Hurry Down Sunshine
“On July 5, 1996, my daughter was struck mad,” Greenberg writes at the start of a remarkable memoir. Sally, fifteen years old, after weeks of reading poetry and scribbling with mounting fervor, whirls...
View ArticleNizza
Nizza is the Italian name for Nice, a city that was under Italian control for much of its history—Garibaldi was a nizzardo and was very annoyed when his home town was ceded to France, in 1860. Its...
View ArticleRed State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State
Attempting to explain “why Americans vote the way they do,” Gelman and a group of fellow political scientists crunch numbers and draw graphs, arriving at a picture that refutes the influential one...
View ArticleThe Snowball
This authorized biography of Warren Buffett, based on thousands of hours of interviews, appears just a week after Buffett took a decisive role in the current financial crisis, investing some five...
View ArticleYerba Buena
The term yerba buena refers to a number of different types of mint—exactly which depends on where in the Americas you are—and seems an apt name for a pan-Latin restaurant. Yerba Buena, which opened...
View ArticleThe Exchange: Fuchsia Dunlop
This week in the magazine, Fuchsia Dunlop, who is the author of three books about Chinese food, including, most recently, “Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China,”...
View ArticleIrving Mill
Lest anyone suppose Irving Mill to be named after some forgotten New York intellectual of the Alfred Kazin era, there is a huge millstone, converted into a table, near the front of the restaurant....
View ArticleThe Art Instinct
Dutton, an aesthetic philosopher best known as the curator of the Web site Arts & Letters Daily, sets out to do for art what Steven Pinker and others have done for psychology, language, and...
View ArticleThe John Dory
It’s been five years since April Bloomfield, a young British chef, introduced New York to the hearty, calorific joys of English gastropub food, with the Spotted Pig, in the West Village. Now comes a...
View ArticleSonata Mulattica
Dove’s verse sequence re-creates the life of the biracial violinist George Bridgetower, best remembered for being the first performer, and the initial dedicatee, of Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata....
View ArticleDelicatessen
As soon as the government has finished with the banks, a stress test for restaurants might be in order, and the ones in east SoHo and on the Lower East Side, which have burgeoned roughly in step with...
View ArticleBrooklyn
Tóibín’s brief novel, following his bravura rendering of the life of Henry James in “The Master,” seems modest at first. A diligent young woman with few opportunities in nineteen-fifties Ireland is...
View ArticleZeitoun
Through the story of one man’s experience after Hurricane Katrina, Eggers draws an indelible picture of Bush-era crisis management. Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a successful Syrian-born painting contractor,...
View ArticleGus and Gabriel
No more gastropubs! Originating in England, the gastropub heralded the arrival of edible, even sophisticated cuisine in drinking establishments whose culinary aspirations had previously risen no higher...
View ArticleEating
This convivial memoir by a distinguished publisher charts a lifetime of cooking and consumption, from childhood efforts to conceal from a grandmother the mediocrity of her culinary efforts to the...
View ArticleThe Humbling
Roth’s slender thirtieth novel is about a famous stage actor in his sixties who has lost his ability to act. “Shorn of his skills, alone, workless, and in persistent pain,” he confines himself to his...
View ArticlePrime Meats
A few months back, an earnest young man in Brooklyn explained how to eat a sausage. Bavarians, apparently, are brought their Weisswurst in a bowl of its cooking water; they cut it longitudinally,...
View ArticleSushi Uo
It takes guts to open a serious sushi restaurant in a bad economy, all the more so if you’re not Japanese and are only twenty-three years old. But David Bouhadana, who grew up in Florida, of French and...
View ArticleCorsino
When you stand at the bar at Corsino waiting for a table to open up, you wonder why restaurants ever fail. Yes, it can be a tough business, but looking around at the chattering throng of youngish,...
View ArticleEpistolary Mystery
The first of five hundred and twenty-six (and counting) anonymous postcards that have brought bafflement, diversion, and, finally, pleasure to the British actor Simon Jones arrived at his apartment on...
View ArticlePies ’N’ Thighs
The first Pies ’n’ Thighs opened in the spring of 2006, a tiny kitchen in the back of a dive bar on Kent Street that produced no-frills barbecue for a scattering of picnic tables almost directly under...
View ArticleMá PêChe
The name Momofuku—as in David Chang’s epochal East Village restaurant—means “lucky peach” in Japanese. And Má Pêche means not “my peach” in French, as you might suppose, but “mother peach” in...
View ArticleA Secret Galsworthy Romance?
The book editor Larry Ashmead died last week. Years ago I was at a lunch to launch a book that Ashmead was publishing; I think it was “Pilgrim” by the late Timothy Findley. I didn’t know Ashmead and...
View ArticleRabbit in the Moon
On an unpromising stretch of Eighth Street lined with shoe stores and smoke shops, there is an ancient baronial manse. Or, rather, there is a two-story storefront that someone has covered in chunky...
View ArticleMillesime
It’s not easy to be a hotel restaurant. Too adventurous and you drive away the hotel guests; too predictable and you become a mere canteen for people who can’t be bothered to go out. Laurent Manrique’s...
