All about Men and the women who love them!
Enjoy this gallery with amazing dishes from the top 10 restaurants of Latin America’s 50 Best 2018, with chef Tsumura’s Maido at number 1 for the second year.The BEST soup made SO EASILY right in your pressure cooker with the crispiest tortilla strips! So good + so comforting!
Chunky sweaters. Homemade tortilla soup. Crispy tortilla strips.
Ugh. Life is good. Too good.
That, and, well, we’re headed to Las Vegas to see Backstreet Boys!
Backstreet’s back, alright!
This was my favorite childhood band ever, and growing up as a very sheltered child, I never went to a single concert of theirs. So don’t mind me while I scream out my lungs at Planet Hollywood tonight.
Until then, I hope you guys find the chunkiest sweater for this soup. It’s so perfect – it’s made in the Instant Pot (which basically means this is the easiest recipe ever), and the chicken is so amazingly tender, it just melts in your mouth.
So grab a spoon and all the crispy tortilla strips you can find.
The BEST soup made SO EASILY right in your pressure cooker with the crispiest tortilla strips! So good + so comforting!
Tag @damn_delicious on Instagram and hashtag it #damndelicious.
The post Instant Pot Chicken Tortilla Soup appeared first on Damn Delicious.
Alex LaPratt believes you shouldn’t have to leave Brooklyn to experience top-notch wine and dining. However, though both his Wine Spectator Best of Award of Excellence–winning restaurants—Atrium Dumbo and Beasts & Bottles—are in his borough of choice, today his workday begins in Manhattan. One of the adjunct wine faculty members at the International Culinary Center (ICC), LaPratt, 37, teaches courses within the school’s 10-week intensive sommelier training program. So after waking up bright and early in his Brooklyn Heights apartment, he’s off to ICC’s SoHo campus to teach today’s lesson: red Burgundy.
“Buckle your seatbelts,” he tells his class of 10 aspiring certified sommeliers. “We’re gonna talk about the Holy Grail of wine.”
LaPratt sips an iced coffee and sits among his students in ICC’s small auditorium as he covers everything from the history of Burgundy to the region’s top vintages and producers to the meaning behind all the double-barreled place names and designations (Gevrey-Chambertin, Vosne-Romanée, etc.).
“It’s kind of like an appetizer,” he warns of the lesson, which is just a taste of one of the wine world’s most notoriously complex regions. “The main course you’re going to have to cook yourself. You’re going to have to do some research, you’re going to have to read some stuff, you’re going to have to drink even more.”
LaPratt interjects his own wine wisdom throughout the two-hour lecture. On the legend of how Corton-Charlemagne became dedicated to white grapes: “Charlemagne—what is that, King Charles the First, or whatever? He saw this hillside and planted it red. But as he got older, his beard turned gray, and apparently his wife said, ‘We should change your wine because of your beard.’ And so he decided to plant Chardonnay as well on the hill, and this is what we get. There are all kinds of weird legends that aren’t necessarily true, but they like to come up with this crazy stuff. You can tell guests this, but it’s absolutely ridiculous.”
“All right, I’m going to need a few volunteers to open these, present them and then pour them,” LaPratt calls out when the class reconvenes after lunch break, which LaPratt spent fielding work calls and emails. He points to the eight bottles of Burgundy he’s lined up near his podium. One by one, students come up to pop corks and practice showing the selections to LaPratt as they would to their guests in a restaurant.
The group then tastes through the lineup, which includes Cyprien Arlaud Nuits-St.-Georges Les Porrets St.-Georges 2014, Domaine Nicolas Rossignol Volnay 2014, Jean-Noël Gagnard Chassagne-Montrachet Morgeot Premier Cru 2015 and other Burgundy Pinots. With LaPratt’s guidance, the students take turns talking through the wines, including commentary on the sight, nose, structure and flavor elements of each.
