A good bitter memory

     My first bottle of Campari begins its tenancy in the cabinet above the refrigerator, which I could simply call the liquor cabinet except that it also houses our cereal, cooking oil, and blender.  Someday, maybe, I'll have an old house with a proper little bar, like (above) the front room at the Echo Lake Inn.

   The Campari is new, but somehow not the taste.  I've met some close relation.

   Finally it occurs to me:  the bitter Italian soda you can sample, along with other odd Coca Cola products, at Epcot.

Boulevardier

      Boulevardier:  1. A frequenter of Parisian boulevards -- more broadly, a man-about-town.  2. A cocktail made with equal parts rye whisky, sweet vermouth and Campari, garnished with a generous slice of orange peel.  

   The first usage I learned from Stephen Presser, a professor at Northwestern Law, circa 1986.  I distinctly remember his delivery:  eyes closed, rising up on the balls of his feet, thrusting his ample torso forward, gesturing grandly.

   The second I learned from a young bartender at Mezze in Williamstown.  A likable guy who talked fast, loved his craft, enjoyed talking to customers -- but not too much -- and was excited to introduce you to a new drink that you "really will like" and actually do.  

   A conversation with the bartender wandered around bourbons for a little while before he suggested the boulevardier, a descendant of the famous Negroni, which is the same drink with gin instead of rye.  Bracing, spicy, bitter, sweet, delicious.  Utterly pleasing.  The second one, too.  

Not food blogging in Century City

   

   So, let us not become a silly food blogger.  As if 

there were any other kind.  Condemning this, ejaculating about that.  

   But there is a difference between all that pretention and simple retention -- making a little note for no other reason than to help you remember where you've been and might want to return.

   Like BJ's Brewhouse at the back side of the Westfield mall in Century City.  Excellent beer. Flatbread pizza with roasted veggies and goat cheese and fresh basil.  A pleasingly charred bison burger with barbecue sauce, roasted peppers and slaw.  A seat outside in some spectacular Southern California weather.  And a terrific soundtrack.  What's not to like?

   

What someone is drinking now

   The Sunday Times Magazine is running a feature "What I'm Drinking Now" by the celebrated chef Mario Batali.  It's a one-paragraph description of a drink that is right for the moment (first day of Fall, Super Bowl weekend, reverting to daylight savings time).  Today's offering, "a Widow's Kiss with a kick":  In a mixing glass filled with ice cubes, stir 2 oz. Calvados, 1 oz. each of Chartreuse and Benedictine and 3 shakes of Angostura bitters, then strain into a chilled martini glass and garnish with an orange twist.  

   I will not be making this anytime soon, as the only ingredients I currently own would be the ice cubes and the martini glass, which I think I could manage to chill.  I don't even know what Chartreuse or Benedictine is.  I owned a bottle of Calvados once.  I have owned, I think, two bottles of Angostura bitters in my life.  I've got to do better than that.  

   I would like a drink, but I have a cold, and so I leave the house for the first time in four days and go for a slow walk up around the pond at the train station.  I take my camera, hoping for I might get one of the neighborhood cardinals set off against snow, and because you just never know.  

   And you don't. 

   I find what someone who is not Mario Batali is drinking now. 

Say goodbye to Paradise (at least for lunch)

    Atlantis.  The destination resort on Paradise Island, connected by a pair of short, steep bridges to the small city of Nassau on the island of New Providence in the Bahamas. 

   It being a destination resort –- full of waterslides and aquariums and fancy shops and restaurants and game rooms and a casino and even an Indiana Jones-like “dig” of “the lost city of Atlantis” –- our group is content not to leave the destination.  Despite my occasional cajoling, no one wants to trek with me across the bridge to explore Nassau for a bit.  And so I go alone.

   I hoof over the bridge and onto the main drag that leads, in maybe a mile, to the center of Nassau.  It’s a strange walk, from the overgrown, rattle-trap, run-down outskirts of town past the occasional modern bank building and suddenly into a thriving, downtown scene of government buildings and luxury stores staffed with impeccably uniformed and coifed and utterly lovely Bahamian women.  I wonder what the little houses look like where they do their hair and makeup in the morning and where they go at the end of the day, after selling $5,000 watches to tourists from the cruise ships in the harbor. 

