December 31, 2010
In London, Private Homes on Display By ANDREW FERREN
AS the last tinges of lavender faded from the fall sky, a group of people lingered for a moment beneath a flickering gas lamp on the threshold of an 18th-century London town house. Were it not for the cars on the street, it might have been a scene from a century ago.
But as I soon discovered, the real leap back in time doesn’t take place until you step through the doorway of the Dennis Severs House (18 Folgate Street; dennissevershouse.co.uk). Mr. Severs (1948-99) was an artist whose masterpiece was his own home, a 1724 Georgian house near East London’s Spitalfields market, once the city’s principal textile exchange. Here Mr. Severs — an American expatriate turned hard-core Anglophile — lived much as he would have in George III’s day, with fireplaces for heat and candles for light in a carefully curated, antiques-filled period environment that he ultimately decided to share with the public.
Rather than freezing the décor in one particular historical moment, Mr. Severs showed how a house would have evolved over successive generations in the hands of a single family — that of one Isaac Jervis, a fictitious Huguenot silk weaver of the sort who once populated Spitalfields. As family fortunes rose and fell, the parlor might get a Victorian face-lift, or the threadbare attic bedroom might be rented to lodgers. Heightening the ambience, the phantom family’s (recorded) rustlings and rumblings can be heard as visitors stroll among the home’s five levels. A visit is especially evocative in winter when the Monday night candlelight tours sell out and the aromas of mulled wine and spice cookies ramp up the atmosphere even further.
Such creations — the private realms and whims of inspired aesthetes put on public display — are something of a fetish in London. Indeed, house museums are to London what streetlights are to most other cities, which is to say everywhere. Perhaps in no other culture has the domestic interior served as such a canvas for personal expression. Homeowners and their architects and decorators have been emboldened to create some pretty fabulous environments over the last few centuries.
Whether visitors seek them or just happen upon them, it is worth taking the time to step inside these charming incubators of idiosyncrasy.
How else would one ever learn about Mah-Jongg, the ring-tailed lemur who in the 1930s and 40s had free reign of Eltham Palace, former home of King Henry VIII (not to mention Kings Henry IV and Henry II) near Greenwich (Court Yard, Eltham; elthampalace.org.uk). Mah-Jongg, whose second-story room at Eltham was decorated with painted scenes of bamboo forests, was the beloved pet of Stephen Courtauld, an heir to the British textile fortune, and his Italian-born wife, Virginia. They acquired the property — notable for its impressive 1470s Great Hall — in 1933 and commissioned the architects Seely and Paget to revamp the estate into a modern home suitable for their considerable entertaining needs.
Collaborating with several design firms, the architects delivered an elegant mix of styles that reflected the prevailing tastes of the day. The tone is brilliantly set in the Swedish Art Deco entry hall, designed by Rolf Engströmer and featuring a stunningly original concrete and glass dome. The room’s Australian black-bean paneling, with marquetry scenes of Venice and Stockholm (with the Courtaulds’ yacht moored in the harbor), is a showstopper. Throughout, Eltham was set up with “mod cons” (as modern conveniences were known) like an internal telephone system and a clock linked directly to the Greenwich observatory. Take a seat in the Venetian bedroom, paneled in walnut with mirrored insets, and watch the Courtaulds’ home movies of parties at home and trips around the world on their yacht. Mah-Jongg seems to have never been far from the action.
Mod cons take a back seat to the lure of the Orient at the Leighton House Museum (12 Holland Park Road; rbkc.gov.uk/leightonhousemuseum). Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830-96), was one of the leading Victorian artists, known for his paintings of languid beauties like “Flaming June.” His home and studio at the edge of Holland Park in Kensington is one of the city’s most remarkable 19th-century abodes and a consummate summation of the period’s Orientalist taste. A frequent backdrop for films (like “Wings of the Dove”) and photo shoots, Leighton’s Arab Hall, showcasing his collection of more than 1,000 Islamic tiles, is among the most singular spaces in all London. The peacock-blue tiles that adorn much of the rest of the public rooms are by William De Morgan and unify the space with an air of opulence.
Begun in 1864 and expanded over subsequent decades, the whole place gleams anew as the house reopened in April after an exhaustive refurbishment designed to make it more faithful to its appearance in Leighton’s day. Displayed throughout are many of Leighton’s own works as well as those of his Victorian contemporaries like John Everett Millais, G. F. Watts and Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Clearly conceived to be Leighton’s best advertisement as a tastemaker, the house enabled the artist to entertain lavishly and often. Though guests never got too comfortable, as the house has just one bedroom — Leighton’s own.
Hemmed in by the whizzing traffic of Hyde Park Corner, Apsley House, also known as the Wellington Museum (Apsley House, 149 Piccadilly; 44-207- 499-5676), might escape the attention of those shuttling between Buckingham Palace and Harrod’s, but it’s worth a stop — if only to see “Mars the Peacemaker,” Canova’s colossal marble statue of Napoleon in the stair hall. In the audio guide, the present Duke of Wellington, who still lives upstairs part time, recalls how he had to take care not to knock the little bronze statuette of Victory out of Napoleon’s hand as he slid down the banister as a child.
With Wellington’s defeat of Napoleon in the Peninsular War and finally at Waterloo, he became Britain’s greatest military M.V.P. of all time. Titles (like Duke), properties (such as this one) and trinkets galore were showered upon him like tribute to a Roman emperor. In gratitude for getting Napoleon’s brother off his throne, the Spanish King Ferdinand VII let him keep works from the royal collection like Velázquez’s “Waterseller of Seville,” which now has pride of place in an upstairs gallery. The Duke also received sets of china and silverware from the crowned heads of Europe. He used these at the annual Waterloo banquets and they are now displayed on the ground floor. The suite of public rooms upstairs provide the backdrop for Wellington’s astonishing collection of paintings. Apparently the military hero did battle with his decorators as well as French tyrants, insisting on yellow silk wall hangings in the ballroom, though they more or less killed the effects of the expensive gilding on the moldings.
Perhaps no London house museum has a more devoted fan base than Sir John Soane’s Museum (13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields; soane.org). Soane (1753-1837) was among England’s greatest architects, and he spent the last 20 years of his life expanding his home in Lincoln’s Inn Fields with the purchase of two neighboring houses. He opened it to the public before he died and arranged an act of Parliament to ensure it would “be kept as nearly as possible in the state that he shall leave it.” Currently, a £6 million project is under way to put on public view the rooms that have served as offices since the house museum opened in 1837.
The Soane Museum is emblematic of a certain brand of Britishness — quirky, highly organized and utterly charming. Passageways, stairways, even Soane’s dressing room are chock full of sculptures and architectural relics and his library of more than 10,000 volumes. Soane added domes, clerestories, skylights and cleverly placed mirrors wherever he could to bring natural light to all corners of the house — even the basement.
Not to be missed is Hogarth’s famous series of paintings depicting “The Rake’s Progress,” displayed on the walls of the picture gallery. The Hogarth paintings tell the tale of a fictitious Londoner, like Severs’s invented silk weaver Jervis. This one is Tom Rakewell, whose spendthrift ways lead to penury and madness. There is an irony in finding these moralistic images of a man who lost it all hanging in the home of a man who tripled the size of his home to keep pace with his prized collections.
Showing posts with label Travel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Travel. Show all posts
Friday, December 31, 2010
Monday, July 05, 2010
The Showboats Must Go On (Even on Their Nights Off) By ERIK PIEPENBURG
uly 5, 2010
The Showboats Must Go On (Even on Their Nights Off) By ERIK PIEPENBURG
Bites from the Broadway bug can be deep, incurable and — for both actors and fans — easy to scratch, even on nights when not much is playing onstage.
Instead of resting on their nights off or going home after the curtain falls, many Broadway performers head to places across the city where no show tune or pop song is wasted. Watching them are Facebook-generated micro-fan clubs, fellow actors, Broadway hangers-on and, if kismet allows, producers, casting agents or other theatrical dream makers.
The options are plentiful on Monday nights, when most Broadway theaters are dark. One of the newest is at Bar-Tini Ultra Lounge, a gay bar in Hell’s Kitchen, and is presided over by the heavily mascaraed drag performer Paige Turner. On a recent Monday, Russell Fischer, who plays Joey and understudies the role of Frankie Valli in “Jersey Boys,” hopped on the small stage around 11 p.m. and performed two very non-Broadway songs (by Maroon 5 and Gnarls Barkley). He also auctioned off signed “Jersey Boys” posters to benefit Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.
“This is a great way to express myself,” Mr. Fischer said. “It’s so much more fun than staying home on my night off.”
The crowds at these events know their stuff. On that same evening a group of young men sang along to Paige Turner’s lip-synched performance of “The Spark of Creation” from the musical “Children of Eden.” And during a round of Name That Tune it took the crowd only five notes to shout out the identity of “The Trolley Song” from the film “Meet Me in St. Louis.”
In the audience was Joe Aaron Reid, enjoying a night out with friends before leaving for the Williamstown Theater Festival to appear in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” Mr. Reid, who recently appeared in the Broadway revival of “Finian’s Rainbow,” said deciding whether to stay at home on his nights off was determined by how well his Broadway work week had gone.
“Everything depended on how good I was that week,” he said. “If I was good, I’d go out. If not, it was better to stay home.”
At the long-running Musical Mondays night at Splash, a gay nightclub in Chelsea, chorus boys (and their female friends) sing along to videos of Broadway musical numbers, movie clips and excerpts from Tony Award ceremonies past. (“And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” and “Defying Gravity” are favorites.) Around midnight the club turns into Curtain Call, a song-and-dance show hosted by Emily McNamara at which Broadway stars can sometimes be spotted performing.
Actors and other theater creatures are familiar to Jim Caruso, the host of Cast Party, a Monday night open-mike show at Birdland in the theater district, now in its seventh year. Mr. Caruso said off-night events like his, in which actors fresh off the bus have been known to mingle with the likes of Liza Minnelli and Idina Menzel, remain popular because they allow members of the Broadway world to pull a Jerome Kern and showboat.
“We’re all showoffs to a certain extent,” said Mr. Caruso, who appeared in “Liza’s at the Palace” on Broadway. “If you’re in a show, especially if you’re in the ensemble, maybe you’re not showing off what you do brilliantly. At Cast Party you can blow it out.” (Monday night at Birdland Mr. Caruso is to present a special benefit for Nashville flooding relief efforts called Singin’ in the Shower.)
Performing on nights off may also help actors find work. Mr. Caruso said Stephen Schwartz, the composer and lyricist of “Wicked,” had once appeared at Cast Party and “talked to people about auditioning” for his show. “People have made some incredible contacts in that room,” Mr. Caruso said.
Broadway performers also use off-night and after-hours events as a way to catch up with friends who work more traditional 9-to-5 schedules. Performers “want to feel like they get a night out as well,” said Brandon Cutrell, who hosts After Party on Friday nights at the Laurie Beechman Theater in Hell’s Kitchen. “Even though they have a two-show day the next day.”
A recent guest at After Party was the comic actress Jackie Hoffman, now playing Grandma in “The Addams Family” on Broadway. Ms. Hoffman said her main reason for performing was to promote her CD of original songs. But she acknowledged that playing in front of a small crowd was intimate in a way the large Lunt-Fontanne Theater, where “The Addams Family” is playing, was not.
“In the show I’m in now I’m not a star,” she said. “But if I go to some low-end cabaret night, I can be the star.”
Not to mention that typical audience members for Ms. Hoffman’s solo shows, with their jokes about terrorism and cancer, probably aren’t lining up for “Addams Family” tchotchkes.
Ms. Hoffman said the audiences at “The Addams Family” were mostly families. “But these kinds of places are my crowd,” she added, “gays and bitter people.”
Blame the “Glee”-ification of the theater world, but at many of these musical evenings the set lists go beyond show tunes. A Pat Benatar anthem or a Christina Aguilera ballad can be a welcome respite after singing “Circle of Life” eight times a week.
“The people who come to my show just want to hear belting,” said Ben Cameron, the host of Broadway Sessions, Tuesday nights at Therapy, a gay bar in Hell’s Kitchen. “This is not the place to try out your new Weill song.”
Fatigue, either physical or vocal, doesn’t seem to stop many performers. Cheering on Mr. Fischer at Bar-Tini was Nova Thomas, who gave him voice lessons at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, N.J. Ms. Thomas said that while she, an opera singer, would normally rest her voice on a night off, she encouraged Mr. Fisher to perform on his.
“I reminded him to embrace the joy of singing and making music,” she said. “This is reminding him of why he sings.”
The Showboats Must Go On (Even on Their Nights Off) By ERIK PIEPENBURG
Bites from the Broadway bug can be deep, incurable and — for both actors and fans — easy to scratch, even on nights when not much is playing onstage.
Instead of resting on their nights off or going home after the curtain falls, many Broadway performers head to places across the city where no show tune or pop song is wasted. Watching them are Facebook-generated micro-fan clubs, fellow actors, Broadway hangers-on and, if kismet allows, producers, casting agents or other theatrical dream makers.
The options are plentiful on Monday nights, when most Broadway theaters are dark. One of the newest is at Bar-Tini Ultra Lounge, a gay bar in Hell’s Kitchen, and is presided over by the heavily mascaraed drag performer Paige Turner. On a recent Monday, Russell Fischer, who plays Joey and understudies the role of Frankie Valli in “Jersey Boys,” hopped on the small stage around 11 p.m. and performed two very non-Broadway songs (by Maroon 5 and Gnarls Barkley). He also auctioned off signed “Jersey Boys” posters to benefit Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.
“This is a great way to express myself,” Mr. Fischer said. “It’s so much more fun than staying home on my night off.”
The crowds at these events know their stuff. On that same evening a group of young men sang along to Paige Turner’s lip-synched performance of “The Spark of Creation” from the musical “Children of Eden.” And during a round of Name That Tune it took the crowd only five notes to shout out the identity of “The Trolley Song” from the film “Meet Me in St. Louis.”
In the audience was Joe Aaron Reid, enjoying a night out with friends before leaving for the Williamstown Theater Festival to appear in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” Mr. Reid, who recently appeared in the Broadway revival of “Finian’s Rainbow,” said deciding whether to stay at home on his nights off was determined by how well his Broadway work week had gone.
“Everything depended on how good I was that week,” he said. “If I was good, I’d go out. If not, it was better to stay home.”
At the long-running Musical Mondays night at Splash, a gay nightclub in Chelsea, chorus boys (and their female friends) sing along to videos of Broadway musical numbers, movie clips and excerpts from Tony Award ceremonies past. (“And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” and “Defying Gravity” are favorites.) Around midnight the club turns into Curtain Call, a song-and-dance show hosted by Emily McNamara at which Broadway stars can sometimes be spotted performing.
Actors and other theater creatures are familiar to Jim Caruso, the host of Cast Party, a Monday night open-mike show at Birdland in the theater district, now in its seventh year. Mr. Caruso said off-night events like his, in which actors fresh off the bus have been known to mingle with the likes of Liza Minnelli and Idina Menzel, remain popular because they allow members of the Broadway world to pull a Jerome Kern and showboat.
“We’re all showoffs to a certain extent,” said Mr. Caruso, who appeared in “Liza’s at the Palace” on Broadway. “If you’re in a show, especially if you’re in the ensemble, maybe you’re not showing off what you do brilliantly. At Cast Party you can blow it out.” (Monday night at Birdland Mr. Caruso is to present a special benefit for Nashville flooding relief efforts called Singin’ in the Shower.)
Performing on nights off may also help actors find work. Mr. Caruso said Stephen Schwartz, the composer and lyricist of “Wicked,” had once appeared at Cast Party and “talked to people about auditioning” for his show. “People have made some incredible contacts in that room,” Mr. Caruso said.
Broadway performers also use off-night and after-hours events as a way to catch up with friends who work more traditional 9-to-5 schedules. Performers “want to feel like they get a night out as well,” said Brandon Cutrell, who hosts After Party on Friday nights at the Laurie Beechman Theater in Hell’s Kitchen. “Even though they have a two-show day the next day.”
A recent guest at After Party was the comic actress Jackie Hoffman, now playing Grandma in “The Addams Family” on Broadway. Ms. Hoffman said her main reason for performing was to promote her CD of original songs. But she acknowledged that playing in front of a small crowd was intimate in a way the large Lunt-Fontanne Theater, where “The Addams Family” is playing, was not.
“In the show I’m in now I’m not a star,” she said. “But if I go to some low-end cabaret night, I can be the star.”
Not to mention that typical audience members for Ms. Hoffman’s solo shows, with their jokes about terrorism and cancer, probably aren’t lining up for “Addams Family” tchotchkes.
Ms. Hoffman said the audiences at “The Addams Family” were mostly families. “But these kinds of places are my crowd,” she added, “gays and bitter people.”
Blame the “Glee”-ification of the theater world, but at many of these musical evenings the set lists go beyond show tunes. A Pat Benatar anthem or a Christina Aguilera ballad can be a welcome respite after singing “Circle of Life” eight times a week.
“The people who come to my show just want to hear belting,” said Ben Cameron, the host of Broadway Sessions, Tuesday nights at Therapy, a gay bar in Hell’s Kitchen. “This is not the place to try out your new Weill song.”
Fatigue, either physical or vocal, doesn’t seem to stop many performers. Cheering on Mr. Fischer at Bar-Tini was Nova Thomas, who gave him voice lessons at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, N.J. Ms. Thomas said that while she, an opera singer, would normally rest her voice on a night off, she encouraged Mr. Fisher to perform on his.
“I reminded him to embrace the joy of singing and making music,” she said. “This is reminding him of why he sings.”
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
La Grenouille By SAM SIFTON
December 23, 2009
La Grenouille By SAM SIFTON
LA GRENOUILLE turned 47 on Saturday, the last great French restaurant in New York. As on its birth night, there was snow outside the old stable at 3 East 52nd Street, and this made the soft, glittering light of the brocaded interior seem all the more inviting, the flowers towering out of the corners all the more welcoming, the sheer elegance of the place all the more arresting, important, rare.
The decline of great French cooking in New York has been a subject of discussion among the food-obsessed for decades, since at least the closing of Le Pavillon in 1971. In the last decade the talk has turned funereal, with the demise of Lutèce, La Caravelle, La Côte Basque, Lespinasse.
Brasserie cooking survives in New York, even flourishes under old mirrors and subway tile. We will always have steak frites.
But the quiet opulence of the traditional haute cuisine that was first brought to New York by Henri Soulé for the World’s Fair in 1939 and which flourished at his Pavillon and other restaurants in the years that followed? The whole marvelous Tom Wolfe scene of it: blanquette de veau and Beaumes-de-Venise, and ladies in finery beside gentlemen in soft cashmere jackets and rolled silk ties? C’est fini!
A series of recent meals at La Grenouille suggests that isn’t so. Not so long as Charles Masson, who has run it since 1975, greets his customers at the door, quiet and French and welcoming. Not so long as people can take a seat on a scarlet banquette at his restaurant, sit beneath a spray of flowers and eat sumptuous food out of Escoffier. It has been this way since his father, also named Charles, opened the restaurant in 1962 with his wife, Gisèle.
The crowd is amazing. There are city patricians, upscale travelers, romantics celebrating anniversaries, cads with escort-service friends, priests drinking Burgundy and spooning soup past their dog collars. There is jewelry everywhere, evidence of plastic surgery.
There are Thackeray characters come to life in a modern age. Some have spent too much time in the sun, doing nothing much more than turning the pages of a book. Others, eyes darting back and forth, examine the restaurant and chart customers as handicappers do horses at Belmont: Are the flowers less resplendent than in years past? Perhaps, ever so slightly, yes. Is the carpet threadbare? Not in the least, though those waiters may qualify! Is that a daughter or lover in the corner with that old lion? Oh, please. Have the Montrachet to start?
Back in the kitchen, the executive chef, Matthew Tropeano, spoons forcemeat pike into simmering broth. He naps the result with sauce and gives the plates to waiters who have known no other service. They present their customers a paragon of quenelles de brochet in the Lyonnaise style, a textbook example of classic French cuisine.
The dish is executed perfectly, a kind of beige-on-beige masterpiece devoid of irony or deconstructionist camp. (Only those without heart would call it gefilte fish.) It is delicious without being overwhelming, without being much more than ethereal pike, light as mist, buttery rice, a shellfish cream sauce with just a hint of nutmeg, a dab of American caviar. It is wonderful to eat at La Grenouille.
The revelations start early. A waiter brings an amuse-bouche, perhaps more perfunctorily than is currently normal in most New York restaurants. He neither issues a greeting nor attempts to make the action dramatic.
“This is a split pea soup,” he says. The offering is roughly four spoonfuls’ worth. Each is a cloud of magnificent flavor — salt that raises the vegetal from its depths, cream that makes it buoyant. It lingers on the tongue. The tiny dish expands the mind.
