Cartoon by Joe Dator. For more from this week’s issue: http://nyr.kr/VISJ6z

In this week’s food issue, Dana Goodyear writes about the rise of secret supper clubs, and visits Wolvesmouth, the underground Los Angeles restaurant run by the chef Craig Thornton out of his apartment: “Around the world, cooks, both trained and not, are hosting sporadic, legally questionable supper clubs and dinner parties in unofficial spaces,” whose goal “is not seduction; it is experience”.

Photograph by Jessica Craig-Martin.

That is what it means to learn to eat. Few of us are encouraged to do as Julia did, and eat in a way that lets us be formed, neatened, honed; that lets us take on eating as a thing to learn, a path that may leave us, god forbid and god grant, tasting and thinking of things differently than we do now.

[P]erhaps the best way to remember Julia is by looking back at images and words of Julia herself, because she is one of those rare stars who is somehow better in reality than in the popular imagination. No matter how many times one hears about how charismatic, how natural and unembarrassed, or how funny and charming she was, seeing Julia onscreen or hearing her talk about food always surpasses those expectations—she’s so perfectly Julia every time. 

Click-through for Rachel Arons’ compilation of “essential Julia Child material to remember the culinary icon on her centennial”: http://nyr.kr/NnoUC7

(Source: newyorker.com)