In the first 50 years of this century men build fortunes to women spend in fashion.
Hearst, Vanderbilt, Bloomingdale, von Bismarck and so on dedicate great part of their lives building
america’s fashion catalog.
If you, by chance, are going to the big apple reserve some time to visit this exhibition.
unfortunately I can’t.
May 7–August 1, 2010
Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing, 4th Floor
Will Fashion’s Biggest Names Kiss the Runway Goodbye?
Soon you may not have to be an A-list celeb, department-store buyer or magazine editor to get a front-row seat at a fashion show. As the luxury and fashion industries continue to struggle with sagging retail sales and consumers’ diminishing interest in $2,000 It bags, designers are looking for alternative ways to show their wares. And more and more of them are turning to the Internet for a bigger audience and to shrink their overhead.
“The cost of a fashion show has become prohibitive,” says David Lauren, Polo Ralph Lauren’s marketing chief. “And because of the economy, fewer members of the press and buyers are making the trip to New York to see the show.” The result is that many designer-initiated brands — including the less-expensive lines, like Donna Karan’s DKNY, that are presented during New York Fashion Week — are rethinking the traditional fashion show. This fall the British designer Alexander McQueen made a splash by live-streaming his Paris show on his website. The season before, Louis Vuitton live-streamed its show on Facebook. And Lauren is the mastermind behind a new initiative to present his company’s brands in virtual fashion shows as opposed to have-to-be-there runway extravaganzas.
On Dec. 11, Rugby, Ralph Lauren’s collegiate brand, will show its holiday collection in an online fashion show that Lauren calls a mix between Harry Potter and Rock Band. Instead of walking down a real runway, the models will be walking on a treadmill in an office with a green screen behind them. Once the clip is produced, a virtual backdrop will be superimposed so that it will look as though the models are walking through New York City or a college campus, or jumping off flying books. The idea, says Lauren, is to bring a cinematic feeling to the brand’s advertising images. And instead of the company’s spending $1.5 million on an audience of approximately 700 members of the fashion press and department-store buyers, the virtual show will cost less than $50,000 to produce and is expected to attract more than 40 million page views.
One advantage to replacing the traditional biannual runway show — which features clothing that won’t be available in stores for another six months — is that designers can close the six-month gap between the show and the products’ availability. Ideally, consumers who watch a show online would then be able to click on a product they see and buy it immediately. “Now we can serve the industry and our customer simultaneously,” says Lauren, “which is critical to the survival of this industry.”
Historically, high-end fashion brands have not fared well when they’ve relied solely on virtual fashion shows. In 1998, Helmut Lang made a statement when he replaced one season’s runway showing with a video recording of a show that went up on his website and was distributed to editors on discs. But the reaction was lukewarm, and the following season Lang returned to the runway. More recently, brands like Viktor & Rolf and Yves Saint Laurent have experimented with online shows.
Next spring Polo Ralph Lauren is planning virtual shows for its less-expensive Lauren line as well as its children’s line. But the company isn’t ready to present its most prestigious line, the Ralph Lauren collection, online. “It’s certainly up for debate,” says Lauren. “It’s making us think differently about how we show our product and how we can show the Ralph Lauren collection.”
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1946717,00.html
LA GRENOUILLE turned 47 on Saturday, the last great French restaurant in New York. As on its birth night, there was snow outside the old stable at 3 East 52nd Street, and this made the soft, glittering light of the brocaded interior seem all the more inviting, the flowers towering out of the corners all the more welcoming, the sheer elegance of the place all the more arresting, important, rare.
The decline of great French cooking in New York has been a subject of discussion among the food-obsessed for decades, since at least the closing of Le Pavillon in 1971. In the last decade the talk has turned funereal, with the demise of Lutèce, La Caravelle, La Côte Basque, Lespinasse.
Brasserie cooking survives in New York, even flourishes under old mirrors and subway tile. We will always have steak frites.
But the quiet opulence of the traditional haute cuisine that was first brought to New York by Henri Soulé for the World’s Fair in 1939 and which flourished at his Pavillon and other restaurants in the years that followed? The whole marvelous Tom Wolfe scene of it: blanquette de veau and Beaumes-de-Venise, and ladies in finery beside gentlemen in soft cashmere jackets and rolled silk ties? C’est fini!
A series of recent meals at La Grenouille suggests that isn’t so. Not so long as Charles Masson, who has run it since 1975, greets his customers at the door, quiet and French and welcoming. Not so long as people can take a seat on a scarlet banquette at his restaurant, sit beneath a spray of flowers and eat sumptuous food out of Escoffier. It has been this way since his father, also named Charles, opened the restaurant in 1962 with his wife, Gisèle.