It also concentrates its focus. For there will be no lemon grass foam to confuse matters on the menu of La Grenouille this evening, no huckleberry confit or magret sliders.
This is a classic French restaurant (with classically high prices; a three-course prix fixe dinner starts at $95). Its strength is still, as Bryan Miller wrote in The New York Times almost 20 years ago, the excellence of its stocks, the basis of its magnificent sauces.
Begin your meal with sweetbreads, then. They are the thymus gland of a calf, two lobes separated by a soft tube of flesh. (Someone always asks!) Here they are trimmed in the manner of miniature chicken breasts, then sautéed until crisp, leaving a creamy interior.
Accompanied by a small bit of demi-glace made piney with rosemary, they provide an instant view of a world in which plenty is not nearly so important as quality — a world in which the point is to experience small, rich pleasures, one by one by one.
In that line, there is also foie gras, of course, fattened duck liver seared beautifully and served with port, melting velvet in the mouth. There is a magnificent country terrine, studded with pistachios and served blessedly at the temperature of the room, so that it spreads easily and caresses the tongue.
On a brisk winter evening, you might begin with risotto, now served with buttery wild mushrooms, each grain separate and pliant and rich.
A slightly rakish salmon tartare arrives piled on a large and perfect blini with more of that American caviar on top to heighten the experience. (Ravioli with lobster and tarragon achieves a similar effect, plus cream.)
And a simple endive salad highlights the bitter sweetness of the green, then sweetens it with slick pear, chalky walnut, the rough, salty excellence of Roquefort cheese.
For main dishes, there are those quenelles. Also frogs’ legs sautéed in butter with parsley and garlic, a nod to the restaurant’s name (in France, une grenouille is a frog). The legs are delicate, flavorful, addictive and impossible even in this luxe setting to finish with knife and fork. (The waiter will bring you a finger bowl when you are done.) There is an excellent plate of veal kidneys, sautéed in a flash of Cognac until just browned around the exterior, served with a thick, piquant mustard sauce. There is another of sirloin, crimson beef dominoes on a plate, with creamy pommes boulangère.
There are beef oxtails of uncommon excellence, braised until sticky in red wine, a dish the late Pat Buckley once said she would choose as her last on Earth.
And for those experiencing the restaurant for the first time, or returning to it for the first time in ages, there is Dover sole. Named for the English port in which it was first popularized, Dover sole is slightly less bathmat-shaped than its relative the flounder. It is prized by diners for close-grained sweet flavor, and by restaurants for ease of filleting, which is why it’s so often done tableside.
Here, grilled and then sauced with butter, and served with soft, golden mustard sauce, it achieves a kind of transfiguration: France brought to Midtown, a vacation in a bite. It’ll change the color of your mood ring.
Let us stay happy through the end of this meal. Wise diners will, as they order the sole, also ask for the preparation of a soufflé for dessert, perhaps the one scented with Grand Marnier. (The unwise will ask for tarte Tatin and receive a wan example in return.)
During the winter of 1997, when La Grenouille was just 35, Ruth Reichl wrote in the restaurant’s most recent review in these pages that it was not for nothing that a parade of soufflés crosses the dining room each evening. “I don’t think there is a better soufflé in New York,” she wrote, and awarded three stars.
That is still the case. It is a magic-trick dessert, a dreamlike concoction from the night kitchen: perfection unsullied. And it stands, in its way, for the importance of La Grenouille. This is the bastion now. It is worth the expense to put on your best and experience it. It is part of why you are here.
La Grenouille
★★★
3 East 52nd Street, Midtown; (212) 752-1495; la-grenouille.com.
ATMOSPHERE Romantic beneath golden light, with flowers everywhere.
SOUND LEVEL Civilized if New Yorkish: you’re quite close to the neighbors.
RECOMMENDED DISHES Foie gras; sweetbreads; wild-mushroom risotto; Dover sole; quenelles of pike; veal kidneys; braised oxtails; soufflés.
WINE LIST Bargains for those who have long money to spend on maturing Bordeaux, and some good offerings from neighboring communes for the rest of us.
PRICE RANGE Two-course prix fixe lunch, $38; three courses, $52. Two-course prix fixe dinner, $78; three courses, $95.
HOURS Monday, 5 to 10 p.m.; Tuesday to Thursday noon to 3 p.m.; 5 to 10 p.m.; Friday, noon to 3 p.m.; 5 to 11 p.m.; Saturday, 5 to 11 p.m.
RESERVATIONS Call a week or so in advance, unless it’s your anniversary, in which case a month before is more like it. Don’t get jammed up on that.
CREDIT CARDS All major cards.
WHEELCHAIR ACCESS Restaurant is on one level.
WHAT THE STARS MEAN Ratings range from zero to four stars and reflect the reviewer’s reaction to food, ambience and service, with price taken into consideration. Menu listings and prices are subject to change.
La Grenouille By SAM SIFTON
LA GRENOUILLE turned 47 on Saturday, the last great French restaurant in New York. As on its birth night, there was snow outside the old stable at 3 East 52nd Street, and this made the soft, glittering light of the brocaded interior seem all the more inviting, the flowers towering out of the corners all the more welcoming, the sheer elegance of the place all the more arresting, important, rare.
The decline of great French cooking in New York has been a subject of discussion among the food-obsessed for decades, since at least the closing of Le Pavillon in 1971. In the last decade the talk has turned funereal, with the demise of Lutèce, La Caravelle, La Côte Basque, Lespinasse.
Brasserie cooking survives in New York, even flourishes under old mirrors and subway tile. We will always have steak frites.
But the quiet opulence of the traditional haute cuisine that was first brought to New York by Henri Soulé for the World’s Fair in 1939 and which flourished at his Pavillon and other restaurants in the years that followed? The whole marvelous Tom Wolfe scene of it: blanquette de veau and Beaumes-de-Venise, and ladies in finery beside gentlemen in soft cashmere jackets and rolled silk ties? C’est fini!
A series of recent meals at La Grenouille suggests that isn’t so. Not so long as Charles Masson, who has run it since 1975, greets his customers at the door, quiet and French and welcoming. Not so long as people can take a seat on a scarlet banquette at his restaurant, sit beneath a spray of flowers and eat sumptuous food out of Escoffier. It has been this way since his father, also named Charles, opened the restaurant in 1962 with his wife, Gisèle.
The crowd is amazing. There are city patricians, upscale travelers, romantics celebrating anniversaries, cads with escort-service friends, priests drinking Burgundy and spooning soup past their dog collars. There is jewelry everywhere, evidence of plastic surgery.
There are Thackeray characters come to life in a modern age. Some have spent too much time in the sun, doing nothing much more than turning the pages of a book. Others, eyes darting back and forth, examine the restaurant and chart customers as handicappers do horses at Belmont: Are the flowers less resplendent than in years past? Perhaps, ever so slightly, yes. Is the carpet threadbare? Not in the least, though those waiters may qualify! Is that a daughter or lover in the corner with that old lion? Oh, please. Have the Montrachet to start?
Back in the kitchen, the executive chef, Matthew Tropeano, spoons forcemeat pike into simmering broth. He naps the result with sauce and gives the plates to waiters who have known no other service. They present their customers a paragon of quenelles de brochet in the Lyonnaise style, a textbook example of classic French cuisine.
The dish is executed perfectly, a kind of beige-on-beige masterpiece devoid of irony or deconstructionist camp. (Only those without heart would call it gefilte fish.) It is delicious without being overwhelming, without being much more than ethereal pike, light as mist, buttery rice, a shellfish cream sauce with just a hint of nutmeg, a dab of American caviar. It is wonderful to eat at La Grenouille.
The revelations start early. A waiter brings an amuse-bouche, perhaps more perfunctorily than is currently normal in most New York restaurants. He neither issues a greeting nor attempts to make the action dramatic.
“This is a split pea soup,” he says. The offering is roughly four spoonfuls’ worth. Each is a cloud of magnificent flavor — salt that raises the vegetal from its depths, cream that makes it buoyant. It lingers on the tongue. The tiny dish expands the mind.
It also concentrates its focus. For there will be no lemon grass foam to confuse matters on the menu of La Grenouille this evening, no huckleberry confit or magret sliders.
This is a classic French restaurant (with classically high prices; a three-course prix fixe dinner starts at $95). Its strength is still, as Bryan Miller wrote in The New York Times almost 20 years ago, the excellence of its stocks, the basis of its magnificent sauces.
Begin your meal with sweetbreads, then. They are the thymus gland of a calf, two lobes separated by a soft tube of flesh. (Someone always asks!) Here they are trimmed in the manner of miniature chicken breasts, then sautéed until crisp, leaving a creamy interior.
Accompanied by a small bit of demi-glace made piney with rosemary, they provide an instant view of a world in which plenty is not nearly so important as quality — a world in which the point is to experience small, rich pleasures, one by one by one.
In that line, there is also foie gras, of course, fattened duck liver seared beautifully and served with port, melting velvet in the mouth. There is a magnificent country terrine, studded with pistachios and served blessedly at the temperature of the room, so that it spreads easily and caresses the tongue.
On a brisk winter evening, you might begin with risotto, now served with buttery wild mushrooms, each grain separate and pliant and rich.
A slightly rakish salmon tartare arrives piled on a large and perfect blini with more of that American caviar on top to heighten the experience. (Ravioli with lobster and tarragon achieves a similar effect, plus cream.)
And a simple endive salad highlights the bitter sweetness of the green, then sweetens it with slick pear, chalky walnut, the rough, salty excellence of Roquefort cheese.
For main dishes, there are those quenelles. Also frogs’ legs sautéed in butter with parsley and garlic, a nod to the restaurant’s name (in France, une grenouille is a frog). The legs are delicate, flavorful, addictive and impossible even in this luxe setting to finish with knife and fork. (The waiter will bring you a finger bowl when you are done.) There is an excellent plate of veal kidneys, sautéed in a flash of Cognac until just browned around the exterior, served with a thick, piquant mustard sauce. There is another of sirloin, crimson beef dominoes on a plate, with creamy pommes boulangère.
There are beef oxtails of uncommon excellence, braised until sticky in red wine, a dish the late Pat Buckley once said she would choose as her last on Earth.
And for those experiencing the restaurant for the first time, or returning to it for the first time in ages, there is Dover sole. Named for the English port in which it was first popularized, Dover sole is slightly less bathmat-shaped than its relative the flounder. It is prized by diners for close-grained sweet flavor, and by restaurants for ease of filleting, which is why it’s so often done tableside.
Here, grilled and then sauced with butter, and served with soft, golden mustard sauce, it achieves a kind of transfiguration: France brought to Midtown, a vacation in a bite. It’ll change the color of your mood ring.
Let us stay happy through the end of this meal. Wise diners will, as they order the sole, also ask for the preparation of a soufflé for dessert, perhaps the one scented with Grand Marnier. (The unwise will ask for tarte Tatin and receive a wan example in return.)
During the winter of 1997, when La Grenouille was just 35, Ruth Reichl wrote in the restaurant’s most recent review in these pages that it was not for nothing that a parade of soufflés crosses the dining room each evening. “I don’t think there is a better soufflé in New York,” she wrote, and awarded three stars.
That is still the case. It is a magic-trick dessert, a dreamlike concoction from the night kitchen: perfection unsullied. And it stands, in its way, for the importance of La Grenouille. This is the bastion now. It is worth the expense to put on your best and experience it. It is part of why you are here.
La Grenouille
★★★
3 East 52nd Street, Midtown; (212) 752-1495; la-grenouille.com.
ATMOSPHERE Romantic beneath golden light, with flowers everywhere.
SOUND LEVEL Civilized if New Yorkish: you’re quite close to the neighbors.
RECOMMENDED DISHES Foie gras; sweetbreads; wild-mushroom risotto; Dover sole; quenelles of pike; veal kidneys; braised oxtails; soufflés.
WINE LIST Bargains for those who have long money to spend on maturing Bordeaux, and some good offerings from neighboring communes for the rest of us.
PRICE RANGE Two-course prix fixe lunch, $38; three courses, $52. Two-course prix fixe dinner, $78; three courses, $95.
HOURS Monday, 5 to 10 p.m.; Tuesday to Thursday noon to 3 p.m.; 5 to 10 p.m.; Friday, noon to 3 p.m.; 5 to 11 p.m.; Saturday, 5 to 11 p.m.
RESERVATIONS Call a week or so in advance, unless it’s your anniversary, in which case a month before is more like it. Don’t get jammed up on that.
CREDIT CARDS All major cards.
WHEELCHAIR ACCESS Restaurant is on one level.
WHAT THE STARS MEAN Ratings range from zero to four stars and reflect the reviewer’s reaction to food, ambience and service, with price taken into consideration. Menu listings and prices are subject to change.
Sunday, December 06, 2009
Travel By JOSHUA HAMMER
The New York Times
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December 6, 2009
Holiday Books
Travel By JOSHUA HAMMER
This winter’s travel books offer a roughly even mix of vice and virtue. From prostitution, thievery and violence in Bangkok and Johannesburg to the classical antiquities and literary treasures of the Greek islands and Oxford, they explore both the dark and sunny sides of human nature. Which is more fun? It’s an open question.
In the wickedly enjoyable BANGKOK DAYS (North Point, $25), Lawrence Osborne, a down-and-out British writer living in New York, flies to Bangkok for a round of cheap dental work — and embarks on a romp through a city whose prime commodity is sex. Many of Osborne’s nocturnal rambles through the Thai capital’s bars, brothels and hotels are carried out in the company of other expats, including an Australian watercolorist named Dennis, “an elderly man with skin as white as fine library dust, with a fop of dyed blond hair falling between his eyes,” and McGinnis, a sinister air-conditioner salesman with a shaved head and a face “like that of a pleasant hoodlum who has just shot down a kite.” Osborne himself knows no shame: at one point, the cash-strapped writer picks up a middle-aged Japanese woman at the bar of the Peninsula Hotel and rips her off while she’s taking a shower: “I lifted my hand and pried into the handbag, knowing there must be money there. . . . I pulled out two thousand-baht notes, which felt like they had been extracted from the warm rollers of an A.T.M. only minutes earlier.”
Osborne also savors the city’s non-libidinous pleasures: gaudy Buddhist temples, exotic fruit and noodle stands, and the handful of tucked-away canals that have survived the asphalting of the old Bangkok. But it’s his descriptions of bar girls and their fellow travelers, of desperate couplings to ward off loneliness, that resonate. At one point, severely ill with a throat infection, Osborne finds himself in a hospital restaurant with a fellow patient who has just told him he’s dying: “Women on crutches with face masks flirted openly with men suffering from epileptic fits and sciatica. Hobbling, limping, squinting, this injured mass proved that the sex drive is the supreme of all instincts and cannot be suppressed even by terminal cancer. We lust till we die, we concluded with some relief, and ordered Tuscan white bean soup.”
In THE LAST RESORT: A Memoir of Zimbabwe (Harmony, $24.99), Douglas Rogers, a white Zimbabwean expatriate, tells of his wrenching return to the backpackers’ hotel his parents built and still operate in that country’s fertile eastern highlands. Swept up in Robert Mugabe’s farm seizures and Zimbabwe’s economic implosion, the elderly couple watch as the tourists flee, then struggle to hang on financially, scheming to keep the property from falling into the hands of Mugabe’s cronies.
Rogers’s tale is reminiscent of Peter Godwin’s “When a Crocodile Eats the Sun,” which described Godwin’s parents’ ruination in the capital, Harare. There are similar riffs on algae-infested swimming pools, break-ins, hyperinflated Zim dollars and rampages by thuggish “war veterans.” But Rogers skirts the bigger political picture and instead homes in on the hotel as a microcosm of a collapsed country. His mother starts writing a cookbook called “Recipes for Disaster: Adventures in the Kitchen of a Failed State.” His father rents out the property’s abandoned guest houses to a sleazy entrepreneur who turns them into a brothel. Eventually, the hotel fills with dispossessed white farmers, a whole new source of eye-witness accounts of the country’s devastation.
Rogers chronicles his parents’ encounters with a boisterous black-market currency trader nicknamed Miss Moneypenny and with a Mugabe loyalist who appoints himself the family’s protector. And always there are the maneuverings of a sinister — and never identified — figure known only as Top Man, a high-ranking official who covets the hotel and its land. Throughout, Rogers’s father battles to outwit Mugabe’s henchmen: “He thought back to all the schemes he had adopted over the years to ward off the war veterans, the settlers, the Top Man, the Commissar. He’d hauled out the shotgun. Grown the bush wild. Erected an electric fence around the house. Shot at baboons and the poachers’ dogs just to let the settlers know that he had a gun.” This vibrant, tragic and surprisingly funny book is the best account yet of ordinary life — for blacks and whites — under Mugabe’s dictatorship.
Ivan Vladislavic’s PORTRAIT WITH KEYS: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked (Norton, paper, $14.95) is an unsettling portrait of Zimbabwe’s southern neighbor. Written as a series of snapshots of life during the first years after apartheid, this memoir-cum-prose poem from the South African-born son of Polish immigrants describes a city overwhelmed by poverty and crime. Among the emblematic details he shares with readers are the manholes Johannesburg’s growing homeless population uses as personal storage spaces, the ubiquitous “Gorillas” (expandable steel bars) employed by car owners to immobilize their steering wheels, and his own bulging key ring, filled with keys for burglar alarms, security doors and other barriers against thieves and marauders. Vladislavic also follows the bizarre story of a real-life gorilla, Max, a denizen of the Johannesburg Zoo who is shot during a scuffle with an escaping robber and survives his wounds to become a local hero.
Seizing on unexpected details, Vladislavic describes the blurring lines between white and black Johannesburg. “The township is made of cardboard and hardboard,” he writes of the slapdash signs for painters, builders and other service providers that begin appearing across formerly whites-only enclaves: “Handpainted on unprimed plaster, scribbled on the undersides of things. . . . Tied to a fence with string, leaning against a yield sign, propped up by a brick, secured with a twist of wire, nailed to a tree trunk.”
Yet too many of Vladislavic’s mini-chapters consist of pointless anecdotes: allusions to friends and lovers who show up once or twice and never appear again, mystifying descriptions of construction sites and storage bins, monotonous encounters with inebriated beggars, parking attendants and other hustlers. However, his descriptions of a long-privileged, long-sheltered tribe, grappling with new realities, can be painfully effective. Gazing at his fellow white South Africans in an airport terminal, he writes: “In a brush cut’s yellow nap, the drawstring of a Woolworths track suit, a splay-heeled foot in a rubber slipslop, a way of lounging against one another like seals, we recognize our kind. Relieved and repulsed, we slip back into the brown water of South African speech.”
Justin Cartwright’s OXFORD REVISITED (Bloomsbury, $18) is a loving tribute to a different sort of cityscape. A South African-born novelist who graduated from Oxford University in the 1960s, Cartwright returns to the medieval campus nearly four decades later on a combination nostalgic tour and journalistic inquiry. Seeking to define the university’s greatness, Cartwright offers erudite meditations on everything from the solidity of its buildings (the color of their limestone is “a washed-out russet, like the skin of an obsolete apple”) to the fiercely individualistic lives of its students. These include the German Rhodes scholar Adam von Trott zu Solz, drawn home before World War II and executed for his part in the 1944 bomb plot against Hitler.
Cartwright visits the New Bodleian Library, where he inspects an original edition of Shakespeare’s First Folio and finds in the library’s “outward-looking, interested, open-minded” atmosphere a metaphor for Oxford itself. He offers sharply observed homages to the thinkers and writers — Isaiah Berlin, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Dodgson — who shaped Oxford’s discourse, and maps out the university’s peculiar mix of silly rituals and sublime intellectual life. In addition, the book retraces Cartwright’s own journey from callow teenager to confident young scholar-athlete. “That first October,” he writes of his early days on campus, “the shadows lengthening and then fading on the Front Quad, the bells pealing all over Oxford, figures cycling . . . through the thickening gloom, the soft halation of lights on walls, I had the overwhelming feeling that life had just begun.”
In TRAVELING WITH POMEGRANATES: A Mother-Daughter Story (Viking, $25.95), Sue Monk Kidd (author of the novel “The Secret Life of Bees”) and her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor, embark on a series of European journeys to heal a rift in their relationship. The story unfolds between 1998 and 2000, when Kidd, then in her early 50s, was experiencing both menopause and writer’s block and her daughter was coping with depression after a failed romance and a graduate school rejection. Mother and daughter take turns narrating this sometimes overwrought tale, which evokes the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone to explore themes of death and rebirth, and the complex relationship between mother and daughter.
