Category Archives: Contemporary Food Culture

Book Review: Drink More Wine! A Simple Guide to Peak Experiences NOW

18 Wednesday Dec 2019

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claridgeCross-posted at Three Quarks Daily.

It’s the holiday season and time to think about presents for the budding wine lover in your life. Of course, any season is the right time to think about that. You should always support your local wine lover. One place to begin is this compelling book by long-time food critic Jon Palmer Claridge entitled Drink More Wine! A Simple Guide to Peak Experiences Now. Most books on wine are meant to inform. This book is no exception, but it is also meant to inspire. It performs both tasks admirably and raises a philosophical issue to ponder as well.

Claridge delivers essential information about varietals and wine regions in easily digestible, bit-sized morsels along with helpful advice on topics such as how to read a wine label, wine and food pairings, setting up wine tastings, storing and serving wines. He covers just enough grape varietals and regions to pique the interest of people new to wine without weighing things down with too much information. (There are, thankfully, no dissertations on soil types or yeast strains.) He manages an authoritative voice without sounding like a snob and most of this information is disseminated via charming, personal vignettes from his extensive travel and entertainment experiences. Most helpful are his recommendations for wines that are affordable and available at even modestly well-stocked wine stores thus avoiding the common complaint that wine writers focus on wines that ordinary consumers can’t find. His advice about buying budget wine in the supermarket is particularly helpful. (Tip: Beware the bait and switch. Stores will use high scores from one superior vintage to sell that wine from a different vintage).

Wine enthusiasts with a passing knowledge of wine regions and varietals will not be surprised by most of this information. But for people just getting into wine or thinking about getting into wine, this book provides, not only the information they need to begin to sort out the complex world of wine, but also the inspiration to continue to improve their wine knowledge. His advice about how to taste wine and improve one’s palate scrupulously avoids jargon and gently guides the reader toward thoughtfully paying attention to what you taste—because the message Claridge consistently articulates is that you will enjoy wine more the more knowledge you gain.

“As these steps become habit, each new glass becomes a playground. Or even better, a puzzle with multiple solutions. The harder you play, the greater the rewards”.

This persistent message that knowledge and thoughtful attention is essential to getting the most out of wine distinguishes his approach from many other wine books on the market. Despite the promise to “demystify” wine and make it accessible to newcomers, he never suggests that wine is easy, purely subjective so “drink what you like”, or lacking in important quality distinctions. In fact, he is clear that the pursuit of peak experiences in the realm of food and wine is an extremely rewarding but, nevertheless, life-long pursuit.

Which brings me to the inspirational part of the book. The insistence of the subtitle is no offhandedly proffered click bait. The promise of the book is not merely the enjoyment of wine as an everyday experience but the enjoyment of wine and food as a peak experience. The book is liberally peppered with enthusiastic stories about memorable meetings with legendary winemakers and visits to Michelin three-starred temples of gastronomy, the latter of which are described in excruciating detail, as if the reader could enjoy a peak experience of food by reading about it. This almost works. Claridge faces the dilemma all food writers face. We lack a vocabulary for describing taste and flavor. Thus, his accounts of gastronomic bliss consist of detailed lists of ingredients appended by superlatives. One dish is “swoon-worthy”, another is “divinely sigh-inducing”, another a revelation. Certain wine pairings are “mind-blowing”.  The choreography, coordination and attention to detail of the extraordinary service at Michelin-worthy restaurants always gets a mention. In short, Claridge enjoys being pampered and beguiled and thinks you should too. As much as this sounds a bit excessive, it does inspire. His enthusiasm is so rich and all-encompassing that if you aren’t motivated to start googling “Michelin restaurants near me” by the time you finish the book, you may lack the gene for peak experience.

Along the way we get a peak experience travel itinerary supported by light-handed advice about places to stay and things to do. An endearing account of a trip down the Danube is especially alluring. Although his passion for creative, meticulously prepared tasting menus is in the foreground, he devotes some attention to seeking out local food traditions if they are one-of-a-kind experiences—such as the lost art of the spice cake gâteau à la broche kept alive in the small hamlet of Sia in the Hautes-Pyrénées  of Southwestern France. He also gives a shout out to several adventurous chefs who lack Michelin stars but showcase Michelin chops. As he rightly points out, you can find peak experiences in almost every locale if you know where to look. Which brings me to another reason to like this book. He devotes considerable attention to up and coming wine regions as travel destinations including Long Island’s North Fork, Texas Hill Country, Virginia, and the Finger Lakes in the United States, as well as South Africa, UK, Greece, Mexico, and Canada. Many of the world’s storied wine regions have become pricey and crowded. Some of the best wine and food adventures can be had in these lesser known regions where they are very serious about their wines and all-in on attracting the global tourist trade.