The crowd is amazing. There are city patricians, upscale travelers, romantics celebrating anniversaries, cads with escort-service friends, priests drinking Burgundy and spooning soup past their dog collars. There is jewelry everywhere, evidence of plastic surgery.
There are Thackeray characters come to life in a modern age. Some have spent too much time in the sun, doing nothing much more than turning the pages of a book. Others, eyes darting back and forth, examine the restaurant and chart customers as handicappers do horses at Belmont: Are the flowers less resplendent than in years past? Perhaps, ever so slightly, yes. Is the carpet threadbare? Not in the least, though those waiters may qualify! Is that a daughter or lover in the corner with that old lion? Oh, please. Have the Montrachet to start?
Back in the kitchen, the executive chef, Matthew Tropeano, spoons forcemeat pike into simmering broth. He naps the result with sauce and gives the plates to waiters who have known no other service. They present their customers a paragon of quenelles de brochet in the Lyonnaise style, a textbook example of classic French cuisine.
The dish is executed perfectly, a kind of beige-on-beige masterpiece devoid of irony or deconstructionist camp. (Only those without heart would call it gefilte fish.) It is delicious without being overwhelming, without being much more than ethereal pike, light as mist, buttery rice, a shellfish cream sauce with just a hint of nutmeg, a dab of American caviar. It is wonderful to eat at La Grenouille.
The revelations start early. A waiter brings an amuse-bouche, perhaps more perfunctorily than is currently normal in most New York restaurants. He neither issues a greeting nor attempts to make the action dramatic.
“This is a split pea soup,” he says. The offering is roughly four spoonfuls’ worth. Each is a cloud of magnificent flavor — salt that raises the vegetal from its depths, cream that makes it buoyant. It lingers on the tongue. The tiny dish expands the mind.
It also concentrates its focus. For there will be no lemon grass foam to confuse matters on the menu of La Grenouille this evening, no huckleberry confit or magret sliders.
This is a classic French restaurant (with classically high prices; a three-course prix fixe dinner starts at $95). Its strength is still, as Bryan Miller wrote in The New York Times almost 20 years ago, the excellence of its stocks, the basis of its magnificent sauces.
Full article: http://events.nytimes.com/2009/12/23/dining/reviews/23rest.html?ref=style
If classic white-glove haute cuisine is a kind of cult religion—and its devoted adherents will tell you that it is—then the aughts were marked by apostasies of the most extreme and horrifying kind. This was the decade that the grand old edifice of puffy soufflés, flutes of Champagne, and white-linen tabletops, revered by generations of New York food snobs, was turned upside down and stood, more or less permanently, on its head. Gourmet magazine did not make it out of the aughts alive. The lowly lobster roll replaced caviar as the dish of choice in seafood palaces around town, and pork belly became the new filet mignon. Venerable dining institutions (Lutèce, Le Côte Basque, La Caravelle) folded their tents one by one, and the shell-shocked Frenchmen who survived grimly opened breakfast bars and sausage joints, and instructed their lieutenants to concoct upscale cheeseburgers larded with fatback or foie gras.
But this was also the decade in which New York finally found its own voice as a restaurant town. In food, as in ballet or comic books or any creative art you can think of, the city has always been a bazaar, a place where ego-driven divas come from around the globe to show their wares, make their outsize reputations, then flame out in a blaze of glory. This ambition is a key to the diversity of the local restaurant scene, and one of the reasons we’re prone to all sorts of fashions and fads. It’s also why New York, unlike other great food cities, like San Francisco, or Tokyo, or Lyon, has never had its own particular fine-dining DNA. Before Henri Soulé opened his famous French restaurant Le Pavillon after the World’s Fair of 1939, the fancy cooks in town were German. Sirio Maccioni infused French haute cuisine with Italian conviviality during the seventies and eighties at Le Cirque, and during the nineties, global superstars like Nobu Matsuhisa and Jean-Georges Vongerichten brought their elaborate Asian-fusion tricks to town.