Kidd’s passages have some lovely turns of phrase. Of a visit to a ruined Greek temple dedicated to the sorceress Hecate she writes: “A flight of steps leads up to a rectangular terrace where prickly cacti grow wild in the stone crevices like an incarnation of the crone Goddess herself — vexing, unbridled, subversive, tough and vibrantly green.” Kidd is brutally honest about her conflicted feelings toward Ann: “Perhaps all mothers of daughters possess a secret talking mirror that announces when their young womanhood begins to fade and their daughters’ begin to blossom.” The experience “can unleash a lacerating jealousy” or “usher in fears that I’ve sworn I’d never have. Of invisibility, anonymity, irrelevance. And deeper down, fears of decline and death.”
Eventually the pair reconcile and overcome their self-doubt — Sue through the burst of inspiration that led to her best-selling novel, Ann through a loving new boyfriend and a fledgling career as a writer. But too much of the book consists of pedestrian jaunts through all-too-familiar tourist locales — the Acropolis, the Louvre, even a bateau-mouche on the Seine. Kidd’s ruminations on aging grow tiresome, as does her daughter’s wallowing in misery. Eventually you wish they’d just lighten up.
In his introduction to the 2009 edition of THE BEST AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITING (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, paper, $14), this year’s guest editor, Simon Winchester, laments the sorry state of American globe-trotting. Constrained by isolation and a historical lack of empire as well as a dismissive attitude toward foreign places, Americans, he argues, have never developed the wanderlust that characterizes their British cousins. (In United States high schools, Winchester points out, the word geography “is buried in a shallow grave . . . known as the social studies and humanities programs.”) Still, the contributions in this book prove that a restless, intrepid spirit isn’t unwelcome to American readers.
In “The Generals in Their Labyrinth,” which originally appeared in Outside magazine, the indefatigable Patrick Symmes travels to Myanmar on the eve of the 2008 cyclone that claimed more than 100,000 lives. As the weather worsens, Symmes makes his way to Naypyidaw, the Burmese junta’s newly built capital in the bush, “an open-air prison where functionaries twirl their fingers at make-work jobs and generals loot the budget.” Symmes — who wisely gives up on a plan to sneak into the house-prison of the Nobel Peace laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi in Yangon — vividly captures the paranoia and callousness of one of the world’s most appalling dictatorships.
Roger Cohen, a former foreign correspondent who is now a columnist for The International Herald Tribune, meets dissidents, revolutionaries and ordinary Cubans in his clear-eyed Times Magazine article “The End of the End of the Revolution,” and finds a population trapped in the grip of a senseless economic system, desperately awaiting the end of the American embargo.
Also memorable are Caroline Alexander’s “Tigerland,” about her trip to the Sundarbans Tiger Reserve, at the mouth of the Ganges River, for a look at one of the world’s rarest creatures, and Eric Weiner’s brief essay “My Servant,” about his relationship through the years with his Indian houseboy. Perhaps the most disturbing contribution is Paul Salopek’s “Lost in the Sahel,” which recounts this Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist’s arrest and detention in Darfur. “He was built square as a butcher’s block, and at age 30 his hair was leached of color,” Salopek writes of Corporal Salah, the “chief whip man” at the prison in the town of El Fasher, where Salopek is detained on charges of being a spy. A brute who dreams of being a doctor, Corporal Salah “spoke to his victims tenderly, urging them not to be afraid, even as he scourged the hide on their backs.”
If that kind of scene quashes your urge to hit the road, you needn’t give up on new — even foreign — experiences. In fact, many of the most pleasant adventures can be found without traveling very far from home. The latest evidence appears in NEW YORK’S UNIQUE and UNEXPECTED PLACES (Universe, $24.95), by Judith Stonehill and Alexandra Stonehill, and NEW YORK: The Big City and Its Little Neighborhoods (Universe, paper, $25), by Naomi Fertitta. The Stonehills’ delightful book is a guide to lesser-known but worthwhile museums, markets, shops, gardens and even a wilderness refuge. Among the highlights: the Map Room at the New York Public Library (a geography buff’s dream, packed with nautical charts, frontier-expedition maps and Dutch-colonial drawings that expose Manhattan’s “hilly topography”) and the garden at the Church of St. Luke in the Fields, a hidden oasis of crab apple trees, roses and magnolias.
Fertitta’s book serves up mini-profiles of 20 ethnic enclaves across New York City, from Flatbush’s Little West Indies and Astoria’s Little Egypt to Little Senegal in Harlem. Her colorful juxtaposition of faces, foods and architecture is a bracing reminder of the city’s diversity. “In the course of exploring 20 neighborhoods, I was humbled,” Fertitta confesses, “by the fact that not only had I been unfamiliar with the ‘outer’ boroughs but, in fact, hardly knew these areas of Manhattan that were often only a short subway ride from my home. My great realization was that in my quest for sophistication, I had become just a provincial New Yorker who thought that the city began and ended at my front door.”
Joshua Hammer, a former bureau chief for Newsweek, is a freelance foreign correspondent. He is writing a book about German colonialism in southern Africa.
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Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By
December 6, 2009
Holiday Books
Travel By JOSHUA HAMMER
This winter’s travel books offer a roughly even mix of vice and virtue. From prostitution, thievery and violence in Bangkok and Johannesburg to the classical antiquities and literary treasures of the Greek islands and Oxford, they explore both the dark and sunny sides of human nature. Which is more fun? It’s an open question.
In the wickedly enjoyable BANGKOK DAYS (North Point, $25), Lawrence Osborne, a down-and-out British writer living in New York, flies to Bangkok for a round of cheap dental work — and embarks on a romp through a city whose prime commodity is sex. Many of Osborne’s nocturnal rambles through the Thai capital’s bars, brothels and hotels are carried out in the company of other expats, including an Australian watercolorist named Dennis, “an elderly man with skin as white as fine library dust, with a fop of dyed blond hair falling between his eyes,” and McGinnis, a sinister air-conditioner salesman with a shaved head and a face “like that of a pleasant hoodlum who has just shot down a kite.” Osborne himself knows no shame: at one point, the cash-strapped writer picks up a middle-aged Japanese woman at the bar of the Peninsula Hotel and rips her off while she’s taking a shower: “I lifted my hand and pried into the handbag, knowing there must be money there. . . . I pulled out two thousand-baht notes, which felt like they had been extracted from the warm rollers of an A.T.M. only minutes earlier.”
Osborne also savors the city’s non-libidinous pleasures: gaudy Buddhist temples, exotic fruit and noodle stands, and the handful of tucked-away canals that have survived the asphalting of the old Bangkok. But it’s his descriptions of bar girls and their fellow travelers, of desperate couplings to ward off loneliness, that resonate. At one point, severely ill with a throat infection, Osborne finds himself in a hospital restaurant with a fellow patient who has just told him he’s dying: “Women on crutches with face masks flirted openly with men suffering from epileptic fits and sciatica. Hobbling, limping, squinting, this injured mass proved that the sex drive is the supreme of all instincts and cannot be suppressed even by terminal cancer. We lust till we die, we concluded with some relief, and ordered Tuscan white bean soup.”
In THE LAST RESORT: A Memoir of Zimbabwe (Harmony, $24.99), Douglas Rogers, a white Zimbabwean expatriate, tells of his wrenching return to the backpackers’ hotel his parents built and still operate in that country’s fertile eastern highlands. Swept up in Robert Mugabe’s farm seizures and Zimbabwe’s economic implosion, the elderly couple watch as the tourists flee, then struggle to hang on financially, scheming to keep the property from falling into the hands of Mugabe’s cronies.
Rogers’s tale is reminiscent of Peter Godwin’s “When a Crocodile Eats the Sun,” which described Godwin’s parents’ ruination in the capital, Harare. There are similar riffs on algae-infested swimming pools, break-ins, hyperinflated Zim dollars and rampages by thuggish “war veterans.” But Rogers skirts the bigger political picture and instead homes in on the hotel as a microcosm of a collapsed country. His mother starts writing a cookbook called “Recipes for Disaster: Adventures in the Kitchen of a Failed State.” His father rents out the property’s abandoned guest houses to a sleazy entrepreneur who turns them into a brothel. Eventually, the hotel fills with dispossessed white farmers, a whole new source of eye-witness accounts of the country’s devastation.
Rogers chronicles his parents’ encounters with a boisterous black-market currency trader nicknamed Miss Moneypenny and with a Mugabe loyalist who appoints himself the family’s protector. And always there are the maneuverings of a sinister — and never identified — figure known only as Top Man, a high-ranking official who covets the hotel and its land. Throughout, Rogers’s father battles to outwit Mugabe’s henchmen: “He thought back to all the schemes he had adopted over the years to ward off the war veterans, the settlers, the Top Man, the Commissar. He’d hauled out the shotgun. Grown the bush wild. Erected an electric fence around the house. Shot at baboons and the poachers’ dogs just to let the settlers know that he had a gun.” This vibrant, tragic and surprisingly funny book is the best account yet of ordinary life — for blacks and whites — under Mugabe’s dictatorship.
Ivan Vladislavic’s PORTRAIT WITH KEYS: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked (Norton, paper, $14.95) is an unsettling portrait of Zimbabwe’s southern neighbor. Written as a series of snapshots of life during the first years after apartheid, this memoir-cum-prose poem from the South African-born son of Polish immigrants describes a city overwhelmed by poverty and crime. Among the emblematic details he shares with readers are the manholes Johannesburg’s growing homeless population uses as personal storage spaces, the ubiquitous “Gorillas” (expandable steel bars) employed by car owners to immobilize their steering wheels, and his own bulging key ring, filled with keys for burglar alarms, security doors and other barriers against thieves and marauders. Vladislavic also follows the bizarre story of a real-life gorilla, Max, a denizen of the Johannesburg Zoo who is shot during a scuffle with an escaping robber and survives his wounds to become a local hero.
Seizing on unexpected details, Vladislavic describes the blurring lines between white and black Johannesburg. “The township is made of cardboard and hardboard,” he writes of the slapdash signs for painters, builders and other service providers that begin appearing across formerly whites-only enclaves: “Handpainted on unprimed plaster, scribbled on the undersides of things. . . . Tied to a fence with string, leaning against a yield sign, propped up by a brick, secured with a twist of wire, nailed to a tree trunk.”
Yet too many of Vladislavic’s mini-chapters consist of pointless anecdotes: allusions to friends and lovers who show up once or twice and never appear again, mystifying descriptions of construction sites and storage bins, monotonous encounters with inebriated beggars, parking attendants and other hustlers. However, his descriptions of a long-privileged, long-sheltered tribe, grappling with new realities, can be painfully effective. Gazing at his fellow white South Africans in an airport terminal, he writes: “In a brush cut’s yellow nap, the drawstring of a Woolworths track suit, a splay-heeled foot in a rubber slipslop, a way of lounging against one another like seals, we recognize our kind. Relieved and repulsed, we slip back into the brown water of South African speech.”
Justin Cartwright’s OXFORD REVISITED (Bloomsbury, $18) is a loving tribute to a different sort of cityscape. A South African-born novelist who graduated from Oxford University in the 1960s, Cartwright returns to the medieval campus nearly four decades later on a combination nostalgic tour and journalistic inquiry. Seeking to define the university’s greatness, Cartwright offers erudite meditations on everything from the solidity of its buildings (the color of their limestone is “a washed-out russet, like the skin of an obsolete apple”) to the fiercely individualistic lives of its students. These include the German Rhodes scholar Adam von Trott zu Solz, drawn home before World War II and executed for his part in the 1944 bomb plot against Hitler.
Cartwright visits the New Bodleian Library, where he inspects an original edition of Shakespeare’s First Folio and finds in the library’s “outward-looking, interested, open-minded” atmosphere a metaphor for Oxford itself. He offers sharply observed homages to the thinkers and writers — Isaiah Berlin, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Dodgson — who shaped Oxford’s discourse, and maps out the university’s peculiar mix of silly rituals and sublime intellectual life. In addition, the book retraces Cartwright’s own journey from callow teenager to confident young scholar-athlete. “That first October,” he writes of his early days on campus, “the shadows lengthening and then fading on the Front Quad, the bells pealing all over Oxford, figures cycling . . . through the thickening gloom, the soft halation of lights on walls, I had the overwhelming feeling that life had just begun.”
In TRAVELING WITH POMEGRANATES: A Mother-Daughter Story (Viking, $25.95), Sue Monk Kidd (author of the novel “The Secret Life of Bees”) and her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor, embark on a series of European journeys to heal a rift in their relationship. The story unfolds between 1998 and 2000, when Kidd, then in her early 50s, was experiencing both menopause and writer’s block and her daughter was coping with depression after a failed romance and a graduate school rejection. Mother and daughter take turns narrating this sometimes overwrought tale, which evokes the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone to explore themes of death and rebirth, and the complex relationship between mother and daughter.
Kidd’s passages have some lovely turns of phrase. Of a visit to a ruined Greek temple dedicated to the sorceress Hecate she writes: “A flight of steps leads up to a rectangular terrace where prickly cacti grow wild in the stone crevices like an incarnation of the crone Goddess herself — vexing, unbridled, subversive, tough and vibrantly green.” Kidd is brutally honest about her conflicted feelings toward Ann: “Perhaps all mothers of daughters possess a secret talking mirror that announces when their young womanhood begins to fade and their daughters’ begin to blossom.” The experience “can unleash a lacerating jealousy” or “usher in fears that I’ve sworn I’d never have. Of invisibility, anonymity, irrelevance. And deeper down, fears of decline and death.”
Eventually the pair reconcile and overcome their self-doubt — Sue through the burst of inspiration that led to her best-selling novel, Ann through a loving new boyfriend and a fledgling career as a writer. But too much of the book consists of pedestrian jaunts through all-too-familiar tourist locales — the Acropolis, the Louvre, even a bateau-mouche on the Seine. Kidd’s ruminations on aging grow tiresome, as does her daughter’s wallowing in misery. Eventually you wish they’d just lighten up.
In his introduction to the 2009 edition of THE BEST AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITING (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, paper, $14), this year’s guest editor, Simon Winchester, laments the sorry state of American globe-trotting. Constrained by isolation and a historical lack of empire as well as a dismissive attitude toward foreign places, Americans, he argues, have never developed the wanderlust that characterizes their British cousins. (In United States high schools, Winchester points out, the word geography “is buried in a shallow grave . . . known as the social studies and humanities programs.”) Still, the contributions in this book prove that a restless, intrepid spirit isn’t unwelcome to American readers.
In “The Generals in Their Labyrinth,” which originally appeared in Outside magazine, the indefatigable Patrick Symmes travels to Myanmar on the eve of the 2008 cyclone that claimed more than 100,000 lives. As the weather worsens, Symmes makes his way to Naypyidaw, the Burmese junta’s newly built capital in the bush, “an open-air prison where functionaries twirl their fingers at make-work jobs and generals loot the budget.” Symmes — who wisely gives up on a plan to sneak into the house-prison of the Nobel Peace laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi in Yangon — vividly captures the paranoia and callousness of one of the world’s most appalling dictatorships.
Roger Cohen, a former foreign correspondent who is now a columnist for The International Herald Tribune, meets dissidents, revolutionaries and ordinary Cubans in his clear-eyed Times Magazine article “The End of the End of the Revolution,” and finds a population trapped in the grip of a senseless economic system, desperately awaiting the end of the American embargo.
Also memorable are Caroline Alexander’s “Tigerland,” about her trip to the Sundarbans Tiger Reserve, at the mouth of the Ganges River, for a look at one of the world’s rarest creatures, and Eric Weiner’s brief essay “My Servant,” about his relationship through the years with his Indian houseboy. Perhaps the most disturbing contribution is Paul Salopek’s “Lost in the Sahel,” which recounts this Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist’s arrest and detention in Darfur. “He was built square as a butcher’s block, and at age 30 his hair was leached of color,” Salopek writes of Corporal Salah, the “chief whip man” at the prison in the town of El Fasher, where Salopek is detained on charges of being a spy. A brute who dreams of being a doctor, Corporal Salah “spoke to his victims tenderly, urging them not to be afraid, even as he scourged the hide on their backs.”
If that kind of scene quashes your urge to hit the road, you needn’t give up on new — even foreign — experiences. In fact, many of the most pleasant adventures can be found without traveling very far from home. The latest evidence appears in NEW YORK’S UNIQUE and UNEXPECTED PLACES (Universe, $24.95), by Judith Stonehill and Alexandra Stonehill, and NEW YORK: The Big City and Its Little Neighborhoods (Universe, paper, $25), by Naomi Fertitta. The Stonehills’ delightful book is a guide to lesser-known but worthwhile museums, markets, shops, gardens and even a wilderness refuge. Among the highlights: the Map Room at the New York Public Library (a geography buff’s dream, packed with nautical charts, frontier-expedition maps and Dutch-colonial drawings that expose Manhattan’s “hilly topography”) and the garden at the Church of St. Luke in the Fields, a hidden oasis of crab apple trees, roses and magnolias.
Fertitta’s book serves up mini-profiles of 20 ethnic enclaves across New York City, from Flatbush’s Little West Indies and Astoria’s Little Egypt to Little Senegal in Harlem. Her colorful juxtaposition of faces, foods and architecture is a bracing reminder of the city’s diversity. “In the course of exploring 20 neighborhoods, I was humbled,” Fertitta confesses, “by the fact that not only had I been unfamiliar with the ‘outer’ boroughs but, in fact, hardly knew these areas of Manhattan that were often only a short subway ride from my home. My great realization was that in my quest for sophistication, I had become just a provincial New Yorker who thought that the city began and ended at my front door.”
Joshua Hammer, a former bureau chief for Newsweek, is a freelance foreign correspondent. He is writing a book about German colonialism in southern Africa.
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Friday, November 20, 2009
Cocina Confidential by STEPHEN METCALF . Photographs by Trujillo Paumier
Cocina Confidential
FORGET THE MARTINI BARS AND SUSHI JOINTS. THE REAL BUENOS AIRES RESIDES IN ITS BODEGONES, NEIGHBORHOOD RESTAURANTS STEEPED IN WHAT IT MEANS TO BE ARGENTINE. STEPHEN METCALF EATS UP.
Photographs by Trujillo Paumier
On a night swaddled in humidity, I made my way down to La Boca, an Italian working-class neighborhood in Buenos Aires. My guide for the evening was the prominent Argentine writer Uki Goni, and as our cab crawled along, half lost, we peered out at meagerly lit scenes of urban decay. ‘‘I’ve had taxi drivers who wouldn’t take me down here,’’ Goni said. Shirtless men carried infants in their arms; the elderly shuffled along without looking up; a well-armed group of policemen turned a corner. These last we asked for directions. They were gracious, but unable to help. Person after person could not point our way to El Obrero, the bodegón we were looking for, an ignorance that left Goni puzzled and slightly dismayed .
El Obrero means ‘‘the worker’’ — it is a parrilla, or traditional barbecue joint. (‘‘Go with time,’’ an Argentine acquaintance told me. ‘‘Three to four hours, to eat to death.’’) It is also, as many parrillas are, a type of bodegón, a simple neighborhood restaurant started by and for immigrants, traditionally of Spanish or Italian descent. Taken together, bodegones form an unofficial institution in Buenos Aires, places where true porteños — as residents of Buenos Aires, a port city, are called — go to enjoy mass quantities of comfort food on the cheap.
Stepping inside after we finally found our bearings, I could see why El Obrero is regarded as a temple of fraternal overeating. The dreariness outside gave way instantly to the clatter of dishes, to bright lights and warm blasts of laughter. Rotating fans, relics from the ’50s, descended from a high ceiling. The floor was a dingy checkerboard, the menu a chalkboard. The waiters, gallant in burgundy shirt jackets, menu a chalkboard. The waiters, gallant in burgundy shirt jackets, greeted us with radiant smiles. Goni is an honored guest here. He has come often to El Obrero and the other parrillas of La Boca, on occasion with the actor Willem Dafoe or the director Francis Ford Coppola. Their pictures hang in a corner, though displayed with far more pride of place are a portrait of the King of Spain in a powder blue sash and photographs of the godhead of Argentine futbol, Diego Maradona.
To taste the real and abiding Buenos Aires, Goni took me to El Obrero. On offer was a complete inventory of the bovine carcass: ojo de bife (eye of beef), chinchulines (small intestines), mollejas (gizzards). ‘‘Until fairly recently,’’ Goni explained, ‘‘a meal in Argentina was beef, potatoes, maybe — maybe — salad.’’ The Argentine palate has evolved, and even at a mecca for steak like El Obrero, there is plenty else. I started with the rabas, fried squid rings that melt in your mouth like buttery lozenges, and a liter of Quilmes, a milky Argentine beer. ‘‘There would have been more bodegones here once,’’ said Goni, who is in his mid- 50s and is best known in Argentina for exposing the extent of the ‘‘ratline,’’ the escape route and eventual haven his country provided Nazis in the aftermath of World War II. ‘‘This is probably one of the last surviving ones.’’
