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Category Archives: On Food

April 24, 2018
On Food

Sometimes the Pie Just Calls Your Name

By Rick Bragg

An illustration from A Apple Pie, by Kate Greenway.

1964

This is not the first memory I have of food. My first memory, I believe, was when I ate the Wet-Nap that came in the bottom of a two-piece dinner from Kentucky Fried Chicken just outside the high school football stadium in Sylacauga, Alabama, because I believed it was food. The less we say about that the better.

This is only my first memory of my mother’s food.

And I thought I would die.

I had already been banished from the kitchen, banished from any proximity to the hot stove and sharp instruments. She made me step back even a few steps farther, beyond the door, in case I should suddenly go peculiar and fling myself into the cabbage grater. I had exhibited some unusual behavior already, even beyond the Wet-Nap incident, behavior that made biting into a moistened towelette seem almost humdrum in comparison. I had, after chewing on it like it was gum, somehow poked a plastic poinsettia berry up my nose, requiring medical attention. The less said about that the better, too—though even that should not be strange for the son of a woman who walked around with a marble in her mouth for about three years. I also went crazy at a lumberyard. That time, they said it was probably just sunstroke. Read More
February 7, 2018
On Food

Dinner at the End of America

By Laura Bannister

The interior of Planet Hollywood Times Square.

Of all the wretched places to visit in New York, Planet Hollywood is king. The moldering eatery’s main entryway—beneath a colossal, glitzy sign that jostles for attention with Times Square’s other lurid neons—leads you to one of two elevators, their doors designed to mimic a subway car’s (as though the real and grimy thing were not a block or two away). One need not feast at a Planet Hollywood to know that the experience will be underwhelming and too expensive, that the earsplitting soundtrack will consist only of pop anthems and Disney theme songs, that there will be a weekly changing burger named the OMG! Burger, and that a visit to the gift shop will make you want to cry. A cursory search of online reviews confirms Planet Hollywood’s status as a dwindling brasserie chain attached to a substandard museum—a place that should no longer exist and yet seems to defy market logic. To quote a recent note on TripAdvisor, “The threat from dust falling from the above decorations was enough to put you off.”

But shortly after moving to America, and for reasons that now evade me, I began dining regularly—and with near-evangelical enthusiasm—at Planet Hollywood Times Square. (This is the city’s only branch, and it has lived here since 2000, after relocating from its original 1991 location on West 57th Street.) I have noshed on spinach dip served in a cocktail glass, and on a pizza whose pepperoni is glistening and wet. I have stopped in for drinks—some of the cocktails, by the way, involve bacon, some chocolate milk, and most have vaguely clever names like Eternal Sunshine, Hawaii Five Ohhh, There’s Something About Mary and Pineapple Express. A couple of titles are less divinely inspired, such as the Red Carpet Margarita. (Also available, for forty-two dollars a bottle, is Vanderpump Rosé, one of Lisa Vanderpump’s wines. If you actually want to get drunk, I recommend that—or a beer.)

Just before Halloween, when dollar-store cobwebs were draped across cases of faded memorabilia, my friends and I paid fifteen dollars for a printout of ourselves clutching pumpkin props. Our fellow patrons, an ambiguous mix of sad-looking young couples and tourist families with teenage kids in tow, stared silently at the ceiling or the floor or their mobile phones, anywhere but each other’s faces, as a dance remix of Justin Bieber’s “Sorry” shook the walls. On Valentine’s Day, a cluster of half-deflated fabric lights emblazoned with HUG ME, KISS ME, and BE MINE were arranged beneath a tawdry button-up shirt that Charlie Sheen, a disgraced misogynist, wore on an episode of Two and a Half Men, a production not so much “Hollywood” as unending, asinine sitcom. Elsewhere, teddy bears were propped clumsily against display cabinets. My favorite bear, splay-legged and smiling, sat atop a see-through box protecting a pair of pink Converse. These had been autographed by former Playboy bunny Holly Madison. Read More
December 21, 2017
On Food

Cocktails for Toasting the End of Patriarchy

By Merrily Grashin

1. The Feminine Mys-tiki

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November 23, 2017
On Food

Hale and Hearty

By Robin Bellinger

The Paris Review staff is off in a tryptophan-induced haze, so we’re reposting some of our favorite Thanksgiving pieces. Enjoy your holiday!