If jetting to far-flung food and wine destinations is not on your agenda, peak experiences can be found at home as well. His discussions of home entertaining include much well-informed attention to wine and food pairing, again using wines that are readily available.  He provides suggestions for each varietal, as well as pairings to avoid. This includes some surprising pairings. I’m looking forward to trying a Gewurztraminer with raw tomatoes, a pairing which has never occurred to me. If you’re a creative home cook and enjoy pairing your dishes with wine, his discussion of how to add bridge flavors to your food to improve the match is especially useful. (Tip: Add dried cherries, mushrooms or white truffle oil to a dish to make it sing with Pinot Noir.) He thankfully dispenses with the outdated advice to serve only white wine with fish and red wine with meat.

He even gives advice on how to throw a food-theatrical dinner party for those so inclined. (Tip: Use as many plates, glasses, and as much silverware as possible.) If you’re really ambitious he includes a complete turducken recipe. (For the uninitiated, that is a deboned duck inside a deboned chicken inside a roast turkey.) The message? Peak experiences require lots of work.

Here is the philosophical issue. What is the secret sauce for achieving peak experience now? On one uncharitable reading of the book the secret is cheap wine and expensive meals. There is tension between his zeal to persuade prospective wine enthusiasts to seize the day and drink what is affordably available and his zeal to persuade everyone that the road to joyful ecstasy runs through the world’s temples of gastronomy such as Noma or Arzak. This equation doesn’t quite compute. The problem is that a peak experience is by definition out of the ordinary—only pleasures rare, exciting and deeply moving count. The idea that you can have one by slugging (or even reverently sipping) a bottle of supermarket plonk is silly. So I think that is not what he is arguing. Instead, the takeaway message is that any journey toward peak experience must start somewhere. That “somewhere” can be anywhere you are—including the aisle at your local grocery store. But that is only the beginning. The rare, exciting, and deeply moving will not come cheaply or without effort but it is worth it. The trick is to begin NOW and allow an openness to experience to carry you along enabling the best the world has to offer to draw you in.

Alas, his epilogue “My Bout With Gout” shows the limits of that ardor.

If you read this book and follow his advice, you won’t become a wine expert overnight, but you will become a wine and food lover and who wouldn’t choose love over expertise?

Food Trends 2019

05 Thursday Dec 2019

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vegan cauliflower pizzaThe inevitable stories about trends in 2019 have started to appear. Two caught my eye today.

According to HuffPo, among The 10 Biggest Trends We Saw in 2019 were improvements to internal restaurant culture:

The #MeToo movement hugely defined restaurant culture in 2018, and intolerance for sexist, harassing and abusive behaviors happily continued to hold a position of top priority in 2019. In fact, 2019 saw restaurant owners, chefs and management reevaluating many of the prevalent industry practices that adversely affected employees.

It’s about time. After reading dearly departed Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential years ago (and witnessing a chef throw a knife at a waitress in my days as a dishwasher—he missed) I wondered why anyone would want to make a career working in restaurants.

And this article about GrubHub’s top food trends in 2019 articulates one reason why the wine business is struggling with younger people:

Vegetarian- or vegan-friendly options made up the majority of the food delivery service’s top 10 foods of the year.

  1. Cauliflower pizza: 650%
  2. Spicy Brussels sprouts: 622%
  3. Portobello empanada: 601%
  4. Black bean and sweet potato taco: 513%
  5. Miso pork ramen: 413%
  6. Chicken burger: 318%
  7. Bone broth: 298%
  8. Brown sugar milk [bubble] tea: 281%
  9. Vegan pad thai: 280%
  10. Impossible burger: 203%

Healthy-ish seems to have captured the imagination of millennials which some speculate means less or no alcohol. What happened to the heath benefits of red wine?