Buenos Aires, goes the claim, is a European city located in South America. True, there are stylish clothes, venerable buildings, small cars and gelato. But to better understand his country, Goni insisted, one should read ‘‘The Return of Eva Perón,’’ by V. S. Naipaul. The essay is cruel, Goni said, but as true today as when it was written, in the early 1970s. To Naipaul, Argentina was less a country than a staging ground for absurdist public traumas that never add up to an actual history. From dictatorship to hyperinflation to, more recently, the currency crisis, which plunged the economy into chaos in 2001, cataclysm seems to come naturally to Argentines.
An older gentleman with a guitar started serenading the crowd. ‘‘Tourists don’t know,’’ Goni said. ‘‘They say, ‘Beautiful girls, macho lovers — I’ll rent a cute place in Palermo,’ ’’ referring to the neighborhood of suave byways that defines the city’s renewal. ‘‘They don’t see the underbelly.’’ The Argentina of Goni’s young adulthood was an economically and, its European roots notwithstanding, culturally insular society. ‘‘We were behind our own iron curtain, in a way.’’
Argentina is nearly the size of India, but with less than one-thirtieth India’s population. It possesses vast tracts of mineral wealth and agriculturally fertile pampas. Once, much of what was consumed here was made here, if inefficiently. ‘‘You could wait 10 or 20 years to get a phone,’’ Goni said. ‘‘Then, in the ’90s, we privatized everything. Now you get a phone in two or three days, and maybe 10 million people in phone,’’ Goni said. ‘‘Then, in the ’90s, we privatized everything. Now you get a phone in two or three days, and maybe 10 million people in the country are much, much better off than ever before. But joining the international community has come at a spectacular price.’’ La Boca, for example, is poorer and more dangerous, while Palermo now gleams with international cachet. But, as Goni said, ‘‘Argentines by and large can’t afford to go there.’’
The old gentleman’s lachrymose folklore ended. The crowd applauded wildly. Goni considered, then said, ‘‘Interesting, isn’t it, how some things completely transcend our idea of ‘good’ and ‘bad?’ ’’
BUENOS AIRES HAS BECOME THAT CITY. YOU AMUSE YOUR palate at a sleek ethnic restaurant, fast-friend it with international party people and find yourself at 4 a.m. on the street, amid boys with beers and suspiciously young women in shrink-wrap outfits, as ill-piloted cabs brush against your back pocket. Palermo has given sections of itself over wholesale to the idea of a cheap playpen for affluent wastrels from the Yanqui north. Its film-and-TV barrio is named Palermo Hollywood, its boutique-and-bistro quadrant Palermo Soho. Menus are bilingual, and ‘‘Apartments for Sale’’ notices are denominated in dollars. Nonetheless, the city remains poised between ingratiating Americanization and the inscrutable nativism that Naipaul described.
I stayed in a duplex off embassy row, overlooking the jacaranda trees of the Plaza Intendente Seeber. One evening, I went with an American who lives in Buenos Aires to eat at Pizzería Güerrín, an old-school joint in the city center. (Locals debate whether Güerrín or El Cuartito, in Recoleta and equally drenched in bygone atmosphere, serves the city's best pie; I enjoyed both. Either way, you must have a fugazzeta, a thick crust pillowed over with mozzarella and a dense tangle of onions.) When we returned to our car, he slipped a few pesos into the hand of a dubious-looking man who had appeared out of nowhere. ‘‘A trapito,’’ my friend explained. Trapitos ‘‘watch’’ your car to make sure ‘‘nothing happens to it.’’
Later we headed out to Rumi, a nightclub. Rumi is a boliche, a true porteño club; food and booze are cheap, the dancing interminable and wild. ‘‘The women here are beautiful,’’ said my new acquaintance, a Mexican businessman named Hector. I agreed. Hector surveyed the dance floor. ‘‘About half of them are men.’’
The key to visiting Buenos Aires, I think, is to locate a city that is neither the ‘‘gaucho curio shop’’ that Naipaul so disdained nor the la-la fantasy of the ‘‘Paris of Latin America.’’ Stroll out of Palermo’s center toward Villa Crespo — a barrio that has nobly rejected the label ‘‘Palermo Queens’’ — and you come upon silent cobblestone streets canopied by oaks and rosewoods. Out on the main avenue is Scannapieco, a 71-year-old heladaría that serves the best ice cream I’ve ever tasted, a dulce de leche the consistency of melted cheese. And although tango is the most oversold concept in tourism since the Scannapieco, a 71-year-old heladaría that serves the best ice cream I’ve ever tasted, a dulce de leche the consistency of melted cheese. And although tango is the most oversold concept in tourism since the cancan, the milongas at La Catedral, an antique timber warehouse filled with artsy bric-a-brac, wire chandeliers and Christmas lights, are genuinely beautiful. Here an older, more rustic and altogether more sensuous version of the dance has been revived by the younger generation.
But old Buenos Aires is best found in the city’s bodegones. ‘‘If it is trendy, expensive or young, it is not a bodegón,’’ said Ruben Guzman, an Argentine-Canadian director whom a mutual friend described as an anthropologist of the bodegones. Bodegones started, by and large, as immigrant groceries, divided into two sections: one for retailing traditional home-country foods, the other for alcohol. Customers who bought a drink would on occasion request a place to sit and a bite to eat, and over time, the bodegón sometimes evolved from a shop into a cafe and social hub.
Ruben and I dined at Café Margot, a classic of its type. More intimate than El Obrero, Café Margot has been, for decades, a gathering place for the notables, mostly futbol jocks and intellectuals and tangueros, of the Boedo district. (No less than Juan Perón was said to treasure its turkey sandwiches.) Café Margot’s open shelving was filled with wine and liqueurs; charcuterie dangled from the ceiling; olives filled large Mason jars. The brick walls were covered in local art.
‘‘First, a bodegón ought to be cheap,’’ Guzman said. ‘‘It has to have at least some homemade food. Charcuterie, the pasta — preferably everything. Here, in Margot, it is a very high percentage, even their beer. It must not be too clean.’’ (Though Café Margot is clean.) ‘‘It must have all ages represented in it — young, old — for a bodegón is not hip. Preferably with bohemians in it.’’ He had described the patrons at Café Margot precisely.
We tucked in to a set of picadas, or tapas-like dishes — in this instance, fleshy tongue-like slabs of roasted red peppers and provolone and provoleta, a fried cheese dish, while we drank pints of the house-brewed beer. When I dipped my bread in the oily remains of a picada, Guzman smiled. ‘‘In Argentina, this is something you don’t do in a restaurant,’’ he said. ‘‘But in a bodegón, they don’t care about manners. In fact, they don’t have any.’’
Against 30 years of upheaval, the bodegones are reasserting themselves as vessels of generosity and calm. They were faced with near-extinction in the ’90s, when they staged an improbable comeback, aided, ironically, by the collapse of the economy. ‘‘Because of the currency crisis,’’ Guzman said, ‘‘people had to find their identity as Argentines again. And it wasn’t just the currency, but neo-liberalism and heavy Americanization. The bodegones were citadels against gentrification.’’ I asked him whether the newfound affection liberalism and heavy Americanization. The bodegones were citadels against gentrification.’’ I asked him whether the newfound affection for the bodegones was simply another way to assert Argentine identity without reckoning with Argentine history. He disagreed. Young people didn’t really experience the dictatorship, he said. ‘‘They experienced neo-liberalism.’’ Globalization has a way of tinting its holdouts in a romantic glow. ‘‘I cannot think of this city without bodegones,’’ Guzman said. ‘‘They will survive. It is part of its spirit.’’
PIETRO SORBA, AN ITALIAN-BORN FOOD CRITIC AND scholar, is the author of the definitive work on the subject, ‘‘Bodegones de Buenos Aires.’’ (The book is bilingual; the English translation is lovely.) Sorba and I met at Miramar, one of the more reputable and longstanding bodegones. It sits on a corner in a former tailor shop, where tango luminaries once came to have suits made. Sorba is a delightful mountain of a man and, from the looks of it, a prodigiously gifted eater. He has been writing about Argentine food for Elle Argentina and Clarín, the local daily, as well as producing documentaries, for years.
We drank malbec, the deceptively soft, dense red wine of Argentina, and passed around a crude wooden tablet listing the platos del día. We started with pulpo a la gallega, or boiled octopus with potatoes in olive oil and pimenton — a sort of paprika — and tortilla a la Española, an omelet-like dish with a spicy salami. When I began espousing pet theories about the bodegón, Sorba demurred. ‘‘Bodegón is the opposite of the culinary culture of Palermo,’’ he said bluntly. ‘‘It is comfort food — no tricks — for people who love to eat. Not for people looking for the fashion thing, or trendy. For my job, I must go to many restaurants. But for me, when I want to eat, I go to a bodegón.’’
Eat, eat, eat — we had moved on to mejillones a la provenzal (mussels, white wine, garlic) and gambas al ajillo (shrimp, garlic, dried chili), all of it richly drenched in olive oil. ‘‘In Italy,’’ Sorba asserted, ‘‘people eat out on the weekend. In Buenos Aires, it is every day. It’s historical. Observe the flats in the center city, the oldest part of the city. The kitchen is small — it’s nothing, in fact. In Italy, people live in the kitchen. But here, people are not as interested in cooking.’’
For all the voguish talk of localism, it’s now possible to get substantially the same meal in any city — in Copenhagen or London or São Paulo. Culinary innovations spoke out to all points of the globe, until food everywhere has been micro-gastronomized into ambrosial dreck. Against the forces of homogenization, the bodegones make an admirable stand. ‘‘This is the first, best example of the porteño menu,’’ Sorba said as we moved on to centolla (king crab) and rabo de toro (oxtail stew). ‘‘In the 1990s, we had a new culinary wave. The new culinary trends were impactful, very hard on the life of the bodegones. But I now believe culinary trends are boring. My next book is going to be called ‘I Am Up to Here With Gourmet,’ ’’ he said, gesturing to his But I now believe culinary trends are boring. My next book is going to be called ‘I Am Up to Here With Gourmet,’ ’’ he said, gesturing to his neck.
Following Sorba’s lead, I hesitate to make too large a claim for the bodegones. Nonetheless, in a city where only 500 yards from the Four Seasons one stumbles upon a villa miseria, a sprawling and viciously impoverished shantytown, they are an implicit guarantee that something exists in between extremes of rich and poor. To reach for another cliché — one that happens only to be true — the importance of clean and well-lit places to Argentina cannot be exaggerated. On the night Goni and I were cabbing it back from El Obrero, he suddenly asked, ‘‘Do you smell that?’’ I did. There was a strong but not entirely unpleasant wood-smokey tang in the air. ‘‘The farmers are clearing land by burning,’’ he said. ‘‘Tonight is O.K., but last summer was really bad. What kind of lawlessness must there be, if you can’t stop the farmers from putting the country’s capital city under an unbearable cloud of smoke?’’
It is possible that Naipaul was right, that Argentina is fated to cycles of forgetting. Commodity prices are collapsing, and the work that might have been accomplished in fat times — education and labor market reforms — remains undone. The ruling Peronists, having mishandled a farm crisis, lost a crucial midterm election. The near political horizon is as Naipaul would have predicted: disarray. But this is why the bodegón is more than a curiosity. ‘‘When you are in a bodegón, you feel like you are in Buenos Aires,’’ Sorba said. ‘‘You political horizon is as Naipaul would have predicted: disarray. But this is why the bodegón is more than a curiosity. ‘‘When you are in a bodegón, you feel like you are in Buenos Aires,’’ Sorba said. ‘‘You breathe its history. Its real history. The eternal Buenos Aires.’’ We pushed away from the table en (considerable) masse with his simple enough benediction: ‘‘We have eaten.’’
Essentials Buenos Aires
RESTAURANTS, CAFES AND BARS La Catedral Cool, authentic milongas. Sarmiento 4006; 011-54-9-11-5325-1630. El Cuartito A 1930s pizza parlor. Talcahuano 937; 011-54-11-4816-4331; entrees about $6.50 to $15.50. Pizzería Güerrín Old-fashioned pizza joint. Avenida Corrientes 1368; 011-54-11-4371-8141; entrees $4.75 to $8.50. Guido’s Bar Holdout bodegón in Palermo. República de la India 2843; 011-54-11-4802-2391; guidosbar.com.ar; three-course meal (with wine) $24. Café Margot Picturesque bodegón. Avenida Boedo 857; 011-54-11-4957-0001; entrees $2 to $9.50. Miramar Atmospheric, good bodegón. Avenida San Juan 1999; 011-54-11-4304-4261; entrees $6.25 to $8.50. El Obrero Classic parrilla in La Boca. Agustín R. Caffarena 64; 011-54-11-4362-9912; entrees $5.25 to $8.50. Rumi Popular porteño nightclub. Avenida Presidente Figueroa Alcorta 6442; 011-54-11-4782-1398; rumiba.com.ar. Scannapieco Fantastic ice cream. Córdoba 4826; 011-54-11-4773-1829.
HOTELS The city has its complement of excellent five-star properties, most notably the Alvear Palace Hotel (alvearpalace.com; doubles from $350), the Four Seasons (fourseasons.com; doubles from $495) and the Park Hyatt (buenosaires.park.hyatt.com; doubles from $490). If you’re looking for something smaller — and less expensive — in a looking for something smaller — and less expensive — in a neighborhood setting, consider the funky Boquitas Pintadas (boquitas-pintadas.com.ar; doubles from $60), the elegant La Cayetana (lacayetanahotel.com.ar; doubles from $120) or the slightly more modern 1890 Hotel Boutique (1890hotel.com.ar; doubles from $75), all in Monserrat, or the homey Racó de Buenos Aires (racodebuenosaires.com.ar; doubles from $100).
FORGET THE MARTINI BARS AND SUSHI JOINTS. THE REAL BUENOS AIRES RESIDES IN ITS BODEGONES, NEIGHBORHOOD RESTAURANTS STEEPED IN WHAT IT MEANS TO BE ARGENTINE. STEPHEN METCALF EATS UP.
Photographs by Trujillo Paumier
On a night swaddled in humidity, I made my way down to La Boca, an Italian working-class neighborhood in Buenos Aires. My guide for the evening was the prominent Argentine writer Uki Goni, and as our cab crawled along, half lost, we peered out at meagerly lit scenes of urban decay. ‘‘I’ve had taxi drivers who wouldn’t take me down here,’’ Goni said. Shirtless men carried infants in their arms; the elderly shuffled along without looking up; a well-armed group of policemen turned a corner. These last we asked for directions. They were gracious, but unable to help. Person after person could not point our way to El Obrero, the bodegón we were looking for, an ignorance that left Goni puzzled and slightly dismayed .
El Obrero means ‘‘the worker’’ — it is a parrilla, or traditional barbecue joint. (‘‘Go with time,’’ an Argentine acquaintance told me. ‘‘Three to four hours, to eat to death.’’) It is also, as many parrillas are, a type of bodegón, a simple neighborhood restaurant started by and for immigrants, traditionally of Spanish or Italian descent. Taken together, bodegones form an unofficial institution in Buenos Aires, places where true porteños — as residents of Buenos Aires, a port city, are called — go to enjoy mass quantities of comfort food on the cheap.
Stepping inside after we finally found our bearings, I could see why El Obrero is regarded as a temple of fraternal overeating. The dreariness outside gave way instantly to the clatter of dishes, to bright lights and warm blasts of laughter. Rotating fans, relics from the ’50s, descended from a high ceiling. The floor was a dingy checkerboard, the menu a chalkboard. The waiters, gallant in burgundy shirt jackets, menu a chalkboard. The waiters, gallant in burgundy shirt jackets, greeted us with radiant smiles. Goni is an honored guest here. He has come often to El Obrero and the other parrillas of La Boca, on occasion with the actor Willem Dafoe or the director Francis Ford Coppola. Their pictures hang in a corner, though displayed with far more pride of place are a portrait of the King of Spain in a powder blue sash and photographs of the godhead of Argentine futbol, Diego Maradona.
To taste the real and abiding Buenos Aires, Goni took me to El Obrero. On offer was a complete inventory of the bovine carcass: ojo de bife (eye of beef), chinchulines (small intestines), mollejas (gizzards). ‘‘Until fairly recently,’’ Goni explained, ‘‘a meal in Argentina was beef, potatoes, maybe — maybe — salad.’’ The Argentine palate has evolved, and even at a mecca for steak like El Obrero, there is plenty else. I started with the rabas, fried squid rings that melt in your mouth like buttery lozenges, and a liter of Quilmes, a milky Argentine beer. ‘‘There would have been more bodegones here once,’’ said Goni, who is in his mid- 50s and is best known in Argentina for exposing the extent of the ‘‘ratline,’’ the escape route and eventual haven his country provided Nazis in the aftermath of World War II. ‘‘This is probably one of the last surviving ones.’’
Buenos Aires, goes the claim, is a European city located in South America. True, there are stylish clothes, venerable buildings, small cars and gelato. But to better understand his country, Goni insisted, one should read ‘‘The Return of Eva Perón,’’ by V. S. Naipaul. The essay is cruel, Goni said, but as true today as when it was written, in the early 1970s. To Naipaul, Argentina was less a country than a staging ground for absurdist public traumas that never add up to an actual history. From dictatorship to hyperinflation to, more recently, the currency crisis, which plunged the economy into chaos in 2001, cataclysm seems to come naturally to Argentines.
An older gentleman with a guitar started serenading the crowd. ‘‘Tourists don’t know,’’ Goni said. ‘‘They say, ‘Beautiful girls, macho lovers — I’ll rent a cute place in Palermo,’ ’’ referring to the neighborhood of suave byways that defines the city’s renewal. ‘‘They don’t see the underbelly.’’ The Argentina of Goni’s young adulthood was an economically and, its European roots notwithstanding, culturally insular society. ‘‘We were behind our own iron curtain, in a way.’’
Argentina is nearly the size of India, but with less than one-thirtieth India’s population. It possesses vast tracts of mineral wealth and agriculturally fertile pampas. Once, much of what was consumed here was made here, if inefficiently. ‘‘You could wait 10 or 20 years to get a phone,’’ Goni said. ‘‘Then, in the ’90s, we privatized everything. Now you get a phone in two or three days, and maybe 10 million people in phone,’’ Goni said. ‘‘Then, in the ’90s, we privatized everything. Now you get a phone in two or three days, and maybe 10 million people in the country are much, much better off than ever before. But joining the international community has come at a spectacular price.’’ La Boca, for example, is poorer and more dangerous, while Palermo now gleams with international cachet. But, as Goni said, ‘‘Argentines by and large can’t afford to go there.’’
The old gentleman’s lachrymose folklore ended. The crowd applauded wildly. Goni considered, then said, ‘‘Interesting, isn’t it, how some things completely transcend our idea of ‘good’ and ‘bad?’ ’’
BUENOS AIRES HAS BECOME THAT CITY. YOU AMUSE YOUR palate at a sleek ethnic restaurant, fast-friend it with international party people and find yourself at 4 a.m. on the street, amid boys with beers and suspiciously young women in shrink-wrap outfits, as ill-piloted cabs brush against your back pocket. Palermo has given sections of itself over wholesale to the idea of a cheap playpen for affluent wastrels from the Yanqui north. Its film-and-TV barrio is named Palermo Hollywood, its boutique-and-bistro quadrant Palermo Soho. Menus are bilingual, and ‘‘Apartments for Sale’’ notices are denominated in dollars. Nonetheless, the city remains poised between ingratiating Americanization and the inscrutable nativism that Naipaul described.
I stayed in a duplex off embassy row, overlooking the jacaranda trees of the Plaza Intendente Seeber. One evening, I went with an American who lives in Buenos Aires to eat at Pizzería Güerrín, an old-school joint in the city center. (Locals debate whether Güerrín or El Cuartito, in Recoleta and equally drenched in bygone atmosphere, serves the city's best pie; I enjoyed both. Either way, you must have a fugazzeta, a thick crust pillowed over with mozzarella and a dense tangle of onions.) When we returned to our car, he slipped a few pesos into the hand of a dubious-looking man who had appeared out of nowhere. ‘‘A trapito,’’ my friend explained. Trapitos ‘‘watch’’ your car to make sure ‘‘nothing happens to it.’’
Later we headed out to Rumi, a nightclub. Rumi is a boliche, a true porteño club; food and booze are cheap, the dancing interminable and wild. ‘‘The women here are beautiful,’’ said my new acquaintance, a Mexican businessman named Hector. I agreed. Hector surveyed the dance floor. ‘‘About half of them are men.’’
