February 16 & 23, 2026 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Helen Rosner, in “Tables for Two,” manages (with help from “a very fancy friend”) to snag a reservation at the “mega-swank” steak house The Eighty-Six in the West Village. She has a blast. First, she has an apple-wood-smoked Martini, “theatrically poured tableside atop a stalagmite of ice grown, science-fair-style, from hyper-chilled water.” She says it was “excellent, and potent as hell.” I mentally sipped it right along with her. Then she has a steak dinner, which she delectably describes as follows:

The exterior, salted and peppered, crackled from a hard sear; the inside was tender pink from edge to edge. The sauces I’d ordered alongside were hardly necessary: an eggy, vinegar-tart béarnaise, and a wiggly, wobbly gelée-adjacent steak sauce made with veal demi-glace. I dipped my fries into them, at least, and enjoyed a whole phalanx of steak-house sides: garlicky spinach; butter-laden mashed potatoes; a strikingly photogenic creamed-corn potpie with a swirly croissant top; snappy green and yellow long beans, dressed in a sharp lemon vinaigrette that sliced through the density of the rest of the food.

That “I dipped my fries into them” made me smile (and salivate). It’s exactly what I’d do.

2. Rebecca Mead’s “The Landscape Artist,” a profile of British artist Andy Goldsworthy, is excellent. See my post yesterday.

3. One of the best New Yorker book reviews I’ve read recently is Hannah Goldfield’s “Daily Bread.” It’s a survey of food diaries – a genre or subgenre I’ve not paid any attention to. But I will now, as a result of reading Goldfield’s illuminating piece. She mentions three books I think I’ll check out: Nigel Slater’s The Kitchen Diaries; Ruth Reichl’s My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes That Saved My Life; and Tamar Adler’s Feast on Your Life: Kitchen Meditations for Every Day. 

4. I enjoyed Zachary Fine’s “Monster Mash” – a review of Pierre Huyghe’s “Liminals,” showing in Berlin, at Halle am Berghain. Fine calls “Liminals” “an absolutely terrifying work of art.” But he doesn’t stop there. He asks why: “Why is this so terrifying?” That question is a sign of a true critic. He’s not content with just stating his response. He digs into the underlying reasons for it. Fine’s answer made me smile. “Well, first of all,” he says, “there’s the missing face.” I also like Fine’s mindfulness of beauty. In the concluding lines of his piece, he writes, “But the film persuades with its frightening beauty: the shimmering flesh-colored rocks, the throbbing soundtrack, the smoothness of the creature’s skin. It’s all too human, but not.” 

Rebecca Mead's "The Landscape Artist"

Photo by Nicholas J.R. White, from Rebecca Mead's "The Landscape Artist"

Rebecca Mead’s “The Landscape Artist,” in the February 16 & 23 New Yorker, profiles British landscape sculptor Andy Goldsworthy. Mead visits him at his home in Penpont, Scotland. She hikes with him and a party of visitors to the site of his 1989 stone wall called “Give and Take Wall.” She goes on an outing with him to view the site where he intends to install a project called “Gravestones.” And she tours some graveyards with him. 

It’s an absorbing, beautifully written piece. But as I read it, I found myself resisting its charms. One thing that put me off was Mead’s mention that Goldsworthy used ten thousand cattails to create one of the works in his “Fifty Years” exhibition at Edinburgh’s Royal Scottish Academy. Maybe I’m overreacting, but the removal of ten thousand cattails from their fragile natural habitat (marshes, bogs, wetlands) strikes me as appallingly destructive. What’s the point of it? This question touches on the other aspect of Mead’s piece that bugs me – the lack of any clear rationale for what Goldsworthy is doing. Mead mentions “the sheer beauty of some of Goldsworthy’s work.” Okay, but what if your idea of beauty is a landscape unblemished by any manmade objects? What if you prefer, as I do, natural beauty?

Mead’s piece is illustrated by a wonderful photo of Goldsworthy sitting on a green-gold grassy hillside (see above). The photo is by Nicholas J.R. White. Under the photo, there’s a caption that says, “Goldsworthy, near hilltop where his work ‘Gravestones’ will be installed.” I look at the photo and think what a pity, because here’s what Goldsworthy has in mind for that hill: “four stone walls, each about four feet tall and eighty feet wide, surrounding a space filled with displaced stones from cemeteries throughout the county of Dumfries and Galloway.” This is Goldsworthy’s idea of beauty. Is it valid? I’m not sure. 

I thought about Goldsworthy’s stone walls as Lorna and I cycled the back roads of Tavira, Portugal. The roads are lined with ancient stone walls. Many of them are cased in white plaster. Here and there, the plaster has cracked open. You can see the old ochre stones inside. These walls are phenomenal to look at – their form, composition, color, and texture. My eyes devour them. I constantly stopped to take pictures of them. Each one is different. To me, they are found works of art. The impulse to photograph them and describe them in words is, to me, understandable. If I were a painter, I’d want to paint them. And if I were a sculptor like Goldsworthy, I’d want to try my hand at building my own stone walls. 

There was a day when these Portuguese stone walls were new. In the centuries since they were first built, they’ve crumbled and eroded. Time and weather have worn them down. They’ve melded with their natural surroundings. The landscape has absorbed them. I recall the phrase “part of nature, part of us” from my readings of Helen Vendler’s book of the same name. It refers, if I remember correctly, to the poetry of Wallace Stevens. It’s an excellent description of those old Portuguese walls. It applies to Goldsworthy’s art, too. Mead, in her piece, mentions how Goldsworthy’s “Give and Take Wall” had a “dense covering of moss.” Nature is taking it back. Time and weather are doing their work. Transience is all.