It’s unseemly, my grandmother would have said, to be obsessed about body weight – although she certainly was obsessed with hers.  It’s true; it is unseemly, especially for someone of my age.  But I am. As I have spent much of the summer alone in Hardwick, Vermont working on a book, and as I know […]

Mike Friedman, the owner of The Red Hen, a really wonderful neighborhood restaurant in Washington, dropped by yesterday morning.  He told me about telephone calls he has received from around the country and the number of death threats presumably from Trump supporters incensed about the denial of service to the White House press secretary at […]

I am in Carmel, California working on a book that’s in part about the romance of cooking.   I don’t mean the romance of food. I mean of cooking. I began learning how to cook at approximately the same time as my mother began learning how to cook. My mother hadn’t learn it as a child […]

When I grow up I want to be a weatherman. I don’t mean a “Weatherman,” one of those young radicals who took their rage to the streets of Chicago in 1969. I mean those whose prognostications I read each day in the Post and hear on NPR. The weather predictors were right last Saturday. They […]

I am sure you know how important the end-of-year holidays – Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve and Day – are to food businesses.   Our customers celebrate the holidays in restaurants; they buy special foods from retail businesses like ours and from mail order. They particularly reward bakeries with appetites for special confections like stollen […]

People in the restaurant business here in Washington nearly all of whom read the weekly “chat” of Tom Sietsema, the Post’s restaurant critic, have been abuzz with an exchange from last Wednesday’s “Ask Tom.” A woman (I presume) wrote to Sietsema as follows: Q: Pineapple & Pearls – Cancellation Policy – They REALLY mean it!  Hi […]

My grandmother was in love with the English language. She abhorred pretension and embraced simplicity. She respected English too much to use many modifiers in speech or writing. Good language didn’t need them. I adored my grandmother and adopted her attention to language. These days it is all I can do to contain myself when […]

My friend David Hagedorn is a food expert.  He talks about it, writes about it, cooks it, even eats it.  He was a pioneer in the city, the chef-owner of Trumpets, a Nineties restaurant and nightclub near Dupont Circle.  Now he writes. He is co-author of several books, one of which is the Rasika cookbook […]

Tom Sietsema’s spring dining guide, an annual restaurant listing of the Washington Post, appeared when some of us at Bread Furst were still in Chicago for the awards of the James Beard Foundation. Those honors are conferred in the first weekend of May each year in an extravaganza, a weekend of parties and restaurant dinners followed […]

Eating locally and seasonally is important to me.   I believe it is good for the environment but I also think it’s more fun to eat seasonally than to eat un-seasonally. I know that lots of people like to eat corn on the cob in December. Why not? If they like it there it is – […]