The key to visiting Buenos Aires, I think, is to locate a city that is neither the ‘‘gaucho curio shop’’ that Naipaul so disdained nor the la-la fantasy of the ‘‘Paris of Latin America.’’ Stroll out of Palermo’s center toward Villa Crespo — a barrio that has nobly rejected the label ‘‘Palermo Queens’’ — and you come upon silent cobblestone streets canopied by oaks and rosewoods. Out on the main avenue is Scannapieco, a 71-year-old heladaría that serves the best ice cream I’ve ever tasted, a dulce de leche the consistency of melted cheese. And although tango is the most oversold concept in tourism since the Scannapieco, a 71-year-old heladaría that serves the best ice cream I’ve ever tasted, a dulce de leche the consistency of melted cheese. And although tango is the most oversold concept in tourism since the cancan, the milongas at La Catedral, an antique timber warehouse filled with artsy bric-a-brac, wire chandeliers and Christmas lights, are genuinely beautiful. Here an older, more rustic and altogether more sensuous version of the dance has been revived by the younger generation.
But old Buenos Aires is best found in the city’s bodegones. ‘‘If it is trendy, expensive or young, it is not a bodegón,’’ said Ruben Guzman, an Argentine-Canadian director whom a mutual friend described as an anthropologist of the bodegones. Bodegones started, by and large, as immigrant groceries, divided into two sections: one for retailing traditional home-country foods, the other for alcohol. Customers who bought a drink would on occasion request a place to sit and a bite to eat, and over time, the bodegón sometimes evolved from a shop into a cafe and social hub.
Ruben and I dined at Café Margot, a classic of its type. More intimate than El Obrero, Café Margot has been, for decades, a gathering place for the notables, mostly futbol jocks and intellectuals and tangueros, of the Boedo district. (No less than Juan Perón was said to treasure its turkey sandwiches.) Café Margot’s open shelving was filled with wine and liqueurs; charcuterie dangled from the ceiling; olives filled large Mason jars. The brick walls were covered in local art.
‘‘First, a bodegón ought to be cheap,’’ Guzman said. ‘‘It has to have at least some homemade food. Charcuterie, the pasta — preferably everything. Here, in Margot, it is a very high percentage, even their beer. It must not be too clean.’’ (Though Café Margot is clean.) ‘‘It must have all ages represented in it — young, old — for a bodegón is not hip. Preferably with bohemians in it.’’ He had described the patrons at Café Margot precisely.
We tucked in to a set of picadas, or tapas-like dishes — in this instance, fleshy tongue-like slabs of roasted red peppers and provolone and provoleta, a fried cheese dish, while we drank pints of the house-brewed beer. When I dipped my bread in the oily remains of a picada, Guzman smiled. ‘‘In Argentina, this is something you don’t do in a restaurant,’’ he said. ‘‘But in a bodegón, they don’t care about manners. In fact, they don’t have any.’’
Against 30 years of upheaval, the bodegones are reasserting themselves as vessels of generosity and calm. They were faced with near-extinction in the ’90s, when they staged an improbable comeback, aided, ironically, by the collapse of the economy. ‘‘Because of the currency crisis,’’ Guzman said, ‘‘people had to find their identity as Argentines again. And it wasn’t just the currency, but neo-liberalism and heavy Americanization. The bodegones were citadels against gentrification.’’ I asked him whether the newfound affection liberalism and heavy Americanization. The bodegones were citadels against gentrification.’’ I asked him whether the newfound affection for the bodegones was simply another way to assert Argentine identity without reckoning with Argentine history. He disagreed. Young people didn’t really experience the dictatorship, he said. ‘‘They experienced neo-liberalism.’’ Globalization has a way of tinting its holdouts in a romantic glow. ‘‘I cannot think of this city without bodegones,’’ Guzman said. ‘‘They will survive. It is part of its spirit.’’
PIETRO SORBA, AN ITALIAN-BORN FOOD CRITIC AND scholar, is the author of the definitive work on the subject, ‘‘Bodegones de Buenos Aires.’’ (The book is bilingual; the English translation is lovely.) Sorba and I met at Miramar, one of the more reputable and longstanding bodegones. It sits on a corner in a former tailor shop, where tango luminaries once came to have suits made. Sorba is a delightful mountain of a man and, from the looks of it, a prodigiously gifted eater. He has been writing about Argentine food for Elle Argentina and Clarín, the local daily, as well as producing documentaries, for years.
We drank malbec, the deceptively soft, dense red wine of Argentina, and passed around a crude wooden tablet listing the platos del día. We started with pulpo a la gallega, or boiled octopus with potatoes in olive oil and pimenton — a sort of paprika — and tortilla a la Española, an omelet-like dish with a spicy salami. When I began espousing pet theories about the bodegón, Sorba demurred. ‘‘Bodegón is the opposite of the culinary culture of Palermo,’’ he said bluntly. ‘‘It is comfort food — no tricks — for people who love to eat. Not for people looking for the fashion thing, or trendy. For my job, I must go to many restaurants. But for me, when I want to eat, I go to a bodegón.’’
Eat, eat, eat — we had moved on to mejillones a la provenzal (mussels, white wine, garlic) and gambas al ajillo (shrimp, garlic, dried chili), all of it richly drenched in olive oil. ‘‘In Italy,’’ Sorba asserted, ‘‘people eat out on the weekend. In Buenos Aires, it is every day. It’s historical. Observe the flats in the center city, the oldest part of the city. The kitchen is small — it’s nothing, in fact. In Italy, people live in the kitchen. But here, people are not as interested in cooking.’’
For all the voguish talk of localism, it’s now possible to get substantially the same meal in any city — in Copenhagen or London or São Paulo. Culinary innovations spoke out to all points of the globe, until food everywhere has been micro-gastronomized into ambrosial dreck. Against the forces of homogenization, the bodegones make an admirable stand. ‘‘This is the first, best example of the porteño menu,’’ Sorba said as we moved on to centolla (king crab) and rabo de toro (oxtail stew). ‘‘In the 1990s, we had a new culinary wave. The new culinary trends were impactful, very hard on the life of the bodegones. But I now believe culinary trends are boring. My next book is going to be called ‘I Am Up to Here With Gourmet,’ ’’ he said, gesturing to his But I now believe culinary trends are boring. My next book is going to be called ‘I Am Up to Here With Gourmet,’ ’’ he said, gesturing to his neck.
Following Sorba’s lead, I hesitate to make too large a claim for the bodegones. Nonetheless, in a city where only 500 yards from the Four Seasons one stumbles upon a villa miseria, a sprawling and viciously impoverished shantytown, they are an implicit guarantee that something exists in between extremes of rich and poor. To reach for another cliché — one that happens only to be true — the importance of clean and well-lit places to Argentina cannot be exaggerated. On the night Goni and I were cabbing it back from El Obrero, he suddenly asked, ‘‘Do you smell that?’’ I did. There was a strong but not entirely unpleasant wood-smokey tang in the air. ‘‘The farmers are clearing land by burning,’’ he said. ‘‘Tonight is O.K., but last summer was really bad. What kind of lawlessness must there be, if you can’t stop the farmers from putting the country’s capital city under an unbearable cloud of smoke?’’
It is possible that Naipaul was right, that Argentina is fated to cycles of forgetting. Commodity prices are collapsing, and the work that might have been accomplished in fat times — education and labor market reforms — remains undone. The ruling Peronists, having mishandled a farm crisis, lost a crucial midterm election. The near political horizon is as Naipaul would have predicted: disarray. But this is why the bodegón is more than a curiosity. ‘‘When you are in a bodegón, you feel like you are in Buenos Aires,’’ Sorba said. ‘‘You political horizon is as Naipaul would have predicted: disarray. But this is why the bodegón is more than a curiosity. ‘‘When you are in a bodegón, you feel like you are in Buenos Aires,’’ Sorba said. ‘‘You breathe its history. Its real history. The eternal Buenos Aires.’’ We pushed away from the table en (considerable) masse with his simple enough benediction: ‘‘We have eaten.’’
Essentials Buenos Aires
RESTAURANTS, CAFES AND BARS La Catedral Cool, authentic milongas. Sarmiento 4006; 011-54-9-11-5325-1630. El Cuartito A 1930s pizza parlor. Talcahuano 937; 011-54-11-4816-4331; entrees about $6.50 to $15.50. Pizzería Güerrín Old-fashioned pizza joint. Avenida Corrientes 1368; 011-54-11-4371-8141; entrees $4.75 to $8.50. Guido’s Bar Holdout bodegón in Palermo. República de la India 2843; 011-54-11-4802-2391; guidosbar.com.ar; three-course meal (with wine) $24. Café Margot Picturesque bodegón. Avenida Boedo 857; 011-54-11-4957-0001; entrees $2 to $9.50. Miramar Atmospheric, good bodegón. Avenida San Juan 1999; 011-54-11-4304-4261; entrees $6.25 to $8.50. El Obrero Classic parrilla in La Boca. Agustín R. Caffarena 64; 011-54-11-4362-9912; entrees $5.25 to $8.50. Rumi Popular porteño nightclub. Avenida Presidente Figueroa Alcorta 6442; 011-54-11-4782-1398; rumiba.com.ar. Scannapieco Fantastic ice cream. Córdoba 4826; 011-54-11-4773-1829.
HOTELS The city has its complement of excellent five-star properties, most notably the Alvear Palace Hotel (alvearpalace.com; doubles from $350), the Four Seasons (fourseasons.com; doubles from $495) and the Park Hyatt (buenosaires.park.hyatt.com; doubles from $490). If you’re looking for something smaller — and less expensive — in a looking for something smaller — and less expensive — in a neighborhood setting, consider the funky Boquitas Pintadas (boquitas-pintadas.com.ar; doubles from $60), the elegant La Cayetana (lacayetanahotel.com.ar; doubles from $120) or the slightly more modern 1890 Hotel Boutique (1890hotel.com.ar; doubles from $75), all in Monserrat, or the homey Racó de Buenos Aires (racodebuenosaires.com.ar; doubles from $100).
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Friendly Skies? Not for Pet Owners By MICHELLE HIGGINS and Pets Onboard: Growls and Purrs By MICHELLE HIGGINS
July 19, 2009
Practical Traveler
Friendly Skies? Not for Pet Owners By MICHELLE HIGGINS
IT'S getting more expensive to take Fifi on vacation. Airlines may be raising the price of in-flight food and checked luggage, but pet owners say the fees for flying with their furry friends are getting out of control.
A number of airlines — including Alaska, American, JetBlue, US Airways and Virgin America — raised their pet fees by about $20 or more in the last year or so, and now charge $100 each way to take a pet on a flight. Continental, Midwest and United now charge $125 to bring a pet onboard, up from $100 previously.
Expect to pay even more to check in larger pets as luggage. Those fees now range from $300 round trip on American to $500 on United. It goes even higher for international flights.
These days, with airfares so low, a pet's fee can be more than a human's ticket.
James Garahan, an international tax lawyer from San Francisco, paid $299 for a round-trip flight from San Francisco to New York in December on United. But to take his 13-pound pug, Sophie, with him, United wanted an extra $350. (United has since lowered the cost to $125 each way, from $175, but that is still higher than the $100 it charged last spring.)
Mr. Garahan views the fee as "discriminatory against pet owners." Sophie, he points out, rides under the seat in front of him — "space I have already paid for."
But for airlines, it's another way to eke out more revenue. American, for example, raised its pet charges in May 2008 — the same time it began charging for things like a second checked bag. "The bottom line is that our fares and our fees together must cover our operating costs if we are to remain viable for the long term," said Andrea Huguely, an American spokeswoman.
Pet owners say they simply have no choice but to pay whatever the airlines charge.
"People that want to travel with pets are pretty much at their mercy," said Jerry Hatfield, a spokesman for Pet Travel Inc., which offers an online guide at www.pettravel.com. "If it's $100, that's what it is. There are no other options. Amtrak isn't accepting any pets."
Actually, there is a new option: Pet Airways (www.petairways.com), a pet-only airline based in Delray Beach, Fla., is beginning service this month. It plans to fly to smaller regional airports near New York City (Republic on Long Island), Washington (Baltimore/Washington International), Chicago (Midway), Denver (Rocky Mountain Metro) and Los Angeles (Hawthorne Municipal).
Aimed at pet owners frustrated with the high cost and poor service associated with most airlines, Pet Airways promises to fly animals in a climate-controlled cabin outfitted with individual crates instead of seats, and staffed with a flight attendant who will check on animals every 15 minutes. The company uses Beech 1900C turbo-props, some versions of which are 19-seat commuter planes.
Tickets for the flights, operated once a week by Suburban Air Freight based in Omaha, Neb., start at $149 each way. There is already a waiting list for the first month, according to Alysa Binder, a founder of the company.
"Size doesn't matter, snout noses don't matter," Ms. Binder said. "It's all about the pets."
Commercial airlines typically will not accept snub-nosed dogs like pugs or cats like Persians as cargo as they tend to be sensitive to heat. Also, many airlines will not accept pets as checked baggage or cargo when the ground temperature exceeds 85 degrees or is below 20 degrees.
Frontier Airlines has barred pets from cabins. "It's a customer service issue," said Steve Snyder, an airline spokesman, noting that customers can still transport pets on Frontier as luggage for $100 or $200 each way depending on size. "There are a lot of folks that may have allergies to pets, or may have a fear of dogs or cats or may not want to be bothered by somebody else's pets."
But some airlines are trying to be more pet friendly. Delta, which had some of the highest fees, lowered its rates this month to $100 each way, from $150, for carry-on pets on domestic flights, and to $175 from $275 for pets checked as luggage.
JetBlue, which transports more than 80,000 pets a year, created a frequent flier program for pets, JetPaws, which allows customers to earn double miles when bringing along their furry friends. Continental and Midwest have similar programs.
Perhaps sensing a competitive niche, Southwest last month began charging $75 to take small dogs and cats onboard, undercutting most other airlines. And on July 1, Air Canada began charging 50 Canadian dollars (about $42 at 1.19 Canadian dollars to the U.S. dollar) each way for pets.
Other tips to keep to mind:
• Airlines limit the number of pets on each flight, so book early if you plan to bring your pet.
• To avoid delays and reduce the stress on your pet, book a nonstop flight whenever possible.
• If checking your pet as luggage, avoid booking a mid-day flight in summer, when the cargo hold can be dangerously warm.
• "I recommend feeding them about four hours before the flight, if possible," said Melissa Halliburton, founder of BringFido.com, a travel site for dog owners. "They can and should continue to drink water right up to the time of travel, though."
• After purchasing an appropriate pet carrier, write your pet's name on it, including identification tags with your home address and phone number as well as the address and phone number of your destination, Ms. Halliburton suggests. If two or more pets are traveling together in cargo, put a sign on their crates indicating that they be placed near one another during the flight.
But if your pet is an anxious flier, consider leaving it home. Sitters can be found online at Petsit.com and Petsitters.org.
Mr. Garahan, the tax lawyer, ended up hiring a pet sitter for $25 a day for his pug. But next time, Mr. Garahan may have to spring for Sophie's flight since his wife, Pam Dickson, often travels to New York City for business.
"When I show up in New York, she's happy to see me," Mr. Garahan said of his wife. "But if I'm bringing Sophie, she's really happy to see me."
Practical Traveler - Flying With Pets Can Be Costly - NYTimes.com (2 August 2009)
http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/travel/19pracpets.html?fta=y&pagewanted=print
http://snipurl.com/oj9wg
FEEDBACK / COMMENTS FROM READERS
August 2, 2009
Practical Traveler
Pets Onboard: Growls and Purrs By MICHELLE HIGGINS
MEOW! Do people feel strongly about pets on planes.
In response to the July 19 Practical Traveler column, “Friendly Skies? Not For Pet Owners,” more than 100 readers weighed in on the subject. Many of the comments expressed outrage at the high fees airlines charge to transport pets, especially on international flights. A number of readers also described nightmarish travel experiences involving pets that arrived severely dehydrated or even near death after flying as checked luggage.
But a surprising majority of comments debated whether pets should be allowed on planes in the first place — a discussion worth summarizing here.
Allergy sufferers cited pet dander as a major health issue. “I have no desire to drug myself up with antihistamines and/or sneeze/wheeze endlessly because of another passenger’s selfish decision to bring their pet on the flight,” said a reader who identified herself as Eve from Portland. “It seems inconsistent for airlines to phase out peanuts as snacks but nonetheless allow animals in the cabin, when their mere presence causes severe discomfort for others.”
Allergy sufferers have little recourse if they find themselves seated near a pet. It’s possible to switch seats with another passenger to avoid sneezing through the entire flight, but that isn’t an ideal solution. “When I complained about a cat under my aisle seat in the front of the plane — I was moved to a rear, middle seat,” wrote Catherine from California. “Meds kept me alive but I was sick for a week from the resulting sinus infection.”
Pet owners, on the other hand, pointed out that they have few alternatives when it comes to transporting their animals, whether for a long vacation or a cross-country move. And banning pets because of allergy sufferers, they argue, is a slippery slope. “If airlines are going to start insisting on pet-free flights because of a few hothouse flowers complaining about the possibility of being annoyed by allergies,” a reader identified as HK from New York City asked, “can they also start banning people with colds?” HK continued, “Oh — and I guess they should ban people who wear too much perfume so that I don’t have to suffer a headache throughout the flight, people with sketchy hygiene and people who want to bring pungent foods onboard.”
But passengers had other reasons for wanting to ban pets from planes. Millie Smith, from Boulder, Colo., described how a small dog on a red-eye flight “barked incessantly for about 45 minutes on takeoff and a half hour on landing.”
So what’s wrong with putting pets in cargo? Even a former airline employee said he would not trust an airline with safely transporting his pets as checked luggage. “Knowing what I do about conditions on the ramp and in the baggage compartment, I would never transport my dog by air, no matter what the season,” said Scott from Morgantown, W.Va., “He would be terrified by the noise, the confusion, the isolation and the physical sensations of flight. It would be pure selfishness on my part to subject him to that just so I could take him along on a trip.” And Kay from Eugene, Ore., described how her daughter had to rush her kitten to the veterinarian when it arrived “at the point of death” from dehydration after a flight from Georgia to Arizona.
Some readers offered suggestions on how to get airlines to pay closer attention to pets. Jim Hutchins of Ogden, Utah, who keeps an online diary about his dog, Roxy, including her travels, recommended writing a friendly note on the carrier when checking a pet as luggage. This may help remind baggage handlers that your pet has a name and isn’t just another piece of cargo. Freezing a bowl of water can help reduce spills and keep the pet hydrated during a flight, he also noted. And booking a window seat may allow you to see your pet as it’s loaded into the aircraft.
Still, some owners go to extraordinary lengths to avoid the stress flying can cause to pets. Shirley Lin, from Arizona, wrote about driving to New York from the Southwest for four days and staying in pet-friendly hotels instead of checking her pets as luggage for a move in 2006. “As much as I would love to vaca (sometimes) with my dogs, it’s more stressful on them, and they’re perfectly happy at home with their favorite sitter,” she wrote.
But sometimes driving is just not an option, as when moving overseas. In those cases, airlines have been known to charge very high fees. One reader, who went by the screen name Krauset, griped about paying $1,700 to move the family dog, Jack, one way from Phoenix, Ariz., to England, on British Airways. “This was not much less than the total cost of our family’s four round-trip tickets,” Krauset wrote. “Shame on you British Airways. The least you could have done was put Champagne in Jack’s water bowl. Stop the price gouging!”
To avoid such charges, one reader, Ami from Washington, suggested smuggling a pet onboard: “I fly with my 20 lb. mutt often on US Airways, Jet Blue, Delta, Continental, etc. He is transported in a rolling bag that I carry on like a suitcase. I sneak him around as much as possible to avoid paying the pet charge. About 80% of the time he does not get spotted by ticketing agents or flight attendants. I only pay the fee when they catch me and make me pay it.”
Still others had more of an issue with pet owners than the pets themselves. “In our family we all have severe cat and dog allergies,” wrote a reader identified as rnzucker from Portland, Ore. “We were quite surprised one time when my daughter was sitting next to a woman who had a dog, who had no sympathy for my daughter and refused to move seats.
“My daughter ended up sitting totally separate from the family as a result,” rnzucker continued. “Pets in the cabin on planes (or on trains) can be a major health issue for many of us, even in carriers, and should not be ignored. Not everyone wants to be next to your pet.”
Will pet lovers and pet haters ever get along? One reader identified as markjay1 from New York City suggested fining dog owners if their pets misbehave onboard: “Every bark, yelp, growl or whine costs the owner $25, no limit. That’s for each one. A growl that ends with a bark is considered two infractions. Every ‘accident’ costs the owner $200. Every passenger whose allergies are set off by the dog is immediately paid $100 by the dog owner. If the dog gets out of its carrier the fine is $250. If the owner lets the dog out of its carrier the fine is $1,000. I think these rules are fair. If your dog is well controlled I have no problem with it, and you, on the plane.”
Practical Traveler
Friendly Skies? Not for Pet Owners By MICHELLE HIGGINS
IT'S getting more expensive to take Fifi on vacation. Airlines may be raising the price of in-flight food and checked luggage, but pet owners say the fees for flying with their furry friends are getting out of control.
