My son, Francois, and I went to New York for an anniversary party of Per Se, the elegant restaurant of Thomas Keller that opened 20 years ago. It’s located on the fourth floor in what used to be called the Time-Warner building that overlooks Columbus Circle and a corner of Central Park. Only New York or London, I think, could have a building in which the 78th floor penthouse was sold in 2015 by a Russian Oligarch for $51 million.

When we arrived, the restaurant was already completely filled with guests who, like us, were handed a glass of champagne as we entered, and then left to walk around, greet others we knew, and taste food.

I don’t like eating that way – nibbles of random food – but Francois doesn’t feel the same way and tasted until he had used all of his prodigious store of taste buds. For me, the visit was purely evocative.

Half a century ago as the women’s movement was becoming really influential, Peg Bracken, a Portlandian, published a funny, cynical book she called The I-Hate-to-Cookbook.  It contained some good recipes, some not so good, and some wisdom.   This book was published at a time when a lot of people, mostly men, still thought that a […]

Note: We have (finally) revised our Breadfurst.com Website. I hope you find it useful and attractive. If during the pandemic you have continued to shop at Bread Furst and to step inside the bakery, you know how much we have changed.  Not only because we have been packaging all our foods in cellophane bags. The biggest change […]