Saveur.com: Travels

A Feast For All

Wed, 23 May 2012 12:00:00 EDT

by John O'Connor
The heat is gathering, driving everyone indoors. It's midafternoon in Dakar, Senegal, and the foot traffic in this narrow, two-story home in the working-class Gibraltar neighborhood is seriously congested. More people arrive every minute-relatives, neighbors, an imam-and collapse in the dark, cool refuge of the living room. In a small kitchen off the courtyard, a handsome, tall woman named Khady Mbow puts the final touches on the soupoukandia, a fiery, gumbolike stew of okra, palm oil, Scotch bonnet peppers, and shellfish served over rice. She and her 30-year-old niece, Sini, have spent the morning pounding vegetables in a mortar and pestle, scraping the mash into a steaming pot and stirring relentlessly. The Gueyes own a food processor, but Khady-the family's matriarch and chief culinary architect-believes the mortar and pestle better preserve flavor. Everything is done by hand.

And so I wait, with the other male guests. In Senegal, the women cook while the men sit in thumb-twirling inertia. Finally, Khady and Sini ladle the soupoukandia into a pair of large metal bowls and trundle them inside. Twenty or so people, including four generations of Gueyes, gather around the bowls, spoons hovering. Then Khady gives the order to eat in French, the country's official language: "Mangez!" The spicy soupoukandia delivers a swift roundhouse kick, making our noses run and sweat bead up on our foreheads, but our spoons continue to shovel away, clinking off the bottom of the bowls. The dish-sweet and sharp and hot all at once-elicits a chorus of contented grunts and lip-smacking. It's difficult to fathom, here, now, that during my first stay in Senegal, it took me awhile to come around to the cooking.

Half a lifetime of Midwestern meat-and-potato standards had not prepared me for the rich, prodigiously spiced cosmos of Senegalese cooking.

Ten years ago, when I was in my late-20s, I lived briefly in Dakar, a city of a million people on an arrow-shaped peninsula pointing into the Atlantic. The contrast between this place of white sand and red-tile roofs and morning air perfumed by baking bread, and my own hometown of Kalamazoo, Michigan, couldn't have been starker. After a month of French classes, I moved on to Thi�s, a city about 30 miles inland, where my girlfriend at the time worked for an NGO. Things began inauspiciously, as I faced the reality that roughly 50 percent of Senegalese still face: unemployment. This new idleness required a period of acclimatization, as did the food. Half a lifetime of Midwestern meat-and-potato standards had not prepared me for the rich, prodigiously spiced cosmos of Senegalese cooking.

The country's cuisine reflects the influence of its west African neighbors and Morocco, to the north, as well as recent patterns of immigration-particularly, since the 1950s, from Vietnam. There are also the legacies of French and Portuguese colonialism, and a varied topography ranging from a seafood-laden coast to a semi-arid interior awash in millet and peanuts. Despite its recent election turmoil, Senegal has been an oasis of stability and democratic rule in west Africa since winning independence from the French in 1960. Still, hunger is endemic in rural areas, and the country continues to suffer from periodic food shortages. All these factors converge in the capital, Dakar. Here and throughout the country, meals tend to be single-dish affairs, with everyone grazing from one bowl or platter, using spoons or bare hands to scoop up meat and vegetables-always supplemented with rice or couscous. Sosa kaani, an incendiary sauce made from Scotch bonnet peppers, is on every table at every meal.

Credit: Penny De Los Santos

Although it's borderline sacrilegious to say so in Senegal, I never took to the national dish of thi�boudienne: rice, fish, and vegetables stewed in a chile-hot tomato base that gets its signature saline funk from two essential Senegalese flavorings, gejj (dried fermented fish) and y�et (dried fermented snails). The clamor of intense flavors and sensations-the concentrated sweetness of tomato paste, the searing heat of Scotch bonnet peppers, and that profoundly fishy bass note-was just too loud for me. I'll confess it wasn't the only one of Senegal's boldly flavored foods that my palate didn't prove equal to at the time. I did, however, come to love m�fe, a delicious peanut stew made with chicken, fish, or lamb. And I developed what my girlfriend considered a troubling obsession with a tangy sauce of cooked-down onions and peppers called yassa, served with grilled chicken or fish. My favorite meals were eaten at friends' houses, prepared in sparse courtyards by women and girls using little by way of equipment besides a mortar and pestle, some dull knives, a propane tank, and a small charcoal grill. As I quickly learned, a guest in Senegal is treated like a king, given the best seat, the biggest cut of meat, and encouraged to eat until he or she is bursting.

For my girlfriend and me, Senegal was an exercise in blind optimism that didn't pan out. After 11 months, I went home. She stayed. Back in the States, living in New York City, I occasionially felt pangs of regret. I wondered if I'd stayed long enough, made the most of my time there, seen enough, done enough. Thi�boudienne became for me a symbol of all that I'd failed to embrace in Senegal. As luck would have it, a Senegalese restaurant opened around the corner from my Brooklyn apartment, and the chef, Pierre Thiam, became a friend. When I confided in Pierre my sense of longing for a Senegal I never fully knew, he pointed out the obvious: What was keeping me from going back?

As my plane lands in Senegal this time, I'm determined to hit the ground running. Pierre's advice: Get myself invited into homes, because that's where the best Senegalese cooking happens. Landing at the Gueyes' turns out to be a terrific stroke of luck. To counterbalance my deplorable French, worse Wolof (the main indigenous language), and appalling sense of direction, I've hired as my translator and guide Medoune Gueye, Khady's 33-year-old son, whose first act of business is to steer me into his mother's kitchen. I eat a lot of Khady's cooking during my week in Dakar, including her yassa j�n, the piquant onion-and-pepper sauce, served with grilled grouper. I've had several variations across Senegal; Khady's irresistibly tart, sticky yassa makes liberal use of cayenne, lime, garlic, and mustard. Eating it after so much time away breeds a curious dissonance. Still, it's good to be back.

After a few days in Dakar, I decide to return to my old town, Thi�s, and Medoune accompanies me. I'm curious to see how it has changed. After Dakar, the place feels provincial, quaint. But there's another side to Thi�s: an exuberant, frantically emergent city. Half a million people now live here, in tracts of beige cinderblock homes. Freshly minted buildings stand where I remember there being only sandy lots. My friend Samuel's grocery store has vanished, absorbed by a massive new house.

In the midst of a busy day, the ritual of drinking tea is an excuse merely to sit and chat and enjoy a mellow moment of quiet

As we make our way around the city, the heat index spikes, and Medoune suggests we pause for tea. Dethie Mbow, Medoune's garrulous cousin, shepherds us into the courtyard of his breezy, low-slung house and promptly dispatches a neighbor boy to fetch some snacks from a vendor around the corner. The boy returns with two classic Senegalese street foods: pastels, tiny empanadas stuffed with fish and onions; and accara, black-eyed-pea fritters. We plunge the pastels and the accara into kaani sauce, and pop them into our mouths.

While we eat, Medoune commences the ataya, an elaborate, three-cup tea ritual that is ubiquitous in west Africa. Chinese gunpowder tea is brewed with sugar and mint and served in a tiny glass called a kas. The first serving is strong and bitter; the second a tad sweeter, with a little mint added; the third is a mint-infused sugar-bomb. Each serving has a heady top layer of foam, achieved by pouring the tea from one kas to another from a great height. Boys apprentice at the ataya for years before they master the proper foam-to-tea ratio. Medoune, who considers himself something of an ataya savant, clearly relishes the opportunity to showcase his talents. In the midst of a busy day, the ataya functions as a social and gustatory salve-an excuse merely to sit and chat and enjoy a mellow, if highly caffeinated, moment of quiet.

Credit: Penny De Los Santos

Caffeine notwithstanding, the tea has a narcotic effect on me. By round three, I'm laid out on a futon in a back bedroom, drifting off to sleep, the flavors of the pastels and accara lingering on my tongue.

After a week of outright gluttony, I've taken all the culinary spoils Senegal has to offer, with one exception: my old nemesis, thi�boudienne. It's time for a reckoning, and also-despite the tacit ban on men in the kitchen-time to do some cooking myself.

My last meal in Dakar takes place at the home of Didier and Marie Jeannette (nicknamed Jeanine) Diop. Didier is a childhood friend of my pal Pierre back in Brooklyn. Pierre has assured me that Jeanine's thi�boudienne will change my mind about the dish.

The day before the meal, Jeanine and I go grocery shopping at a large covered market downtown called March� Kermel. Its symmetry and order are impressive. The building is vaguely octagonal, with concentric rows of produce, meat, and fish stalls spiraling neatly inward from exterior archways. Still, navigating any Dakar market requires great tactical sense, and it's all I can do to keep up with Jeanine as she swoops from vendor to vendor, picking through vegetables and haggling over prices. Normally a sweet, soft-spoken woman, she transforms into a cold and ruthless negotiator.

"I love to bargain," she says. After hearing a vendor's price for a bushel of okra, Jeanine bursts out laughing, waves him away, and descends on the next stall, where the vendor quickly bends to her will. "You can't let them hustle you," Jeanine tells me. By the time we drive back to the Diops', the trunk of their blue Chevrolet Optra is sagging with produce-onions, turnips, eggplants, Scotch bonnet peppers, squash, manioc, carrots, cabbage, tamarind, cauliflower, and I forget what else, but so much that we had to hire a porter to lug it to the car for us-plus a grouper the size of a small submarine, purchased at another market, on the beach.

Credit: Penny De Los Santos

Preparing the thi�boudienne takes all day. We start at 8 a.m. in the Diops' rear courtyard, with sunlight slashing through the palm trees and a pair of disheveled chickens scraping around. My first job is to make the rof, or stuffing, for the grouper. It requires mashing vegetables into a thick paste. This I can do. An onion, a head of garlic, a bunch of parsley, and a handful of dried chiles gradually yield to the pestle. I turn to the grouper, which has been cut into eight or nine steaks. I poke two holes in each, stuff them with the rof, and then coat them thoroughly with the vegetable paste.

Under Jeanine's supervision, I saut� onions and green peppers in a large pot heated by a propane tank, then stir in some tomato paste. Once the sauce starts to come together, we add a few cups of water to thin it and let it simmer a while. I carefully arrange the grouper steaks in the pot, followed by some cabbage; dried bisaap (hibiscus) leaves and tamarind paste, both of which impart a wonderful tartness; and four or five Scotch bonnet peppers. As the pot continues to simmer, we add other ingredients: hunks of salted, fermented cod (gejj) and some dried snails (y�et), turnips, eggplants, squash, manioc, carrots, cauliflower, and okra.

Once the vegetables have cooked through, I pluck them out and place them in a large bowl, followed by the fish. Rice is added to the pot, where the remaining sauce quickly stains it a deep red. Finally, the cooked rice is scraped into a waiting bowl and the blackened crust at the bottom of the pan-a much-loved delicacy called x�o�-is plated to be served on the side.

Preparing the thi�boudienne takes all day. We start at 8 A.M. in the courtyard, with the sunlight slashing through the palm trees

It's nearly 3 p.m. by the time we finish. Didier returns from work just as Jeanine's parents, Joseph and Marie Th�r�se Nesseim, arrive, and the five of us arrange ourselves on a mat in the basement next to an open window. A heaping platter of thi�boudienne appears, with the grouper sitting atop the rice, and the eggplant and manioc and cauliflower on the sides. With a breeze buffeting us, we dig in.

Pierre is right. Jeanine's is the Cadillac Fleetwood of thi�boudiennes. The tamarind cuts through the pungency of the gejj, and the dried snails, used to enrich the base, lend a hint of umami flavor. It's a more nuanced version of the pungent thi�boudienne I had recalled. But it's also familiar, with a distinctive peppery finish. Didier reminds me that thi�boudienne originated in Saint-Louis, the former colonial capital in the country's north, near the border with Mauritania. Over time it became the national dish, so rabidly and universally was it loved by all Senegalese-and now, at long last, by me.

Jeanine's mother reveals that the recipe has been passed down in her family for generations, that her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother all made thi�boudienne like this. She taught Jeanine how to prepare it, and she believes her daughter has done well today. "I'm proud of you," she says, and Jeanine beams.

Dusk is approaching. After a long, hot day, I'm stumbling with fatigue. But I linger for a while, chatting with the Diops on their patio. This is the kind of occasion that I remember best from my time in Senegal: unwinding with friends after a meal in a cool, shady place, the early-evening sky turning a livid orange as the muezzins sing out the call to prayer. I'd like it to last a little longer.