A number of airlines — including Alaska, American, JetBlue, US Airways and Virgin America — raised their pet fees by about $20 or more in the last year or so, and now charge $100 each way to take a pet on a flight. Continental, Midwest and United now charge $125 to bring a pet onboard, up from $100 previously.
Expect to pay even more to check in larger pets as luggage. Those fees now range from $300 round trip on American to $500 on United. It goes even higher for international flights.
These days, with airfares so low, a pet's fee can be more than a human's ticket.
James Garahan, an international tax lawyer from San Francisco, paid $299 for a round-trip flight from San Francisco to New York in December on United. But to take his 13-pound pug, Sophie, with him, United wanted an extra $350. (United has since lowered the cost to $125 each way, from $175, but that is still higher than the $100 it charged last spring.)
Mr. Garahan views the fee as "discriminatory against pet owners." Sophie, he points out, rides under the seat in front of him — "space I have already paid for."
But for airlines, it's another way to eke out more revenue. American, for example, raised its pet charges in May 2008 — the same time it began charging for things like a second checked bag. "The bottom line is that our fares and our fees together must cover our operating costs if we are to remain viable for the long term," said Andrea Huguely, an American spokeswoman.
Pet owners say they simply have no choice but to pay whatever the airlines charge.
"People that want to travel with pets are pretty much at their mercy," said Jerry Hatfield, a spokesman for Pet Travel Inc., which offers an online guide at www.pettravel.com. "If it's $100, that's what it is. There are no other options. Amtrak isn't accepting any pets."
Actually, there is a new option: Pet Airways (www.petairways.com), a pet-only airline based in Delray Beach, Fla., is beginning service this month. It plans to fly to smaller regional airports near New York City (Republic on Long Island), Washington (Baltimore/Washington International), Chicago (Midway), Denver (Rocky Mountain Metro) and Los Angeles (Hawthorne Municipal).
Aimed at pet owners frustrated with the high cost and poor service associated with most airlines, Pet Airways promises to fly animals in a climate-controlled cabin outfitted with individual crates instead of seats, and staffed with a flight attendant who will check on animals every 15 minutes. The company uses Beech 1900C turbo-props, some versions of which are 19-seat commuter planes.
Tickets for the flights, operated once a week by Suburban Air Freight based in Omaha, Neb., start at $149 each way. There is already a waiting list for the first month, according to Alysa Binder, a founder of the company.
"Size doesn't matter, snout noses don't matter," Ms. Binder said. "It's all about the pets."
Commercial airlines typically will not accept snub-nosed dogs like pugs or cats like Persians as cargo as they tend to be sensitive to heat. Also, many airlines will not accept pets as checked baggage or cargo when the ground temperature exceeds 85 degrees or is below 20 degrees.
Frontier Airlines has barred pets from cabins. "It's a customer service issue," said Steve Snyder, an airline spokesman, noting that customers can still transport pets on Frontier as luggage for $100 or $200 each way depending on size. "There are a lot of folks that may have allergies to pets, or may have a fear of dogs or cats or may not want to be bothered by somebody else's pets."
But some airlines are trying to be more pet friendly. Delta, which had some of the highest fees, lowered its rates this month to $100 each way, from $150, for carry-on pets on domestic flights, and to $175 from $275 for pets checked as luggage.
JetBlue, which transports more than 80,000 pets a year, created a frequent flier program for pets, JetPaws, which allows customers to earn double miles when bringing along their furry friends. Continental and Midwest have similar programs.
Perhaps sensing a competitive niche, Southwest last month began charging $75 to take small dogs and cats onboard, undercutting most other airlines. And on July 1, Air Canada began charging 50 Canadian dollars (about $42 at 1.19 Canadian dollars to the U.S. dollar) each way for pets.
Other tips to keep to mind:
• Airlines limit the number of pets on each flight, so book early if you plan to bring your pet.
• To avoid delays and reduce the stress on your pet, book a nonstop flight whenever possible.
• If checking your pet as luggage, avoid booking a mid-day flight in summer, when the cargo hold can be dangerously warm.
• "I recommend feeding them about four hours before the flight, if possible," said Melissa Halliburton, founder of BringFido.com, a travel site for dog owners. "They can and should continue to drink water right up to the time of travel, though."
• After purchasing an appropriate pet carrier, write your pet's name on it, including identification tags with your home address and phone number as well as the address and phone number of your destination, Ms. Halliburton suggests. If two or more pets are traveling together in cargo, put a sign on their crates indicating that they be placed near one another during the flight.
But if your pet is an anxious flier, consider leaving it home. Sitters can be found online at Petsit.com and Petsitters.org.
Mr. Garahan, the tax lawyer, ended up hiring a pet sitter for $25 a day for his pug. But next time, Mr. Garahan may have to spring for Sophie's flight since his wife, Pam Dickson, often travels to New York City for business.
"When I show up in New York, she's happy to see me," Mr. Garahan said of his wife. "But if I'm bringing Sophie, she's really happy to see me."
Practical Traveler - Flying With Pets Can Be Costly - NYTimes.com (2 August 2009)
http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/travel/19pracpets.html?fta=y&pagewanted=print
http://snipurl.com/oj9wg
FEEDBACK / COMMENTS FROM READERS
August 2, 2009
Practical Traveler
Pets Onboard: Growls and Purrs By MICHELLE HIGGINS
MEOW! Do people feel strongly about pets on planes.
In response to the July 19 Practical Traveler column, “Friendly Skies? Not For Pet Owners,” more than 100 readers weighed in on the subject. Many of the comments expressed outrage at the high fees airlines charge to transport pets, especially on international flights. A number of readers also described nightmarish travel experiences involving pets that arrived severely dehydrated or even near death after flying as checked luggage.
But a surprising majority of comments debated whether pets should be allowed on planes in the first place — a discussion worth summarizing here.
Allergy sufferers cited pet dander as a major health issue. “I have no desire to drug myself up with antihistamines and/or sneeze/wheeze endlessly because of another passenger’s selfish decision to bring their pet on the flight,” said a reader who identified herself as Eve from Portland. “It seems inconsistent for airlines to phase out peanuts as snacks but nonetheless allow animals in the cabin, when their mere presence causes severe discomfort for others.”
Allergy sufferers have little recourse if they find themselves seated near a pet. It’s possible to switch seats with another passenger to avoid sneezing through the entire flight, but that isn’t an ideal solution. “When I complained about a cat under my aisle seat in the front of the plane — I was moved to a rear, middle seat,” wrote Catherine from California. “Meds kept me alive but I was sick for a week from the resulting sinus infection.”
Pet owners, on the other hand, pointed out that they have few alternatives when it comes to transporting their animals, whether for a long vacation or a cross-country move. And banning pets because of allergy sufferers, they argue, is a slippery slope. “If airlines are going to start insisting on pet-free flights because of a few hothouse flowers complaining about the possibility of being annoyed by allergies,” a reader identified as HK from New York City asked, “can they also start banning people with colds?” HK continued, “Oh — and I guess they should ban people who wear too much perfume so that I don’t have to suffer a headache throughout the flight, people with sketchy hygiene and people who want to bring pungent foods onboard.”
But passengers had other reasons for wanting to ban pets from planes. Millie Smith, from Boulder, Colo., described how a small dog on a red-eye flight “barked incessantly for about 45 minutes on takeoff and a half hour on landing.”
So what’s wrong with putting pets in cargo? Even a former airline employee said he would not trust an airline with safely transporting his pets as checked luggage. “Knowing what I do about conditions on the ramp and in the baggage compartment, I would never transport my dog by air, no matter what the season,” said Scott from Morgantown, W.Va., “He would be terrified by the noise, the confusion, the isolation and the physical sensations of flight. It would be pure selfishness on my part to subject him to that just so I could take him along on a trip.” And Kay from Eugene, Ore., described how her daughter had to rush her kitten to the veterinarian when it arrived “at the point of death” from dehydration after a flight from Georgia to Arizona.
Some readers offered suggestions on how to get airlines to pay closer attention to pets. Jim Hutchins of Ogden, Utah, who keeps an online diary about his dog, Roxy, including her travels, recommended writing a friendly note on the carrier when checking a pet as luggage. This may help remind baggage handlers that your pet has a name and isn’t just another piece of cargo. Freezing a bowl of water can help reduce spills and keep the pet hydrated during a flight, he also noted. And booking a window seat may allow you to see your pet as it’s loaded into the aircraft.
Still, some owners go to extraordinary lengths to avoid the stress flying can cause to pets. Shirley Lin, from Arizona, wrote about driving to New York from the Southwest for four days and staying in pet-friendly hotels instead of checking her pets as luggage for a move in 2006. “As much as I would love to vaca (sometimes) with my dogs, it’s more stressful on them, and they’re perfectly happy at home with their favorite sitter,” she wrote.
But sometimes driving is just not an option, as when moving overseas. In those cases, airlines have been known to charge very high fees. One reader, who went by the screen name Krauset, griped about paying $1,700 to move the family dog, Jack, one way from Phoenix, Ariz., to England, on British Airways. “This was not much less than the total cost of our family’s four round-trip tickets,” Krauset wrote. “Shame on you British Airways. The least you could have done was put Champagne in Jack’s water bowl. Stop the price gouging!”
To avoid such charges, one reader, Ami from Washington, suggested smuggling a pet onboard: “I fly with my 20 lb. mutt often on US Airways, Jet Blue, Delta, Continental, etc. He is transported in a rolling bag that I carry on like a suitcase. I sneak him around as much as possible to avoid paying the pet charge. About 80% of the time he does not get spotted by ticketing agents or flight attendants. I only pay the fee when they catch me and make me pay it.”
Still others had more of an issue with pet owners than the pets themselves. “In our family we all have severe cat and dog allergies,” wrote a reader identified as rnzucker from Portland, Ore. “We were quite surprised one time when my daughter was sitting next to a woman who had a dog, who had no sympathy for my daughter and refused to move seats.
“My daughter ended up sitting totally separate from the family as a result,” rnzucker continued. “Pets in the cabin on planes (or on trains) can be a major health issue for many of us, even in carriers, and should not be ignored. Not everyone wants to be next to your pet.”
Will pet lovers and pet haters ever get along? One reader identified as markjay1 from New York City suggested fining dog owners if their pets misbehave onboard: “Every bark, yelp, growl or whine costs the owner $25, no limit. That’s for each one. A growl that ends with a bark is considered two infractions. Every ‘accident’ costs the owner $200. Every passenger whose allergies are set off by the dog is immediately paid $100 by the dog owner. If the dog gets out of its carrier the fine is $250. If the owner lets the dog out of its carrier the fine is $1,000. I think these rules are fair. If your dog is well controlled I have no problem with it, and you, on the plane.”
Sunday, February 08, 2009
36 Hours in Dallas By LUISITA LOPEZ TORREGROSA
February 8, 2009
36 Hours in Dallas By LUISITA LOPEZ TORREGROSA
DALLAS may not be a world-class city, but it's pulling out all the stops to get there. This oil-rich city is pumping millions of dollars into a new Dallas Center for the Performing Arts in the Arts District. When completed, the district will rank among the largest urban arts centers in the nation. Meanwhile, glamorous subterranean bars and edgy Asian restaurants are giving the city a cosmopolitan aura. But when it comes to entertainment, its No. 1 attraction is still the Cowboys, especially when the new, $1.2 billion football stadium opens this year, featuring one of the largest retractable roofs and high-definition televisions in the world.
Friday
4 p.m.
1) ARCHITECTURE PARK
See what the buzz is all about. Go on a walking tour of the Dallas Arts District (www.artsdistrict.org), a 19-block area straddling downtown office skyscrapers and uptown luxury hotels. Highlights include the new Dallas Center for the Performing Arts (2100 Ross Avenue, Suite 650; 214-954-9925; www.dallasperformingarts.org), a four-venue complex for music, opera, theater and dance in a parklike setting that's scheduled for a fall opening. The center will include a drum-shaped opera house designed by Norman Foster and a cube-shaped theater designed by Rem Koolhaas. To take it all in, find a bench at the Nasher Sculpture Center (2001 Flora Street; 214-242-5100; www.nashersculpturecenter.org), a museum designed by Renzo Piano with a lush garden that features works from a collection that includes Rodin, Henry Moore and George Segal.
7 p.m.
2) CHEERLEADING COCKTAILS
Size up the city's trend setters and assorted poseurs in their alligator boots and butter-soft tailored jackets at the Rattlesnake Bar, a plush lounge with mahogany-paneled walls and chocolate-brown leather sofas at the new Ritz-Carlton, Dallas (2121 McKinney Avenue; 214-922-4848; www.ritzcarlton.com/dallas). Order the Dean's Margarita with organic agave nectar ($12), nibble on spring rolls with achiote pulled pork ($14), and watch heads turn whenever a posse of lanky blondes in skinny jeans and designer heels sidles up to the bar.
8 p.m.
3) SOUTHWEST SUPREME
Not so long ago, Dallas was a culinary wasteland, save for its famous barbecue. But in recent years, celebrity chefs like Nobu Matsuhisa, Tom Colicchio and Charlie Palmer have planted their flags in Dallas, joining a fresh crop of hometown talent. At the top is Fearing's (2121 McKinney Avenue; 214-922-4848; www.fearingsrestaurant.com), a casual but chic restaurant that serves imaginative Southwest-rooted cuisine at the Ritz-Carlton. Opened in 2007, Fearing's already enjoys national acclaim: Zagat named it No. 1 in domestic hotel dining, and Frank Bruni, the restaurant critic for The New York Times, called it one of the country's top 10 new restaurants outside of New York last year. The current menu includes lobster coconut bisque ($14) and wood-grilled Australian lamb chops on pecorino polenta ($44). Dinner for two, about $200.
10:30 p.m.
4) PARTY HIGH
There are still men's clubs, honky-tonks and jukebox joints in Dallas, but the city's night life has gotten decidedly sleeker and flashier, with velvet-roped discos and bottle-service lounges. If you want a stellar view of the stars and the city's bright lights, go to the rooftop bar of the Joule hotel (1530 Main Street; 214-748-1300; www.luxurycollection.com/joule). It features bedlike sofas and cocoonlike chairs arrayed along a slender, cantilevered swimming pool that juts out 10 stories above the sidewalk. Or, for an even better view, go to Five-Sixty, Wolfgang Puck's new Asian-style restaurant in the glowing ball atop the 560-feet-high Reunion Tower (300 Reunion Boulevard; 214-741-5560). The rotating bar, which serves a dozen kinds of sake, offers magnificent views of a skyline edged in colorful lights and the suburban sprawl beyond.
Saturday
9:30 a.m.
5) MORNING GLORY
Need a breath of fresh air after a late night out? Head to Katy Trail (entrance at Knox Street at Abbott Avenue; 214-303-1180; www.katytraildallas.org), a 3.5-mile greenway that winds through the city's wooded parks and urban neighborhoods. Built along old railroad tracks, the trail is a favorite of young and old, bikers and runners, strollers and dog walkers.
11 a.m.
6) DIGGING FOR ART
From the air, Dallas might look like a forest of faceless skyscrapers, but there are pockets of bohemia. The talk this season centers on Dragon Street in the Design District, where warehouses are becoming cool galleries, and boxy apartments and studios are being built. The street may still feel a tad empty on weekends, but the top draws include the Gerald Peters Gallery (1019 Dragon Street; 214-969-9410; www.gpgallery.com), with its sleek spaces and smart mix of paintings and sculptures, and the Holly Johnson Gallery (1411 Dragon Street; 214-369-0169; www.hollyjohnsongallery.com), a gleaming space devoted to contemporary artists.
1 p.m.
7) SLOWER FOOD
Chicken-fried everything may be a staple in Texas, but in Dallas organic salads and other light fare is just as popular. A trendy spot is Rise No. 1 (5360 West Lovers Lane; 214-366-9900; www.risesouffle.com), a charming bistro with a grass-green facade that serves up wonderful soufflés — a slow-paced antidote to Dallas's manic drive-and-shop lifestyle. Try the truffle-infused mushroom soufflé ($15) with a glass of dry white.
3 p.m.
8) RETAIL OVERLOAD
Shopping is a local sport here, but there's more to Dallas than Neiman Marcus. For slow-paced window shopping, stroll around Inwood Village (West Lovers Lane and Inwood Road; www.inwoodvillage.com), a landmark 1949 shopping center with an eclectic range of signature stores. Retail highlights include Rich Hippie (5350 West Lovers Lane No. 127; 214-358-1968; www.richhippie.com) for retro and avant-garde clothing like a finely tooled pink leather jacket ($728). Next door is Haute Baby (5350 West Lovers Lane No. 128; 214-357-3068) for cute toddler wear, like a yellow slicker with hoodie ($110). But perhaps the chicest boutique is Forty Five Ten (4510 McKinney Avenue; 214-559-4510; www.fortyfiveten.com). The prices are shocking but it's worth a visit. Recent finds included a vintage trolley case by Globe-Trotter ($1,175) and an iron vase by the Texan artist Jan Barboglio ($550).
8:30 p.m.
9) MEX-MEX
This is the land of Tex-Mex. And while cheesy tacos and greasy nachos are the standard fare, more authentic Mexican cuisine has roots in Dallas as well. One of the most popular spots for original Mexican fare is La Duni Latin Cafe (4620 McKinney Avenue; 214-520-7300; www.laduni.com), which offers a terrific dish called tacos de picanha (beef loin strips on tortillas, $19.75). But for more inventive cuisine, try Trece: Mexican Kitchen & Tequila Lounge (4513 Travis Street; 214-780-1900; www.trecerestaurant.com). The formal dining room, dressed in cream, cacao and sepia colors, invites celebration. Kick things off with a jalapeño caipirinha ($11) or a blueberry mojito ($11) before tucking into the braised short ribs in cabernet and chile molasses ($21).
11:30 p.m.
10) COOL KIDS
Once a ramshackle district, the historic Cedar Springs neighborhood has a new energy, with gay-friendly discos, curio shops, burger bars, boutiques and galleries. To mingle with the neighborhood's varied stripes, bop over to J. R.'s Bar & Grill (3923 Cedar Springs Road; 214-528-1004; www.partyattheblock.com), a cavernous club with brick walls, a tin-ceiling and a scuffed dance floor that draws gays, straights, middle-aged couples, midnight cowboys, frat boys and Amy Winehouse lookalikes. Nothing gets going before midnight, when the pub crawlers and night lizards come out to play.
Sunday
11:30 p.m.
11) SPORTS MADNESS
If it's Sunday in Dallas, do as the locals do and hit a sports bar. There are dozens in town, if not hundreds, but a favorite is the McKinney Avenue Tavern (2822 McKinney Avenue; 214-969-1984; www.mckinneyavenuetavern.com), affectionately nicknamed the Mat. There is a carved-wood bar with two dozen or so rickety tables fronting the 30-odd television screens that show nothing but sports, day and night. When the Cowboys play, the joint is bedlam. Rule No. 1: Go early, stay late.
THE BASICS
American, Delta, Continental and other major airlines serve the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. A recent Web search turned up a nonstop American flight from La Guardia starting at $269 for travel in February. A car rental is optional; there are plenty of taxis in the city.
Dallas has plenty of luxury hotels. The Ritz-Carlton, Dallas (2121 McKinney Avenue; 214-922-0200; www.ritzcarlton.com/dallas) ranks near the top, with one of the finest restaurants (Fearing's), a spa and other amenities. Rooms start at $299 and go much higher.
The Joule (1530 Main Street; 214-748-1300; www.luxurycollection.com/joule) is a new and trendy hotel in downtown Dallas, and features a Charlie Palmer restaurant, a jazzy basement nightclub called PM, and a rooftop bar with a pool. Rooms start at about $325.
The Belmont (901 Fort Worth Avenue; 866-870-8010; www.belmontdallas.com) brings back 1940s charm with modern amenities. Set across the Trinity River, this recently restored hotel has a terrace bar and inviting midcentury-style rooms done in vibrant colors. Rooms start at $125.
http://events.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/travel/08hours.html?pagewanted=print
http://snipurl.com/bigi6
36 Hours in Dallas By LUISITA LOPEZ TORREGROSA
DALLAS may not be a world-class city, but it's pulling out all the stops to get there. This oil-rich city is pumping millions of dollars into a new Dallas Center for the Performing Arts in the Arts District. When completed, the district will rank among the largest urban arts centers in the nation. Meanwhile, glamorous subterranean bars and edgy Asian restaurants are giving the city a cosmopolitan aura. But when it comes to entertainment, its No. 1 attraction is still the Cowboys, especially when the new, $1.2 billion football stadium opens this year, featuring one of the largest retractable roofs and high-definition televisions in the world.
Friday
4 p.m.
