In a career that has included wine jobs at haute dining and wine destinations Per Se,Cru and, since June, the head sommelier at Daniel Boulud's flagship New York eatery Daniel, Raj Vaidya has paired more than his share of his duck with vino.
Born in Jersey, and raised in his parents' native Bombay and Singapore, Raj's wine tutelage began well before he was of legal drinking age, enjoying vino and good food with family and company. It laid the groundwork for post-college (a degree in political science and philosophy from Rutgers University) career in the wine business, where he first started working at New Jersey's Ryland Inn and did time in the biodynamic fields at Robert Sinskey Vineyards in Napa.
As fall quickly approaches, we caught up with Raj to discuss the different elements one needs to consider when pairing wine with all those preparations of this wonderfully fatty, gamey bird, creamy foie gras and bloody duck à la presse.
Strawberries with wine? It's not a pairing most people ask Chez Panisse sommelier Jonathan Waters about. In fact, he can't remember anyone ever asking him to take the sweet-tart berry -- which has dotted dessert menus for much of the summer -- and combine it with a crisp, ethereal vino. Champagne, yes, but wine, no.
"It's pretty rare that somebody would have strawberries with wine," says Waters (no relation to that other Chez Panisse Waters), who has worked at the restaurant for more than 20 years.
That said, he thinks the two are a very plausible match and was up to the challenge. We caught up with him to chat strawberries, Alice Waters' practice of finishing a meal with seasonal fruit, and his thoughts on organic wine.
Do you guys ever serve whole strawberries? We do. We serve them at the end of a meal. Alice's idea is that the perfect end of a meal is a fruit. If you have ever read [David Mas] Masumoto's book about peaches ... we only serve strawberries for a very short window because it's a short season when they are perfect.
Does the restaurant serve them other ways? We serve strawberries with other things for a longer period, like macerated strawberries over sherbet or strawberry shortcake.
Sara Reistad-Long and Camille Noe Pagán. Photo: JP Pagán
Ask a woman about healthy eating, and the words "slab of steak" are not typically the first out of her mouth.
But that's exactly the sort of mindset being peddled at newly launched Svelte Gourmand, which promotes portion control over fat-free obsessiveness. "I'd rather eat less of a full-fat dessert than more of a low-fat one" are among the words penned on the site, which is written by seasoned health and lifestyle writers Sara Reistad-Long and Camille Noe Pagán.
The two friends started the site -- a mix of health and food news along with featured columnists like Slashfood's own wine pro Gretchen Roberts -- this month in the hopes of helping people live healthfully while enjoying the foods they love. "I think it's really difficult," Pagán says. "People often blame willpower, but ours is a culture that does not encourage people to do things in moderation. It was really important to us to not be like a Weight Watchers or Cooking Light. We wanted to be like nothing that is out there."
We caught up with Pagán to chat about her dislike of food "fanaticism," the evils of high-fructose corn syrup and how she not only has her steak, but eats it too. Who is the site geared toward? People who like food. We are speaking to a more general audience, male and female. People who read Gourmet, but might read Fitness, too. People who are really interested in food and their health.
It's up to mixologist and sommelier Todd Thrasher to find the right vino to balance out the sweet, tangy summer favorite. A native Virginian who got his start in the drink biz by bartending his way through college, Thrasher has schlepped drinks at such esteemed places as José Andrés' Café Atlantico.
"People ask how you get into wine and I say you read a lot about wine and then tasting blind is how you get into it," he says.
After a sommelier course and a failed business try, he was ready to bolt from the industry for a career as a scuba instructor on a Caribbean island until he was hooked up with chef Cathal Armstrong. "The rest is history," he says.
We caught up with Thrasher to talk the Virginia tomato season, the art of tomato pairings and his tomato pet peeve -- teaming a raw tomato with a red wine.
Haute Burger. The idea seems silly of a food that was once so simple. (Grind meat. Form patty. Grill. Dress. Eat.)
That's no longer the case. Proprietary patties are big business, with big money to be earned in creating a mouth-watering blend of ground cow. A masterful mix could earn a chef the coveted crown of Burger King at one of growing number of cook-offs, such as the Feedbag's first annual cook-off in Summit, N.J., last weekend.
In New York, when a chef wants a custom burger, he often turns to third-generation meatman Pat La Frieda, whose family has been making burgers for nearly a century. He and his staff spend up to two months creating the right mix of meat for a chef.
"For the Shake Shack we made almost 30 different blends," La Frieda told us. "For Minetta Tavern's Black Label Burger, it was probably just as many. We tried different styles of meat, different weights. It was a process. I was eating burgers everyday."
We caught up with LaFrieda to get the juice on his family, the growing list of big name chefs trafficking in burgers and his decision this month to finally make three types of patties available to home cooks through Fresh Direct.
Danielle Johnson Walker. Photo: Daniel Doke Photography
When beachgoers dine at the celebrated southern Maine restaurant Arrows and its sister seaside bistro MC Perkins Cove for a ubiquitous lobster roll, it falls to sommelier Danielle Johnson Walker to find an ideal wine to match with what she calls the "lazy man's lobster."