See all our Senegalese recipes in the gallery �
See a guide to where to stay and where to eat in Dakar �
See a guide to the regional cuisines of Senegal �

20 Great Bread Bakeries

Tue, 22 May 2012 12:00:00 EDT

by Meryl Rosofsky and Alex Rush

Acme Bread Company

Bay Area, California
510/524-1327
This nearly 30-year-old Berkeley institution, helmed by co-founder and Chez Panisse alum Steve Sullivan, is not content to rest on its yeasted laurels. Committed since 1999 to using only organic flour, these days Acme, with its original bakery in Berkeley and an outpost in San Francisco's Ferry Building Marketplace, is working closely with flour supplier Keith Giusto and his cadre of California farmers to find hearth bread-friendly wheat varieties suited to the local climate. A loaf to look out for: Acme's new hand-formed "Edible Schoolyard Loaf," a tasty homage to Alice Waters' groundbreaking program, a toasty bread made from California-grown, stone-milled Yecora Rojo wheat. A point of pride for Sullivan: five current or former employees now have an ownership stake in this much-loved pioneering bakery.

Balthazar

Englewood, New Jersey
201/503-9717
Like watching the Yankees, riding the Cyclone and shopping in SoHo, eating Balthazar bread is a quintessential New York experience. Okay, so it's technically baked at a 14,000-square foot warehouse in Englewood, New Jersey, but Balthazar's dozens of products fill the breadbaskets of hundreds of eateries in the five boroughs, including the bakery's sister brasserie of the same name. And despite the large-scale operation, each bread tastes like the work of a single boulangerie. The French Baguette, Rye Boule, a beer-infused Olive Bread and Chocolate Bread loaded with morsels of bittersweet chocolate are just a few of Balthazar's greatest hits.

Berkshire Mountain Bakery

Housatonic, Massachusetts
413/274-3412
Baker Richard Bourdon's shop may be tucked away in a Western Massachusetts village with a population just over 1,000, but it has garnered nation-wide attention. The calls for road trips to Berkshire Mountain Bakery are certainly warranted, as Bourdon, who hails from Quebec, has been committed to the art of natural sourdough baking for more than 35 years - long before this wild yeast process became en vogue in America. Some of the his most legendary products are Bread and Chocolate, a white boule studded with Callebaut chocolate chunks, the Multi Grain covered with rolled oats and the Cherry Pecan, which makes for incredible French toast.

Credit: Alan Tansey

Bien Cuit Bakery

Bien Cuit

Brooklyn, New York
718/852-0200
Zachary Golper's stories of his first baking experiences as a 19-year-old in rural Oregon sound like generations-old folklore - but they happened a mere 15 years ago! He worked by candlelight under the guidance of a man known to him only as Carlos, hand-mixing dough and raking the embers of the wood-burning oven. These days, Golper uses electric mixers in the one-year-old Boerum Hill bakery and caf� he owns with his wife, Kate Wheatcroft, but his techniques are as meticulous as ever. For instance, he blends six different flours and then ferments the dough for 68 hours to craft the miche, a round French-style loaf with a dark, chewy crust and a slightly sour flavor.

Credit: Meg Matyia

Blue Duck Bakery and Caf�

Blue Duck Bakery Caf�

Eastern Long Island, New York
631/629-4123
Keith Kouris has been raising the bread bar since the mid-1990s, when, as a visionary young baker in a suburban King Kullen, he introduced artisan breads to one of Long Island's largest supermarkets. In 1999 he and his wife Nancy opened Blue Duck in Southampton, in a building that had housed a bakery since the 1930s, turning to Europe for inspiration for their traditional, hand-made baguettes, b�tards, and focaccias. We love their chewy, hearty Pain Rustique; gorgeous, cake-like Pain Chocolat; super aromatic fennel-scented Swedish Limpa with raisins and spices; and a stunning seed-studded sunflower loaf. What makes Blue Duck breads so delicious? Proximity to the water - the Atlantic Ocean on the South Fork and the Long Island Sound on the North - may be part of the secret, fortifying Kouris's cultures with moisture and a lick of salt air. But it's the baker's passion that elevates Blue Duck above the flock.

Bread Alone

Boiceville, New York
845/657-3328
This pioneering bakery nestled in New York's Hudson Valley churns out more than 55,000 pounds of organic bread each week, sending freshly baked loaves to supermarkets, specialty shops and farmers' markets throughout the Northeast, not to mention its three Upstate New York cafes. But Bread Alone wasn't always such a major operation. Artisan Dan Leader moved to the Catskills in 1983 to escape the New York City rat race and sold bread out of his Mazda Hatchback. But he was back in Manhattan soon enough, hawking Bread Alone loaves at city greenmarkets. And despite Bread Alone's expansion, Leader and his team still use locally sourced ingredients for everything from their golden Challah to their rustic Ciabatta.

Credit: Ed Anderson

Della Fattoria Bakery

Della Fattoria

Petaluma, CA
707/763-0161
Started in 1995 by Edmund and Kathleen Weber at their family ranch, an old chicken farm that today supplies eggs and produce to their caf� in downtown Petaluma, Della Fattoria began quite by accident back in 1994 after Kathleen installed a wood oven outside the kitchen ("a lifelong dream!") and began baking breads for friends, neighbors, and soon, the chef at Sonoma Mission Inn where her son Aaron was working. These days Della Fattoria turns out 400-1,200 hand-shaped loaves a night, crusty beauties crafted from 100% organic flour, Brittany sea salt, and a natural starter that began life years ago with yeast from Weber Ranch grapes (they still grow Pinot Noir at their small vineyard). Their breads - campagne, levain, ciabatta, polenta, pumpkin seed, and more - are all naturally leavened and baked on the bottom of their two wood-burning ovens using retained heat. Find them at restaurants like Napa Valley's Auberge du Soleil and the Marin and San Francisco Ferry Plaza weekly farmers markets. Della Fattoria's Rosemary-Meyer Lemon bread is a knockout: salty, lemony, herbal, with a beautiful sheen to the well-structured crumb and a crust that bears beauty marks from the floor of the hearth it baked upon.

Gerard's Breads of Tradition

Westford, Vermont
Available at Onion River Co-Op, Burlington, Vermont
It's a good thing Gerard Rubaud set up his bakery next to his Vermont home, as he often works 15 straight hours to hand-form and wood-fire hundreds of his signature item, the wild yeast-based 3 Grain Country Loaf. "I like baking through the night, under the stars - that's my life," said Rubaud, a Savoie-native who took his first apprenticeship at age 13. Vermont's beloved artisan (he has a street named after him!) still employs many of the same techniques that he learned as a teen in the 1950s, including using a manual grinder to mill flour and feeding his organic levain three times a day. It's methods like these that make Gerard's sourdough arguably the most deeply flavored bread in the state.

Leslie Cole (courtesy of Grand Central Bakery)

Grand Central Bakery

Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington
This Pacific Northwest pioneer, founded by Gwenyth Bassetti in 1989, grew out of her little Seattle sandwich shop The Bakery, which when it opened in 1972 served a custom "Bakery Blend" coffee made for them by a new local company called Starbucks. Today Grand Central Bakery has three locations in Seattle and another six (soon to be seven) in Portland, and is run by Gwen's son Ben, a onetime geologist and fisherman in Alaska; daughter Piper, the "soul" of the company; and an assortment of friends who share their passion. Grand Central's rustic European-style hearth baked breads are made from sustainably grown white flour from Shepherd's Grain in Palouse, Washington and whole wheat flour from Camas Country Mill in Oregon's Willamette Valley, which is bringing back heirloom wheat varieties like Red Fife well suited to the local climate. In addition to their classic baguettes, levains, ciabattas, sour ryes, and their famous white Italian-style Como Loaf, with its crisp crust and glossy crumb, Grand Central Bakery has just started a seasonal loaf program, kicking off this past winter with a rye-based Swedish Limpa, scented with anise, coriander, caraway seeds, and orange zest.

Hungry Ghost Bread

Northampton, Massachusetts
413/582-9009
The Hungry Ghost feeds more than spirits with its spectacular breads, among them French, organic raisin, and a dense rye topped with toasted black kalonji seeds. Baked in a wood-fired masonry oven baker/owners Jonathan Stevens and Cheryl Maffei helped build themselves, many of Hungry Ghost's breads are made from locally grown, freshly milled wheat and spelt, cultivated as part of the bakery's "Little Red Hen" project to restore grain-growing in the Pioneer Valley. Like the Johnny Appleseeds of wheat, Stevens and Maffei started several years ago doling out handfuls of wheat berries to eager customers to plant in their yards and gardens. By now, one local farmer delivers 400 pounds of flour to Hungry Ghost each week. Try the Hungry Ghost's Trinity bread, made from local spelt, wheat, and triticale (a wheat-rye cross). Another curious specialty is annadama, a corn flour-and-molasses New England bread born, the legend goes, when a hungry fisherman, tired of the cornmeal and molasses porridge his unimaginative wife served him day after day, added yeast and flour, muttering "Anna, damn her" as he baked the concoction.

Credit: Lawrence Mambrino

Iggy's Bread of the World Bakery

Iggy's Bread of the World

Cambridge, Massachusetts
619/924-0949
Husband-and-wife team Igor and Ludmilla Ivanovic changed the Boston bread scene when they opened their groundbreaking Watertown bakery on a nondescript industrial block in 1994. Their creations, from moist focaccia made from naturally leavened dough to hearty 7-Grain roll laced with wildflower honey, were revelations to locals raised on overly processed supermarket bread. Iggy's, whose breads are available at the bakery's storefront, New England farmers markets and grocery stores, prides itself on using organic ingredients sourced from sustainable farms.

Ken's Artisan Bakery

Portland, Oregon
503/248-2202
Inspired by the late famed French baker Lionel Poil�ne, Ken Forkish ditched his career in the high-tech world of Silicon Valley in search of something more craft-driven. The result: this warm, welcoming bakery, started in 2001 and now a neighborhood institution, serving up traditional European-style hearth-baked boules and baguettes that fans say rival the best in Paris. Clearly, the career move has paid off, with Forkish recently garnering his third nomination for a prestigious James Beard Award for Outstanding Pastry Chef. Look out this fall for his first book, Flour Water Yeast Salt: The Fundamentals of Artisan Bread and Pizza (Ten Speed Press, September 2012). In the meantime, if you're in the area, treat yourself to Ken's soulful walnut levain, with its gorgeously irregular honeycombed crumb and notes of lavender, or a nice Country Blonde, its thin crisp exterior cloaking a light, subtly tangy sourdough crumb.

Credit: Emily Hart Roth

Milo andamp; Olive Bakery

Milo andamp; Olive

Santa Monica, California
310/453-6776
Fans are already flocking to this tiny Santa Monica bakery and pizzeria that turned out its first breads just last November. Run by husband-and-wife team Josh Loeb and Zoe Nathan, whose nearby much-loved restaurants Rustic Canyon and Huckleberry Bakery ensured an instant following, Milo andamp; Olive brims with playful energy: the place was named for the couple's young son and the daughter they may one day have, and Tartine-trained Zoe cheerfully confesses that the inspiration for her out-of-sight Cheese Bread, packed with parmesan, Grana Padano, Gruy�re, and cheddar, was childhood favorite Cheez-It crackers. But don't be fooled: her multigrain baguette, swoon-worthy Cinnamon Sugar Brioche, and jewel-studded Fruit andamp; Nut Bread are as sophisticated as they come.

Credit: Josh Shaub

Orwasher's Bakery

Orwasher's

New York City
212/288-6569
Even the newest offerings at this 86-year-old bakery are firmly rooted in the past. Orwasher's line of artisan wine breads, launched in 2008 by new owner Keith Cohen, are based on centuries-old French recipes that feature the yeast of fermented grapes. Of course, the Upper East Side shop still serves brick oven-baked favorites that were perfected by the Orwasher family (the original owners) like the Jewish Rye and Pumpernickel - edible histories for the Eastern European immigrant experience.

Pain D'Avignon

Long Island City, New York
718/729-6832
(not open to the public)
No matter how many restaurants and markets clamor for their bread, the Pain D'Avignon crew refuses to cut corners. Bakers at the 12-year-old Long Island City operation work side by side, cutting and shaping dough by hand before allowing it to slowly ferment en couche - in a cloth that supports the dough as it rises and keeps it from drying out. But while the dough is the tour de force of Pain D'Avignon's product line, intoxicating ingredients like fresh Rosemary, caraway seeds, cranberries and pecans are wonderful supporting players.