1) ARCHITECTURE PARK
See what the buzz is all about. Go on a walking tour of the Dallas Arts District (www.artsdistrict.org), a 19-block area straddling downtown office skyscrapers and uptown luxury hotels. Highlights include the new Dallas Center for the Performing Arts (2100 Ross Avenue, Suite 650; 214-954-9925; www.dallasperformingarts.org), a four-venue complex for music, opera, theater and dance in a parklike setting that's scheduled for a fall opening. The center will include a drum-shaped opera house designed by Norman Foster and a cube-shaped theater designed by Rem Koolhaas. To take it all in, find a bench at the Nasher Sculpture Center (2001 Flora Street; 214-242-5100; www.nashersculpturecenter.org), a museum designed by Renzo Piano with a lush garden that features works from a collection that includes Rodin, Henry Moore and George Segal.
7 p.m.
2) CHEERLEADING COCKTAILS
Size up the city's trend setters and assorted poseurs in their alligator boots and butter-soft tailored jackets at the Rattlesnake Bar, a plush lounge with mahogany-paneled walls and chocolate-brown leather sofas at the new Ritz-Carlton, Dallas (2121 McKinney Avenue; 214-922-4848; www.ritzcarlton.com/dallas). Order the Dean's Margarita with organic agave nectar ($12), nibble on spring rolls with achiote pulled pork ($14), and watch heads turn whenever a posse of lanky blondes in skinny jeans and designer heels sidles up to the bar.
8 p.m.
3) SOUTHWEST SUPREME
Not so long ago, Dallas was a culinary wasteland, save for its famous barbecue. But in recent years, celebrity chefs like Nobu Matsuhisa, Tom Colicchio and Charlie Palmer have planted their flags in Dallas, joining a fresh crop of hometown talent. At the top is Fearing's (2121 McKinney Avenue; 214-922-4848; www.fearingsrestaurant.com), a casual but chic restaurant that serves imaginative Southwest-rooted cuisine at the Ritz-Carlton. Opened in 2007, Fearing's already enjoys national acclaim: Zagat named it No. 1 in domestic hotel dining, and Frank Bruni, the restaurant critic for The New York Times, called it one of the country's top 10 new restaurants outside of New York last year. The current menu includes lobster coconut bisque ($14) and wood-grilled Australian lamb chops on pecorino polenta ($44). Dinner for two, about $200.
10:30 p.m.
4) PARTY HIGH
There are still men's clubs, honky-tonks and jukebox joints in Dallas, but the city's night life has gotten decidedly sleeker and flashier, with velvet-roped discos and bottle-service lounges. If you want a stellar view of the stars and the city's bright lights, go to the rooftop bar of the Joule hotel (1530 Main Street; 214-748-1300; www.luxurycollection.com/joule). It features bedlike sofas and cocoonlike chairs arrayed along a slender, cantilevered swimming pool that juts out 10 stories above the sidewalk. Or, for an even better view, go to Five-Sixty, Wolfgang Puck's new Asian-style restaurant in the glowing ball atop the 560-feet-high Reunion Tower (300 Reunion Boulevard; 214-741-5560). The rotating bar, which serves a dozen kinds of sake, offers magnificent views of a skyline edged in colorful lights and the suburban sprawl beyond.
Saturday
9:30 a.m.
5) MORNING GLORY
Need a breath of fresh air after a late night out? Head to Katy Trail (entrance at Knox Street at Abbott Avenue; 214-303-1180; www.katytraildallas.org), a 3.5-mile greenway that winds through the city's wooded parks and urban neighborhoods. Built along old railroad tracks, the trail is a favorite of young and old, bikers and runners, strollers and dog walkers.
11 a.m.
6) DIGGING FOR ART
From the air, Dallas might look like a forest of faceless skyscrapers, but there are pockets of bohemia. The talk this season centers on Dragon Street in the Design District, where warehouses are becoming cool galleries, and boxy apartments and studios are being built. The street may still feel a tad empty on weekends, but the top draws include the Gerald Peters Gallery (1019 Dragon Street; 214-969-9410; www.gpgallery.com), with its sleek spaces and smart mix of paintings and sculptures, and the Holly Johnson Gallery (1411 Dragon Street; 214-369-0169; www.hollyjohnsongallery.com), a gleaming space devoted to contemporary artists.
1 p.m.
7) SLOWER FOOD
Chicken-fried everything may be a staple in Texas, but in Dallas organic salads and other light fare is just as popular. A trendy spot is Rise No. 1 (5360 West Lovers Lane; 214-366-9900; www.risesouffle.com), a charming bistro with a grass-green facade that serves up wonderful soufflés — a slow-paced antidote to Dallas's manic drive-and-shop lifestyle. Try the truffle-infused mushroom soufflé ($15) with a glass of dry white.
3 p.m.
8) RETAIL OVERLOAD
Shopping is a local sport here, but there's more to Dallas than Neiman Marcus. For slow-paced window shopping, stroll around Inwood Village (West Lovers Lane and Inwood Road; www.inwoodvillage.com), a landmark 1949 shopping center with an eclectic range of signature stores. Retail highlights include Rich Hippie (5350 West Lovers Lane No. 127; 214-358-1968; www.richhippie.com) for retro and avant-garde clothing like a finely tooled pink leather jacket ($728). Next door is Haute Baby (5350 West Lovers Lane No. 128; 214-357-3068) for cute toddler wear, like a yellow slicker with hoodie ($110). But perhaps the chicest boutique is Forty Five Ten (4510 McKinney Avenue; 214-559-4510; www.fortyfiveten.com). The prices are shocking but it's worth a visit. Recent finds included a vintage trolley case by Globe-Trotter ($1,175) and an iron vase by the Texan artist Jan Barboglio ($550).
8:30 p.m.
9) MEX-MEX
This is the land of Tex-Mex. And while cheesy tacos and greasy nachos are the standard fare, more authentic Mexican cuisine has roots in Dallas as well. One of the most popular spots for original Mexican fare is La Duni Latin Cafe (4620 McKinney Avenue; 214-520-7300; www.laduni.com), which offers a terrific dish called tacos de picanha (beef loin strips on tortillas, $19.75). But for more inventive cuisine, try Trece: Mexican Kitchen & Tequila Lounge (4513 Travis Street; 214-780-1900; www.trecerestaurant.com). The formal dining room, dressed in cream, cacao and sepia colors, invites celebration. Kick things off with a jalapeño caipirinha ($11) or a blueberry mojito ($11) before tucking into the braised short ribs in cabernet and chile molasses ($21).
11:30 p.m.
10) COOL KIDS
Once a ramshackle district, the historic Cedar Springs neighborhood has a new energy, with gay-friendly discos, curio shops, burger bars, boutiques and galleries. To mingle with the neighborhood's varied stripes, bop over to J. R.'s Bar & Grill (3923 Cedar Springs Road; 214-528-1004; www.partyattheblock.com), a cavernous club with brick walls, a tin-ceiling and a scuffed dance floor that draws gays, straights, middle-aged couples, midnight cowboys, frat boys and Amy Winehouse lookalikes. Nothing gets going before midnight, when the pub crawlers and night lizards come out to play.
Sunday
11:30 p.m.
11) SPORTS MADNESS
If it's Sunday in Dallas, do as the locals do and hit a sports bar. There are dozens in town, if not hundreds, but a favorite is the McKinney Avenue Tavern (2822 McKinney Avenue; 214-969-1984; www.mckinneyavenuetavern.com), affectionately nicknamed the Mat. There is a carved-wood bar with two dozen or so rickety tables fronting the 30-odd television screens that show nothing but sports, day and night. When the Cowboys play, the joint is bedlam. Rule No. 1: Go early, stay late.
THE BASICS
American, Delta, Continental and other major airlines serve the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. A recent Web search turned up a nonstop American flight from La Guardia starting at $269 for travel in February. A car rental is optional; there are plenty of taxis in the city.
Dallas has plenty of luxury hotels. The Ritz-Carlton, Dallas (2121 McKinney Avenue; 214-922-0200; www.ritzcarlton.com/dallas) ranks near the top, with one of the finest restaurants (Fearing's), a spa and other amenities. Rooms start at $299 and go much higher.
The Joule (1530 Main Street; 214-748-1300; www.luxurycollection.com/joule) is a new and trendy hotel in downtown Dallas, and features a Charlie Palmer restaurant, a jazzy basement nightclub called PM, and a rooftop bar with a pool. Rooms start at about $325.
The Belmont (901 Fort Worth Avenue; 866-870-8010; www.belmontdallas.com) brings back 1940s charm with modern amenities. Set across the Trinity River, this recently restored hotel has a terrace bar and inviting midcentury-style rooms done in vibrant colors. Rooms start at $125.
http://events.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/travel/08hours.html?pagewanted=print
http://snipurl.com/bigi6
Friday, December 19, 2008
Where Lifts Cost Less By SARAH TUFF
The New York Times
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December 19, 2008
Ski Report
Where Lifts Cost Less By SARAH TUFF
THE price of a one-day lift ticket on a weekend at Vail Ski Resort in Colorado is $97; at Stowe Mountain Resort in Vermont it is $89. (And don’t even start thinking about the potentially dizzying costs of lodging and travel.)
But there are ways around high lift costs, without pretending to be sick so you can ski on a work day, or that you are under age 12, or that you know how to skin up the mountain. Skiers and riders can head to some of the country’s lesser-known ski areas, where rates are often a fraction of those at the bigger resorts.
No, a place like Snow King Resort (www.snowking.com) in Wyoming may not boast as much thigh-pounding vertical or skiable terrain as its natty neighbor, Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. But both areas share the same town, and many people will find themselves perfectly satisfied with (if not elated by) the $41 Snow King experience — and with a few extra dollars to spend on Jackson’s après-ski scene.
“You don’t have to be a jet-setter,” said Michael Berry, president of the National Ski Areas Association, who praised smaller, less expensive ski areas for keeping alive the feel of skiing in the 1970s. “You sit in the cafeteria after buying your lift ticket, and it’s a little reminiscent of a less complicated day.”
A day on the slopes at dozens of areas can cost less than $50. As Mr. Berry pointed out, many ski areas in the Midwest qualify, including spots like Crystal Mountain (www.crystalmountain.com) in Michigan and Afton Alps (www.aftonalps.com) in Minnesota. Here’s a nationwide ski sampler.
Camden Snow Bowl
Camden, Me.
Within a lobster claw’s reach of the Atlantic, the 80-acre Camden Snow Bowl gets an annual snowfall of 72 inches and has snowmaking on less than half of the mountain — so it’s best to nose the Subaru there right after a storm. The main draws of this municipal facility (on the verge of a major face-lift thanks to the Ragged Mountain Recreation Area Redevelopment Project) are its small-town charm and the views of Penobscot Bay. “You can see the ocean from the slopes,” said Greg Sweetser of the Ski Maine Association. You can night-ski on several runs, too.
The Camden Snow Bowl is also home to the United States National Toboggan Championships, on Feb. 6 to 8 this season. Skiers lucky enough to find a room in town that weekend will find everybody talking toboggan.
One-day adult weekend lift ticket (9 a.m. to 4 p.m.): $33. Information: www.camdensnowbowl.com.
Sipapu Ski and Summer Resort
Vadito, N.M.
Mother Nature has already been kind to this 200-acre ski area in the Carson National Forest, 20 miles southeast of Taos. Some autumn snow and cold temperatures allowed Sipapu to open on Nov. 15. And while skiers and riders won’t find the knee-knocking steeps of Taos Ski Valley, they will discover 41 trails of decent length, including seven double-black-diamond slopes.
Sipapu’s two terrain parks are less crowded than those in larger resorts, making them a good place to try out new tricks. And for those who want to try a whole new sport on snow, Sipapu also offers lessons and rentals for ski biking (just what it sounds like). The ski area gives free lift tickets every day to skiers under 6, fourth graders, 40-year-olds (really) and those 70 and older.
One-day adult weekend lift ticket (9 a.m. to 4 p.m.): $39. Information: www.sipapunm.com.
Ski Cooper
Leadville, Colo.
At 10,152 feet, Leadville, Colo., claims to be the highest incorporated city in North America, and its also lofty playground is this 26-run ski area. It sits atop Tennessee Pass, one of the training sites for the 10th Mountain Division for World War II, and if skiers and riders aren’t giddy from the altitude, they might be from the 2,400 acres of snowcat-served backcountry skiing on the Continental Divide. (Tours are a splurge, costing $290 to $325.)
But for those who want to stay inbound, Ski Cooper caters to families. Long, easy cruisers like Tenderfoot and Sitzmark mosey down the mountain, giving everyone ample time to admire surrounding peaks like Mount Elbert and Mount Massive.
One-day adult weekend lift ticket (9 a.m. to 4 p.m.): $42. Information: www.skicooper.com.
Howelsen Hill Ski Area
Steamboat Springs, Colo.
Receiving the same “champagne powder” as the neighboring Steamboat resort, Howelsen Hill is a town-operated training area that has helped send more than 64 athletes, including the 2003 Nordic combined world champion Johnny Spillane, to the Winter Olympics.
Howelsen has 15 trails served by four lifts. If the fun runs out on the downhill side, visitors can switch over to cross-country skiing on nearly 13 miles of trails or try out the terrain park.
One-day adult weekend lift ticket (9 a.m. to 4 p.m.): $16. Information: steamboatsprings.net.
Bridger Bowl
Bozeman, Mont.
Around Bozeman, the most reliable snow report is found atop the historic Baxter Hotel. If the blue light is flashing, it means that nearby Bridger Bowl has more than two inches of fresh snow.
And chances are that traveling powder hounds can actually stay right in town (and not crash at a friend’s pad) and ski 2,000-acre Bridger, thanks to the affordability of the nonprofit community ski area. “It’s one of those breathtaking places,” Mr. Berry said.
This season, Bridger is adding more than 300 acres of lift-served ridge terrain: steep, ungroomed and unmarked trails that will require expert skiers and riders to carry avalanche transceivers. Beginners and intermediates will find fully half of the ski area devoted to gentler runs.
One-day adult weekend lift ticket (9 a.m. to 4 p.m.): $45. Information: www.bridgerbowl.com.
Badger Pass Ski Area
Yosemite National Park, Calif.
Long after the summer tourists have retreated from Yosemite National Park, winter storms turn Badger Pass into a friendly, low-key ski area. Most of the terrain is beginner or intermediate, and mild temperatures create tolerable learning conditions.
Badger has 10 runs, and plenty to do once skiers and riders have notched enough laps, starting with an expansive deck for soaking up the California sunshine. The park also works with Yosemite Mountaineering School to offer backcountry ski tours throughout the Sierra Nevada range.
One-day adult weekend lift ticket (9 a.m. to 4 p.m.): $42. Information: www.badgerpass.com.
Cochran’s Ski Area
Richmond, Vt.
Blink while driving along I-89 near Burlington, Vt., and you’ll miss Cochran’s, which has just three lifts and six trails on 350 vertical feet. But since 1961, when it first opened for children and had a single rope tow, this little molehill has churned out a mountain of world-class skiers; the family’s own Barbara Ann Cochran won Olympic gold in 1972, while Jimmy Cochran now competes on the World Cup circuit.
Today, Cochran’s is still for kids. The nonprofit area claims to introduce skiing to more than 800 local schoolchildren each year, and teaches parents how to teach their little ones. It’s a rambunctious, winter-loving place and can be just as much fun for adults.
One-day adult weekend lift ticket (9 a.m. to 4 p.m.): $20. Information: www.cochranskiarea.com.
Other Options
Larger, more expensive resorts don’t have to be a washout for those on a budget. Skiers can often find cheaper rates than the standard, one-day pass by checking the Web site of their favorite area and buying lift tickets in advance, or by buying a multiday ticket. In addition, the Web site Liftopia (www.liftopia.com) sells discounted lift tickets to resorts throughout North America.
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By
December 19, 2008
Ski Report
Where Lifts Cost Less By SARAH TUFF
THE price of a one-day lift ticket on a weekend at Vail Ski Resort in Colorado is $97; at Stowe Mountain Resort in Vermont it is $89. (And don’t even start thinking about the potentially dizzying costs of lodging and travel.)
But there are ways around high lift costs, without pretending to be sick so you can ski on a work day, or that you are under age 12, or that you know how to skin up the mountain. Skiers and riders can head to some of the country’s lesser-known ski areas, where rates are often a fraction of those at the bigger resorts.
No, a place like Snow King Resort (www.snowking.com) in Wyoming may not boast as much thigh-pounding vertical or skiable terrain as its natty neighbor, Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. But both areas share the same town, and many people will find themselves perfectly satisfied with (if not elated by) the $41 Snow King experience — and with a few extra dollars to spend on Jackson’s après-ski scene.
“You don’t have to be a jet-setter,” said Michael Berry, president of the National Ski Areas Association, who praised smaller, less expensive ski areas for keeping alive the feel of skiing in the 1970s. “You sit in the cafeteria after buying your lift ticket, and it’s a little reminiscent of a less complicated day.”
A day on the slopes at dozens of areas can cost less than $50. As Mr. Berry pointed out, many ski areas in the Midwest qualify, including spots like Crystal Mountain (www.crystalmountain.com) in Michigan and Afton Alps (www.aftonalps.com) in Minnesota. Here’s a nationwide ski sampler.
Camden Snow Bowl
Camden, Me.
Within a lobster claw’s reach of the Atlantic, the 80-acre Camden Snow Bowl gets an annual snowfall of 72 inches and has snowmaking on less than half of the mountain — so it’s best to nose the Subaru there right after a storm. The main draws of this municipal facility (on the verge of a major face-lift thanks to the Ragged Mountain Recreation Area Redevelopment Project) are its small-town charm and the views of Penobscot Bay. “You can see the ocean from the slopes,” said Greg Sweetser of the Ski Maine Association. You can night-ski on several runs, too.
The Camden Snow Bowl is also home to the United States National Toboggan Championships, on Feb. 6 to 8 this season. Skiers lucky enough to find a room in town that weekend will find everybody talking toboggan.
One-day adult weekend lift ticket (9 a.m. to 4 p.m.): $33. Information: www.camdensnowbowl.com.
Sipapu Ski and Summer Resort
Vadito, N.M.
Mother Nature has already been kind to this 200-acre ski area in the Carson National Forest, 20 miles southeast of Taos. Some autumn snow and cold temperatures allowed Sipapu to open on Nov. 15. And while skiers and riders won’t find the knee-knocking steeps of Taos Ski Valley, they will discover 41 trails of decent length, including seven double-black-diamond slopes.
Sipapu’s two terrain parks are less crowded than those in larger resorts, making them a good place to try out new tricks. And for those who want to try a whole new sport on snow, Sipapu also offers lessons and rentals for ski biking (just what it sounds like). The ski area gives free lift tickets every day to skiers under 6, fourth graders, 40-year-olds (really) and those 70 and older.
One-day adult weekend lift ticket (9 a.m. to 4 p.m.): $39. Information: www.sipapunm.com.
Ski Cooper
Leadville, Colo.
At 10,152 feet, Leadville, Colo., claims to be the highest incorporated city in North America, and its also lofty playground is this 26-run ski area. It sits atop Tennessee Pass, one of the training sites for the 10th Mountain Division for World War II, and if skiers and riders aren’t giddy from the altitude, they might be from the 2,400 acres of snowcat-served backcountry skiing on the Continental Divide. (Tours are a splurge, costing $290 to $325.)
But for those who want to stay inbound, Ski Cooper caters to families. Long, easy cruisers like Tenderfoot and Sitzmark mosey down the mountain, giving everyone ample time to admire surrounding peaks like Mount Elbert and Mount Massive.
One-day adult weekend lift ticket (9 a.m. to 4 p.m.): $42. Information: www.skicooper.com.
Howelsen Hill Ski Area
Steamboat Springs, Colo.
Receiving the same “champagne powder” as the neighboring Steamboat resort, Howelsen Hill is a town-operated training area that has helped send more than 64 athletes, including the 2003 Nordic combined world champion Johnny Spillane, to the Winter Olympics.
Howelsen has 15 trails served by four lifts. If the fun runs out on the downhill side, visitors can switch over to cross-country skiing on nearly 13 miles of trails or try out the terrain park.
One-day adult weekend lift ticket (9 a.m. to 4 p.m.): $16. Information: steamboatsprings.net.
Bridger Bowl
Bozeman, Mont.
Around Bozeman, the most reliable snow report is found atop the historic Baxter Hotel. If the blue light is flashing, it means that nearby Bridger Bowl has more than two inches of fresh snow.
And chances are that traveling powder hounds can actually stay right in town (and not crash at a friend’s pad) and ski 2,000-acre Bridger, thanks to the affordability of the nonprofit community ski area. “It’s one of those breathtaking places,” Mr. Berry said.
This season, Bridger is adding more than 300 acres of lift-served ridge terrain: steep, ungroomed and unmarked trails that will require expert skiers and riders to carry avalanche transceivers. Beginners and intermediates will find fully half of the ski area devoted to gentler runs.
One-day adult weekend lift ticket (9 a.m. to 4 p.m.): $45. Information: www.bridgerbowl.com.
