Joe Warwick and his book: “Where Chefs Eat”
Scanning the line-up of panelists for this year’s Terroir Symposium, held recently in downtown Toronto, Irish-raised Londoner Joe Warwick’s photo and bio stood out among the roster of famous chefs, well-known restaurant critics and culinary academics. Read more…
Two weeks in London (U.K.) last month wasn’t long enough to sleuth the hot ‘n’ happening food scene in that fair city.
In the 1950s and ’60s, when I spent formative years there, bagels and baguettes were a novelty In fact, my Canadian dad used to make a pilgrimage to Soho’s Berwick St. Market to find cobs of corn: an imported delicacy in those days that cost the equivalent of a dollar apiece. Sunday was the day for our visit to Zlotnick’s in the North London suburb of Finchley where we lived to purchase bagels – almost unknown in our white, white-collar, white-bread nabe – at that lone Jewish deli.
Today, London is a hot-bed of delicious chow – from the nutrient-packed, luscious Muesli pot at Pret a Manger to high-end stuff like snails at the new St. John Hotel. What’s more, corn is on almost every menu along with harissa, veal cheeks, smoked eel, burrata, lovage and other exotica. Read more…
My recent annual visit to London (U.K.) was the best yet. And, as a long-time defender of British food – yes, this in the face of doubters and haters who think gray roast meat and overcooked brussels sprouts typify that island’s grub – even I was surprised at the high quality of chow (almost) everywhere we ate.
Ross and I spent two weeks covering a wide area of that magnificent city – the place where I lived during formative years from age four to 19 – while sleuthing food, live music and just plain old fun.
This was in between hanging out with my mum who, at age 88, is alive, kicking, still speaking seven languages, being a culture vulture, savouring Goethe in the original with her morning coffee and teaching young ‘uns to read at the local primary school in Primrose Hill. Read more…
I have long dreamed of eating at famed Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse.
At an Association of Food Journalists gathering in the Napa Valley more than a decade ago, I tried, without success, to find a way to make that pilgrimage.
A couple of years later, I interviewed its earth-mother, food guru founder Alice Waters by phone while she was on a train en route to Yale university where her daughter Fanny was a student and where Alice was trying “to change the food in the college dining halls and to change the way people there think of food.” Read more…
The annual South Beach Wine & Food Festival took place this year from February 19-22 in Miami.
As usual and even in tough economic times, this glitzy, pricey, never-dull four-day event sponsored by, among others, the Food Network and Food & Wine magazine, was sold out.
Attended by more than 30,000 people and founded by a fellow called Lee Schrager in 2001, it is the biggest culinary celebration of its kind in North America. Read more…
In case you didn’t catch my chat with host Jeff Goodes on Fresh Air on CBC Radio on Saturday morning, January 27, here’s a list of places I mentioned during our discussion about eating out in winter:
Down the Street, Stratford, Ontario, especially for its warm welcome but also for the cozy decor and excellent food. Read more…
My brother Eric and I were both born in Montreal. We didn’t live there long as the wanderings of our academic parents began soon after, taking us to Halifax, Nova Scotia, followed by London, England, where we spent 15 years and then back to Canada in the late ’60s.
Still, that lovely city of my birth has always loomed large, partly because, as children, we regularly made summer visits there to see both sets of grandparents, crossing the Atlantic several times by ocean liner (not a good memory) and because my dad would sometimes talk about growing up in that city’s famous Jewish neighbourhood now called Mile End or The Main. Read more…
