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It is important to walk to Noma over city bridges and along waterfront streets to embrace Copenhagen’s bone chilling winter.  February Noma meals are miraculously conceived outdoors; natural bounties harvested, pickled, smoked, or dried in step with a harsh Scandinavian winter calendar. Only then are they skillfully nurtured into a series of intellectually compelling courses [...]

Noma is Copenhagen, Copenhagen is Noma. They are intertwined the way musicians reflect root and spontaneous influences. For us, we are in the middle of both; five days of frosty, windswept, Nordic Copenhagen and two meals at its geographic mirror called Noma.  All of it feels severe and subtle, cozy and edgy, intellectual yet simple, [...]

While food and wine still do not rank as keywords for Amsterdam’s travel websites, it is time to cut the canal city some slack. Visiting Amsterdam as a young man in the 1980′s and 90′s conjured immersive travel images of great contrast to the Amsterdam we experienced this weekend.  While our first day was reserved for [...]

Wine stemware was conspicuously absent at AKA Bistro’s sake and French cuisine dinner. On the table in front of me, next to a flask-like tokkuuri, were wood box masu, some kiki choko beaming their bottom-of-the-cup targets, and a flat ceremonial sakazuki drinking vessel. Of course, I would know little about any of this crystal-trumping nomenclature without the help of [...]

A cellar clearance sale occurs every summer at Boston’s wine-oasis-restaurant Troquet. Once upon a time, years ago, Troquet proprietor Chris Campbell owned a simpler but no less compelling wine Mecca, UVA, in Brighton.  You would find winos, sommeliers, and chefs ordering pizza and grilled meats to drink with Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Rhone wines selling for [...]

Bordeaux improves through cellaring; nothing new about that. A long time ago I joined a group dinner to taste claret with Clive Coates and he drew something like this to explain a cultural gap in patience, along wines’ life trajectories, between British and American wine enthusiasts: At a very recent dinner I hosted for a group of business [...]

Blanket statements can be dangerous and instigative, so let’s begin by saying something nice about California Cabernet; several offer amazing, sexy, and voluptuous drinking.  Some are even global ambassadors offering classic varietal profiles and age worthiness such as Ridge Montebello, Dominus, and Dalla Valle, as examples.  Still, I drink very, very little of it besides [...]

Opening red wine with oysters stirs cries of insubordination similar to the ones Beijing party leaders might attach to Tiananmen political dissenters.  Champagne, Muscadet, Chablis, Sauvignon Blanc, Gruner, Chenin Blanc, Picpoul and a smattering of other crispy acidic white wines make the cleared list while reds take cover in their brackish shadows. Give me oysters bathed in [...]

Like all great cities, eating and drinking in Chicago is a dual proposition.  While the likes of Alinea, Moto, and Green Zebra ping away at culinary pleasure sensors, the city’s midwest soul food circuits beckon.  I developed my own ritual patterns for Chicago’s simpler local eating more than twenty years ago, always making sure to [...]