Misunderstanding the Role of the Food Critic

04 Monday Nov 2019

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restaurant criticLast week, New York Times restaurant critic Peter Wells published a scathing review of one of the iconic restaurants in the U.S.—Peter Lugar Steakhouse. Luger has been around since 1887 and is considered by many to be New York’s finest  steak house, appearing on many lists of the best restaurants in the U.S. But Wells complained about every dish he tasted, as well as the price, claiming he felt scammed.

This is neither surprising nor noteworthy. Wells is well-known for the occasional vituperative, negative review and I’ve never been to Peter Lugar so I have no opinion to offer. But what I did find noteworthy is one response to Well’s review in Huffington Post by Nancy Koziol. Posing a question about whether critics are “out of touch” she writes:

But does Wells’ opinion really hold much weight?

According to Facebook, the steakhouse is still knocking it out of the park: It has a rating of 4.7 out of 5 based on the opinion of about 4,200 of the site’s members. Scroll past the last few days of reactionary reviews and it’s clear that people love Luger, which makes one question whether professional critic reviews speak to the average diner. Luger’s reputation on Yelp is great, with over 5,000 reviewers giving it an overall 4-star rating. Several 5-star reviews have come rolling in this week.

She then goes on to look at the continued popularity of several restaurants that Wells has trashed in the past.

The underlying assumption of the whole article is that the validity of food criticism is somehow dependent on whether it conforms to popular taste. A critic that goes against a Yelp rating is “out of touch”. This is beyond silly. If the purpose of food criticism is to conform to popular taste, then critics really are irrelevant. Since we have Yelp and Facebook to tell us what’s popular we don’t need critics.

This has it backwards. The purpose of food criticism is to hold restaurants to a higher standard than mere popularity. The relevance of food criticism today depends on the idea that what is popular may not be good, and someone with vastly more knowledge and experience than the average diner can provide a useful perspective on culinary matters. The problem with crowdsourced opinion is twofold. First, 1000 uninformed opinions do not add up to an informed opinion. Secondly, most human beings have a tendency to follow the crowd and approve of what’s in fashion. Crowdsourced opinion has no antidote to that tendency and is in fact nothing but a measure of “trendslavery”.

And so the food critic’s job is to point out when the emperor has no clothes. The last thing we want from a food critic (or wine critic for that matter) is to rubberstamp conventional opinion.

The Influence of “Terroir” in Bourbon Production

17 Thursday Oct 2019

Posted by in Contemporary Food Culture, Philosophy of Food and Wine

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bourbon barrelsI’ve been doing some research on bourbon recently for a writing project I was hired to do. One question I wanted to answer was whether the idea of terroir (or some similar concept related to the “taste” of a place) plays a role in quality differences. My conclusion is that location does play an important role although it differs significantly from the role terroir plays in wine.

Basically there are five factors that influence the flavor of bourbon: water, the grain recipe, fermentation, distillation, and maturation in oak.

By law bourbon must be made from at least 51% corn and typically includes some rye, barley or wheat as well. The precise ratio of grains (called the mashbill) matters a great deal but I doubt it matters where the grain was grown as long as the plants were healthy. This is the main difference between wine and whiskey with regard to terroir. For bourbon, the main ingredient could be grown anywhere.

Water however is often mentioned in Bourbon lore. Kentucky distillers insist water resting on the limestone soils of Eastern Kentucky are ideal for making Bourbon. But as far as I can tell, they are inflating its importance. What matters is that the water used to make the mash be mineral rich, alkaline (i.e. high PH) and low in iron. There are countless places around the world that would satisfy those criteria. In any case you could add calcium carbonate to the water to elevate the PH. Water is important but I doubt it is water from a specific location that matters. Famed Kentucky producer Brown-Foreman uses treated municipal water for their celebrated Old Forester bourbon.

The strain of yeast used influences the flavor of bourbon. Although many producers use commercial yeast, some cultivate their own strains and take great pains to make sure it is consistent from year to year. But that is not quite the same as using whatever ambient yeast happens to be around in the environment as  some natural winemakers do. As it is with wine, this is an under-explored dimension of terroir. But again it isn’t obvious that location is the variable here.

The distillation process differs from distillery to distillery and differences in equipment can make a substantial difference. But this has nothing to do with location.

