November | 2014 | ideas that taste good

Cooking through the fourth wall

November 30, 2014 by antdina

Ferris Bueller tells us to “go home, it’s over.” The stage manager explains what is about to happen in Our Town. Hamlet acknowledges that we’re watching. All examples when the fourth wall is broken: when a character in a show speaks directly to us. Their eyes meet ours and we are no longer pious spectators. We participate. Our reaction speaks back to them. Cooking is performance art. And yet it’s a hidden drama. For unless you have the chef’s table, the […]

Categories: Pioneer • Tags: fourth wall, grill, Pieous, Qui, Salty Sow, sea bream, Shakespeare, smoke, tableside, theater, white oak

When the soprano kissed the coalman

November 24, 2014 by antdina

She steps through theater air. Her hair, a radiant gold, swaying like an Tupelo porch swing. Her voice piercing and melodic. Notes of apricot and honeydew hang like ornaments. She smells of honeysuckle and wears a glycerin smile. Her name Tokaj (“toe-kye”). She is born from northeastern Hungary. Her audience often summoned by royal degree. He is a man of the inner mountain with large, thick hands. The mere sight of them a humbles us with thoughts of heavy work […]

Categories: Pioneer • Tags: coalman, kiss, pastrami, Pieous, Princess Bride, soprano, storytelling, Tokaj, wine

The opposable mind of China’s mountain cooking

November 9, 2014 by antdina

Airplanes only arrive in the evening. They deposit fresh tourists, then whisk away the fulfilled. The landing strip is large enough to land a jet. Though you’d never be able to tell by the quiet landscape. It might as well be called Aspen. The Aspen of Hunan, China. Except there is no skiing. No six-foot tall snow bunnies wearing furs and Prada boots. No ski bums staffing restaurants. This is China. Elegant and serene. A culture infused with black tea, yellow […]

Categories: Food Finds • Tags: Avatar, bacon, breakfast taco, China, fiddlehead fern, Hunan, monkey, rice cake, ZhangJiaJie

Cuisine as genetic code

November 2, 2014 by antdina

Luc Besson gives us a story about Nature’s true survival instinct in his movie Lucy. Billed as an action SciFi thriller, promoters sell a provocative idea: the full use of the brain can be unlocked by a drug. It’s the overdose of the toxic potion which turned a frappy girlfriend, named Lucy, into a Neo-like heroine. Beneath the veneer of vigilante bravado, lies a curious premise: all living things are designed to pass along information from one generation to the next. It’s a redux of the […]

Categories: Chef Talk • Tags: Daniel Espinoza, Dinner Lab, Luc Besson, Lucy, Mexican

ideas that taste good

storytelling through food

Monthly Archives: November 2014

Cooking through the fourth wall

When the soprano kissed the coalman

The opposable mind of China’s mountain cooking

Cuisine as genetic code