Andrea Nguyen is the foremost English-speaking voice of Vietnamese gastronomy in the world, and her 2006 book Into The Vietnamese Kitchen was a landmark tome in demystifying the country’s sophisticated culinary culture to the Western world. Her latest book, The Pho Cookbook (which one a James Beard Award in April…
Every once in awhile, you encounter a story that makes you say, “Wow, I wish I had been smart/talented/cool/thoughtful/funny enough to write that.” Such is the case with this fun read from Slate’s Nick Greene, who interviewed the San Francisco Chronicle’s wine critic, Esther Mobley, about where the wine-loving LeBron…
By all accounts, actor Matthew Rhys is a busy guy: He’s wrapping up his final season on the acclaimed FX series The Americans, played a pivotal role in Steven Spielberg’s award-season favorite The Post, and the native Welshman and his Americans co-star Keri Russell also have a toddler, named Sam, at home in New York.…
San Francisco Chronicle food writer and restaurant critic Jonathan Kauffman wondered how the popular hippie food he ate as a child in the ’70s made it all the way to his hometown of Elkhart, Indiana. His resulting book, Hippie Food: How Back-To-The-Landers, Longhairs, And Revolutionaries Changed The Way We Eat, is a…
Andrew Zimmern, whose stomach has hosted more animals than Noah’s Ark, has made a career vicariously eating on behalf of the unadventurous among us. On Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods, Zimmern seeks out food cultural traditions in the locales he visit, and if it means snacking on fresh cow placenta or a still-beating…
Many books exist about ice cream that explore methodology and technique—the how of making top-notch ice cream. Rare is the tome that explains the science behind it, the careful engineering and balancing act required to produce a rich, creamy, and consistent product. One reason may be that the science behind ice cream…
The Venn diagram circles of professional basketball writers and food writers overlap very little, but within that narrow sliver lies one journalist who’s covering the NBA-food beat better than anyone else: ESPN’s Baxter Holmes.
Ruby Tandoh was a contestant on The Great British Bake Off during its 2013 season, riding to a top three finish with her original flavors and wry sense of humor. While many of the show’s contestants returned to their day jobs and maintained baking as a weekend project, Tandoh has parlayed her star-making turn on Bake…
Imagine selling the Bloody Mary to a focus group today: “Say, you know what goes well with vodka? Tomato juice!”
Airline food: butt of jokes, favorite subject of ’90s stand-up comedy routines, butt of jokes about ’90s stand-up comedy routines. It’s also the passion of Nikos Loukas, the primary voice behind the 4-year-old website Inflightfeed.com and its associated Instagram account, a hypnotic scroll of seat-back trays and tiny…
How can the mighty egg be simultaneously associated with such beauty and ugliness?
Sixteen years have passed since Anthony Bourdain entered our consciousness, his memoir Kitchen Confidential slicing through the crisp-suited maître d’ ideal of fine dining like a serrated knife through ripe tomato. The book exposed what chefs and servers knew happened beneath the industry’s prim veneer—a…
Pok Pok chef Andy Ricker stopped by Supper Club studios to chat about his adventures in Thai cookery. Watch our Facebook Live session below. Here’s the recipe mentioned at 25:20 for fried egg salad, which Ricker says “is so simple and yet so distinctive that it became a dish that I’d make at Pok Pok, sure, but also…
This June, the breakfast site Extra Crispy held a much-publicized writing contest in which the winner would be anointed its bacon critic. The job title is as ridiculous as it is a carnivore’s dream—a three-month fantasy baconalia, traversing the world in search of the one true bacon. Attending bacon festivals. Rubbing…
