Travel

While things change so fast in this world, there are still places where time stands still. The face of Paris changes faster every year that I visit and not always for the better. There are more and more fast food chains, pasta restaurants, pizza sellers and Asian takeaway because everyone wants to eat quickly and run somewhere...

At L'Ami Jean time has stopped, it is old fashioned, handcrafted French/Basque cuisine. The restaurant has an aged yellowed patina with acorn fed Spanish hams hanging from the rafter with an inviting glow that welcomes you. The menu changes daily and the ingredients could not be better sourced or fresher! Whatever they make is always breathtaking!

Stephane Jego the chef/owner holds court from his extremely busy kitchen filled with six assistants that move around at blurring speed. One of the starters the night we were there, last week, included the freshest poached mackerel topped with a dollop of brandade served in the center of a curry rosemary vegetable laden broth. Curry and rosemary an unlikely combination that really worked!

This past summer my boyfriend and I set out on a cross-country road trip from Boston to L.A, a drive whose route would transverse America, and take us to countless places we’d never been before.  With only a few changes of clothes, two sleeping bags and a cooler, we left the East Coast energetic and idealistic about the trip.  The things most looked forward to: upstate New York in August, the peak of wild flower season, wheat fields in Iowa and the Rockies once out west, stretched out ahead of us for weeks on end.  I can honestly say that we did see these things, all of them. Unfortunately, I wasn’t paying much attention… far too busy reading the Sterns. 

My cover of the Sterns’ 2005 edition of “Roadfood” features a close-up of an oozing triple-decker grilled cheese sandwich, the evidence of whose butter-fried preparation proclaims itself from each crispy edge of toast and glistening golden burnt bit. The bread appears to be highly refined, and the cheese orangey processed.  In other words: the cover-sandwich looks criminally delicious, the kind you’d find in a favorite diner, or perhaps in one of the 600 odd restaurants, spanning 48 states, that the Sterns describes within.  Snappily written reviews of places chosen for their honest cooking, lack of pretense and use of ingredients rated high to higher on the bad-for-you index, make for an addictive read.  It’s also a really fun book for sickos to pour over when the trail mix runs out, and the only work of non-fiction I packed on my person when leaving for The Big Move out west.

An excerpt from  "Hungry for Paris"

Some ten years ago, I went to dinner one night with no expectations. A London newspaper had asked me to write about Lapérouse, an old warhorse of a restaurant overlooking the Seine on the Left Bank—it was doing historic Paris restaurants, and this one’s been around forever. I politely suggested that there might be better candidates, because as far as I knew, this place was still a slumbering tourist table flogging its past: it has several charming tiny private dining rooms with badly scratched mirrors—as the legend goes, these cuts were made by ladies testing the veracity of newly offered diamonds (real diamonds cut glass).

The editor was unyielding, so off I went. The stale-smelling dining room was mostly empty on a winter night, and though the young mâitre d’hôtel was unexpectedly charming and gracious, I was more interested by my friend Anne’s gossipy accounts of a recent visit to Los Angeles than I was by the menu.

People who love barbecue really love barbecue, and will go to great lengths to find the perfect ribs. I’m one of those, so I was thrilled to be invited to judge The Best in the West Nugget Rib Cook-Off in Sparks, Nevada.

For die-hard barbecue lovers and novices alike, this kind of cook-off is a slice of pork heaven.

Instead of driving around the country to sample regional styles of barbecue, all I had to do was take a three-block stroll down Victorian Avenue in front of the Nugget for some of the best ribs in the country.

Pit masters competed from all over the country, cooking up slab after slab of pork ribs in pick up-sized smokers and finishing them off on 10-foot-long wood-fired grills. Some hailed from legendary barbecue states like Texas, South Carolina, and Kansas. But many, many others came from states that folks rarely associate with this style of cooking—we’re talking all the way from California to Minnesota, Pennsylvania and, yes, even New Jersey.

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