Author: John Curtas

VALLEY CHEESE AND WINE

It was the gourmet food store I had been waiting for, for twenty years. It remains, two years after opening, the only purveyor of quality fromage in the entire valley.

The first time I walked into this modest storefront, I started to weep silently to myself with joy. Because laid before me, in its medium sized refrigerated case, were wheels (not pre-cut packages) of Colston Bassett Stilton, cave-aged Taleggio, true Camembert, cloth-bound Vermont cheddar, and dozens of others of the world’s finest (and hard to find) cheeses.

Behind the counter that fateful day were Kristin Sande and Bob Howald – a couple who met at a cheese convention…I mean how cheesy is that! They were and are there every day to discuss levels of ripeness, serving suggestions and wine pairings from their selection of esoteric (and extremely well-priced) wines of the world.

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He was a great chef as chefs go, and as chefs go, he went.

You heard it here first: Adam Sobel has officially departed Bradley Ogden. Todd Williams, formerly sous chef under Bryan Ogden, has taken over as top toque. Bryan Ogden continues to be associated with BO, but only in a capacity as consultant chef. Meaning: he flies in once a month to check on things….kinda like his dad.

Alfred Portale, the man behind the venerable Gotham Bar and Grill in New York, and the popularizer of vertical food (an idea whose time has toppled) has signed on with the Fontainbleau Hotel project to bring an outpost of GB&G to Vegas.

Larry Forgione is hard at work at the restaurant soon to be formerly known as Tableau in the Wynn. He is slowly revamping Mark LoRusso’s menu and making it an updated version of his venerable An American Place in St. Louis; a place that was formerly Forgione’s signature restaurant of the same name in Gotham – only without any vertical food. Got that?

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Slow Food Savors San Francisco, the world sleeps

This Labor Day weekend, the Slow Food Movement, that began in Bra, Italy in 1986, will invade San Francisco for three days of ponderous preaching, locavore lectures, esoteric eating, and sustainable agriculture.

It couldn’t have picked a better place than that bastion of food snobbery and imperious attitudes about all things culinary. While the Slow Food Movement pretends to be about getting back to the land and savoring life, it’s pretty much been adopted by elite restaurateurs and purveyors of expensive vittles as a way to strut their stuff.

Our buddy, Steven “The Fat Guy” Shaw. founder of www.egullet.org, perfectly encapsulates the criticisms of this “movement” when he equates people who attend Slow Food events with “…the guys in college who go to protests just to meet girls. They couldn’t care less about the ideology.”

Guilty as charged.* What’s your point Steven? I mean if you get that many food snobs in one place, something tasty is bound to happen, right?

Read more about this future weekend of dilettante delights in this New York Times article.

As for me, I subscribed to the Slow Food Journal a few years ago, and decided the whole concept was just about trying to make rich white people feel good about themselves (sorta like Whole Foods, only with denser prose.)

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* On both counts. Attending anti-war protests in the early ’70’s was my standard MO to meet hot, hippie chicks…although my chinos, Topsiders, and polo shirts (not to mention the Nixon/Agnew button I proudly sported) usually made them less than enthusiastic about having casual sex with me.