That brings us to the most important dimension of bourbon-making—the aging process. Depending on who you ask, 50-80 percent of the flavor of Bourbon comes from the barrel. By law, Bourbon must be aged in 100% charred, new oak barrels. The minimum aging requirement is two years for a spirit to be called straight bourbon.  In addition to the degree of char, the type and quality of the wood matters a great deal and bourbon producers are careful about where they source their wood. Thus, I suppose you could argue the terroir of the wood is a factor in bourbon quality.

But the source of the wood is not the most important factor in the aging process. The most important differentiator among styles of Bourbon has to do with the location of the warehouse as well as the location of the barrels inside the warehouse. Bourbon is almost always aged in warehouses without much temperature control. Thus, the ambient temperature influences how the bourbon ages. Barrels subject to more heat will have more oak character because heat advances the chemical reactions going on in the barrel. Whiskey aged in cooler areas will age more slowly and can be aged for a longer time. Hot, dry conditions will increase evaporation thus increasing the proof of the alcohol, cool or humid conditions will inhibit evaporation keeping the alcohol levels more moderate. This applies not only to the region of the country where the aging takes place but the location in the warehouse as well. The top floors are typically warmer than the bottom floors. Many producers have a “favorite floor” where they expect to get their best whiskeys. Of course, most bourbons are blends of many barrels, a process that would diminish the influence of warehouse location. (Perhaps that is an argument for more single barrel bottlings.)

This is a clear case where location matters, not because of soil characteristics but because of ambient temperatures during aging.

Now I Know Why I Stopped Drinking Beer

19 Thursday Sep 2019

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no to beerI drank beer back in the day when the only decision was Bud or Miller. Then I discovered wine, and beer became only an occasional thirst quencher. Then craft beer came along and beer became interesting again. Artisan, local producers. Fierce arguments over purity and authenticity. Total dedication to craft. Insurgent brewers railing against Big Beer. There was a lot there for a wine lover to like.

But my interest in it again waned—to many IPA’s, too little differentiation, nothing to hold my interest.

This article in Imbibe Magazine explains what’s going on in the beer industry today, and it’s not a pretty sight. No wonder I lost interest.

Angry rhetoric has since faded like foam on an hour-old beer. Where lines were once drawn in the sand, crossed at peril to a brewery’s reputation, the sand’s now been shoveled into a snow globe and shaken willy-nilly. Forget tradition. Brewers are serving fruited goses through slushy machines and packing imperial stouts with peanut butter cups, as well as taking tea and seltzer on a hard turn.

Ownership lines are also blurring. In an era of heightened competition, with more than 7,000 breweries in America and climbing, independent breweries are teaming up to better weather the economic storm. Victory, Southern Tier and Sixpoint now comprise Artisanal Brewing Ventures, while in May, The Boston Beer Company—the makers of Samuel Adams beer—merged with Dogfish Head in a $300-million deal. It’s tempting to deem this a new beer landscape, but that’s too mild. A cultural and economic earthquake is rattling the industry’s foundation, with no certainty of how things will settle, or crumble beyond recognition.

“Teaming up to better weather the economic storm” is a polite way of saying industry consolidation. Big brewers swallowing up the little guy; the little guy trying to become a big guy so they can swallow up the little guys that are left.

As the article points out, there never was much of a commitment to localism on the part of the beer consumer. There is a good reason for that. Unlike wine, location makes little difference in beer production. It makes little difference where you get your hops or grains as long as the quality is there. Aside from the moral imperative to support your local business, there isn’t much of an argument for beer localism.

And it’s no longer about making good beer—it’s about finding a gimmick.

Breweries are entering a permissive era that’s formally blessed by the Brewers Association, which last year eliminated the requirement that a brewery’s production be mainly beer. Most prominently, boozy sparkling water has bubbled up, headlined by Boston Beer’s Truly Hard Seltzer….Branching beyond beer lets breweries flex their muscles, utilizing infrastructure and fermentation know-how to fashion newfangled beverages. …Golden Road now offers the Spiked Agua Fresca in flavors such as cucumber-lime, while 10 Barrel makes canned cocktails and the LQD Creative Liquids line, including green tea and coconut water gone hard.…It behooves breweries to create compelling experiential draws, which brings this story to the slushy machine. Breweries from Boston’s Trillium to Los Angeles Ale Works have loaded the churning contraptions with fruity sour beers and more, served frozen and sometimes topped with tiny umbrellas. “We’ve had people come in that don’t drink beer and have really gravitated toward the slushies,” …

No thanks.  These are desperation moves, flailing like a fish out of water. And it will happen to wine if industry consolidation continues. Once you lose what makes you distinctive, it’s a race to the bottom.

