The farther you get off the ground, the old saying goes, the worse the food gets, with airplanes being the prime example. As someone who suffered through the revolving-restaurant craze of the late 1970s (and more than a few horrendous airline meals), I can attest to the accuracy of this maxim. And as someone who had dined at Top of the World several times after its opening in April 1996, I always thought it stood out as Exhibit A among earthbound examples.
Author: John Curtas
Baby Eels at DANIEL
Also known as piballes, these squirmy little critters come from a river in Maine, where the Browne Trading Company gets them from whomever goes fishing for such things.
Then, they find their way to Daniel (and a select few other multi-starred temples of gastronomy in NYC) where the James Beard Restaurant of the Year 2010 and uber-chef Daniel Boulud springs them on special customers as a little amuse bouche…a small, lively little something to stimulate and titillate your gueule.
We were surprised to say the least, when they showed up at our table a night before the Beard awards. Having had them once before (at DJT) we remembered the powerful punch of their briny mouth-feel, and the light tomato and caper broth they came in let the taste of these subtle-y fishy, salty and rich little elvers come through. They’re not for everyone (in more ways than one) but the taste is one of the rarest in the world of gourmet delicacies, and we were honored to have a porti0n bestowed upon us.
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Read These Now
ELV note: Merci beaucoup to Patricia Thacker (Food Gal #1 and The Official Ex-Wife of ELV) for sending us this article. Continue after the jump for the complete list of James Beard Foundation Media & Book Award Winners, or, as we call it around the ELV household, Passover.
Check out some of the year’s most important stories written about food, all in the running for this week’s Beard Awards.The James Beard Foundation hosts its prestigious award ceremony at Lincoln Center in New York City on May 3. Much like James Beard, the man himself—a quintessential American cook who loved to eat—the Oscars of the food world tends to favor upscale dining in big city places. While the foundation could make a bold statement by highlighting more cooks who are making a difference by making dinner, in at least one category, it’s shown it is willing to award a combination of food and social change—a viable and visible countercuisine.
Beard was a “patron saint of culinary values,” according to food writer David Kamp, and as more reviewers move away from being mere culinary mentors towards acting as consumer advocates, one of the James Beard Award’s categories—for food journalism—shows just how contemporaries are serving up social values through food.
Here are eight of nominees worth reading:
“In Through the Back Door” in The Oxford American
John T. Edge consistently writes about Southern food with a scholarly flourish. He doesn’t celebrate virtuous eaters and hipster farmers; instead, he writes about how food can bridge fractured race and class relations, in this case, with greasy, hickoried pork-shoulder sandwiches known as barbecue. (ELV note: we have eaten at Craig’s Barbecue in De Valls Bluff, Arkansas (twice with Food Gal #1) and it’s one of many reasons we are such barbecue snobs when it comes what passes for such in these here parts.)