HUDSON CLEARWATER'S BROOKLYN BROTHER

The up-and-coming Brooklyn band Bad Girlfriend performed at the inaugural Last Supper in July, held at Dan Martensen and Clare Richardson’s barn in upstate New York, with food by Alejandro Alcocer.

Though he would be hard-pressed to admit it, Manfred Krankl, the man behind Sine Qua Non wines, has become one of the most celebrated and respected wine- makers in the United States. Eternally humble, Krankl describes himself as an uneducated winemaker whose strength lies in his creativity. But with an eight- year waiting list, and with patrons willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a taste of his renowned wine, one must disregard Krankl’s modesty.

Heston Blumenthal, best known as one of Britain’s most decorated chefs and true culinary visionaries, has just released his latest book, Historic Heston. To call it a cookbook wouldn’t be fair, for Blumenthal goes far beyond any standard collection of recipes and dives deep into the murky waters of British cuisine.

The self-taught chef opened his first restaurant, The Fat Duck, in Berkshire, England, in 1995 and despite his lack of culinary training, the restaurant was awarded its first Michelin star after four short years. Since then, Blumenthal has been impressing critics with his uninhibited approach to cooking and his experiments with molecular gastronomy. The restaurant has topped the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list for nine years, and currently holds three Michelin stars.

Even—or perhaps especially—in New York, where ovens are used as storage and having friends over more often than not means delivery, there’s something special about the home-cooked meal. Few people understand this better than Laila Gohar, the culinary wizard behind the new catering company Sunday Supper. Gohar, who also writes about food, art, and design, points to her childhood in Egypt as the beginning of her fascination with the way the dining table can bring people together. “My love for food and cooking stems from the meals I had with my family growing up in Cairo,” she says. “No one in my family was a chef, but everybody loved to improvise and come up with different recipes.”

The most surprising thing about the East Pole is not how far east it is, but how far north. The new restaurant from Ben Towill and Phil Winser—the team behind New York staple the Fat Radish—sits at a far remove from the downtown circles where they have made their name, tucked onto a quiet block in the Sixties on the Upper East Side. “When we opened the Fat Radish down on Orchard Street, there wasn’t a crazy amount happening down there,” says Winser. “The appeal for us in opening there as opposed to somewhere like the West Village was that it was never really a destination. The Upper East Side has a connotation of just being stuffy, but I feel like there’s so much more in that neighborhood. We wanted to go uptown and open something for the neighborhood up there.”

Since its inception last fall, the New York-based custom cake company Flour Shop has rapidly risen to become one of the go-to shops for baked goods among some of the city’s main tastemakers. Founded by first-time chef and entrepreneur Amirah Kassem, Flour Shop specializes in over-the-top confections, using unconventional flavors like lime icing and bacon in her cakes, which take on the shapes of dinosaurs, volcanic islands, sombreros, and buckets of popcorn.

With food taking up a growing share of the public conversation, we are living through an explosion of artists turning to it as a medium for social, creative, environmental, and political engagement and interaction in public spheres. The larger movement surrounding food may be a response and a countermeasure to our online lives. As we spend increasing amounts of time online, we are seduced by the promise that we can be in closer-than-ever touch with each other, with no actual touching ever taking place. The lack of physicality has caused our digital generation to resort to food as a reassurance of physical reality and tangibility. You simply can’t taste food online, and as a result, a growing number of youth are becoming intrigued by food and reclaiming dining as a form of connection that has been somewhat lost in the digital dispersion.

Todd Selby, the photographer and artist behind the ever-popular blog The Selby, is at it again. Two years ago his first book The Selby Is in Your Place offered a glimpse into the homes and happenings of some of the most engaging people throughout the creative industries. This time around, with Edible Selby, he has […]