But the aughts haven’t been kind to carpetbagging superstar chefs with lots of tricky recipes up their sleeves. Long before the Great Recession cut expense accounts in half, food snobs were using chaste buzzwords like local, market-driven, and homegrown. Danny Meyer’s Union Square empire incorporated the Greenmarket gospel being preached by Alice Waters (among others) and gave it a polished Manhattan sheen. But Meyer’s restaurants are front-of-the-house operations, and during the aughts, the crackpots and kitchen slaves in the back of the house stormed the barricades and brought a new brand of informed, high-end comfort cooking to the masses. At Babbo, Mario Batali took the Led Zeppelin ballads his prep cooks chopped onions to all day and pumped them into his dining room. Then in 2001, Tom Colicchio opened Craft, in the Flatiron district, which took the elements cooks revere most (ingredients, sourcing, technique) and raised them to the level of haute cuisine.
Colicchio is a national TV personality now, and the restaurants he’s opened in the last few years have more in common with Vegas than New York. But if you had to pick the Le Pavillon of the aughts, it would be Craft, and its influential little spin-off Craftbar. “It’s as if they’ve rearranged the way traffic works,” someone said when I ate there for the first time, and it was true. The restaurant had the utilitarian, but polished, look of a soundstage or the showroom of an obsessively chaste cabinetmaker in Vermont. The culinary theme wasn’t faux French, or crypto-brasserie, or even fake Californian (à la Per Se); it was the purity of the ingredients themselves. There were 65 of them listed on Colicchio’s menu, and his original radical idea was to have no actual recipes at all. Some restaurants, like Blue Hill andSavoy, were peddling a similar bucolic vision of haute cuisine, but no one had articulated the cult of unpretentiousness in quite such an immaculately pretentious, big-city way.
So what does the prototypical New York restaurant for the aughts look like? Maybe the walls are covered with maple wood, or railroad ties, but not much else. The bar is designed for eating, not drinking, and chances are you can see the kitchen from your chair. The menus are spare, single-page documents, which emphasize top-of-the-line ingredients and the farms they come from. There’s plenty of elevated comfort food on the menu (pork products, offal, bowls of ramen), because that’s what former kitchen slaves (like David Chang, who once toiled at Craft) like to eat. The technique is still top-notch, and the influences, like at Chang’s justly hyped establishments or Wylie Dufresne’s WD-50 or Michael Psilakis’s great midtown Greek restaurant Anthos, come from around the world. But for the first time in this great dining city, the alchemy—the heat—emanating from the kitchen has a flavor all its own. It’s New York cooking, and you won’t find it anywhere else.
Read more: Adam Platt on the Invention of New York Cuisine – The 00′s Issue — New York Magazine http://nymag.com/arts/all/aughts/62491/#ixzz0Z4USuBTM
Are you eating an endangered species?
Bluefin tuna found in sushi at many New York restaurants
It’s enough to make you drop your chopsticks: A new study says some of the tuna sushi being served in New Yorkrestaurants comes from an endangered species.
.Scientists who have come up with a way to identify the different species of tuna have determined that bluefin tuna, an endangered fish, is regularly on the menu in New York eateries as well as inColorado, reports LiveScience.com.
“When you eat sushi, you can unknowingly get a critically endangered species on your plate,” Jacob Lowenstein, a grad student affiliated with Columbia University, told LiveScience.com.
“But with an increasingly popular technique, DNA barcoding, it is a simple process for researchers to see just what species are eaten at a sushi bar.”
All three species of bluefin (northern, southern and Pacific) are a lucrative catch – fishermen can sell a single fish for tens of thousands of dollars. As a result, over-fishing has reduced the world’s bluefin population to 10% of what it was, according to Livescience.com.
Lowenstein and his colleagues, whose study was published in the journal PLoS ONE, used DNA barcoding to identify the fishes labeled “tuna” in 30 New York City restaurants and one in Denver. The study found that nearly a third of the samples in the study were bluefin – and that almost half of the restaurants did not correctly label the kind of tuna being used in sushi.
“It is very difficult to get reliable information about the species you are eating, especially since the FDA‘s approved market name for all eight species of (tuna) is simply ‘tuna’,” said Lowenstein.
After seventeen years, Jean-Georges Vongerichten will close Vong on Saturday, Eater reports. Early on, New York critic Hal Rubenstein praised the Thai-French pioneer, writing that “no musical fantasy could convince you that dining can be something more wonderful than this.” But in 2006, Frank Bruni stripped Vong of two stars, saying that it wasn’t as appealing now that its formula is so familiar. “That foie gras and that soup lack a sense of surprise that, it turns out, were integral to the intensity of their appeal,” Bruni wrote. “Like the majority of the dishes at Vong, they’re entirely pleasant but not remotely compelling.” Vongerichten’s people tell Eater: “Our lease was up and we decided not to renew. We are currently looking at other venues in which to reopen Vong in the near future.” A change of venue wouldn’t be a bad idea — the old room did feel a bit stale and empty at times, and it’s easy to imagine Vongerichten finding cheerier digs for the $26 prix fixe lunch and the $38 dinners, which were fine-dining steals.
