Category

Diana

  • Our Skeleton Twins Sundance Adventure

    Our Skeleton Twins Sundance Adventure

    When I first laid eyes on Craig, it was in the spring of 2006 at Joe on Waverly and he was with a guy slightly shorter than him working on a screenplay. I didn’t know they were working on a screenplay; mostly, I wondered if they were a couple or just friends. When Craig went…

  • Diana’s Butter-Roasted Potatoes

    Diana’s Butter-Roasted Potatoes

    Now we all know the concept of the student beating the master and I don’t want to imply that my friend Diana was ever my student or that I was ever her master (though I was her roommate, which is kind of the same thing with me); what I’d like to imply, however, is that…

  • The Porch Swing

    The Porch Swing

    Looking for a refreshing summer drink? Try this one on for size. On Sunday night, we went over to our friends Mark and Diana’s and they served up a delightful twist on the Pimm’s Cup, a cocktail called The Porch Swing which they learned from Blue Smoke in New York (the restaurant that also catered…

  • Chocolate Chile Pound Cakes

    Chocolate Chile Pound Cakes

    Tweaking a Daniel Boulud recipe is a little bit like rewriting the lyrics to a Bob Dylan song. It’s a brazen thing to do. But when I made that Smoky Beef Chili for Diana’s birthday (and, by the way, not enough of you liked that recipe on Facebook and Twitter; I think it’s because chili…

  • Cherries in Salad

    Cherries in Salad

    You know how people say “pretty please with a cherry on top?” but the visual you get, from that request, is of an ice cream sundae with chocolate sauce and whipped cream? From now on, I want you to think about salad. Because cherries taste really good in salad. No, not cherries from a jar,…

  • Roquefort Cheese and Green Onion Tart

    Roquefort Cheese and Green Onion Tart

    The ladies who lunch really exist. I saw them on the Upper East Side, where I stayed for several months recently, and they don’t necessarily wear hats anymore (“Does anyone still wear a hat?”) but they know how to command a room. Two women I sat next to at Maison Kayser completely ignored their bread…

  • Bäco Mercat & La Casita Mexicana

    Bäco Mercat & La Casita Mexicana

    Two things are making me more of a restaurant adventurer here in L.A. than I was in New York: (1) nicer weather and (2) a car. In New York, on the bitterest, most miserable days of January, I would stick to a very specific loop that involved lunch at Hummus Place, coffee at Joe, and…

  • A Field Trip To Atwater Village: Atwater Village Farm, Proof Bakery & Canelé

    A Field Trip To Atwater Village: Atwater Village Farm, Proof Bakery & Canelé

    One thing I know to be true about cities is this: they’re best judged by their neighborhoods. I fell in love with some of my favorite cities–Seattle, Atlanta, New York–by visiting off-the-beaten-path neighborhoods with hidden-away restaurants, coffee shops, bakeries, book stores and movie theaters. In Seattle, there’s Capitol Hill and Ballard; in Atlanta there’s the…

  • Saravanaa Bhavan & Jo’s Shanghai

    Saravanaa Bhavan & Jo’s Shanghai

    I have the good fortune to be friends with a guy named Dan Fortune, a DJ with an incredible knack for hunting down obscure tracks–mostly show tune oriented–performed by unexpected artists (Stevie Wonder singing “Hello Young Lovers” from “The King & I,” Nina Simone singing a medley of songs from “Hair,” James Brown singing “September…