Last year’s Food & Travel Issue, containing four
brilliant pieces (Lauren Collins’s “Come to the Fair,” Dana Goodyear’s “Mezcal Sunrise,” Carolyn Kormann’s “The Tasting Menu Initiative,” and Dexter Filkins’s
“The End of Ice”), was my pick for Best Issue of the Year (see here). It’s a tough
act to follow. This year’s Food & Travel Issue suffers in comparison. It
lacks the kind of pungent, textured specificity I associate with great food and
travel writing. Rachel Monroe’s “#Vanlife” isn’t bad, if you relish sentences
like “King checked Instagram on her phone; her most recent post, a shot of a
storm building over the Pacific, had been something of an aesthetic
departure—most Where’s My Office Now images include King, the van, or Penny;
the most popular tend to include all three—and it was underperforming.” But I don't. I couldn’t be done with it fast enough. The same goes for Lauren Collins’s
“Secrets in the Sauce,” in which the sentence “Barbecue might be America’s most
political food” stopped me cold; I didn’t read another line. I skimmed Daniel
Mendelsohn’s “An Odyssey,” an account of a trip he and his father took on a
cruise ship, retracing Odysseus’ journey. This may strike some as interesting;
it didn’t do anything for me. Politics, social media, and patriarchal Greek
poetry make a strange and unappealing hash.
Speaking of hash, care for a pot brownie? No, not really, but
I read Lizzie Widdicombe’s “High Cuisine” anyway, because … well, because it’s
by Lizzie Widdicombe, writer of, among other piquant pieces, the superb “The Bad-Boy Brand” (April 8, 2013). “High Cuisine” contains at least two inspired
sentences:
A team from Weedmaps, a “Yelp for pot” based in Irvine,
California, was visiting the facility, and a photographer had set up a light
box, which he was using to take pictures of pot cookies.
I nibbled a small pie: it tasted like pumpkin, but with a
weedy aftertaste, which brought back Proustian memories of high school.
For me, the best food writing in this otherwise dismal Food
& Travel Issue is found in Shauna Lyon’s “Tables For Two: King” and Talia
Lavin’s “Bar Tab: The Binc.” Lyon’s piece offers pure, sensuous bliss:
A spectacular, bracing salad served at the beginning of
March included a pink radicchio that one guest had recently spied in the
produce section of Eataly, and a mysterious soft-crunchy, hollow stalk, which
turned out to be the heart of a puntarelle, whose chickory-like leaves were
more easily identified. The coniglio alla cacciatora, or hunter’s
rabbit, came as nubs of tender, gamey meat on a bed of polenta larded with
cheese and butter, and the onglet appeared as great red slices of hanger steak,
alongside al-dente chickpeas. For dessert, a Pernod semifreddo in a dainty
coupe was an inspired touch.
Lavin’s “The Binc” shows a deep pleasure taken in
description:
The interior is suffused with a warm, orangey glow, and,
though it just celebrated its one-year anniversary, it feels curiously
unfocussed in time. There is a faded portrait of a mustachioed man from an
indeterminate era, and antique marionettes of soldiers hanging on a cloudy,
wall-size mirror; the rest-room signs are done in careful Art Deco lettering.
On a recent Saturday night, the bar top was crowded with rows of multicolored
tinctures, like cardamom bitters and sweet-potato shrub, which added complexity
to cocktails such as the Whitaker (vodka, ginger) and the Fall of Roebling
(tequila, habanero). Twelve barflies gave the room a pleasantly full, but not
overcrowded, air.
I have a suggestion for next year’s Food & Travel Issue: turn it over to the “Tables For Two” and “Bar Tab” crew; let them write it.
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