Badger Pass Ski Area
Yosemite National Park, Calif.
Long after the summer tourists have retreated from Yosemite National Park, winter storms turn Badger Pass into a friendly, low-key ski area. Most of the terrain is beginner or intermediate, and mild temperatures create tolerable learning conditions.
Badger has 10 runs, and plenty to do once skiers and riders have notched enough laps, starting with an expansive deck for soaking up the California sunshine. The park also works with Yosemite Mountaineering School to offer backcountry ski tours throughout the Sierra Nevada range.
One-day adult weekend lift ticket (9 a.m. to 4 p.m.): $42. Information: www.badgerpass.com.
Cochran’s Ski Area
Richmond, Vt.
Blink while driving along I-89 near Burlington, Vt., and you’ll miss Cochran’s, which has just three lifts and six trails on 350 vertical feet. But since 1961, when it first opened for children and had a single rope tow, this little molehill has churned out a mountain of world-class skiers; the family’s own Barbara Ann Cochran won Olympic gold in 1972, while Jimmy Cochran now competes on the World Cup circuit.
Today, Cochran’s is still for kids. The nonprofit area claims to introduce skiing to more than 800 local schoolchildren each year, and teaches parents how to teach their little ones. It’s a rambunctious, winter-loving place and can be just as much fun for adults.
One-day adult weekend lift ticket (9 a.m. to 4 p.m.): $20. Information: www.cochranskiarea.com.
Other Options
Larger, more expensive resorts don’t have to be a washout for those on a budget. Skiers can often find cheaper rates than the standard, one-day pass by checking the Web site of their favorite area and buying lift tickets in advance, or by buying a multiday ticket. In addition, the Web site Liftopia (www.liftopia.com) sells discounted lift tickets to resorts throughout North America.
Friday, December 12, 2008
American Journeys | Gila National Forest, New Mexico Walking a Dream of Desolation By KEITH MULVIHILL
December 12, 2008
American Journeys | Gila National Forest, New Mexico Walking a Dream of Desolation By KEITH MULVIHILL
THE sun dipped overhead, casting a thick glow of yellow-orange light that radiated off narrow canyon walls. The sound of rushing water filled the chasm, a steady, satisfying whoosh from Whitewater Creek, a stream charging over boulders and through gaps about 20 feet below me. It would have been enough just to be standing there, taking it in. But I was walking directly into this spectacle on a zigzagging metal path high over the water, angling deeper into steep-walled Whitewater Canyon.
On Day 2 of a trip in and around the Gila National Forest, I had made my way five miles to this spot outside Glenwood, a speck of a town in a far-flung area of southwestern New Mexico. I was navigating the 300-foot-long namesake section of the Catwalk National Recreation Trail — a metal walkway clinging to towering vertical slabs of rock.
In the 1890s, workers using muscle power and ropes ran a pipeline along the wall of this canyon to carry water to a mill that processed gold and silver ore. They moved along on planks above the pipes, calling this their catwalk. In the 1930s, long after the mill went defunct, the Civilian Conservation Corps was assigned the task of salvaging the 18-inch pipe and turning the support structure into a safely walkable recreation attraction.
Some of the hand-forged hardware supporting the catwalk today was drilled into the rocks in the original pipeline project, and the entire trail, though only a mile long, is visually action-packed. The last leg is an Indiana Jones-style metal suspension bridge that dangles about 40 feet above the rapid stream. Then the path ends abruptly on a rock ledge.
But the catwalk trail barely scratches the surface of the natural beauty and abundance found in this area. Just beyond this canyon, the scruffy, jagged terrain surges skyward. Steep slopes form the flanks of the Mogollon Mountains, a solid wall delineating the western edge of the sprawling Gila Wilderness, which, in 1924, under the guidance of the conservationist Aldo Leopold, became the nation's first designated wilderness area. As envisioned by Leopold, the term "wilderness" would define "a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two weeks' pack trip, and devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man."
Today, the Gila Wilderness and the Aldo Leopold Wilderness, which borders just to the east, together contain more than 750,000 acres of unspoiled land, forming the heart of the Gila National Forest — 3.3 million acres of publicly owned forest and range land. The forest, southwest of Albuquerque, straddles a 170-mile stretch of the Continental Divide and teems with wildlife. Flowing through it is the Gila, one of the few undammed rivers in the West.
This furrowed countryside, with its mix of canyons, mesas and grasslands, makes for a three- or four-day adventure with miles of vistas and a smattering of towns where meals smothered in green chilies set your tongue on fire. (After the Catwalk, hungry hikers can recharge with burgers and milkshakes amid the cowboyish ambience of the Blue Front Bar Cafe in Glenwood.)
It's farther down the road (about nine miles south) where sightseers can truly begin to appreciate the size of the magically desolate land that surrounds them. At the Aldo Leopold Vista, if you can tear yourself away from the dreamy view of the Gila Wilderness, there are plaques to read and local historical facts to ponder. But the glorious panorama beckons, the horizon taunts: "What are you doing over there? Come over here!"
On a short backpacking trip in the Mogollon (pronounced mo-go-YON) Mountains, I was lucky enough to get a taste of this rugged, wild place. About five miles in, just over Windy Gap (via Little Dry Trail No. 180), my hiking companion and unofficial guide, Michael Berman, a friend of a friend, stopped about 10 paces ahead of me to take in the view.
"This is the Gila," he announced, gesturing outward to a plunging ravine, up to craggy pinnacles, and over toward buff-colored rock faces blazing in late-afternoon sunlight. Snaking groves of ponderosa pine wended their way out of small box canyons and up steep gorges, spreading to dominate the hulking mountaintops.
Mr. Berman, an artist and photographer, lives nearby with his wife and has hiked countless miles in the Gila. He described once being startled by two bears tumbling out of a tree and, another time, coming upon a mountain lion with a freshly killed elk.
Exploring this wilderness takes patience, he said. "It can be hard to get into. There's no one place to go." But for anyone willing to devote a little time and expend the energy, there are hundreds of miles of trails and much to discover.
Mr. Berman's stark black-and-white photographs of the Gila capture the enormousness and mystery of this seemingly desolate land. A 2008 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for a project photographing grasslands in the Chihuahuan Desert, he is drawn to barren locales. "If you attend and look closely at a place," he told me, "there is a certain magic and beauty to it." The light was fading when we set up camp in Big Dry Canyon, at the confluence of Big Dry and Spruce Creeks. The streams were gushing from a recent spate of rain; water tumbled over boulders and splashed into deep, dark brown pools. We cooked steaks on hot coals, and tequila kept the chilly night air at bay.
The next morning, we made the strenuous climb back out of the canyon. "The Gila always makes you pay to get into good places," Mr. Berman said.
Later we drove north on Highway 180 to the small cattle ranching and timber town of Reserve, where Ella's Cafe, on Main Street, serves up tasty jalapeño poppers and green chili cheeseburgers. A few doors down is Uncle Bill's Bar, where the ceiling is adorned by T-shirts from teams of forest-fire fighters — called hotshot crews — and a smattering of suspended guns and rifles. A sign near the bar announced a pool tournament every Friday night.
Accessible from Reserve is a web of gravel timber and ranch roads crisscrossing the northern section of the national forest. Up here, grasslands spread out atop a high plateau, forming magnificent golden vistas: rolling hills dotted with piñons and junipers, dark green stands of conifers in deep crevices. Driving east along Forest Road 141, in the T-Bar grasslands, we spotted a lone pronghorn antelope in the distance, its white-blazed flanks flashing as it ambled in the bright sunlight.
Most people who visit the Gila make Silver City their home base. A former mining town, it oozes Old West charm, especially along Bullard Street, where handsome adobe and brick buildings line the pavement. Galleries, bars and restaurants are plentiful, and the Javalina Coffee House serves up strong brew and snacks. Down the road, Nancy's Silver City Cafe specializes in New Mexican food.
The most accessible way into the Gila Wilderness is Route 15, a narrow and winding road that heads north out of Silver City, stretching over 42 scenic miles. Visitors can stop along the way to bask in natural hot springs. Gila Hot Springs Campground has three large ones, varying in temperature, nestled along the banks of the Gila River. The spot is open to day-trippers and campers alike.
"Wow, this is a cool place," I said to a couple of soakers. "Actually, it's pretty hot," a tie-dyed-bikini-clad woman cracked. Her male companion grinned. "If you want to get cool," she said, "get in here a few minutes and then sit up on the edge in the breeze."
Two hot springs away. I chatted with Abel Hinojosa, who was relaxing, au naturel, in the steamy water. He and his wife, who live near Las Cruces, were on a three-day respite, camping no more than 50 yards from the hot springs. "This is a lot more rustic than the more developed spots," Mr. Hinojosa said. "We like that." The previous night's full moon had made their nighttime soak especially memorable. "It was awesome," he said. "You could see the outline of the mountain ridge, and the whole area was filled with moonlight."
At the end of Route 15 is Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument, a spectacular collection of American Indian ruins. A one-mile loop trail gracefully ascends about 180 feet above a narrow canyon. Walking inside enormous south-facing caves, among the pale stone walls, it's easy to see the appeal of living in such a place. The serene, pleasingly minimalist structures and the jaw-dropping view of the adjacent rocky-canyon walls, decked out in tall pine trees, gave the feeling of being in a heavenly penthouse.
A trickle of water over the cave's gaping archway created tiny water droplets that sparkled like falling diamonds in the late morning sun. Zump Urycki, 33, a volunteer guide, summed it up nicely: "The perfectness of all this is pretty unbelievable."
OLD TIMES IN NEW MEXICO
INFORMATION about the Gila National Forest and the Gila Wilderness can be found at www2.srs.fs.fed.us/r3/gila/. Maps ($9) are available at any of the six ranger district offices listed on the Web site. The Silver City office is at 3005 East Camino del Bosque (575-388-8201).
The Catwalk National Recreation Trail is open daily from sunrise to sunset. Parking is $3 a vehicle.
The Blue Front Bar Cafe (575-539-2561) is on Highway 180 in Glenwood.
The turnoff for the Little Dry Trail 180 is about a mile north of the Aldo Leopold Vista on Highway 180. Turn right on Sacaton Road (Forest Road 147). When the road forks, turn left onto Forest Road 196 and drive to the trailhead.
In Reserve, Ella's Cafe (575-533-6111) at 96 Main Street and Uncle Bill's Bar (575-533-6369) at 230 Main Street are good stops. Rooms at the Rode Inn Motel, 200 Main Street (575-533-6661) are $58 to $79 a night.
Silver City offers numerous lodging options for a variety of budgets. The Palace Hotel (106 West Broadway; 575-388-1811; www.zianet.com/palacehotel; $48 to $79) is within walking distance of restaurants, bars and art galleries. On North Bullard Street are the Javalina Coffee House (No. 201; 575-388-1350) and Nancy's Silver City Cafe (No. 514; 575-388-3480).
The Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument (575-536-9461; www.nps.gov/gicl) accepts visitors from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily; $3 a person and $10 a family
Gila Hot Springs Campground (575-536-9551; $3 a person for day use and $4 overnight) is on Access Road off Highway 15, about 3.5 miles south of the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument visitor center.
Works by Michael Berman (www.fragmentedimages.com) are currently being exhibited at the Santa Fe Art Institute and Lannan Foundation Gallery in Santa Fe.
http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/12/12/travel/escapes/12american.html?ei=5070&pagewanted=print
http://snipurl.com/83l6r
American Journeys | Gila National Forest, New Mexico Walking a Dream of Desolation By KEITH MULVIHILL
THE sun dipped overhead, casting a thick glow of yellow-orange light that radiated off narrow canyon walls. The sound of rushing water filled the chasm, a steady, satisfying whoosh from Whitewater Creek, a stream charging over boulders and through gaps about 20 feet below me. It would have been enough just to be standing there, taking it in. But I was walking directly into this spectacle on a zigzagging metal path high over the water, angling deeper into steep-walled Whitewater Canyon.
On Day 2 of a trip in and around the Gila National Forest, I had made my way five miles to this spot outside Glenwood, a speck of a town in a far-flung area of southwestern New Mexico. I was navigating the 300-foot-long namesake section of the Catwalk National Recreation Trail — a metal walkway clinging to towering vertical slabs of rock.
In the 1890s, workers using muscle power and ropes ran a pipeline along the wall of this canyon to carry water to a mill that processed gold and silver ore. They moved along on planks above the pipes, calling this their catwalk. In the 1930s, long after the mill went defunct, the Civilian Conservation Corps was assigned the task of salvaging the 18-inch pipe and turning the support structure into a safely walkable recreation attraction.
Some of the hand-forged hardware supporting the catwalk today was drilled into the rocks in the original pipeline project, and the entire trail, though only a mile long, is visually action-packed. The last leg is an Indiana Jones-style metal suspension bridge that dangles about 40 feet above the rapid stream. Then the path ends abruptly on a rock ledge.
But the catwalk trail barely scratches the surface of the natural beauty and abundance found in this area. Just beyond this canyon, the scruffy, jagged terrain surges skyward. Steep slopes form the flanks of the Mogollon Mountains, a solid wall delineating the western edge of the sprawling Gila Wilderness, which, in 1924, under the guidance of the conservationist Aldo Leopold, became the nation's first designated wilderness area. As envisioned by Leopold, the term "wilderness" would define "a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two weeks' pack trip, and devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man."
Today, the Gila Wilderness and the Aldo Leopold Wilderness, which borders just to the east, together contain more than 750,000 acres of unspoiled land, forming the heart of the Gila National Forest — 3.3 million acres of publicly owned forest and range land. The forest, southwest of Albuquerque, straddles a 170-mile stretch of the Continental Divide and teems with wildlife. Flowing through it is the Gila, one of the few undammed rivers in the West.
This furrowed countryside, with its mix of canyons, mesas and grasslands, makes for a three- or four-day adventure with miles of vistas and a smattering of towns where meals smothered in green chilies set your tongue on fire. (After the Catwalk, hungry hikers can recharge with burgers and milkshakes amid the cowboyish ambience of the Blue Front Bar Cafe in Glenwood.)
It's farther down the road (about nine miles south) where sightseers can truly begin to appreciate the size of the magically desolate land that surrounds them. At the Aldo Leopold Vista, if you can tear yourself away from the dreamy view of the Gila Wilderness, there are plaques to read and local historical facts to ponder. But the glorious panorama beckons, the horizon taunts: "What are you doing over there? Come over here!"
On a short backpacking trip in the Mogollon (pronounced mo-go-YON) Mountains, I was lucky enough to get a taste of this rugged, wild place. About five miles in, just over Windy Gap (via Little Dry Trail No. 180), my hiking companion and unofficial guide, Michael Berman, a friend of a friend, stopped about 10 paces ahead of me to take in the view.
"This is the Gila," he announced, gesturing outward to a plunging ravine, up to craggy pinnacles, and over toward buff-colored rock faces blazing in late-afternoon sunlight. Snaking groves of ponderosa pine wended their way out of small box canyons and up steep gorges, spreading to dominate the hulking mountaintops.
Mr. Berman, an artist and photographer, lives nearby with his wife and has hiked countless miles in the Gila. He described once being startled by two bears tumbling out of a tree and, another time, coming upon a mountain lion with a freshly killed elk.
Exploring this wilderness takes patience, he said. "It can be hard to get into. There's no one place to go." But for anyone willing to devote a little time and expend the energy, there are hundreds of miles of trails and much to discover.
Mr. Berman's stark black-and-white photographs of the Gila capture the enormousness and mystery of this seemingly desolate land. A 2008 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for a project photographing grasslands in the Chihuahuan Desert, he is drawn to barren locales. "If you attend and look closely at a place," he told me, "there is a certain magic and beauty to it." The light was fading when we set up camp in Big Dry Canyon, at the confluence of Big Dry and Spruce Creeks. The streams were gushing from a recent spate of rain; water tumbled over boulders and splashed into deep, dark brown pools. We cooked steaks on hot coals, and tequila kept the chilly night air at bay.
The next morning, we made the strenuous climb back out of the canyon. "The Gila always makes you pay to get into good places," Mr. Berman said.
Later we drove north on Highway 180 to the small cattle ranching and timber town of Reserve, where Ella's Cafe, on Main Street, serves up tasty jalapeño poppers and green chili cheeseburgers. A few doors down is Uncle Bill's Bar, where the ceiling is adorned by T-shirts from teams of forest-fire fighters — called hotshot crews — and a smattering of suspended guns and rifles. A sign near the bar announced a pool tournament every Friday night.
Accessible from Reserve is a web of gravel timber and ranch roads crisscrossing the northern section of the national forest. Up here, grasslands spread out atop a high plateau, forming magnificent golden vistas: rolling hills dotted with piñons and junipers, dark green stands of conifers in deep crevices. Driving east along Forest Road 141, in the T-Bar grasslands, we spotted a lone pronghorn antelope in the distance, its white-blazed flanks flashing as it ambled in the bright sunlight.
Most people who visit the Gila make Silver City their home base. A former mining town, it oozes Old West charm, especially along Bullard Street, where handsome adobe and brick buildings line the pavement. Galleries, bars and restaurants are plentiful, and the Javalina Coffee House serves up strong brew and snacks. Down the road, Nancy's Silver City Cafe specializes in New Mexican food.
The most accessible way into the Gila Wilderness is Route 15, a narrow and winding road that heads north out of Silver City, stretching over 42 scenic miles. Visitors can stop along the way to bask in natural hot springs. Gila Hot Springs Campground has three large ones, varying in temperature, nestled along the banks of the Gila River. The spot is open to day-trippers and campers alike.
"Wow, this is a cool place," I said to a couple of soakers. "Actually, it's pretty hot," a tie-dyed-bikini-clad woman cracked. Her male companion grinned. "If you want to get cool," she said, "get in here a few minutes and then sit up on the edge in the breeze."
Two hot springs away. I chatted with Abel Hinojosa, who was relaxing, au naturel, in the steamy water. He and his wife, who live near Las Cruces, were on a three-day respite, camping no more than 50 yards from the hot springs. "This is a lot more rustic than the more developed spots," Mr. Hinojosa said. "We like that." The previous night's full moon had made their nighttime soak especially memorable. "It was awesome," he said. "You could see the outline of the mountain ridge, and the whole area was filled with moonlight."
At the end of Route 15 is Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument, a spectacular collection of American Indian ruins. A one-mile loop trail gracefully ascends about 180 feet above a narrow canyon. Walking inside enormous south-facing caves, among the pale stone walls, it's easy to see the appeal of living in such a place. The serene, pleasingly minimalist structures and the jaw-dropping view of the adjacent rocky-canyon walls, decked out in tall pine trees, gave the feeling of being in a heavenly penthouse.
A trickle of water over the cave's gaping archway created tiny water droplets that sparkled like falling diamonds in the late morning sun. Zump Urycki, 33, a volunteer guide, summed it up nicely: "The perfectness of all this is pretty unbelievable."
OLD TIMES IN NEW MEXICO
INFORMATION about the Gila National Forest and the Gila Wilderness can be found at www2.srs.fs.fed.us/r3/gila/. Maps ($9) are available at any of the six ranger district offices listed on the Web site. The Silver City office is at 3005 East Camino del Bosque (575-388-8201).
The Catwalk National Recreation Trail is open daily from sunrise to sunset. Parking is $3 a vehicle.
The Blue Front Bar Cafe (575-539-2561) is on Highway 180 in Glenwood.
The turnoff for the Little Dry Trail 180 is about a mile north of the Aldo Leopold Vista on Highway 180. Turn right on Sacaton Road (Forest Road 147). When the road forks, turn left onto Forest Road 196 and drive to the trailhead.
In Reserve, Ella's Cafe (575-533-6111) at 96 Main Street and Uncle Bill's Bar (575-533-6369) at 230 Main Street are good stops. Rooms at the Rode Inn Motel, 200 Main Street (575-533-6661) are $58 to $79 a night.
Silver City offers numerous lodging options for a variety of budgets. The Palace Hotel (106 West Broadway; 575-388-1811; www.zianet.com/palacehotel; $48 to $79) is within walking distance of restaurants, bars and art galleries. On North Bullard Street are the Javalina Coffee House (No. 201; 575-388-1350) and Nancy's Silver City Cafe (No. 514; 575-388-3480).
The Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument (575-536-9461; www.nps.gov/gicl) accepts visitors from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily; $3 a person and $10 a family
Gila Hot Springs Campground (575-536-9551; $3 a person for day use and $4 overnight) is on Access Road off Highway 15, about 3.5 miles south of the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument visitor center.
Works by Michael Berman (www.fragmentedimages.com) are currently being exhibited at the Santa Fe Art Institute and Lannan Foundation Gallery in Santa Fe.
http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/12/12/travel/escapes/12american.html?ei=5070&pagewanted=print
http://snipurl.com/83l6r
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