   Once I’ve seen the center of town, I wander up the hill and around a few streets behind it to see the big pink building at the top of the hill, which must be the governor’s residence, snapping pictures –- since lost –- of the big house and some other bits of Nassau that catch my fancy and my untrained eye.

   I’m not hungry, but the smells –- and my desire to live just a bit of the life of Bourdain -- draw me into a local café, where I have a fine cup of conch chowder, a half-dozen superb and piping hot conch fritters and a cold, delicious bottle of Kalik, the ubiquitous Bahamian beer.  I eat and drink and read the USA Today sports section that I had tossed into Rachel’s backpack along with my light fleece and camera and sunglasses and Blackberry, all of which makes me a bit less like my hero Bourdain and a bit more like the tourists around the corner shopping for jewelry and such.  

   Ah well.  Tony would have enjoyed the fritters, and the beer, and the local scenes on the walk between Nassau and Paradise.

Trophy

   A Sunday afternoon in January.  You take your daughter to volleyball, shop for groceries, read a good chunk of the Sunday Times instead of watching sports on TV, roast several pans of vegetables for the week, and decide, at about 3 pm, that while none of this may get you in the Husband Hall of Fame, a small trophy just might be in order.   

What nothing tastes as good as

   The bony British model Kate Moss recently repeated the mantra that she did not invent but lives by nonetheless:  “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.”  I suppose that could make sense if you felt that your reason for being on this earth is to have your picture taken wearing clothes you do not own.  Happily for me I am not one of those people and I can tell you that nothing tastes as good as cold beer.  

Eating Japan

   Some of what we ate in Japan: 


   A bag of little dried fish chips. 

   Freshly made rice crackers dipped in soy sauce at the market in Asakura.  

   Sweet black beans and tiny dried fish in the open market, and then a terrific sushi lunch, around the corner from the Tokyo fish market.  

   A bento box lunch on the train from Tokyo to Nagoya, with sushi and bits of cooked shrimp and eel and noodles and pickled vegetables.  

   A can of melon soda.  

   Three hot, steamed buns from a small shop in Takayama, one with beef, one with red beans (so much better hot than cold), and one with pumpkin.  

   Also in Takayama, a perfect cup of sake sherbet, maybe the single most surprising and delightful thing we ate the entire trip, unless it was the Japanese marshmallow, a warm square of meringue, which we got from the vendor along the river the next day.  

   At the ryokan in Takayama, the simple, soothing, hot, green tea we were served in our room when we arrived and two enormous dinners featuring slices of tender, fatty Hida beef, which we grilled ourselves on the petals of the shabu-shabu pot in the middle of our table in the tatami-matted dining room, and corn, onions, peppers, greens, three kinds of mushrooms, four kinds of picked vegetables, a giant raw sweet shrimp, two kinds of raw fish, a small curious dish with chopped mushrooms and walnuts, soba or udon noodles, miso soup, rice and a desert of strawberry mousse; and a breakfast at the ryokan with its own array of small bites, and grilled trout instead of beef, and a perfectly poached egg. 

   In Kyoto, in our own little dining room upstairs at a restaurant on Pontocho Street, overlooking the river, sukiyaki for the three girls, which we cooked at the table, and eel, more eel, for me.  

   Chocolate croquettes at the Nishiki food market in Kyoto.  

   The satisfying pancake-noodle-cabbage-egg-sauce mash-up that is okonomiyaki, first in Hiroshima and then in Osaka.  

   One of the plums that Noburo and Akiko had put up in a jar, soaked in strong sake.  

   A fine kaiseke dinner in Himeji, which featured a blissful soup with corn tofu, and a warm-potato-salad-stuffed eel –- better than it sounds, and indeed, one of the best dishes on the trip.  

   And everywhere the different styles of little monju cakes and the essential vending machines with their cold, little cans of sweet iced coffee, and cold bottles of water and tea. 

   The crowded McDonald’s on the Ginza is a sad sign of things to come in Japan.  It seems will take their sushi and green tea (and excellent cars and electronics) in trade for our hamburgers and heart disease (and washed-up baseball players).

   

Time to make some tea.