Seven Stars Bakery

Providence, Rhode Island
401/521-2200
Baker/owners Jim and Lynn Williams started tending their whole wheat and rye sourdough starters months before they opened their bakery in early 2001, and they continue to lavish the care of a parent on their starters to keep them young and healthy for breads with great flavor and rise and only the mildest tang. The couple have since expanded operations to include three locations around Providence, one on the site of the old Rumford baking powder plant, now a National Chemical Historic Landmark. We especially like the French Rye, the Toasted Walnut and Raisin, and the chewy Olive Batard, strewn with tiny oil-cured Moroccan olives and plump, briny Kalamatas, the essence of the Mediterranean in bread form.

Credit: Squire Fox

Sullivan Street Bakery

New York City
212/265-5580
The innovator whose no-knead bread recipe became a New York Times sensation in 2006 and who invents bread names - truccione , cruccolo, doni - that quickly take on the patina of authenticity, Jim Lahey also embodies a back-to-basics classicism that prizes skill, repetition, and craftsmanship, even as his breads and business continue to evolve. He lauds the local flour movement and quests for exotic yeasts, but at the end of the day, he says, "it's the primacy of the bread, feeding someone, that really matters." Bite into his succulent, slightly salty Truccione Sar�, a rustic sourdough with deep, appealing slash marks and a heavily charred, crackly crust, and savor that primal feeling.

La Farm

Cary, North Carolina
919/657-0657
You know what they say, you can take the baker out of France but you can't take the French out of the baker. That's certainly the case for Paris-native Lionel Vatinet. He left his French bread-baking guild to travel the world and eventually settled in a Raleigh, NC suburb, where he opened La Farm with his future wife, Missy. La Farm reflects the baking traditions Vatinet learned during his seven-year tenure with the prestigious guild, Les Compagnons du Devoir: The dough is made with a natural sourdough starter and unbleached flours before it is baked in a European-style hearth oven. "I wanted to introduce people in the neighborhood to crusty, hand-made bread," Vatinet said. But he does enjoy experimenting with internationally influenced breads, such as the addictive Asiago Parmesan Cheese Bread. "We're a French bakery with the creativity of the American spirit," Vatinet said.

Standard Baking Company

Portland, Maine
207/773-2112
There's often a long line at this 17-year-old bakery located inside a brick warehouse, but that may not be such a bad thing; the wait gives customers the time to inhale the scent of fresh-baked bread and behold the wicker baskets filled to the rim with gorgeous loaves. Husband-and-wife co-owners Matt James and Alison Pray modeled the Standard Baking Company after the neighborhood bakeries of France and Italy, and breads like the flour-dusted Rustic Loaf and Rosemary Focaccia are the edible incarnations of their influences.

Tartine Bakery andamp; Cafe

San Francisco, California
415/487-2600
Elisabeth Prueitt and Chad Robertson's Mission District phenomenon is its city's gold standard for impeccable organic bread. The stone hearth-baked loaves have spawned a caf� menu of artfully prepared sandwiches, but bread bought unadorned is still the best way to experience Robertson's way with flour, salt, water and wild yeast. His masterpiece is the Country Loaf, which he developed and perfected over the course of two decades. The process takes 24 hours and Tartine loyalists line up to buy this fundamental bread when it's served fresh from the oven after 5 pm Wednesday through Sunday. The Country Loaf is available with walnuts, olives or sesame seeds, but purists prefer it plain and simple.

What's your favorite bakery? Let us know in the comments.

Universal Language

Fri, 18 May 2012 12:00:00 EDT

by Francine Prose
My son Leon and his wife, Jenny, joke that their love blossomed over enchiladas. Jenny prepared them for him on one of their early dates. Jenny is from Mexico, and we couldn't have been happier to discover that she is not only an enchanting person, but also a terrific cook. Like Leon, in no time, we fell for her and her delicious food, too. It's hard to choose between Jenny's pozole, a meaty stew made with hominy and chiles; nopales, cactus paddles peeled, sliced, boiled, and served in a salad; chiles rellenos, poblano peppers stuffed with cheese, then lightly battered and fried. Each time she'd visit Mexico, Jenny would return to New York with a mole sauce that only her aunt knows how to prepare, or with tamales that no one makes like her grandma.

Ever since a mutual friend in Brooklyn introduced Leon and Jenny, he's made numerous trips to Mexico, where her parents and grandparents rapidly discovered that her gringo boyfriend was a nice guy who loved her. But distance and everybody's busy schedule had conspired to keep the rest of our family-my husband, Howie, me, and our younger son, Bruno-from meeting Jenny's relatives until she and Leon were to be married. It might seem a little unusual to first meet one's new in-laws minutes before the wedding takes place. But when the families assembled on the steps of the Brooklyn courthouse, everyone's affection for Leon and Jenny was so intense that it seemed as if this was how it was supposed to be. Even the judge was visibly moved by the sight of three generations weeping with joy.

The three-day fiesta that followed was catered by a modest but brilliant Mexican luncheonette in Queens. There were mariachi musicians, a Cuban dance band, plenty of tequila, and a crowd of family and friends from New York, Los Angeles, and several cities in Mexico. The party, in a loft in Manhattan, was the sort of occasion that ends with everyone exchanging heartfelt vows to get together again as soon as possible. Among those promises was one I gave Jenny's mother, Lourdes, to visit Morelia, the capital of Michoac�n-the city where Lourdes grew up, where her family still lives, and which, she promised, is the most beautiful in Mexico.

the night Howie and I arrived in Morelia to celebrate the wedding once more, this time at the home of Jenny's great aunt, it was obvious that Lourdes was right about the beauty of her hometown. The zocalo, the leafy main plaza, was brightly illuminated and gorgeous, as were the towers of the magnificent 17th-century stone cathedral. Founded by the Spanish in 1541, this historic center of the stately colonial city, which was designated a World Cultural Heritage site by UNESCO, evokes its Spanish counterparts-�vila, Segovia, and Seville. Except that there was livelier music thrumming out of the car radios and playing in the caf�s beneath the arched portals of the plaza.

Though communication with our new in-laws had its limits, the food we shared created an unspoken bond

But architecture was only one of the things that Lourdes raved about. Along with Puebla, Morelia is considered a gourmet's paradise, the Lyon of Mexico. In the morning, Lourdes and Jenny's father, Jesus, came to pick up Howie, Bruno, Leon, Jenny, and me from the hotel to take us to the central market for breakfast. Jesus spoke perfect English, while Lourdes was more hesitant about her grasp of the language. It was certainly better than my Spanish, which was virtually nonexistent, except for perhaps 200 words, mostly having to do with food. After a quick coffee, we were off to eat.

I was astonished by the variety of vegetables at the market, the artistry with which they were displayed, the stalls that sold chiles, spices, shelled beans, straw baskets, bright pi�atas, bags of mole sauce, and mounds of the chiles rellenos that are probably my favorite Mexican dish. Jesus ordered several plates of corundas, which he told me are unique to Michoac�n. Shaped a bit like pyramids, they're a regional variation on the tamale. Like tamales, they're made of masa and steamed inside the dark-green leaves of the corn plant. They were delicate, served with red or green salsa and a dollop of crema, a pleasingly tart cream, which pleasingly offset the sweetness of the corn.

Jesus and Lourdes went off to fetch the car, and we set out for Quiroga, a town known for its meat-namely carnitas, giant loins of pork that, in this town, were braised in orange juice and chiles, then deep fried. You purchase the juicy carnitas and tortillas by the kilo from a vendor, then find a seat under the shady awning of the stand, where you can also buy sodas. Jenny appeared with ripe avocados that we sliced and added to the pork, which we tore with our fingers and rolled between fresh tortillas. Though communication with our new in-laws had its limits, the food we shared created an unspoken bond.

After lunch, we headed back to Morelia to rest and dress for dinner at Jenny's great-aunt's home. Promptly at eight, we arrived at a pretty house in an outlying neighborhood. All day, I'd felt so at ease with Lourdes and Jesus that it slipped my mind that we were the new relations arrived from north of the border. For a moment I became aware of being an outsider, but my anxiety instantly dissipated, because everyone acted as if Jenny had brought home a group of long-lost relatives. The women hugged and kissed us, the men shook hands. Jenny's great uncle, T�o Flor, brought out a volume of photographs, and we marveled over how adorable Jenny was as a baby. The bilingual ones translated and, with a little help, conversation flowed: One of the uncles talked about his racing pigeons; T�o Flor told us about his passion for dancing and the legendary contest in which he won fourth place.

All this time the little cousins were eyeing us shyly until everyone headed up to the roof for the breaking of the large, star-shaped pi�ata. The scene reminded me of my own sons' birthday parties: kids gone wild with baseball bats and blindfolds. It was pure bedlam until finally, the pi�ata lay in shreds on the roof. Full of candy, the kids led us back downstairs.

By then, platters of food were appearing from the kitchen: a huge turkey marinated in a spicy mole sauce, fresh tortillas, salads. After dessert-a rum cake iced with buttercream-the tables disappeared as magically as they arrived. Someone put on a CD, and T�o Flor took the lead. If he won fourth place in a dance contest, I'd like to see the guy who won first. His dove-gray leather shoes skimmed across the floor as he spun and twirled. Lourdes, the family's other passionate dancer-as I recall from the wedding-joined him, and the rest of us watched, awed by their expertise.

An uncle poured snifters of brandy and led us in a toast. We wished for happiness and health, and raised our glasses to what people everywhere toast when there's love and good will in the room. As I thanked our new relatives for their delicious dinner and warm welcome, and expressed my joy at being part of the family, I found myself in tears-which needed no translation. All of us were moved by the power of love, aided by the fabulous food, to transcend the differences in our backgrounds and to lift us to a higher plane on which we all believed, for the moment, that borders don't exist.

Costa Rica: San Jose's Mercado Central

Thu, 17 May 2012 12:00:00 EDT

by Jane Sigal
Most visitors to Costa Rica zip through the capital city, San Jos�, on their way to beaches or jungles. But I like to linger there, if only to spend a morning at Mercado Central, a block-long covered market built in 1880 that contains a warren of produce stalls, sodas (small, family-run eateries), bric-a-brac counters, and caf�s.

After ogling the spiky red mamon (rambutan) and giant green guanabana (soursop) at the fruit stands, I slake my thirst with a refresco at Soda Los Angeles (506/2223-2606), on the market's southwest side, where freshly squeezed juices such as cas (sour guava), and mora (raspberries) are mixed with water or milk and sugar.

If I'm hungry, I go for olla de carne (the local pot-au-feu, made with beef short ribs) or a casado (a heaping plate of rice, beans, fried plantains, and salad, with chicken, meat, or seafood), dishes that emerge from the upstairs kitchen at Soda Cristal (506/2223-5002), in the market's center.

For dessert, there's La Sorbetera de Lolo Mora (506/2256-5000), near the main entrance. This 111-year-old ice cream parlor makes one flavor only: a heady mix of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and vanilla with a granita-like texture.

I top off the roving meal on the market's northeast end at Cafeteria y Caf� Central (506/2222-1769). The local arabica variety here-brewed using mild peaberry beans-is prepared as a caf� chorreado; hot water is poured into a coffee-filled sock that's set over an aluminum pot called a chorreador, resulting in a fresh, bright cup. Sometimes I stop by Souvenirs Midey (506/2233-4660), at the southeast end, to pick up one of these cute pots to take to someone back home.

For a potent end to my visit, there's El Gran Vicio (506/2223-5976). At this 130-year-old cantina, shots of Costa Rican sugarcane brandy are spiked with red sirope de kola (kola nut syrup)-a bittersweet San Jos� tradition.

Corsica

Wed, 16 May 2012 12:00:00 EDT

by David McAninch
In the palm-shaded Corsican city of Ajaccio, I'm standing at an open window overlooking the port, which shimmers in the hot sunlight of a late-spring morning. In the distance, I can make out snow-capped mountains, which rise improbably from the Mediterranean Sea. Carried on the breeze is the incenselike scent of the maquis, the thicket of flowering shrubs and herbs that blanket nearly a fifth of this small island and creep up to the streets of Ajaccio.

I take this all in from the book-cluttered apartment of a British expat named Rolli Lucarotti. I met her only yesterday, yet we've already learned a lot about each other. I've told her that, ever since I lived in France in my 20s, Corsica-the birthplace of Napol�on, onetime fief of Genoa, now a kind of orphan province of France-has loomed large in my imagination. My fascination increased as I read accounts of the mysterious island's ancient blood feuds, its monumental prehistoric sculptures, and its sturdy cuisine. She's told me about how she and her husband moored their small sailboat in Ajaccio's harbor in 1970 during a storm and, bewitched by the beauty of the place, never left.