LaPratt is so wrapped up in the tasting that class runs 10 minutes over. “Hopefully, if I did my job well, you’ll leave with more questions and more curiosity than when you came to class today,” he says. But there’s no time to bask in the glow of his lecture right now. He’s running late.
From the backseat of an Uber, LaPratt handles more restaurant business on his phone, occasionally looking up to call out directions to the driver—shortcuts he knows that the GPS doesn’t—so he can rush home, change his clothes and get to his next stop of the day.
His schedule is always packed, he says. “I usually do the things I really enjoy first thing, just to make sure I get them out of the way.” Some days, that means an intense workout in preparation for his next big adventure. (LaPratt is an avid cyclist, and he recently climbed Washington’s Mount Rainier.) Today, it meant a quick sprints exercise and a bit of guitar practice, a hobby he picked up when he had some free time after earning the Master Sommelier pin—which he now proudly wears on the lapel of his crisp navy suit—in 2014. It’s an accomplishment that took years of study.
But it’s not like things have slowed down since. Following the opening of Atrium in 2013, LaPratt and partners chef Laurent Kalkotour and manager Leslie Affre opened their second restaurant, Beasts & Bottles, in 2016. And he drops a hint about the team’s next conquest, a restaurant he hopes will “redefine wine excellence for the Miami area,” in that city’s trendy Design District.
Beasts & Bottles’ dining room is modern, rustic, and, for the moment, empty save for a few staff members prepping for dinner service. Scott Lefler, the restaurant’s sole sommelier, and Brady Brown, his Atrium counterpart, are both waiting for LaPratt when he arrives. The trio taste through a few Champagnes that importers have dropped off for consideration for the restaurants’ wine lists—among them cuvées from Pierre Moncuit, A. Margaine and Agrapart & Fils.
Next? More tasting, of course. Both somms are training for different certification exams within the Court of Master Sommeliers. LaPratt, the resident Master, often helps them out with mock exams.
“Alex is tractor-beaming us up to the mother ship,” Lefler jokes.
Today, they’re doing a “full six,” meaning each somm has 25 minutes to blind-taste six wines—three whites and three reds—and identify their grape varieties, countries of origin, appellations of origin and vintages.
“It’s like the wine Olympics,” LaPratt says. “The same mindset as sports, for sure. A lot of visualization. Confidence is key.”
As each somm takes his turn rattling off the characteristics of the wines in the lineup, LaPratt takes notes at an equally breakneck pace. As they’re winding down, all three wine pros seem in need of an energy boost. As if on cue, they’re jolted alert by an unexpected visitor.
“Is that Fred Dex? On his scooter in a Def Leppard t-shirt?” Brown points out the window. Indeed, another Brooklyn-based wine guy, Fred Dexheimer, is wheeling by. LaPratt springs into action, waving his pal in. “Do you guys still have that Champagne? Let’s pour him some.”
LaPratt is supposed to head over to Atrium for staff lineup—the next item on his uber-structured to-do list—but the opportunity to shoot the breeze with a friend (and fellow Master Sommelier) is too good for him to pass up. The two haven’t seen each other in over a year and have lots to discuss.
From the struggle of being a restaurant owner:
“People don’t understand the financial reality of running a restaurant. And now the government’s getting ready to get rid of the tip credit,” LaPratt speculates. (New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has been conducting a review of the provision that allows restaurant owners to pay their employees less than the standard minimum wage as long as the tips earned by a worker bring his or her income up to or above the minimum wage.) “And if you get rid of the tip credit, your employees don’t necessarily make more. Often, they make less. We just want to be sure everybody makes enough money. We try to do, like, Manhattan money, but Brooklyn convenience; that’s how we try to retain a lot of our staff. It’s not easy when it’s all yours and you have a limited bank account,” he says, comparing his budget to those of some of the big-ticket restaurants he’s worked at in the past, including the French Laundry, Daniel, Le Bernardin and Jean-Georges.
