Lisa Corson
How to tell if that peach is ripe? Ask Southern California’s ‘Produce Hunter’
The New York Times
Shopping at the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market, Karen Beverlin reached into a five-pound box of tart Belle Magnifique cherries, grabbed a couple and ate them.
Tart cherries are tricky to size up at a glance: Flavors can range from gently tangy to very sour, and just looking at them offers no reliable clues. All Ms. Beverlin had to go on was her palate. She ate a few more, and smiled.
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Adam Amengual
The evolution of a restaurant dish, from vision to revision
The New York Times
Standing beside a table of four at Rustic Canyon, a casual but ambitious restaurant here, a server described an elaborate new special for two or more to share: an entire spatchcocked chicken, cut into parts, with blueberries and chicken jus, and grilled chicken hearts on rosemary skewers. He detailed the three sides: housemade toast with chicken-liver mousse and poached gizzards; polenta that used corn six ways; and an okra confit with gribenes, crispy bits of chicken skin.
Jeremy Fox, the executive chef and an owner, expected that most diners would pass judgment on the dish, which was being introduced that night in July, well before the server’s spiel was done. “If it’s something really good and appealing,” he said, “you’re like, ‘I’m getting that. You can stop talking.’”
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Amy Dickerson for The New York Times.
Red, ripe and renegade: Berries that break all the rules
The New York Times
OXNARD, Calif. — It ought to be easy to find a single ripe strawberry to sample in a 20-acre field. But Rick Gean picked two bright-red specimens and looked dubious.
“This one should be O.K.,” he said, sounding not quite convinced. Then again, his definition of ripe is more stringent than most.
Mr. Gean and his wife, Molly, own Harry’s Berries, a strawberry farm on the inland edge of this coastal city north of Los Angeles where they do nearly everything wrong, at least according to the gospel of modern commercial berry farming.
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Todd Heisler for The New York Times.
Loss leaders on the half shell
The New York Times
The joint is jumpin’: Three mixologists in striped dress shirts, dark slacks and suspenders pour drinks almost as fast as three shuckers send platter after platter of raw oysters to their fate. A bluesy soundtrack wafts over the standing-room-only din as patrons sip and slurp, oblivious to the crowd that has gathered outside for what can be a 90-minute wait.
It feels like 9 o’clock on a Saturday night. It is 4:30 on a dank weekday afternoon.
This is oyster happy hour at Maison Premiere in Williamsburg, Brooklyn — a selection of 15 different kinds of oysters, most of them for $1 each, with a handful at $1.25 because they had to fly in from the West Coast. Krystof Zizka, a co-owner of the restaurant, says he doesn’t make a penny on the oysters, though they are one of the reasons his three-year-old restaurant is so successful.
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Monica Almeida for The New York Times.
For a chef, 41 years in the kitchen takes its toll
The New York Times
Starting as a dishwasher at the age of 17, the chef Mark Peel worked his way up at some of the great California restaurants: Ma Maison, Michael’s, Chez Panisse, Spago, Chinois and, finally, for more than two decades, Campanile, his own place in Los Angeles.
Those 41 years in the kitchen have brought him considerable fame: Campanile won the James Beard award as outstanding restaurant in the United States in 2001. They have also brought him carpal tunnel syndromein both wrists and thoracic outlet syndrome in his shoulders, resulting from repetitive stirring, fine knife movements and heavy lifting. He has a bone spur on one foot and a cyst between toes of the other from constantly standing. He has had three hernia operations and lives with a chronically sore back.