I watch Rolli in her kitchen, chopping a bunch of wild mint, which she scrapes into a bowl along with six farm eggs and two spoonfuls of brocciu, the moist and crumbly cheese made daily by seemingly every sheep and goat farmer on the island.

She's also told me about the years she spent traveling to remote mountain villages, coaxing secrets from grandmothers so she could write Recipes from Corsica (Prospect Books, 2004), the first serious English-language account of the island's cooking. It was her book that introduced me to the touchstones of Corsican food: stews made from wild game; hearty fish soups; savory tarts with local herbs; heavenly pork charcuterie; fresh farmers' cheeses and pungent, washed-rind tommes; stuffed pastas; and countless galettes and cakes made from chestnut flour, a native staple that kept many
Corsicans alive during times of siege or privation.

I watch Rolli in her kitchen, chopping a bunch of wild mint, which she scrapes into a bowl along with six farm eggs and two spoonfuls of brocciu, the moist and crumbly cheese made daily by seemingly every sheep and goat farmer on the island. "They add a little whole milk to the brocciu, so it's richer than ricotta," Rolli tells me in a Somerset accent undiminished by her years here. She pours the mixture into a skillet to make an omelet, which she cooks open face, in the unfussy Corsican style.

Before us on the table is our lunch, a meal of spare, pristine simplicity. On a platter next to the just-set omelet are a dozen sea urchins that we bought this morning at the docks. This, she tells me, is the very essence of coastal Corsican cookery, which isn't so much cookery as it is a matter of acquainting a fresh piece of seafood with a glass of wine, occasionally fire, and some wild herbs. We scoop out the iodine-sweet orange flesh with teaspoons and sip a pale, dry Corsican ros� from mismatched glasses.

There is also a salad of pleasingly bitter chicory that, like much of the produce we saw this morning in Ajaccio's central market-the mint, bundles of lavender and thyme, fragrant leeks, young asparagus-were foraged in the maquis, or on other tracts of land on this still remarkably unspoiled island, where large-scale agriculture remains relatively unknown. We eat our lunch with thick slices of country bread and end it with a mousse made from tangy Corsican lemons. This is my first real Corsican meal, a taste of what's to come during the rest of my eight-day trip, and an object lesson in what a big-city chef might call "ingredient-driven cooking."

photo of Rolli Lucarotti by Beth Rooney

The next day, Rolli and I follow a hairpin road into the hills far above Ajaccio. We stop for lunch at a rustic inn called U Licettu, which Rolli has described to me as a bastion of old-school Corsican cuisine. This kind of cooking, she says, tends to reflect the culture of the mountains more than that of the coasts, parts of which were infested with malaria until World War II and remained relatively sparsely populated well into the 20th century. The meal-served in a prim dining room crisscrossed with rough-hewn ceiling beams-has no main courses, no lugubrious progression of everweightier dishes. Just small, shared pleasures: handmade cannelloni wrapped around fluffy brocciu; meaty white beans called fasgioli slow-cooked in an herb-flecked tomato sauce; light and crisp zucchini fritters brightened by wild mint; a silky terrine of wild boar, an animal that still roams freely in the maquis. And (cured-meat lover that I am) my holy grail: gossamer ribbons of dry-cured ham called prizuttu, generously marbled and dark ruby red, made from Corsican pigs fattened on the chestnuts that grow abundantly on the island. I knew that handmade charcuterie-with names, like coppa and lonzu, that hint at their Italian pedigree-is the coin of the realm here, but Rolli tells me that the extra-fatty charcuterie made from Corsican pigs is a prize on the order of Italy's finest prosciuttos.

Sated and content, I drive Rolli back to town, retracing our morning route. She spies something out the window and asks me to stop. She walks a few yards down the road and tugs green shoots from the loose dirt alongside the asphalt. "Wild garlic," she calls back to me. I shut off the engine and step out, and instantly my ears are filled with a thrumming sound. It is the noise of bees, millions of them-this, I realize, is the song of the maquis.

I'm driving over the spine of Corsica, through a stark alpine landscape so unlike the lush coast I left behind a mere 20 miles ago that it seems a continent away. I am technically in France, but not. The road signs, right down to the little tombstone-shaped mile markers, appear to be French government-issue, but the place names are in both French and Corsu, an ancient Tuscan dialect, and I notice that often the French name has been crudely redacted with black spray paint-echoes of an on-and-off independence movement that began in the 1970s. In a one-street village somewhere outside the ancient hilltop city of Corte, I stop at a little caf�-bar, park myself under the shade of an awning, and overhear men inside speaking Corsu amid the click-clack of dominoes. Their words issue forth in lusty bursts of consonants, in a distinctly Italian cadence.

A wiry older fellow wearing a gold chain gets up from the table and comes out. He presses a hand firmly onto my shoulder and almost shouts, in French, "Yes, my young man!" I order a glass of chilled red Corsican vin de pays, and a coppa sandwich. It comes with cornichons on a generously buttered baguette stuffed with thin rounds of sumptuous cured meat that could have come from the finest salumeria in Rome.

I find that I'm growing accustomed to Corsica's implausible beauty and starting to dread my encroaching departure, after which I'll no longer happen upon these otherworldly sights.

A day later, I circle back to the coast via a scrubby headland called the Agriates Desert, a scorched, jagged landscape that merges incongruously with some of the island's most idyllic beaches. I find that I'm growing accustomed to Corsica's implausible beauty and starting to dread my encroaching departure, after which I'll no longer happen upon these otherworldly sights. I decide to commemorate one of my last nights here with a special meal at Pasquale Paoli, a jewel-like restaurant in the port of L'�le Rousse, known for its modern interpretations of traditional Corsican cooking. Like many things on this island, it's named after the 18th-century statesman who was the father of Corsican independence, all 14 years of it.

I am seated under a plane tree, whose leaves form a canopy over the restaurant's little terrace, in front of a bone-white bowl that has a tiny portrait of Paoli painted on it. In the bowl, nestled in a dark, limpid broth made from spider crabs, are three delicate, hand-shaped strozzapreti. Each plump, mint-scented dumpling-made with equal parts brocciu and shredded Swiss chard-was strewn with purple borage flowers, just like ones I've seen dotting the maquis. Six bites, and the strozzapreti are gone.

photo by Beth Rooney

Soon a new bowl arrives, this one bearing little rectangular sheets of toothsome pasta layered with a rag� of winey, slow-braised beef cheeks. Each bite seems to dissolve on the tongue. And before long, dessert: a sugar-dusted Paris-Brest, typically a wheel of p�te � choux pastry filled with praline cream, reimagined here as a paean to that most cherished Corsican ingredient, the chestnut. The pastry is made with chestnut flour, and the cream filling is flavored with chestnuts. So is the scoop of ice cream on top, which itself is topped with a single candied chestnut. Dessert is served with a nectarlike drink called muscamaru, made from Corsican muscat and chestnut liqueur.

I sip for a while and reflect on the meal. Here were four pillars of the rustic Corsican kitchen-handmade pasta, seafood, meat stew, chestnut flour-eased gently into a new dispensation, not with any shocking wizardry, but with an eager desire to reanimate the island's bedrock foods. The chef, I found out when he stopped by my table after my meal, is named Ange Cananzi and grew up in a nearby village. "I was taught the value of our island's ingredients from a young age," he says, "and I try not to put 'luxury' ingredients on the menu." I try to imagine foie gras and caviar here, and indeed the notion seems irrelevant.

I'm due to depart tomorrow, and the spirits of this island seem to know it, for I've stumbled on a spot that no person could ever want to leave: a forested mountain glen on Cap Corse, the isle's remote, fingerlike northern tip. The glen is bisected by a burbling, sun-dappled stream called the Guado Grande and occupied by an ancient-looking stone cottage, the only work of civilization that I can see for miles around. In a grassy clearing next to the cottage, a communal picnic is getting under way-just a few folding tables covered in embroidered cotton sheets, some plastic cups for the wine. A tall man in tinted wire-rimmed glasses detaches himself from the crowd and invites me to join the potluck. His name is Jean-Toussaint. The cottage, he says, houses an old olive oil mill. The picnickers are people from the township, which has been raising money to restore the mill, and they've gathered to celebrate the first pressing of olives here in 70 years.

In the cool, stone-floored anteroom of the cottage, a half-dozen ladies set finger foods onto platters they've brought from home. Everywhere I turn, a woman offers me something to taste: little squares of homemade quiche, a slice of wild-herb-and-leek tart, farmers'-cheese beignets baked on a chestnut leaf. I migrate outside and loiter by a charcuterie platter piled with the most enticingly fatty lonzu I've ever seen, and links of figatellu, a gamy-tasting air-dried sausage made from pig livers. A stocky young guy in a soccer jersey walks up, plucks a slice of lonzu from the plate, and matter-of-factly tells me the name of the farmer who made it. "Ah," he says, tearing off a bite, "his stuff is always the best."

photo by Beth Rooney

There are many sweets, too: dense chestnut-almond tarts, chocolate cake, and a fluffy brocciu cheesecake called fiadone. And now a napkin-lined straw basket emerges from the cottage on the arm of a pretty blond woman in a purple blouse. She walks over to me. "They're frappes," she says, raising the basket to show me the little sugar-dusted pastries inside. "Take a few!" I help myself to a handful and find a shady seat on a low stone fence where I can enjoy them. The inch-long curls of fried dough are pleasure-inducing the way cotton candy is.

And so here I am, licking sugar off my fingers and listening to the Guado Grande's waters as they descend to the Mediterranean. Sharing my patch of shade is an old man in a brimmed cap whose name is Charles Pasquini. He says he was a ship's navigator in the merchant marine. I tell him where I'm from, and he laughs. "Les Am�ricains is the name they used to give people from Cap Corse who left for the New World and came back here to build their great mansions," he says, resting his hands on a wooden cane. I laugh, too, and think, I should be so lucky.

Read more about Corsica's native wines �
Read about Corsica's cheeses �
Read more about Corsica's heritage �
Read about Corsican charcuterie �
See a guide to where to eat and where to stay in Corsica �
See all our Corsican recipes in the gallery �

Iowa's Pork Tenderloin Sandwiches

Mon, 14 May 2012 12:00:00 EDT

by Jane and Michael Stern
Of pork products that make Iowans proud, the tenderloin is king. We don't mean a roast that requires marinade or seasonings, then gets carved, plated, and eaten with knife and fork; in Iowa the tenderloin is a sandwich. Sometimes abbreviated to BPT for "breaded pork tenderloin," it consists of a trimmed and pounded-tender slice of pork loin that is battered, fried, and sandwiched in a roll along with pickle chips, raw onion, ketchup, and mustard. (It's not a schnitzel because it's deep-fried rather than pan-cooked, and is always served on a bun.) You'll find BPTs at caf�s, diners, drive-ins, and eat-shacks that earn partisans because they serve the juiciest or the widest.

Why Iowa for such a thing? A stroll through the spectacularly large Swine Barn at the annual State Fair helps explain the local passion for pork. Here you'll learn that pork production adds $2.5 billion to the state's economy and that one out of three hogs raised in America is Iowan. Indiana actually lays claim to having invented the BPT-at Nick's Kitchen in Huntington, in 1904-but nowhere is the tenderloin more exalted than in Iowa, especially in the farmlands of the western part of the state, where hogs' favorite food, corn, grows especially high.

Some BPTs, particularly those made in and around Des Moines, flaunt a disk of fried pork as wide as a dinner plate, making its placement between the top and bottom of a standard hamburger bun comical. The Original King Tenderloin, served since 1952 at Smitty's, just minutes from the airport, is too broad to be hoisted by the bun in any normal way-even by a person with abnormally long fingers-but it is thin enough to tear off and eat pieces of the circumference until the bun is reachable. Twice breaded with cracker meal procured in Chicago, and then deep-fried in soybean oil ("for the flavor," says third-generation chef Ben Smith), Smitty's tenderloin is all about the crunch that envelops the slim layer of juicy pork.