The Art of the Lobster Roll

16 Monday Sep 2019

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coreaThe art of the lobster roll is a lot like the art of winemaking—don’t do anything to screw it up. It’s all about fresh lobster that came off the boat that morning.

I’ve been on the east coast of Nova Scotia and Maine for the past few weeks so I’ve become an expert.

Here’s a few guidelines for a righteous lobster roll.

1. You must have the proper roll. Not a hot dog bun, please no hamburger buns. The roll must have flat sides that are generously buttered and then toasted so each bite has a buttery hint. its lobster; there must be butter.

2. The lobster must be exceedingly fresh and cooked to the perfect temperature making the meat firm but never tough or mealy.

3. The lobster should be lightly dressed in just a bit of mayonnaise, to add moisture and fat. My preference is for a few thin slices of celery in the mayo for crunch and sprinkled with a few chives, but neither are necessary. Please do not put a piece of lettuce in the bun. And don’t sprinkle it with old bay seasoning. That’s just a distraction.

4. The bun should overflow with lobster. Ideally there should be a mix of claw meat and tail meat.

5.  Where you eat matters. This is the most important rule. A lobster roll must be eaten in sight of where the lobster was brought to shore, preferably in a beat up old shack on an ocean pier surrounded by lobster boats, with a briny smell in the air, seagulls on the attack and a waitress who says “labstah”.

6. There is one acceptable variation. In Connecticut they eat lobster rolls with the meat warmed and bathed in drawn butter. This is really, really good. But sadly they no longer harvest many lobsters in Connecticut due to the waters becoming too warm and so are in violation of (5). If you find this style in the proper environment you hit the jackpot.

side-streetWhere does one find this perfect lobster roll?

This mammoth sandwich at Side Street in Bar Harbor Maine had the proper mix of claw and tail meat, but they put old bay seasoning on it (why?), there was too much mayo, and it wasn’t quite as fresh as others I tasted. And the restaurant is in town elbow to elbow with hordes from the cruise ships.daves-at-halifax

At Halifax, Nova Scotia on the boardwalk downtown I had a singular taste experience. A lobster roll, one half dressed in traditional mayo with celery and one half warmed in butter. Almost perfect, but alas, it was consumed at a food court accompanied by a reggae band (who were quite good but one needs jerk chicken with ackee and saltfish when listening to reggae)

It was at Corea wharf north of Bar Harbor near the Schoodic Peninsula, where Lobster Roll satisfaction is to be found. A modestly sized sandwich of perfectly cooked, stunningly fresh claw and tail meat, perfectly dressed, overlooking the harbor pictured above—(1)-(5) satisfied well enough.coreas

Rappie Pie: An Acadian Delight

29 Thursday Aug 2019

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20190828_112558We’re in Halifax, Nova Scotia which of course is known for lobster, lobster and more lobster. But you can get fresh lobster almost anywhere.  The unique, distinctive cuisine in Nova Scotia is Acadian cooking.

The Acadians are descendants of French colonists who settled in Canada’s maritime provinces in the 17th and 18th centuries. When Britain went to war with France in 1756 they were expelled by the British (some made their way to Louisiana and became known as “Cajuns”. ) After the hostilities ended some returned to New Brunswick, parts of Quebec, and Nova Scotia and today they maintain a vibrant, minority culture here, especially in the southern part of the province.

20190828_120026When researching the food ways here, the one Acadian dish I especially wanted to try was Rappie Pie. But the only restaurant I could find that serves this labor intensive dish, Cafe l’Acadie, made it only on Sunday and we were planning on heading south midweek. So I thought I would have to settle for Chicken Fricot or fishcakes. Happily, when I asked the owner about their rappie pie, he just happened to have a prized corner piece left over from the weekend so I had my rappie pie plus an impromptu lesson on how to make it.