http://newyork.grubstreet.com/
With the cosmopolitan magic that had launched his father’s fabled Harry’s Bar in Venice a half-century earlier, restaurateur Arrigo Cipriani swooped in to conquer New York café society in 1985, then left his dashing son, Giuseppe, to build a citywide nightlife empire. Their departure, in 2008, was equally dramatic, amid tabloid-splashed charges of tax evasion, Mob ties, and political conspiracy. In London and Venice, the author gets the Ciprianis to talk for the first time about the wreckage of their American dream, and their plans for the rest of the ultra-civilized world.
Full article: http://www.vanityfair.com/
Michelin Picks Are In: Daniel Upgraded to Three
http://newyork.grubstreet.com/2009/10/michelin_picks_are_in_daniel_u.html
Michelin results are in, folks. We’ll dissect the selections later, but for now, here’s this year’s list. Of note, right off the bat: After its redesign, Daniel has been upgraded from two stars to three (Alan Richman had worried it wouldn’t be). A good day for Chef Boulud.
Three Michelin stars mean exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey. One always eats extremely well, sometimes superbly. Distinctive dishes are precisely executed, using superlative ingredients.
Daniel (N)
Jean Georges
Le Bernardin
Masa
Per Se
Two Michelin stars mean excellent cuisine, worth a detour. Skillfully and carefully crafted dishes of outstanding quality.
Alto (N)
Corton (N)
Gilt
Gordon Ramsay at The London
Momofuku Ko
Picholine
One Michelin star means a very good restaurant in its category. A place offering cuisine prepared to a consistently high standard.
Adour
Annisa
Anthos
Aureole
A Voce (N)
Blue Hill
Bouley (N)
Café Boulud
Casa Mono (N)
Convivio (N)
Del Posto
Dressler
eighty one
Eleven Madison Park (N)
Etats-Unis
Gotham Bar and Grill
Gramercy Tavern
Insieme
Jewel Bako
Kajitsu (N)
Kyo Ya
L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon
Marc Forgione (N)
Marea (N)
Minetta Tavern (N)
Modern (The)
Oceana
Perry Street
Peter Luger
Public
Rhong-Tiam (N)
River Café (N)
Rouge Tomate (N)
Saul
Seäsonal (N)
Shalizar (N)
SHO Shaun Hergatt (N)
Soto (N)
Spotted Pig
Sushi Azabu (N)
Sushi of Gari
Veritas
Wallsé
wd~50
2010 MICHELIN Guide New York City Bib Gourmand Restaurants
Amy Ruth’s
Ápizz
Aroma Kitchen & Wine Bar
Baci & Abbracci
Belleville
Beyoglu
Bianca
Bistro 33
Blue Ribbon Bakery
Blue Smoke
Boqueria
Brooklyn Star
Buttermilk Channel
Char No. 4
Cho Dang Gol
Congee Village
Crispo
Daisy May’s BBQ
Danny Brown Wine Bar & Kitchen
DBGB Kitchen & Bar
Dim Sum Go Go
Dinosaur Bar-B-Que
Dirt Candy
Ed’s Lobster Bar
Egg
Emporio
El Parador
Fatty Crab
Frankies 457 Spuntino
Franny’s
Garden Court Café
Gennaro
Golden Unicorn
Good Fork, The
Great N.Y. Noodletown Chinatown & Little Italy
Hunan House Queens
‘inoteca e Liquori Bar Gramercy, Flatiron & Union Square
J.G. Melon Upper East Side
Jackson Diner
Jaiya
Jean Claude
Kampuchea
Katz’s
Kif
L’Ecole
Les Halles
Lil’ Frankie’s Pizza
Lupa
Marlow & Sons
Mesa Coyoacan
Momofuku Noodle Bar
Momofuku Ssäm Bar
Motorino
Nyonya
Park Avenue Bistro
Persimmon Kimchi House
Phoenix Garden
Prime Meats
Prune
Quinto Quarto
Red Egg
Rye
S’Agapo
Saravanaas
Seo
Sette Enoteca & Cucina
Sevilla
Sip Sak
Snack
Soba-Ya
Supper
Surya
Szechuan Gourmet
Taco Taco
Thomas Beisl
Turkish Kitchen
202
Uva
Uvarara
Vida
World Tong
Yakitori Torys
Zabb Queens
Zarela
Zoma