Mr. Bibbs Tenderloins, a stark, open-kitchen sandwich shop in Des Moines's Highland Park neighborhood, serves its own double-wide, centimeter-thin 'loin fully accoutred (if you order it "deluxe") with ketchup, mustard, pickles, sliced tomatoes, lettuce, and onions. Essential companion: lushly crusted onion rings. We happened to eat our tenderloins at 10 a.m. on the first day of classes at nearby North High School, since proprietor Kathy Essex fretted that, by noon, her tiny establishment would be overwhelmed with students who come for sandwiches and extra-thick chocolate malts. At Bandamp;B Grocery, just a few miles away, we ate insanely wide tenderloins alongside lunching local police officers who took great delight in demonstrating how to fold the meat over once or even twice inside the bun to make it easier to handle.

photo by Ariana Lindquist

The following day we ventured an hour west to what many connoisseurs consider the heart of tenderloin country. Here in Audubon and Cass counties, the cutlet is significantly thicker and therefore juicier and porkier; some sandwiches overhang their bun, but few are silly-wide. At the Farmer's Kitchen, co-owner Charlene Johnson's fried pork is plump and succulent, merely haloed by a buttermilk-tinged, seasoned breading. At the Chatterbox Cafe in Audubon, Samantha Goetz took our order, cooked it, and delivered a piping-hot slab of sweet pork with an especially gnarled crust, the sandwich sided by a heap of pickle chips and topped with a thick slice of white onion. Samantha also gave us the lowdown on the restaurant's rather goofy signature item, the "hamburloin"-a burger atop a tenderloin in a single bun. She was joined in her regional-food discourse by various men and women from other tables, all of whom treat this place as a second home, pouring their own coffee when they need refills or when they come between meals to chat with friends.

From the outside, Darrell's Place in Hamlin looks more like a crop-duster hangar than a notable restaurant. The interior is all beer signs and bare Formica. And the tenderloin, made in the thick-patty style, is magnificent. Winner of the first annual Iowa Pork Producers Association Award in 2003, this sandwich sports a wavy, thousand-faceted bread crumb crust that hugs a luscious lode of pork. And by the way, Darrell's rhubarb pie, made using stalks secured from customers' patches, is peerless in a state famous for its pie: piled into a master-class crust, its tantalizing sugar-tart filling is balanced by the cascade of soft-serve vanilla ice cream that is its traditional garnish.

Just south of Audubon, in Exira, we had what might be our favorite Iowa tenderloin at a low-slung eatery with four tables called Red Barn. Costing $3.60, it is super wide but also mighty thick, really juicy and snug inside a savory crust, garnished with pickles and onions. The tenderloin is just one item on an exemplary Hawkeye State menu that also includes pea salad with shredded cheese bound in Miracle Whip, a lovely loosemeats sandwich special made of spiced minced beef and onion, and nutmeg-dusted vanilla custard.

By 11:45 a.m., every seat in the Red Barn was occupied and we were sharing our table with four strangers. Whereas habitu�s may linger when they come for coffee midmorning or in the afternoon, country-caf� courtesy at mealtime demands freeing up a seat as soon as one has finished eating. We quickly polished off dessert and paid our check, worrying all the while that we had appropriated two seats from a rotation of customers that rarely includes anyone from out of town.

THE GUIDE

photo by Ariana Lindquist

Bandamp;B Grocery
(515/243-7607)
2001 SE Sixth Street
De Moines, Iowa 50315

The Chatterbox Cafe
(712/563-3428)
120 N Division Street
Audubon, Iowa 50025

Darrell's Place
(712/563-3922)
4010 First Street
Hamlin, Iowa 50117

The Farmer's Kitchen
(712/243-2898)
319 Walnut Street
Atlantic, Iowa 50022

Mr. Bibbs Tenderloins
(515/243-0929)
2705 Sixth Avenue
De Moines, Iowa 50313

Smitty's
(515/287-4742)
SW 1401 Army Post Road
Des Moines, Iowa 50315

Red Barn
(712/268-2645)
613 West Washington Street
Exira, Iowa 50076

Restaurant Review: Verjus, Paris

Tue, 08 May 2012 12:00:00 EDT

by Alexander Lobrano
The first real modern American restaurant in Paris opened last December. It's called Verjus, it occupies a sunny triplex space in a 19th-century house overlooking the Palais-Royal, and it's run by New Orleans-born, Boston-bred chef Braden Perkins, 32, and his partner in work and life, Saint Paul native Laura Adrian, 27.

After two-plus decades of living in France, unless someone had told me Verjus was owned by Americans, I'd never have suspected-not upon arriving, anyway-that the owners were anything but French, so perfectly does the mise-en-sc�ne of the white-painted dining room with huge picture windows master the codes of the new wave of young-chef-helmed bistros in Paris (mismatched flea market chairs, bare wooden tables). The service is the tip-off. The young waitresses are friendly but don't want your stress. You'll be served when you're served, so relax. In any event, I'm never much fussed by the service when the food is this good. And it's wonderful, at last, to be in a Paris dining room where there's so much laughter in the crowd noise.

Verjus has been a hit with food-loving anglophone expats like me, and it's also gotten the thumbs-up from a couple of the more incisive young French food writers. One even described the place as having "un vibe tr�s Brooklyn"-high praise, as young Parisians are currently besotted with the New York City borough they perceive as hip and assiduously gastronomic but unpretentious. Since Perkins revises his two dinner-only tasting menus almost daily (one is four courses, the other, six), his imagination is always sparking. As evidenced by a winter starter of a poached egg with three types of grilled mushrooms (shiitake, button, and a tiny wild Japanese one) on a bed of wild rice with microscopic dandelion leaves and a sprig of dill, his food can be so fragile, intimate, and self-effacing that it induces perfect, fleeting, ego-free moments of Zen pleasure.

If none of the dishes throws flavor bombs or talks too loud, all of them intrigue with impeccable logic and sly intelligence.

If none of the dishes throws flavor bombs or talks too loud, all of them intrigue with impeccable logic and sly intelligence. A perfect example: a dish of pan-seared duck breast cooked rare and served sliced on top of ravioli filled with caramelized red onions, garnished with smoked celery root skin, orange segments, microgreens, and parsley-infused oil. The surprise Perkins teases out here is the nexus between the palates of central Europe and Japan: Duck, red onion, and orange is as Bohemian as can be, but the earthy celery root and small sharp bolt of herbaceousness read ryokan. At least that was my take on this terrific dish. A Parisian at the next table was vocally disconcerted: "Mais c'est bizarre du oignon rouge avec du canard!" ("Red onion with duck is weird!") Overhearing this remark, I thought, You'd never get this kind of guff at Spring, the other well-known Paris restaurant with an American chef. There, Daniel Rose has so diligently assimilated the classic calibrations of the French palate that there's nothing that would gall a Gaul; he's a French-trained chef making French food, however fresh his perspective.

photo by Laurent Chamussy

The first time I ate at Verjus, I was abashed to find myself cast, initially, in the role of the prissy Parisian. The dining room had none of the social and psychic tension of a French restaurant; you just kind of came in and sat down. The atmosphere was so low-key, it reminded me of the peace-and-love, spider-plant vegetarian places I used to go to in Northampton, Massachusetts, when I was a student at Amherst College. Then I remembered I not only like but prefer this social frequency in a restaurant. The first dish was a pair of roasted beets garnished with caraway seeds in a shallow pool of buttermilk; the next was brought out by an earnest young man with Clark Kent glasses, who I guessed was the chef. On that plate was a winter still life of pickled baby leeks with a quail's egg, Israeli couscous, oven-dried radicchio leaves, and a scattering of ash made from the green ends of the leeks. I loved the bitter staccato punctuation of the radicchio on the longer play of caramelized leek, and the little egg oozing into the chewy couscous. Next came a superb rectangle of skillet-cooked salmon garnished with a dab of grilled eggplant pur�e and salmon roe, with a tofu flan topped by a corsage of tiny mesclun leaves and razor-fine slices of fennel bulb. Worldly, casually sophisticated, sensual, and satisfying, this dish was a brilliant cameo of the best of contemporary American cooking.

After several more meals at Verjus, it became obvious to me that conventional restaurant reviewing protocol-the anonymous writer (which I was) comes for a few paid meals and then slinks away to deliver a verdict-just wouldn't work. There simply wasn't any honest way for me to be blas� about the nerviness (shading to audacity) of an American chef deciding to open his first restaurant in Paris.

So I met Perkins for a coffee on a frigid morning in a branch of Le Pain Quotidien, the Belgian bakery chain. I knew already that Perkins had cooked with Seattle chef Tom Douglas for several years before moving to Paris five years ago. Since he'd run the incredibly successful, now-defunct "Hidden Kitchen," a supper club in the Paris apartment he and Adrian share, I assumed he knew what he'd be up against. "What we're doing is unabashedly not a French restaurant," he told me. "Paris is on the receiving end of food trends today, and it makes some people a little uncomfortable, some a little defensive." But if Paris is no longer the global axis of gastronomy, why did he move here instead of, say, Philadelphia? "I wanted the experience of cooking with French produce," he said. "What's cool is democratizing good food, taking it down from the pedestal where the French expect to find it. Too often in France, the best food is humbled by antagonistic hospitality and an uptight atmosphere."

photo by Laurent Chamussy

Before the puckishly named Verjus-verjus, bien s�r, is the juice of unripened grapes; this handle was inspired by the restaurant's youth relative to the long-running Anglo-owned Paris wine bars of two of Perkins's friends and neighbors, Mark Williamson of Willi's Wine Bar and Tim Johnston of Juveniles-my experiences of soi-disant American food in Europe had always been cringe making. Only last summer, the best and most famous food writer in France wrote an article about American food that was a hailstorm of stereotypes, upbraiding our eats as an unappetizing collage of ice cream, pizza, sandwiches, barbecue, hamburgers, ketchup, and even chewing gum, for Pete's sake. The grand finale was a photograph of an obese woman standing on a scale.

Such serendipity is the reason a meal at Verjus should be on the to-do list of anyone who's Paris-bound anytime soon.

This is the international challenge for the first generation of serious American chefs to come of age since Alice Waters and company began teaching the United States to eat well: Every day, people all over the world think they've eaten typical American food when they haven't-unless you consider T.G.I. Friday's, McDonald's, and Kentucky Fried Chicken the sum of what's typical. Against this backdrop, can the rest of the world take American cooking seriously? Perkins thinks so. "Contemporary American cooking is ingredient driven and restlessly creative," he insists. "As Americans, we're not afraid to work across different spectrums and create new dishes, like Korean tacos. This approach runs counter to the Cartesian French way of thinking-you know, that there's a right and a wrong way to do everything. The idea that the 'wrong' way might produce something interesting-even delicious-doesn't register much in Paris."

Such serendipity is the reason a meal at Verjus should be on the to-do list of anyone who's Paris-bound anytime soon. Perkins's distinctly American culinary creativity interprets the best Gallic produce in a way that's unique and often spectacularly good.

It occurred to me that while I came to France a long time ago on bended knees in the hope of being gastronomically enlightened, that story is well and truly over. Perkins doesn't have a trace of the colonial bumpkin complex I once suffered from. His restaurant is the first self-described American address in the Old World that's ever made me feel proud.

Verjus
33/1/-4297-5440
52 rue de Richelieu
1st, Paris
Monday-Friday 7-10P.M.
Four courses: $72; six courses $92

Alexander Lobrano is the author of Hungry for Paris: The Ultimate Guide to the City's 102 Best Restaurants (Random House, 2008).

Smoky and Sweet

Fri, 04 May 2012 12:00:00 EDT

by Betsy Andrews
Recently at Spot Dessert Bar in Manhattan's East Village, I ate a slice of cake unlike any I'd had before: It was a coconut cheesecake with a thick whipped cream topping, and it looked typical enough. But it was perfumed with musky, flowery aromas and flavored with notes of caramel and smoke. It turns out that Spot's consulting chef, Ian Chalermkittichai, uses a technique from his native Thailand to infuse the cake's cream cheese base with this heady mix of scents and tastes.

The method employs tian op, a horseshoe-shaped, beeswax-coated wick suffused with aromatics: piney frankincense, flowery ylang-ylang, mossy patchouli, and spicy mace. The material is lit at both ends, then placed in a dish inside a bowl, jar, or saucepan with the food to be smoked. Then the vessel is covered, smothering the wicks, which smoke profusely, infusing the food with their complex fragrance.

Tian op may have traveled along the spice route from Arabia, or it may have roots in northeast India, where ghee-drizzled charcoal is placed in bowls of curry to add smoky flavor. But Thai cooks perfume only sweets, like salim, mung-bean flour noodles dressed in a smoke-infused coconut syrup. Other desserts-flower-shaped kleep lamduan shortbreads; coconut milk, sugar, and flour pyramids called a-lua-are made first and then smoked with the candle, whose effects grow stronger the longer it smolders.