View ArticleAnd Mubarak Says…
Cartoon: Saul Steinberg.See the rest of the story at newyorker.comRelated:Daily Cartoon: Friday, January 22ndDaily Cartoon: Thursday, January 21stDaily Cartoon: Wednesday, January 20th
View ArticleRed Rooster Harlem
For a while, it seemed that Marcus Samuelsson—the Ethiopian-Swedish chef who became famous at Aquavit when he was only twenty-four—was too busy with TV shows, charitable work, and whipping up Obama’s...
View ArticleDon’t Let’s Watch the Royal Wedding
Thirty years ago, my primary school, in Oxford, recorded a song for the Royal Wedding. As I recall it, large numbers of other British primary schools were doing the same, though a cursory search of...
View ArticleTen Reasons I Watched the Wedding (After I Swore I Wouldn’t)
I swore I wouldn’t, but here’s what happened. I found myself awake very early for no reason—one of those mornings that are probably God’s way of telling you you’re wasting your life—and thought I...
View ArticleAi Fiori
What is Setai? A kind of satay? A kind of settee? Actually, it’s a hotel brand whose lavish, sleekly bland properties are perhaps a dastardly plot to make the Mandarin Oriental look quirky. Now a Setai...
View ArticleBrushstroke
At David Bouley’s latest Tribeca venture, he does no cooking at all, but instead is a kind of non-executive producer for a Japanese restaurant devoted to kaiseki, which consists of a succession of tiny...
View ArticleMonument Lane
Lined with ho-hum cafés, shops, and remnants of St. Vincent’s hospital, Greenwich Avenue always seems more dishevelled than the ultra-gentrified precincts to its west. But before the Revolutionary War,...
View ArticleLa Mar Cebichería Peruana
Gastón Acurio is Peru’s most famous chef, with a TV show, some two dozen cookbooks, and more than thirty restaurants across the globe. This one, his first in New York, sets out to educate the local...
View ArticleRouge Et Blanc
The décor at this seductive French-Vietnamese bistro—antique Chinese screen panels, red wooden chairs, rattan-matted walls, bas-reliefs of pagodas—conjures up a bordello somewhere in interwar...
View ArticleLittleneck
A clam shack by the Gowanus Canal? It sounds like the setup for a joke, as God only knows what freakish mollusks lurk in that fetid post-industrial waterway. Never fear: Littleneck sources its seafood...
View ArticleThe Clearest Voice: Remembering Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
“We singers die two deaths: the death of the voice, then the death of the body.” I’m quoting from memory, but these words, from the documentary “Autumn Journey,” about the German baritone Dietrich...
View ArticleThe August Tradition of Mocking German Lieder
David Denby, in his fine eulogy of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, mentions the difficulty he has relating to the lied repertoire, thanks to “all the plangent aestheticism” of the German Romantic poetry on...
View ArticleJoanne Trattoria
Joanne Trattoria is a simple mom-and-pop outfit, but the mom and pop in question are Joseph and Cynthia Germanotta, the parents of Lady Gaga. The music idol is not involved in the restaurant, but it...
View ArticleThe Escape Artist
On February 22, 1942, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig and his second wife went to the bedroom of a rented house in Petrópolis, Brazil. They lay down—she in a kimono, he in a shirt and tie—after taking...
View ArticleHospoda
Czechs like a nice big head on their beer, and as soon as you sit down at Hospoda, in the Bohemian National Hall, you are welcomed with a small glass of beer that is almost all head. The bubbles of...
View ArticleThe End of Your Life Book Club
After the author’s mother was given a diagnosis of cancer, in 2007, a lifelong habit of discussing books acquired a new impetus. Forming a book club of two members, they read the same books till her...
View ArticleOotoya
To the Westerner, it can seem as if there are two contrary Japans—one a slow, peaceful land of Shinto shrines and tea ceremonies, the other a jangling zone of automation, neon signs, and bullet trains...
View ArticleListening to Lupu
Tonight, there’s a concert I have been looking forward to attending for almost a year, ever since it was announced: a Radu Lupu recital at Carnegie Hall. If you live in New York, you’re spoiled for...
View ArticleAska
It is uncertain when the Nordic lands first became a source of trendiness. Early chroniclers mention one Erik Koolssen, who raided the Irish coast in the ninth century, subjecting the monastic...
View ArticleLe Philosophe
French restaurants in New York tend to put on French airs—whether on the model of the late, lamented Lutèce (hushed decorum, intimidating staff) or that of Balthazar and its countless imitators (red...
View ArticleBriefly Noted
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, by Helen Fielding (Knopf). In the weeks leading up to this book’s publication, fans were treated to some distressing revelations: Mark Darcy has been killed by a land...
View ArticleMy Liszt Obsession
It’s not every year that Franz Liszt’s birthday—he was born October 22, 1811—coincides with the announcement of a new iPad. What better opportunity to look at a recent iPad app, The Liszt Sonata? And,...
View ArticleBriefly Noted
Double Down, by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann (Penguin Press). “I am wired in a different way than this event requires,” Barack Obama said, according to the authors, as he prepared for his second...
View ArticleGordimer and Me
In 2008, a publisher asked me to edit a collection of nonfiction by Nadine Gordimer, who died this week at the age of ninety. There had been a couple of short selections before, but the idea behind the...
View ArticleHarbour
Moored in the southwest corner of SoHo, this new seafood restaurant is a maritime fantasy, with porthole windows, wood-lined interiors, and white leather banquettes evoking the interior of a yacht or a...
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