To the sommelier version of the word “swagger”:
“Swagger has to do with confidence, and it’s confidence that’s earned by sweat and toil over a long period of time,” LaPratt says. “Some people say, ‘Alex, you’re so cocky.’ But I’m not cocky, I’m confident. I don’t get nervous doing what I do anymore. I can be in a room of 100,000 people, it doesn’t affect me.”
But even while kicking back, LaPratt takes care of business: A guest approaches the table where LaPratt is holding court. He’s looking for a Northern Rhône red, something refined with some olive notes, around $200.
LaPratt pauses to mull over his list. He looks up. “I’m going to change your life. Forever.” He asks Lefler to open a bottle of the Marcel Juge Cornas 2015. “If this doesn’t change you life, you let me know, because I’ll come and drink it, and we can get anything else.”
“That’s called swagger!” Dexheimer chimes in.
It’s after dark when LaPratt and Dexheimer have exhausted conversation topics—and bottles of bubbly. There’s no chance now that he can stop at Atrium like he planned, or even grab a bite to eat. He hustles to call a cab to take him back into Manhattan and get back on schedule.
Over the bridge, LaPratt has organized a gathering of wine friends in a private room at La Compagnie des Vins Surnaturels, a popular sommelier hangout downtown. He makes the rounds greeting his comrades-in-wine—sommeliers from New York hot spots such as Union Square Cafe, Per Se and the University Club, as well as producers, marketers and even an app creator—most of whom seem to have come prepared to impress with their wine selections.
LaPratt wields his own picks with pride: From the Compagnie wine list, a jeroboam of Karthäuserhof Riesling Spätlese Trocken Alte Reben 2012, and from Beasts & Bottles, a magnum he brought of A. J. Adam Hofberg Riesling 2012.
“It’s good to get everyone out, taste some wine, have some camaraderie,” he says. “Everyone is always trying to be all serious. I think we need to take that out sometimes.”
For the rest of the night, LaPratt will stay busy entertaining his friends while keeping their glasses filled, ensuring everyone gets a taste of what he’s got to offer.
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From a sweet potato souffle with pistachio crust to a luscious maple-infused sweet potato gratin, you’ll find plenty of inspiration for your Thanksgiving table.It began as a festive display to delight all assembled: Huge LED formations of fanciful wine bottles and Champagne flutes lighting up the sky in a drone show over Victoria Harbor at last week’s Hong Kong Wine and Dine Festival. But the show, and 46 drones, came to an abrupt end when said drones unexpectedly made a plummet-out-of-the-sky formation into the water. Authorities are now investigating what went wrong.
The 100-machine show, which commemorated the 10th anniversary of the four-day wine and food event, went off without a hitch the first two nights. It’s still not certain exactly what caused the drones to fritz during their third act, though local publications are blaming GPS interference, with some speculating that the signal was intentionally jammed. According to the South China Morning Post, the Hong Kong Tourism Board, which organized the festival, estimated the calamity caused at least HK$1 million (about $127,500) in damage. (So far no one had suggested that the wine robots, silently chafing under their human masters and forced into menial vineyard labor, wine bar servitude and, now, humiliating aerial dances, were finally revolting, until we just did.)
However, at least some of the festival’s estimated 140,000 attendees were too preoccupied with the main draws of the attraction—wine-pairing meals created by top chefs, tasting classes led by industry experts, and 450 booths showcasing wines, beers, snacks and more by vendors from all over the world—to even notice that something had gone awry in the sky.
“Actually, we didn’t know the show was going on,” Hongkonger Eva Ng, a regular festival attendee, said to the Post. “But we really like to join the wine-tasting classes.”
Benjamin Hessel, winemaker at Château des Annereaux in the small Bordeaux appellation Lalande-de-Pomerol, lost almost all his crop to frost in January. Every year, it seemed to him—hail, frost, erratic weather! So he did as any frustrated citizen might: Write his representative, French President Emmanuel Macron. Hessel emailed that climate change conditions were hurting his vineyard’s production—hurting his business—though “[the letter] was more like how you write a book, as a therapy,” Hessel told Unfiltered. He didn’t expect a response.