Among the many things for which I will give thanks this Thursday, foremost is the fact that I am not in charge of Thanksgiving dinner. Instead I’ll be helping my mother in her kitchen, as she helped me in mine last year. It isn’t that I dislike cooking, or even that I feed a real crowd; I cook every day, usually with pleasure, and we don’t pull many extra chairs up to the table for the holiday. But sometime after the second pie has been baked and the turkey is in the oven and half the vegetables are ready but there is still so much to make, and the table not even set, I just want to sneak away without finishing up.

How great a disappointment I would have been to Sarah Josepha Hale, the woman who led the campaign to make Thanksgiving a national holiday. When Hale was thirty-four and the year was 1822, her husband died, leaving her with five children. Did she allow despair to overcome her stout Yankee heart? Never! She supported her family with that reliable moneymaker, poesy, before publishing a best-selling novel, and eventually going on to become the editor of the most influential women’s magazine in America.

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August 28, 2017
On Food

Reading and Eating Paris

By Jennifer Burek Pierce

All images from Hazel and Hewstone Raymenton’s travel journal, England and France, July 1914. By permission of Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries.

Memories of Paris are entwined with its eateries. From Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast to expatriates’ essays in the New York Times following the terrorist attacks in November 2015, writers have shown how their lives in Paris are marked by its restaurants, bakeries, and markets. Hemingway’s account of his postwar Parisian life uses food to define his days, his success, and his relationships. His struggle to find outlets for his fiction is linked with the tantalizing “bakery shops” that “had such good things in the windows and people [eating] outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food.” He recounts meeting authors and artists for aperitifs or champagne, explaining that “drinking wine … was as natural as eating and to me as necessary, and I would not have thought of eating a meal without drinking either wine or cider or beer.” He wrote in cafés amid the “smell of café crèmes.” A century later, news of the November attacks brought nostalgia for one writer, who, no longer in Paris, recalled the market “beckoning with the smell of roasting chickens” and “the flash of bright fruit against stark winter skies.” Another essayist described his decision, days later, to seek out the farmers and vendors of his local market. Its reopening, he wrote, reflected the resilience of Paris: “the market will be a celebration of the city itself, unvanquished, animated and always hungry.”

For those who come to Paris as either actual or armchair tourists, guidebooks discuss how and where to savor the city’s food. Galignani’s 1830 guide for English-speaking visitors, as David McCullough observes, promised readers that French cafés and restaurants, characterized by elegance and quality, were superior to those of London. The Galignani guide explained everything from pricing to the Parisian habit of “lounging away nearly the whole of the day in cafés” to the French dish of “fried and fricasseed frogs,” which, readers were assured, “are an acknowledged and exquisite luxury.” Reading has long been a prelude to eating well in Paris. Read More
May 3, 2016
On Food

A Taste of The Photographer’s Cookbook

By Caitlin Love

Stephen Shore, New York City, New York, September–October 1972. © Stephen Shore, Courtesy of the artist and 303 Gallery, New York.

Our dual subscription deal with Lucky Peach technically ended last week, but we’re extending it because we’ve still got food and drink on the mind—especially after flipping through The Photographer’s Cookbook, out next month from Aperture and the George Eastman Museum. Commissioned by the latter in the late seventies, the book showcases recipes and pictures from the era’s leading photographers; it was never published before now. Below are five of our favorite photo/recipe combos, including Stephen Shore’s Key lime pie supreme, Imogen Cunningham’s borscht, and a classic down-South dish from the master of seventies color photography himself: William Eggleston’s cheese-grits casserole. —Caitlin Love Read More