What is rappie pie? Well it isn’t pie. Its basically a potato cake mixed with broth and baked for four hours. You start by making homemade chicken broth seasoned with summer savory, reserving the chicken meat when it is cooked. (or you can roast the chicken separately). Meanwhile you grate your potatoes, soak them in cold water to remove starch, and then put them in a towel and squeeze the crap out of them until all the water is removed. (Key point: reserve the water and measure it so you know how much was removed.) Then mix the potatoes with hot chicken stock, replacing 3/4’s of the volume of the water that was removed forming a thick paste. Then take an aluminum pan and put a layer of potato mixture on the bottom, then a layer of sliced chicken, then another layer of potatoes on top of the chicken. Then top the whole thing with a layer of salt pork strips. Put it in the oven at 425 degrees and bake for 4 hours.

The result is an intensely flavored cake, soft, creamy and fatty on the inside, with a deliciously crisp crust on the outside. Rustic and decadent.20190828_112831

They also know how to make a seafood chowder in these parts—just a touch of cream, not that heavy, gloupy stomach bomb that passes for chowder in most of the U.S.

Peameal Bacon: “Meh” to Toronto’s Signature Dish

14 Wednesday Aug 2019

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pea bacon sandwichOne of my pastimes when traveling is tracking down foods unique to the area in which I’m staying—foods that I’m unlikely to find anywhere else. Hawaii has its poi, Nebraska its runzas, the upper Midwest its pasties, and Wisconsin has booyah.

You’ve never heard of, let alone tasted, these local delicacies? In this age of global cuisine and instant communication, there is a reason why they haven’t escaped the confines of local food traditions—they’re not very good. You would find them appealing only if you grew up with them—the taste of home always tastes good. I realize I just made myself a boatload of enemies but truth be told these dishes weren’t worth the effort to track them down.

carousel bakeryBut nevertheless I persist. We were in Toronto last week, a great food town which I’ll post more on later. Toronto’s signature dish is the peameal bacon sandwich and so that was #1 on the list of dishes I had to have. The version at Carousel Bakery, housed inside a bustling downtown market, even had Anthony Bourdain’s imprimatur, and it appears in the book 1001 Foods You Must Eat Before You Die. I was sure this one would beat the odds and would be worth an Uber fare to track it down.

So what is peameal bacon? It’s unsmoked pork loin, cured in a brine of salt and sugar, trimmed of fat, and rolled in cornmeal to create a thin crust. Then it’s fried on the griddle, slapped on a soft bun and served with a variety of condiments. Carousel’s version had three generous slabs on each sandwich. It’s meaty and very tender but fans of what’s called bacon in the U.S. will find it bland. It lacks the crave-able smoky, fatty, salty, caramelized intensity of it’s cousin taken from the belly. It’s just very “porky”. The version at Carousel also had very little cornmeal on it. A crunchy crust would have vastly improved the sandwich. (Peameal bacon by the way is not Canadian bacon, which is smoked and not really Canadian at all. The name “peameal” comes from the ground yellow peas that were ground into a meal and used as a coating on the meat to preserve it in the 19th Century.)

So this goes on my list of regional foods that aren’t quite worthy of their hype although I must say it beats poi, runzas, pasties or booyah by a considerable distance. I might order it again but wouldn’t spend $25 on an Uber ride to find it.

Visiting Juneau

07 Wednesday Aug 2019

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IMG_3544No, as far as I know, they don’t make wine in Juneau. But the food is good, the culture is interesting, and the natural resources breathtaking. My excuse for going was the International Food Blogger’s Conference, which highlighted Juneau’s burgeoning food scene. But you don’t need an excuse to go; it has a singular charm worth experiencing.

IMG_3560Juneau is an old mining and fishing village accessible only by boat or plane. It’s firmly attached to the mainland but the steep mountains and treacherous weather make road building inordinately difficult and expensive. Nevertheless, somehow, it became Alaska’s capitol. The gold mines shut down years ago but the protected harbor was ideal for cruise ships exploring the stunning Alaska coastline. Today it’s fishing, government, and tourism that keep this city of around 30,000 permanent residents afloat. Everything not grown or manufactured on a narrow strip of flat land between the mountains and the water must be flown or shipped in, which means everything is expensive here.

