Most people go to Vermont to watch the leaves change colors in the fall but I like it in the spring when the leaves on the trees are green, 67 colors of green, so that the bonnets of the trees look like a jigsaw puzzle and the tulips are in bloom and the geraniums and the cherry blossom trees – there’s nothing fancy about Vermont, it’s all straight up plain flowers plainly blooming everywhere, as if the earth is starting fresh again after winter and toward the end of May it hits an optimum equilibrium even if it does rain every other day which if you’re only there for a day and a half isn’t very good odds, at least not of skipping the rain. But people in Vermont don’t mind, they just take out their umbrellas and keep on truckin’….
“And why are we going to Vermont in May, Mom? I don’t get it. Why are we going to Vermont, at all???”
“You’ll see, Anna.”
Call it denial having taken this long to write about it. Call it anything you want but there will be NO MORE Gourmet magazine in anyones mailbox ever again and that will take a lot of getting use to. It was always the first food magazine that I opened each month, the others could wait. Of course it's shocking and sad, the end of an era and no more Ruth piloting the ship. And I will most miss her.
A: It's been 21 years since we opened Kate Mantilini's, which I
named after my Uncle Rob's mistress. My mother wouldn't let me speak to
her, nobody would allow us to mention her name, but she was a very
strong woman and I wanted to name my restaurant after her. My husband
was under contract with Warner Brothers, and he did 50 films in the
1940s before we went into the restaurant business.