A self-trained sommelier, Walker uses the winter months -- when Arrows is hibernating -- to pair vacations with winery visits throughout South Africa and Europe to add extra oomph to her vino repertoire. As summer kicks into high gear and our hankering for lobster on buttered buns borders on fixation, we quizzed Walker about secret cooking techniques, wines to avoid and what makes lobster rolls so bleeping addictive. What makes the lobster roll such a great food? It's the lazy man's lobster. When in Maine, you eat boiled lobster once or twice and after that you have the lobster roll. I don't think it's a food people can get sick of. It's like a good hamburger.
After the jump, the secret the the Arrows lobster roll and why to avoid oaked chardonnays.
Doug Sohn, owner of Hot Doug's. Photo: William Couch/ Flickr.
Frankfurter maestro Doug Sohn, the man behind the beloved Chicago eatery Hot Doug's, is a stickler for putting the same care into his hot dog toppings that a top chef would a béarnaise sauce.
Sohn is a trained chef who bypassed life in a haute restaurant to grill haute dogs. He's been on the wiener beat for nearly a decade, and remains an undeterred champion of foie gras in the wake of a since-overturned Chicago-wide ban. His sought-after pups feature tantalizing names like the "mighty hot" Keira Knightley and the "mighty, might, mighty hot!" Salma Hayek andouille sausage.
NYU chemistry professor Kent Kirshenbaum. Photo: Jeff Potter
Like many inquisitive scientists, Kent Kirshenbaum regularly scans the ingredient list of prepared foods to uncover the chemical composites lurking within. The substance that most recently piqued the New York University chemistry professor's curiosity is liquid smoke. "My immediate thought was that it was a horrible mix of chemicals," he told us.
After distilling the concentrated smoke and liquid mix (often sold at the grocery store by the bottle to enhance barbecue) down to its roots of water and more than 400 chemical compounds, the scientist (who in person comes across as one part Einstein, one part Malcolm Gladwell) learned that liquid smoke is actually "safer [for human ingestion] than untreated wood smoke."
Kirshenbaum discussed his discovery last week during a monthly gathering of the Experimental Cuisine Collective -- food nerds who love to make things like edible foam. We caught up with him to chat smoke, bongs and homemade liquid smoke. What is liquid smoke? Liquid smoke is very simply smoke in water. Smoke usually comes as a vapor, but there are ways to condense it and turn it into liquid and that liquid can then be carried in water.
Ubuntu Sommelier Daniel Sarao Photo: Michelle Branton
At Ubuntu, Napa Valley's acclaimed vegetarian restaurant slash yoga studio, it falls to wine director and general manager Daniel Sarao to find harmony between the lush bounty of on-site gardens and a vino list sparkling with biodynamic sips.
The son of Italian immigrants who taught him an appreciation for wine, Sarao put himself through college and grad school working at restaurants, cutting short a trajectory towards a liberal arts Ph.D. for the life of a full-time oenophile. We chatted with him about the myths around pairing wine with veggies (yes, you can drink red!), the wonders of caramelizing and five inexpensive summer sippers to pair with grilled veggies.
Are you a vegetarian? I am not a vegetarian. The chef is not a vegetarian and neither is the owner. But we believe that vegetables can stand on their own. We are breaking the stereotype.
How much of what you serve comes from your garden? Right now we get about 75 to 80 percent of our ingredients from [our garden]. Our goal is to get almost everything from there. It makes an amazing difference. Squash and peppers are [in season] right now.
Learn more, plus five great wines for under $25 to pair with vegetable dishes, after the jump.
Spinning off the wildly popular "Top Chef," Bravo TV is pitting 24 of the best chefs around the globe against one another in a no-holds-barred knife fight for the chance to win $100,000 for charity in "Top Chef Masters." The show, which debuts Wednesday at 10 p.m. EST, comes complete with its very own Padma in Kelly Choi, a 33-year-old former model born in Seoul and raised in the suburbs of Richmond, Va.
She was cherry-picked straight from local access TV in New York, where, dressed in skimpy outfits and armed with an inquisitive mind, she gave New Yorkers an intimate view of some of the city's top kitchens. We caught up with her to talk about her rise to national stardom, how the best chefs in the world handle criticism and what the deal is with magicians acting as judges.
How did you get involved with the show? Someone from Bravo called me out of the blue and asked me to fly out to L.A. to meet the producers. What I do on ["Eat Out NY"] is pick a dish and cook it with a chef on TV. I pick all the restaurants that I want to feature and dishes that I think the readers would be into. This Bravo exec saw me on TV and flew me out and my dream came true.
Why do you think this show matters in this economy? Why not? Everybody loves food. The alternative is to cook at home and you can totally pick up tips. It's a fun way -- to be inspired by fun and passionate people -- to cook at home.