According to Nancie McDermott, the author of several Thai cookbooks, tian op is used specifically with the types of labor-intensive desserts that derive from Thai palace cuisine. When I told her about Chalermkittichai's cheesecake, she laughed. "Tian op is an old-time thing," she said, "and this cake is so 21st century. In Thailand, you'd use it only with a few desserts. You come to America, and there are no rules. It's wonderful."

See the recipe for Smoked Coconut Cheesecake �

Spot Dessert Bar
(212) 677-5670
13 St Marks Place
New York, NY 10003

True Nordic Iceland's Seafood

Tue, 01 May 2012 12:00:00 EDT

by Shane Mitchell
Even by Icelandic standards, the Westfjords is isolated. A cliff-rung peninsula on the island's northwest corner, it is tied to the country only by a four-mile-wide isthmus. Fish air-cure in drying sheds left open to the salty wind. Polar bears stray onto the shore. The hardy souls who reside here make their living in the chilled North Atlantic hunting for cod and haddock.

Monkfish or halibut often winds up in the panfry, a one-skillet meal of seasoned, butter-fried fish, vegetables, and potatoes at Tj�ruh�si�, a dockside restaurant in the town of �safj�r�ur, open from May to September. When I happened upon it on recent visit to Westfjords, it reminded me of Try Pots, the chowder house from Moby Dick: fish soup bubbled on a stove manned by the grizzled chef and co-owner Magn�s Hauksson, whose ingredients for his heimilismatur ("home-style cooking") menu arrive straight off the boats.

After bobbing all morning near the Arctic Circle with two long-line fishermen, I was grateful for the Viking-size panfry placed in front of me in Tj�ruh�si�'s timber-frame dining room, formerly a har�fiskur (wind-dried fish) storage shed. Juggling skillets, Hauksson had tossed rich Icelandic butter atop sizzling plaice filets, finishing the dish with tiny boiled potatoes dug from a nearby field. Even cloaked under wild mushroom gravy, the fish that had been fathoms deep hours earlier was the dish's essence. It was Nordic cooking at its most comforting, worthy of a sea voyage.

Tj�ruh�si� Restaurant
(+354) 456-4419
�safj�r�ur
Open only during the summer.

Aloha, Vegas

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 12:00:00 EDT

by Brock Radke
With laid-back island tunes drifting overhead and photos of friends and family posted on the wall, this strip-mall restaurant feels more like a weekend cookout. It smells like home, too, with chicken and fish frying away, sweet and sour sauces simmering, and the light scent of our just-ordered poke salad- fresh, raw ahi tuna tossed with sesame and furikake-tempting us to begin our meal.

I'm eating out today with my friend Gary Haleamau. Born on the Big Island and calling Vegas his home for nearly 15 years, Gary is a musician and organizer of festivals that highlight his native culture. He's brought me to Island Flavor, his pick for the most authentic Hawaiian food in Las Vegas, a city they call the Ninth Island for its large islander population. More than 15,000 Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders live in Las Vegas, lured here by the low cost of living and work in the booming casino industry. The community has its own magazine, its own radio station, and its own flagship hotel and casino, called the California, boasting its own Hawaiian-themed eateries. But when natives want to eat the foods of home, says Gary, they come to restaurants like Island Flavor.

At this cozy, brightly-colored eatery, converted from a sushi bar four years ago, the most popular plate is kalbi short ribs, a spin on a Korean dish, succulent shards of beef made sticky-sweet when the soy-garlic-brown sugar marinade caramelizes under the broiler. Gary's favorites are salty, smoky kalua pig, and an off-menu treat of laulau, tender pork steamed in taro leaves.

Fried chicken katsu prepared loco moco-style, over rice with fried eggs and rich brown gravy, is an instant nap inducer, leading Gary to joke about his native eats. "It's always a ridiculous amount of food. Hawaiians, you know, maybe our food is known for quantity over quality," he laughs. "But when we get together for a festival or just to be with family, it's all about the food."

Island Flavor
8090 S. Durango Blvd. #103
Las Vegas NV 89113
702-876-2024
islandflavorv.com

SAVEUR's Essential Middle East: Cuisine, Travels, and Culture

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 12:00:00 EST

Twist by Pierre Gagnaire Las Vegas

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 12:00:00 EST

by James Oseland
Beyond the buffets and chain eateries and boozy bacchanals, Twist by Pierre Gagnaire is a restaurant that demonstrates how much Las Vegas dining has evolved. In the past dozen years, the world's top chefs have made their indelible mark on the city. Among them are more than a few Frenchmen: Alain Ducasse, Guy Savoy, Jo�l Robuchon, and since 2009, Gagnaire, with his enthralling restaurant in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel.

In its elegant contradictions, Twist shows why France's most noted toques love Las Vegas. On the one hand, the food of Vegas is so particular that it feels French in an offhand way. On the other hand, Gagnaire insists that Twist's dishes "possess eccentricity." What better place to flaunt eccentricity than Las Vegas? The restaurant lives up to its name, upending every expectation, gracefully, deliciously. Order the "zezette broth," and you don't just get broth; you get a mushroom and coconut soup infused with an abundance of fragrant herbs, plump vegetable gnocchi, and chicken chiffonade floating within. With it comes a cod cake tangy with Kaffir lime, and bavaroise flavored like ratatouille atop a ruby-colored bloody mary sorbet.

There seems no outward reason for this hodgepodge. The dishes are beautifully presented in a mosaic, but don't seem to go together. Then you taste, and the alchemy of so many textures, so many varying temperatures, so many flavors of herb and acid and sea and earth, is out of this world-and so precisely of this world that it seems to express the very essence of the food. You feel shaken awake. Your taste buds perk up. And so does your mood. Gagnaire understands Las Vegas; he's having fun here.

"Twist," he says, "means to turn things around, to unscrew them, to liberate, to have a different approach to traditional or normal dishes. I respect tradition, but with my own rules." Would that we could all play by our own rules in Vegas.

Pictured: Clockwise from top left: Muscavado sugar tuile with hojicha tea-flavored sugar-glass "opaline," citron-flavored royal icing, and matcha green tea powder atop an orange-saffron syrup; A granit� of green apple and lime topped with a cinnamon-dusted confit of apples and apple-flavored "opaline"; Cr�me br�l�e ice cream atop caramelized pineapple soaked in cr�me de cassis; A chocolate biscuit cake soaked in grappa, topped with ginger sorbet and served in a pool of banana coulis

Breakfast of Champions, Vegas Style

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:00:00 EST

by Josh Ozersky

Credit: Todd Coleman

My first trip to Vegas brought me west with the promise of easy money and, more enticing still, a cache of secret spaghetti. The money, or so I flattered myself, was to be had at the gaming tables of the Rio Casino, where the World Series of Poker was held that year. I wasn't a great player, but poker is a game even a bad player can win if he finds one worse (or more intoxicated) than himself.

The spaghetti, though, was what prompted the trip. Thanks to my run as the editor of a New York City restaurant blog, I had access to the city's best tables. But there was one that was still forbidden to me: Rao's, the legendary East Harlem red-sauce joint famous for refusing reservations to anyone other than its favored clientele. Rao's is the special preserve of politicians, moguls, and mobsters, all of whom rank far higher in the real world than bloggers. It made perfect sense that I should be excluded. I would have excluded me. It made me sad, though, because I grew up in Atlantic City eating exactly the kind of old-school Italian-American food that Rao's was said to serve so peerlessly. Would I ever get to eat it? I would indeed; I would do so in Las Vegas.

I meant to salve the wound of my exclusion with a sensualistic surrogate. A Rao's had opened in Caesars Palace, and I was determined to feed on veal chops and shrimp fra diavolo purchased with my poker winnings. The restaurant was said to be an exact simulacrum of the original, down to the last signed photo of Frankie Valli.

Rao's hovered over my mind during the many hours I sat at the gaming tables. Patience and self-control kept me from playing weak cards or being drawn into risky bets. I simply waited until a near-unbeatable hand came my way, and hoped that one of the Gen-Y dopes in sunglasses and headphones, their hands atwitter with aggression and the rhythms of Nickelback, bet into me. The process was long and wearying, and part of the discipline was not to play tired or angry. So every five or six hours I would get up and find, to my delight, that I was hungry. And no matter the time of day or night, I would walk over to S�o Paulo Cafe, the Rio's coffee shop, and order double hash browns, juice, and either bacon or sausage, depending on my mood. While I ate, I would look at a printout of the Rao's menu that I kept in my pocket.

The hash browns at the S�o Paulo deserve special notice. Like all fetishists, I pay inordinate attention to technique, and the versions I encountered there were flawless.

Las Vegas is a city of spectacular coffee shops, from the off-Strip gem Mary's Hash House to the Tropical Breeze Caf� in the Flamingo hotel, where short-order cooking is an art form. The hash browns at the S�o Paulo deserve special notice. Like all fetishists, I pay inordinate attention to technique, and the versions I encountered there were flawless. Unlike the heavy ones forced on me in New York, these were loose white shreds, weightless and massless, seemingly more at home in superstring theory than on a griddle. They became evanescent vehicles for salt, frying oil, and their own textural metamorphosis. And, oh, what texture! Their surface was a perfect crust, ranging from Florentine gold in the middle to mahogany on the ragged edge. The tender inner shreds, only touched by heat, were nestled safely inside, all steam and innocence. I mixed up the crunchy edges with the soft middle and forked hungrily in, chasing each bite with orange juice. Then I was ready to play again.

Three days passed in this hypnotic routine. It was a welcome fugue state, the most relaxed I've ever been. I had only two things to do, and they were totally absorbing-play and eat. On the third day, I found myself at the table with people with things on their mind besides veal chops, and my concentration, aided by some timely queens and jacks, allowed me to win. I left for Rao's with $1,200 in my pocket and an empty stomach.

What was the meal like? It was good, very good: I was wowed by the succulence of the veal, the vibrancy of the tomatoes. But I still want to go to the original Rao's. And looking back, the meals that stand out from the trip were the unplanned ones at the S�o Paulo Cafe, roughly 50 carpeted paces from the game floor. That was a true Las Vegas restaurant experience, as satisfying as Rao's and, in its way, as inimitable.

S�o Paulo Cafe
Rio Las Vegas
3700 West Flamingo Road
Las Vegas, NV 89103
702/777-7923

Nothing Better Than A Home-Cooked Meal

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 12:00:00 EST

by Andrea Sun
Credit: Todd Coleman

I grew up in Las Vegas. Those six simple words never fail to provoke an awkward pause in conversation. Followed, inevitably, by the polite, "So, what was it like?"

There were no neon lights at the ranch house where I spent my childhood. No showgirls, no $5 buffets, no Cirque du Soleil spectacles. There was just my mom and a 30-year-old wok. We moved to Las Vegas when I was five, to a street on the west side of town that wasn't even a blip on our crinkled map. It was a road less traveled compared to most coming-to-America stories, I suspect, moving from Taiwan to Michigan to Vegas. But my mother, Eatty Du, who fled her native Shanghai with my grandparents in the 1940s to escape the Communist regime, was always one for the unexpected. When we arrived in Vegas in the early 1990s, the city had no Chinatown yet; that would come later, after thousands of immigrants from mainland China flocked here to fill jobs at a number of newly opened resorts. When Mom needed the earthy dried mushrooms essential to her delicious stock, or the funky black bean paste that added the perfect hint of umami to her stir-fries, we used to have to pile into our beat-up minivan for the five-hour pilgrimage to Los Angeles.

Nowadays I live in LA, and when I visit Mom, she bustles around her kitchen with armfuls of ingredients from one shiny new Asian market or another. We bicker over whether to braise or fry the porky lion's head meatballs, and discuss the merits of the leftover vegetables she's about to toss into her ginger-spiced stock. And as we sit together to eat with my brother, Alex, and the rest of our family, I feel such a fondness for our Chinese table in Las Vegas. And all that glitters on the Strip feels so far away.

See the recipe for Sweet and Sour Shrimp �
See the recipe for Braised "Lion's Head" Meatballs with Napa Cabbage �
See the recipe for Homestyle Tomato Beef Stir-fry �

Pictured above: The author and her family sit down to a Sunday meal at the Las Vegas home of her mother, Eatty Du. Seated clockwise from left are the author's cousin, Jeremy Hsia; the author's brother's fianc�e, Bridget Chu-Dante; the author's niece, Mia Sun; the author's brother, Alex Sun; and the author. On the table are Shanghainese dishes made by the author and her mother: (clockwise from top left) pickled radish and green onion salad; Shanghai-style spare ribs; braised lion's head meatballs with Napa cabbage; chilled braised pumpkin with red dates; thousand-year-old egg and tofu salad with pickled mustard greens; tomato and beef stir-fry; celery, carrot, and bean sprout salad with sesame oil; sweet and sour shrimp; shredded pork, dried bean curd, and cilantro; Chinese chicken wings with rehydrated mushrooms; pickled cucumber salad with wood ear mushrooms.

