islands, and Paolo Ercole, an Italian, keep the food as straightforward as the décor. The long menu consists almost entirely of house-made pastas, which on my visit included squid-ink pappardelle tossed with shellfish and white wine, beet gnocchi with butter and herbs, spaghetti carbonara and a decadent duck ravioli in a port-and-prune cream sauce. The priciest entree, a gnocchi topped with black caviar, went for 9,500 pesos.
A delightfully earthy special of artichoke ravioli reflected Ms. Alfageme’s emphasis on cooking with whatever is fresh and seasonal.
“It is entirely what it is,” she told me. “Super, super pure.”
The next morning my search was for pure caffeine. I headed to Café Vinilo, which channels Valparaíso’s bohemian, Old World vibe with frothy cappuccinos, cracked tiles and a communal marble dining counter, a butcher block salvaged from the building’s former life as a carnicería. At night, a young crowd comes for wine and Chilean-influenced bistro fare, and since vinilo means vinyl, the staff plays scratchy old jazz records — actual records — until closing at 2 a.m.
From Café Vinilo, it was on to lunch at La Concepción, opened in late 2005 by an American couple, Jude and Robert Gerrity. They try to use local products, including the meat in the excellent walnut-crusted ostrich (9,800 pesos). The restaurant is in a 19th-century house, and the Gerritys have placed tables in the back garden, which has prime views of container ships far below in Valparaíso’s working port.
Full article: http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/travel/08journeys.html
