Food & Drink

Letter From France: Drum Cafe, An Excellent Restaurant at LUMA, Arles
By Alexander Lobrano The new Drum Cafe at the LUMA Foundation in Arles is an excellent example of how good a museum restaurant can actually be when someone cares about serving good food instead of the usual bland industrial food-service catering too often found at museums. The food at the Drum

The Seven New Restaurants Not to Miss in Paris Right Now
By Alexander Lobrano The Paris restaurant scene has deliciously come back to life after the challenges of two recent lockdowns, and a talented new generation of chefs are serving intriguing contemporary French cooking that leaps beyond the cliches of la bistronomie (modern French bistro cooking) with an emphasis on simplicity

Rodney Scott Spreads the Joy with BBQ
By Beverly Stephen Be forewarned. If you read Rodney Scott’s World of BBQ (Clarkson Potter) or watch his episode on the Netflix series Chef’s Table BBQ, you’re gonna need a BBQ fix. Do not pass go, get to the nearest rib joint immediately. Better yet, if you live anywhere near

Letter from Paris: Liquide
By Alexander Lobrano It wasn’t until I went to Liquide, chef Matthias Marc’s new “modern tavern” cum bistro in Les Halles in Paris the other day for lunch that I realized just how much I had been missing restaurants since they shut down in France last October. What I’d been

Letter from Paris: MoSuke, Paris, Mory Sacko’s Exquisite Franco-Afro-Japanese Cuisine
By Alexander Lobrano As the months roll by during the second national lockdown of France’s restaurants, I often find myself thinking of chef Mory Sacko and his intriguing restaurant MoSuke. The reason why is that I desperately hope this exceptionally talented young chef’s intriguing restaurant will survive the financial

An Interview with Alexander Lobrano on his new Paris Memoir, “My Place at The Table.”
By Everett Potter It’s the rare American food writer who can not only hold his own among the food-obsessed French but become one of the leading restaurant critics in Paris. That is the story at the heart of My Place at the Table: A Recipe for a Delicious Life

Celebrity Chef Marcus Samuelsson Gives his Compatriots the Respect They Deserve
By Beverly Stephen “Black food matters,” so declares Marcus Samuelsson in his new book The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food. Note that the title is not “soul food” but rather the “soul of American food.” Samuelsson laments that “many readers may still think that Black

Paso Robles: A Road Less Traveled
By Brian E. Clark For decades, so the story goes, Paso Robles was a mere pitstop off California’s Highway 101 for wine aficionados on their way to the Napa and Sonoma valleys. But that began changing about two decades ago, and Paso Robles – which means Passage of the Oaks in Spanish

Letter From Paris: Maison Aribert, Uriage | My Last Restaurant of 2020
By Alexander Lobrano During the year without restaurants, it turns out the last one I would go to in 2020 was the Maison Aribert, a Michelin two-star table in the operetta-set-like little spa town of Uriage-les-Bains, which is a few miles outside of Grenoble in the Vercors. In retrospect,

Colin Keegan: The Architect of Santa Fe Spirits
Story & photos by Neil Wolkodoff As the craft distillery movement gains, the people making an impact with unique spirits have some funky backgrounds. Colin Keegan is the quintessential spirit maker at Santa Fe Spirits combining a totally un-related field with the artistic bent of distilling. When you visit, Santa