Cartoon by Peter C. Vey. For more: http://nyr.kr/YIG2Y2

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.

On Wednesday of last week, the New York Times dining critic, Pete Wells, filed the most incendiary review of his tenure, on Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar, a five-hundred-seat behemoth in Times Square. The chef behind the restaurant, Guy Fieri, co-owns five other restaurants in California and hosts several shows on the Food Network, including “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.” Wells’s review was so colorful in its take-down of Fieri’s restaurant—“why did the toasted marshmallow taste like fish?” was one of the more popular lines—that it became a viral sensation. But how bad can a highly caloric meal in an air-conditioned environment really be? United in a firmly held conviction that the only place to eat in the vicinity of The New Yorker’s office building in Times Square is the Szechuan place on 39th St., and in their passion for chicken tenders and dessert cocktails, two co-workers went for lunch to investigate. Here are their post-prandial remarks…

Photograph by Theo Wargo/WireImage/Getty.

April Bloomfield: The “Not-So-Nasty Bits”

Reading “A Girl and Her Pig”—and you can read it, as much as you can leaf through and gawk at pigs’ ears and mark the recipe for “Smoked Haddock Chowder and Sausage-Stuffed Onions” that you want to make—brought back, for me, the pleasure of Bloomfield’s company (“Drain the chard well in a colander, but don’t squeeze it to buggery,” she writes), while deepening my understanding of her aims in the kitchen. Before I wrote about her, I had assumed that the success of the Spotted Pig was down, perhaps, to the “gastropub” concept—that the charm of the place lay in the fact that someone had thought to hang a shingle, unspool some tartan, and ply New Yorkers with blue-cheese burgers and rosemary-flecked shoestring fries, rather than in their execution. I realized soon, as I watched Bloomfield prepare a radish salad with a maneuver that she and her friend the chef Fergus Henderson refer to as “the claw”—it’s a way of “smooshing and bruising things to get all the flavors to come together”—that I was badly mistaken. Bloomfield is humble; her food is sophisticated.

Cartoon of the day. For more cartoons from this week’s issue: http://nyr.kr/A6DCPT

(Source: newyorker.com)

For your lunchtime reading pleasure: Menu Design, from the Civil War to Chez Panisse

The Food At Our Feet: Why is Foraging All the Rage?

I spent the summer foraging, like an early hominid with clothes. It didn’t matter that the first thing I learned about that daunting pastime of hunter-gatherers and visionary chefs was that nature’s bounty is a thorny gift. Thorny, or, if you prefer, spiny, prickly, buggy, sticky, slimy, muddy, and, occasionally, so toxic that one of the books I consulted for my summer forays carried a disclaimer absolving the publisher of responsibility should I happen to end up in the hospital or, worse, in the ground, moldering next to the Amanita phalloides that I’d mistaken for a porcini. I was not deterred.