In just two years as the sommelier and wine director at New York's world-renowned Le Bernardin restaurant, 37-year-old Aldo Sohm has become a wine world heavyweight, having been recognized as "Best Sommelier in the World" in 2008 and earlier this month for "Best Wine Service" at the James Beard Awards. Trained in his native Austria, Sohm came to the United States to improve on his then "dumpy" English so he could better compete at wine competitions. We caught up with Sohm this morning to chat about the unwritten rule of pairing fish with white wine, which vino goes well with grilled salmon and that other reason why he now lives in America.
How did you become a sommelier?
Ever since I was little I had a thing of smelling food and wines. At first I didn't really like wine when I entered the industry. This was [when I was ] 16 or 17. People in the restaurant would ask me what you could recommend and I didn't know and thought this was embarrassing. [Then] I went on a wine trip with my father -- he invited me. I was 20 and I saw it, and it was kind of interesting and just went from there. You said you moved to the United States to improve your English, but I get the sense there was another reason?
Austrians love to complain. I hate to complain so I figured it is easier to change a country than to change myself.
More about pairing rules -- and how to break them -- after the jump.
To much of the country, charismatic Food Network star and restaurateur Emeril Lagasse has become, well, just another household name. But in Bethlehem, Pa., tucked in the foothills of the state's Pocono Mountains, Emeril has become a culinary heartthrob whose embrace has sent the locals into a frenzy.
For the residents of this overhauled steel town already gaga over the coming of its first casino, the addition of Emeril's Chophouse side-by-side with the slots is a coup. After all, the Yankee (he hails from Fall River, Mass.) bypassed New York City (where he has a second home) and Boston (an hour from his birthplace) for "Christmas City" to house his first northeast eatery.
The Bam! man was on hand Tuesday for a media luncheon, and is currently in Bethlehem overseeing a test run of his 230-seat restaurant for its sold-out Friday opening. Located inside an old steel mill building, the restaurant is fittingly outfitted with cast-iron steel flourishes and a menu combining Emeril's bayou style with the no nonsense meat and potato sensibilities of the region: "We are very sensitive to the market no matter where we are," he told us.
Troubled by what he had been reading about his dinner, documentary filmmaker Robert Kenner embarked on a 6-year, cross-country journey to expose the nation's agribusiness industry. "Food, Inc." (see the trailer above) features interviews with authors Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan and quotes from some of the heads of Big Farming from Walmart to Tyson. Kenner examines recent salmonella scares, chats with organic farmers and calls his film -- which hits the big screen next month -- "entertaining and hard-hitting." We caught up by phone with Kenner in L.A. to chat mutant chicken nuggets, Oprah's legal issues and his quest to leave you "delightfully disturbed." What made you want to make this film? We spend less of our paycheck on food now than at any time in our history, which is great, but it also comes at a great cost to us ... I made a film that I hope will leave you delightfully disturbed.
What do you mean by "a great cost to us"? One out of every three babies born after 2000 will develop early onset diabetes. A lot of that is attributed to corn and corn byproducts. We can't sustain that. There are environmental costs and ultimately it is a cost to the consumer. You might be paying less money, but you are paying additional [health] costs that are becoming very, very expensive.
Men in suits, their strawberries and Oprah after the jump.
Chantelle Pabros, a sommelier at Chicago's L20, is widely considered a rising star of the wine universe. Entrenched among oenophiles since leaving high school, at a mere 26 she has worked alongside world-renowned talent including chef Laurent Gras at his seafood-centric eatery. Though Chantelle has few hard and fast rules about pairing wine with food, she offered a couple tips as we head into prime grilling season. We caught up with her this afternoon to talk burgers and vino.
Do you think burgers and wine go together? Yes, absolutely. Though we don't have burgers [at L20], I like pairing wine with them. There is this place here called Kuma's Corner. We normally drink beer there, but I am thinking about the possibilities of wines with their burgers.
How does one go about pairing the two? With pairing, things that you think would go well don't always go. It's trial and error. I start by thinking about the classic burger, cooked medium rare with really fresh lettuce, tomato, onion and a really intense mustard. Chantelle's five under-$25 burger-friendly wines after the jump.
Ever sip a soda on a hot July day that seems the peak of deliciousness until someone points at it and says, "ugh, that's too sweet for me"?
Well, now science and Washington are joining the chorus: Harvard scholars are urging lawmakers to rethink how we sugarcoat our drinks and reeducate sugary soda sippers to dial back their sweet tooths, and in Washington, the anti-sugar police want to hold hearings about a federal 3-cent tax increase on drinks like sodas, energy drinks and sweetened teas in order to generate money for health care.
Of course health concerns (diabetes, obesity) are at stake, but there's also the little matter of taste. Since eaters fancy an incredible range of sweetness, we try to keep you covered with both sugary goods and their less tooth-bending counterparts. LeNell's head-turning rhubarb fizz is made with homemade soda, whereas arguably better-for-you agave sweetens this champagne-pear elixir. And for those of you wishing the sugar cops would just stay out of your business, well, at least they're not messing with your coffee.
Spinning off the wildly popular 
To much of the country, charismatic Food Network star and 
Ever sip a soda on a hot July day that seems the peak of deliciousness until someone points at it and says, "ugh, that's too sweet for me"?
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