IMG_3355The cruise ships, 3 or 4 towering, floating hotels, arrive each morning and the area around the harbor gradually fills with people throughout the day. Jewelry and Native American curio shops line the streets with aggressive sales people who hound you as you stroll about. I found nothing of interest here and one restaurant I sampled, called Wicked Fish, was wicked dreadful—think Red Lobster at twice the price.

juneau 2The one exception in the immediate vicinity of the cruise ships was Tracy’s Crab Shack. Justly famous—an episode of Top Chef’s “Quick Fire” was filmed here—they serve delicious, melt in your mouth, fresh King Crab. Don’t miss it. You won’t find better.

To experience the real Juneau you have to head further into town although still within walking distance of the port. Coffee shops, breweries, distilleries, and quality shops abound. But the real attraction for me of course was the food scene. With an abundance of fresh seafood harvested right out their front door and a steady stream of tourists seeking an alternative to cruise ship fare, Juneau has been able to attract and support talented chefs with a knack for creative dishes.

James Beard Rising Star semifinalist Beau Schooler’s plate of Alaskan Salmon Chorizo, with brussels sprouts and chili lime accompanied by Alaska Spot Prawn Escabeche with rhubarb and ginger was the highlight of the conference reception. His restaurant, Boca al Lupo, serving Italian-inspired cuisine with seasonal, nightly seafood specials was the best restaurant meal we had during our visit.

For something quite different try V’s Cellar Door—a Korean/Mexican fusion restaurant serving casual dishes like fusion nachos with Korean cabbage slaw and Bulgogi steak. For regional specialty items The Salmon Shoppe is a must visit—where else in the world will you find Reindeer sausage or Kelp Salsa?

For an overview of the food scene, I highly recommend the tours by Juneau Food Tours.

IMG_3402But don’t spend all your time eating. The eagles, bears, whales, and sea lions will be disappointed if they don’t have the opportunity to entertain you. The whale watching is usually successful. The whales follow regular feeding routes and the naturalists on board know where to find juneau-bearthem. Eagles in some places are as common as sparrows—that is only a bit of exaggeration. And I found that encountering a bear when you’re out walking is not out of the question.

Viewing a real, live glacier is also an experience worth having. The Mendenhall glacier is easily accessible via bus, tour company or rental car. You can actually reach the glacier via a long hike. But the shorter trails near the visitor’s center get you close to it.  But don’t wait too long. It is receding.

The people in Juneau can be a hoot. They are very much aware of their isolation and independence and wear it like a badge. This is a unique city. There is no place like it in the U.S.IMG_3481

Juneau: Cruise Ships, Midnight Twilight, Ubiquitous Seafood

21 Friday Jun 2019

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juneau-`

From the hotel at 10:00 P.M.

Dusk is usually fleeting. Light and dark briefly touch and then pull away as if feeling discomfort in each other’s presence. But here, in June, the sun never really sets. Light and dark linger as if unsure of their aim. Dusk happens between midnight and 2:00 A.M. after which morning breaks immediately. A world without night is a world without mystery. It’s unsettling.

juneau 4This year we decided to forego the wine blogger’s conference in Australia and attend the food blogger’s conference held this year in Juneau. The conference itself is mostly about social media marketing—a topic about which I care little. But conferences are seldom about the theme of the conference and more about the culture that provides the venue. And Juneau is as fascinating as it is beautiful. It’s really on old mining town and fishing village that’s been blessed with 1.2 million tourists each year pouring out of cruise ships to sample the local cuisine and shop.

The city is crammed into a sliver of flat land between the ocean and precipitous mountain slopes that make road building prohibitively expensive.  Thus there are no roads that connect Juneau to the rest of the American continent. It’s accessible only by boat and plane. Their food is foraged from the ocean; about 60% of the fresh seafood caught in the U.S. each year comes from Alaskan waters and fish farming here is illegal.

There may be no better place in the world to eat fresh fish, and Juneau has developed a thriving food scene. Thanks to Midgie at Juneau Food Tours for a wonderfully informative tour.

juneau 2Highlights from this day of exploring Juneau’s food culture include crab cakes from Tracy’s Crab Shack, this utterly strange blue tea made from dried blueberries and devil’s club, a locally foraged herb, found at Harbor Tea and Spice, and a salsa made from dried kelp, sampled at The Salmon Shop.juneau3