Dining Like a Rhinestone Cowboy

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 12:00:00 EST

by Max Jacobson
Nearly two decades ago, when I was a restaurant critic at the Los Angeles Times, I visited Las Vegas intent on eating a juicy steak at Binion's Horseshoe. The meat was raised on owner Jack Binion's ranch in Miles City, Montana. I made the mistake of entering Binion's with a card-counting friend who'd been banned from the casino for life. Spotted by a pit boss, we ended up running for our lives down a side street, with two goons in hot pursuit.

Fact is, beneath its neon veneer, Las Vegas remains the Old West. Most everyone who travels here, whether from Scranton or Singapore, wants to experience a legendary Vegas steak house, and it's been that way for as long as anyone can remember.

Mobster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel founded upscale Vegas in 1946 when he opened its first fancy "carpet joint," the Flamingo Hotel andamp; Casino, but a restaurant scene didn't take shape until the 1950s, when gourmet dining rooms helmed by tuxedoed captains became the ne plus ultra. In the early '60s, my friend Larry Ruvo worked as a busboy at House of Lords in the Sahara, where everyone ordered the steak Diane, seared at the table with Worcestershire sauce and brandy in a copper pan. "Those were the days," Larry says. "At Chateau Vegas, the owner, Al Mangarelli, bought his meat directly from a Chicago stockyard. He'd bring Sambuca or Strega to your table. If you were a regular, he'd leave the bottle." (Today Larry runs Southern Wine andamp; Spirits of Nevada, which sells top-drawer Bordeaux to every steak house in town.)

Business, official and otherwise, has always been conducted in the tufted-leather booths of the city's steak houses. Back in the 1970s, Las Vegas's former mayor, Oscar B. Goodman, was an attorney to a number of notorious clients; he held meetings with a knife and fork. "I loved Vegas in the '70s," he told me recently, hoisting a gin martini. Today his wife, Carolyn, is the city's mayor, and Goodman holds court at Oscar's, a steak house named for him at the Plaza Hotel downtown. We talked in his office behind the bar, as I dug into a flank steak marinated with onions, garlic, and peppers. "That was Tony 'The Ant' Spilotro's favorite," he said. Spilotro, the basis for Joe Pesci's character in the movie Casino, was Goodman's most notorious client of all.

Business, official and otherwise, has always been conducted in the tufted-leather booths of the city's steak houses.

The steak chains of the '80s-Ruth's Chris, the Palm, Smith andamp; Wollensky, Del Frisco-all traded on that old-school vibe. The modern steak house didn't arrive until Charlie Palmer opened his eponymous place at the Four Seasons Hotel, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten launched Prime Steakhouse at the Bellagio. They were part of a wave of celebrity chefs that hit the city in the late '90s and just kept coming. By the time I moved to Vegas, in 1999, it was becoming a world-class dining destination. "Customers today are super discerning," Palmer says. "They care about everything from the beef's heritage to the aging program."

In 2012, a 35-day dry-aged steak seems almost prosaic. A porterhouse I recently ordered at Mario Batali's and Joe Bastianich's steak palace Carnevino, in the Palazzo, had been aged 260 days and tasted of rich meat and blue cheese; executive chef Zach Allen insisted that it be eaten rare, cut thin like an Italian tagliata, dressed with sea salt. But for my money, the city's best steak now is the designer-labeled Rangers Valley Angus wet- and dry-aged New York strip at Jean Georges Steakhouse, in the glittering CityCenter's Aria Resort andamp; Casino. The grain-fed meat, cooked on a wood-burning grill, is intensely beefy with a firm yet yielding texture, and a finish as long as a premium Pomerol.

Meanwhile, the steak house at Binion's is still open, as are such shrines to old Vegas as the Golden Steer and Bob Taylor's Ranch House. Even in a town whose shape is constantly shifting, as one building implodes and another rises in the image of our latest heart's desire, we still love to play the cowboy.

See the recipe for Prime's Porterhouse Steak with Lemon-Thyme Butter �

The Guide: Dakar

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 12:00:00 EST

Where to Stay

H�tel Al Afifa 46 rue Jules Ferry (221/33/889-9090) Rates: $90-$220 Double. With its lush garden patio, this hotel feels like a colonial throwback. Its location-on a quiet side street within easy walking distance of several of Dakar's best outdoor markets-is tough to beat.

Radisson Blu Route de la Corniche Ouest (221/33/869-3310) Rates: $250-$280 Double. Set right in Dakar's Fann Corniche neighborhood on a lively oceanfront esplanade, this sparkling new high-rise boasts a huge outdoor swimming pool and beautiful ocean views.

Where to eat

Keur N'Deye 68 rue Vincens (221/33/821-4973) This simple, cozy oasis in the heart of downtown Dakar is widely known for serving some of the best Senegalese cuisine available outside of home kitchens. The yassa poulet-grilled chicken with a tangy onion-and-pepper sauce-is excellent.

Le Djemb� 56 rue St. Michel (221/33/821-0666) A very pleasant hole-in-the-wall located right behind the Place de l'Indep�ndence-Dakar's central square-this place is famous for its thi�boudienne, the rice-and-tomato-based fish dish that is the Senegalese national dish.

Chez Loutcha 101 rue Mouss� Diop (221/33/821-0302) This rollicking eatery, popular with the downtown lunchtime crowd, specializes in both Senegalese and Cape Verdian dishes, served in gargantuan portions. Try the m�fe ginaar, rice and chicken in a thick peanut sauce.

P�tisserie Les Ambassades, 4 boulevard de l'Est, Point E (221/33/825-5587) Dakar is teeming with Parisian-style caf�s, and Les Ambassades, filled at all hours with employees of nearby embassies, is arguably the best. It would be hard to find a better pain au chocolat in all of west Africa.

What to Do

March� Sandaga Avenue Pompidou Dakar's largest outdoor market is chock-full of classic Senegalese street foods, including fluffy beignets; pastels, tiny empanada-like parcels filled with fish; and accara, black-eyed-pea fritters, served with kaani, a fiery chile-and-tomato sauce.

Soumb�dioune Route de la Corniche Ouest At this evening fish market right on the beach, you can buy fresh grouper, swordfish, barracuda, prawns, and sea urchins fresh off the boats. Several makeshift food stalls called tanganas sell grilled fish, omelets, and pasta. Wash everything down with a caf� touba, a heavily sugared, thick, bracing coffee.

Back to the article A Feast for All �
See all our Senegalese recipes in the gallery �
See a guide to the regional cuisines of Senegal �

Senegal's Regional Cuisines

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 12:00:00 EST

by John O'Connor
When I was living in Senegal, hitting the highway and getting out into the countryside as often as I could, I was always struck by how radically the landscape changed from point A to point B. In Thi�s, where I lived, on the edge of the semi-arid Sahel plain, sandstorms sometimes swept into town; we'd suddenly find ourselves half-blind and bumping into lampposts. Yet due south, in the Casamance region, I encountered tropical forests, mangroves, and a lush river delta full of dolphins and white pelicans, and then outside Touba, in east-central Senegal, red lowland savannahs and peanut plantations stretched to the horizon. Although there's great consistency across the national palate, this varied topography divides the country into three principal regions, each with its own distinct cuisine.

The South: Before France consolidated its colonial rule in the second half of the 19th century, Portugal made inroads in tropical Casamance and helped shape dishes like caldou, a fish soup similar to Portuguese caldeirada de peixe, made with lime, tomatoes, and grilled carp or tilapia. The Diola people have cultivated rice in the river flood plains of this region for centuries, while fonio, an ancient species of millet that was a staple before the French arrived, is now making a comeback thanks to its reputation as a super-grain rich in amino acids. The rainforest, dense with game, supplies dibiteries-roadside butcher shops-which offer delicious grilled game meat like antelope, as well as beef and lamb.

The North: Seafood is abundant in this part of Senegal-from both the Atlantic and the Senegal River-and many of the country's most beloved dishes, including the fish-and-rice specialty thi�boudienne, originated in the former French colonial capital of Saint-Louis. Given its proximity to the Sahara, the north of Senegal shares many features with North African cuisine. Couscous has been produced here from pearl millet by the nomadic Fula group for centuries; in fact, Moroccans may have learned to process and steam couscous from the Fula. From the east, along the border with Mali, where peanut plantations stretch for miles, comes m�fe, a thick peanut stew made with chicken or lamb.

Dakar: In Senegal's cosmopolitan capital, Dakar, the Wolof are the largest ethnic group. As of 1902, this was the capital of all of French West Africa, which accounts for the ubiquity of fresh bread; every neighborhood has its boulangeries. Vietnamese immigrants began arriving in the 1950s, as French colonial Indochina plunged into war, hence the high concentration of Vietnamese restaurants in Dakar. Today, in fact, Senegalese of various ethnicities use Southeast Asian fish sauce as a substitute for traditional umami-boosters like gejj (dried fermented fish), even in the revered national dish thi�boudienne.

Back to the article A Feast for All �
See our guide to where to eat and stay in Dakar �

The Guide: Corsica

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 12:00:00 EST

Where to Stay

Hotel le Maquis

Route D55, Grosseto-Prugna, Porticcio (33/4/9525-0555). Rates: $600 double. This 60-year-old waterfront hotel is something of a grande dame on the island, as is founding owner Ketty Salini. She presides over Le Maquis' graceful lobby and its excellent white-linen restaurant, L'Arbousier, where a meal of grilled day-boat fish in olive oil and wild herbs is worth every centime.

La Villa Calvi

Chemin Notre Dame de la Serra, Calvi (33/4/9565-1010). Rates: $500 double. La Villa, in the picturesque beach town of Calvi, could be said to represent the new school of Corsican hospitality: infinity pool, minimalist decor. It's a nice choice if you're exploring the island's northern tier and want to splurge. The hotel bar offers a delicious local version of kir using Corsican myrtle liqueur.

Where to Eat

Auberge U Licettu

Plaine de Cuttoli, Cuttoli (33/4/9525-6157). Expensive. This rustic inn and restaurant, in the herb-covered hills overlooking the Gulf of Ajaccio, offers traditional Corsican cuisine: wild-boar terrine, headcheese, handmade pastas, and a sumptuous pork shoulder cooked for 10 hours over a wood fire.

Restaurant U Pasquale Paoli

2 place Paoli, L'�le Rousse (33/4/954-706-770). Expensive. The finely wrought cuisine at this gem of a restaurant in the northern port of L'�le Rousse applies French rigor to native Corsican ingredients. Chef Ange Cananzi's renditions of traditional dishes might include a veal-liver risotto with baby purple artichokes, and other thoughtful takes on local ingredients.

La Litorne

Route de Casevecchie, Ville de Pietrabugno (33/4/9531-4189). Inexpensive. This always-busy restaurant, in the foothills north of the waterfront town of Bastia, sees only a smattering of tourists a year. Its cuisine is centered on a wood-fired hearth that turns out perfectly singed thin-crust pizzas topped with local charcuterie, as well as grilled meats and fish.

What to Do

March� Central d'Ajaccio

Boulevard du Roi J�r�me. Ajaccio's main outdoor market, a warren of tented stalls in the center of town near the port, offers a thorough introduction to Corsican ingredients and foodstuffs, especially artisanal cheeses and charcuterie. The city's main fish market is in a public hall just steps away, on the quai Napol�on.

Key

Dinner for two with drinks and tip:
Inexpensive: Under $75
Moderate: $75-$99
Expensive: $100 and up
Air France offers daily connecting flights from Paris Orly to Corsica.