When Hessel heard back from Virginie Routis, Macron’s head sommelier at Élysée Palace, exactly one week later, the response was even more than he had hoped for. “She wrote, that after my letter to the President Macron, she would be glad to receive me at Élysée and taste the Château des Annereaux,” Hessel said. “I was really surprised—first to get an answer, then a personal answer from the sommelier, then to be invited at Élysée to taste my wine.”
In addition to Routis calling the wines “excellent,” as Hessel recalled, the 30-minute meeting ended with her ordering cases of Annereaux’s 2012s and 2015s. “All the work and the effort we make to produce the best wine was judged by the most important sommelier of France,” Hessel said. “[It felt like] a sort of knighting of our wine by the president.” While Macron has made great strides in blind tasting and decreed wine o’clock for lunch and dinner, it remains to be seen how much he can influence the fickle depredations of the angry weather gods.
Being Unfiltered means learning surprising tidbits about the pop cultures of the world’s major wine producing countries, so here’s something about the French: They love, love, love comic books, almost as much as bicycles, selfies and vandalism. Naturellement, the intersection of BD (“graphic novels”) and vin was inevitable (there is now, in fact, an annual BD & Vin festival at Bordeaux’s Château Lacouture).
The latest addition to the canon is particularly ambitious: L’Incroyable Histoire du Vin, published last week, is a 232-pager from author Benoist Simmat and illustrator Daniel Casanave that travels 10,000 years of wine from Noé (Noah) to Chine (China). “What we wanted to show is that the story of wine is a story of world conquest,” explained Simmat to Unfiltered via email. “What seems surprising to [our French readers] is that this story is not a ‘French’ story, but a global conquest, that concerns all continents and civilizations.”
Indeed, our intrepid guide through the book is a friendly orange-bearded, flannel-clad time-traveling bon vivant who walks the vines from Stone Age Mesopotamia through ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, through medieval France and Spain, and into California, Australia, South Africa and China. All our favorite wine superheroes are there, Avengers-style: Dom Ruinart, the duke who banned Gamay from Burgundy, the popes of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Thomas Jefferson, mononymous novelist and wine aficionada Colette, André Tchelistcheff, Prof. Patrick McGovern, a gender-non-specific phylloxera and many more.
Simmat, who’s also a journalist with La Revue du Vin de France, said the book has already been picked up for translation into Spanish, and he hopes to see an English version soon. “I had written this story for the global public.”
Once upon a time, if you were riding the rails to destination unknown with nothing but knapsack on your shoulder and a song in your heart, your trusty companion in said knapsack was bottle of Thunderbird, the flavored, fortified, wine-adjacent drink from the original E. and the original J. Gallo. “What’s the word? Thunderbird. How’s it sold? Good and cold,” went the jingle in ads for a product that, really, sold itself.
And now, like some sort of mythical bird that dies and is reborn from the ashes, Thunderbird is back! Gallo’s new ‘bird is neither flavored nor fortified nor 60 cents (as the jingle had it), but its packaging preserves the retro font and the mighty winged logo: “We have always felt there was something powerful about the Thunderbird logo,” Leon Susen, senior director of marketing for E. & J. Gallo Winery, told Unfiltered via email. “It is bold, disruptive and hardworking.” The new T-Bird comes in Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay and red blend, with a Zin on the way, and Gallo began the rollout in the Midwest’s great M cities (Milwaukee, Madison, Minneapolis), sponsoring performances of local musicians like Greatest Lakes, Luxi, Lost Lakes, Guerilla Ghost and General B & The Wiz. Next up, Gallo is casting around for more musical partners and markets for expansion. And a final tip for anyone in the market for either a piece of collectible Americana or one last citrus hangover: “We are discontinuing the old Thunderbird,” Susen confirmed.
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