Discover the cuisine of Corsica in our article Pleasure Island �
See the gallery of Corsican Recipes �

The Art of the Cure

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 12:00:00 EST

by David McAninch
Traditional Corsican charcuterie is made using the same centuries-old methods-salting, air-curing, smoking, and cave-aging-that were likely carried over from Italy during the long periods of Genoan rule. The calling card of Corsican charcuterie is rich marbling, which owes to the free-range, chestnut-fattened Nustrale pigs, a black-skinned breed that is related to the island's native wild boars. Curing was customarily carried out during the tumbera, or pig harvest, which takes place in mid-December. Though the tumbera is now a ceremonial event, Corsica's charcuterie makers-mostly farmers and rural artisans-still slaughter their animals in early winter and break them down to make the four major types of charcuterie: coppa (smoked filet, pictured), lonzu (dry-cured loin), prizuttu (dry-cured ham), and figatellu (smoked liver sausage). All are typically enjoyed as a precursor to a meal, though many cooks like to use them, especially figatellu and prizuttu, to enrich soups and slow-simmered beans and vegetables.

See our article on Corsica, Pleasure Island �

Fresh and Aged

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 12:00:00 EST

by David McAninch
Given Corsica's mountainous topography, it's no surprise that sheep's and goat's milk cheeses reign. The most famous of them is brocciu, the ricotta-like cheese made from a mixture of whey, the watery by-product of the cheesemaking process, and whole milk-either sheep's, goat's, or both. Brocciu, which is richer than ricotta, may be the Corsican cook's most cherished ingredient; the cheese is essential for a host of savory and sweet dishes. The island also produces a natural-rind semifirm style called tomme, a generic French term for a disk-shaped cheese. The ones pictured at right are sold under the names tomme de br�bis (made from sheep's milk) and tomme de ch�vre (goat's milk). These are aged from one to three months and can range from soft and supple to tangy and crumbly. Developed more recently are the creamy sheep's milk cheeses called brin d'amour and fleur du maquis, both rolled in dried herbs and made primarily for export. Another Corsican cheese is fromage piquant, made from scraps of long-aged tomme whose sinus-clearing bite comes solely from fermentation.

See our article on Corsica, Pleasure Island �

Island Heritage

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 12:00:00 EST

by Elyse Inamine
Located 100 miles south of Provence and 51 miles off the coast of Tuscany, Corsica's identity bears the cultural imprint of France, Italy, and the other foreign occupiers that have laid claim to the mountainous island since the Greeks first colonized Corsica around 560 b.c. But the centuries-long occupation by Genoa that ended in 1755 (followed by Corsica's sole period of independence, which lasted 14 years and ended when it became a province of France) was the lengthiest and had the most lasting influence on Corsican cooking. Though the cuisine incorporates indigenous foods-cheeses made from the milk of mountain-dwelling sheep and goats, wild boar charcuterie, native grapes for wine, herbs foraged from the maquis-Genoans contributed the crafts of meat preservation and pasta- and cheese-making, and an agricultural system that endowed the island with chestnuts, citrus, and olives. All are essential to the Corsican pantry. Despite its vast coastline, Corsica's history as a target for piracy long discouraged the formation of seaside communities. Hence, fresh fish never developed an important role in Corsica's cucina povera, its rustic, country-style cuisine.

Back to the article Pleasure Island �

Postcard: Crawfish Harvest in Erath, Louisiana

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 12:00:00 EST

by Meryl Rosofsky
Crawfish season is always cause for celebration in Cajun country, and the folks in Erath know how to throw one helluva party-especially when there's a chance to share their emblematic food with newcomers, like my group of grad students from NYU's Food Studies program. We arrived at the Perrin farm in Vermilion Parish on a sunny day, just in time to harvest some of the squirming critters. Heading out in the flooded rice paddies in a converted pirogue on tractor-like wheels, with stowaway snapping turtles sunning themselves inches from our toes, we watched, mesmerized, as our captain and his helper hauled in trap after trap of the otherworldly delicacy.

A mishap with a fire ant hill didn't dampen our appetite for the feast that followed-a traditional crawfish boil, expertly seasoned and served on platters the size of flying saucers, accompanied by a slew of other dishes: crawfish stew, crawfish cornbread, crawfish sauce piquant over rice, crawfish fettuccine, crawfish casserole, and crawfish salad, alongside newfangled crawfish enchiladas from Prejean's in Lafayette, courtesy of our wonderful hosts Warren and Mary Perrin's son, Bruce. Chefs Kyle and Ron tended a giant cauldron of crawfish jambalaya and fried up some alligator tenders and hushpuppies that we washed down with cold Abita beers. And to cap it all off, a delectable sheet cake drizzled with Steen's syrup from the sugarcane grown across the way.

Get more Cajun recipes and travel stories on our Essential Louisiana page �

All Hail the King and Queen of Books

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 12:00:00 EST

by Ruth Reichl
The last thing I expected to find in Las Vegas was a phrase of apples. Well, actually, the last thing I expected to find in Las Vegas was a store that had a book that had a recipe for a phrase of apples, a medieval English dessert that resembles a fruit pancake. In fact, I almost didn't.

Amber Unicorn Books is just another shabby-looking storefront in one of the shopping malls that parade endlessly through non-Strip Vegas. Sitting in the shadow of a Trader Joe's, it makes no attempt to lure you through the door.

Even inside, the shop is slow to reveal itself. I'd been told they had some vintage cookbooks, but walking through aisles of military books and science fiction, I was sure I'd stumbled into the wrong place. Then I noticed a first edition of The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book and pounced. Next, I spied another rare cookbook, Aunt Sammy's Radio Recipes (complete with transcripts from a program that was on the air from 1926 to 1934). But it was not until I picked up a signed copy of Louis Szathmary's American Gastronomy that I felt a little tap on my shoulder. I turned to find a pleasant-looking woman surveying me. "Did you ever meet him?" she asked, referring to the chef and author of the book I was holding. "He was a truly great man; a regular customer of ours."

Myrna Donato owns the shop with her husband, Lou, and she doesn't want you to just buy her cookbooks. She wants you to treasure them. She wants you to discuss them with her. She wants to tell you about the people who buy them and the meals that they make from them. Last year, when I found myself spending a few weeks in Las Vegas, Amber Unicorn became my lifeline to reality. Whenever the glitz of the Strip became too much, I fled to the bookshop, losing myself in reading and recipes. I spent a lot of money at Amber Unicorn, but I was getting much more than old cookbooks. For me, this modest little shop with its superb cookbook collection was the perfect antidote to neon Vegas. And unlike everything in that other Vegas, this one comes home; the shop ships.

Amber Unicorn Books
2101 S Decatur Blvd #14
Las Vegas, NV 89102
702/648-9303

True West

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 12:00:00 EST

by Beth Kracklauer
In a buff-colored, terracotta-shingled suburban development at the western edge of Las Vegas's steady spread into the surrounding desert, the Bunker house is a very pleasant place to be on a Sunday afternoon. Bowls and cutting boards and fresh vegetables and herbs cover the island at the center of the kitchen, where various Bunkers are gathered, all of them busy. As Morgan Bunker-a 43-year-old PR executive with a thick thatch of silver hair-reaches for the avocados, his petite, blonde mother, Carole, claps her hands. "Oh, goody. You're working on the guac."

Like Morgan's wife, Allyson, Carole is a transplant from California, whereas Morgan and Allyson's three teenage children-Tristan, Gavin, and Cicely-are sixth-generation Nevadans. Their Bunker forebears, some of the state's early Mormon pioneers, arrived by covered wagon in 1877. So I'm told by Morgan's father, Richard, who was born in Las Vegas in 1933, "when the population was 8,000. Now it's over 1.3 million." Richard is given to producing figures like these, having served as County Manager and, in the 1980s, as chairman of the state Gaming Control Board. "At that time, 80 percent of revenue here came from gambling. Now, 50 percent comes from restaurants, shows, and other entertainment."

Credit: Todd Coleman

This sunny kitchen, bustling as it is with everyone pitching in to prepare lunch, couldn't feel farther from the frenetic action over on the Strip. On the menu today: that guacamole, plus fish tacos made with tilapia grilled out on the back patio, velvety black beans, cilantro-flecked rice, and a homemade limeade so bright and tart and delicious I can't stop refilling my glass. When I ask what's in it, 14-year-old Cicely grabs a blue binder loaded with family recipes. While helping me to find the page, she proudly points to a section labeled Sizzy (her nickname). All three kids are cooks. "Sizzy's in charge of Sunday morning," Morgan says. "Pumpkin chocolate chip pancakes," his daughter adds, by way of example.

As Gavin stirs the chipotle crema for the tacos, Richard says, "OK, wrap it up, buddy." Everyone moves over to the big oak table at the other end of the kitchen. Dishes are passed around; Morgan and his mother quibble genially over whether to use two tortillas or one per taco. I tell Allyson how happy I am to be invited to a part of Las Vegas most tourists don't see. "You know," she tells me, "when we moved out here eight years ago, it was just dirt between here and the freeway." A century and a half after their wagons rolled into Nevada, the Bunkers are still pioneers.

See the recipe for Grilled Fish Tacos with Creamy Chipotle Sauce �
See the recipe for Cilantro Rice �
See the recipe for Black Beans �
See the recipe for Cucumber Limeade �

Hot, Sour, Sweet, Bitter, Hot

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 12:00:00 EST

by Jonathan Gold
When I worked for Gourmet magazine a dozen years ago, one of my duties was to stop by Las Vegas every so often to report on the new hotel restaurants that were just starting to open in astonishing numbers. The confluence of Las Vegas and ambitious chefs seems obvious now, but it hadn't been more than a few years since the California Pizza Kitchen was the most interesting casino restaurant in town.

On one of these trips, I had been hitting bad restaurant after bad restaurant, all of them expensive, many of them classically French: blanquette de veau is hard to digest when it is 110 degrees in the shade. So on the third day, I canceled my reservation at a dining room known for its individual beef Wellingtons and drove a mile or so off the Strip to a new Thai place jammed into an enormous strip mall where Led Zeppelin had once played in a skating rink.

Lotus of Siam was not immediately promising. The banner advertising a cheap lunch buffet was bigger than the restaurant's neon sign, the walls were decorated with torn travel agency posters, and most of the customers were piling their plates with broccoli beef and mounds of fried rice big enough to be mistaken for oyster middens. But when you opened the menu and leafed past the expected fried wonton and mee krob noodles, there was a wonderland of dishes from all over Thailand. From the northeast Isaan region, grilled fermented-pork sausages with fried peanuts and raw chiles; pungent larb salad made with chopped catfish; soupy, intensely peppery Lao-style vegetable curries; and clean, lime-scented, chile-hot salads of every description, even koi soi, a sort of beef tartare whose effect depends on tangy beef bile, an ingredient you don't find at Kroger. A hot-sour soup was flavored with a kind of Cambodian smoked fish I wasn't aware you could get in the United States, and there was a great version of my favorite Thai appetizer, nam kao tod, a salad made with crunchy rice, fried peanuts, and cubes of raw cured pork sausage. On the back of the menu, there was a roster of the restaurant's real specialties: the robust, salty-bitter cooking of northern Thailand, including a fleshy jackfruit salad, the roasted green-chile dip nahm prik nuhm, and an almost-perfect version of the delicate curried-noodle dish khao soi.

I went back for the next four or five meals in a row, and I almost cried when I had to get on a plane back to New York.

It was the best Thai meal I had ever eaten. I went back for the next four or five meals in a row, and I almost cried when I had to get on a plane back to New York. I called it the best Thai restaurant in North America in my review for the magazine, and in the dozen years since, it has become probably the most famous Thai restaurant in the United States. The chef, Saipin Chutima (who runs the restaurant with her husband, Bill, and their daughters), tied for "Best Chef: Southwest" last year by the James Beard Foundation, making her the first Asian-born chef to win a Beard award for cooking the cuisine of her homeland. It was a stunning, and overdue, tribute.

Lotus of Siam has expanded over the years (it no longer has any relationship with the restaurant of the same name in New York), and Bill has built up the meager wine list into an important collection of German whites, a brilliant pairing with spicy food. There's a refinement, a lightness and pitch-perfect balance to Saipin's cooking that captures all that's great about Thai cuisine. But she also occasionally introduces Western elements into Thai formulas in a way that could be interpreted as fusion, putting salmon into khao soi, perhaps, or cooking a steak in the manner of sua rong hai, with a spicy sauce.

The restaurant has made it into practically every Las Vegas guidebook in existence, and tourists regularly cab it there from the major hotels. There is still a $9.99 buffet lunch. But the real astonishment in visiting and revisiting the restaurant over the years is its purity: the authenticity of the cooking and the quality of the ingredients the Chutimas have managed to maintain in a restaurant with essentially no Thai customers. Thai restaurants, like Thai herbs, are difficult to cultivate in the dry heat of Las Vegas. The Chutimas have made theirs thrive.

See the recipe for Lotus of Siam's Panang Chicken Curry �