All posts tagged: table

Why “Chef’s Table” still matters

Why “Chef’s Table” still matters

Published by Sam Flores

When Netflix announced the first-ever Chef’s Table Food Festival, bringing 70 internationally acclaimed chefs to Park City for four days of dinners, demonstrations and excursions, I felt something between excitement and apprehension. The series changed the way I understood food. I wasn’t yet sure whether a festival built around it could preserve the reason why. If you asked me to name the greatest piece of modern food media, I would hesitate. Without missing a beat, I would say Season 1 Episode 1 of “Chef’s Table.”  And that answer has been the same for a decade.  It’s not because I think Massimo Bottura is the greatest chef alive. It wasn’t only the breathtaking cinematography or the immediate fantasy of booking a flight to Modena and a table at Osteria Francescana.  I’ve returned to it so many times because it permanently changed the way I think about food. Yes, food media should make you hungry. But the very best examples also make you care about something greater than what’s on the plate.  I was initially drawn in …

‘Sex? It’s on the table for ever’

‘Sex? It’s on the table for ever’

Published by Daniella Wilson

Add Can You Keep a Secret? to your watchlist Dawn French was adamant she didn’t want to star in another sitcom. Adamant. So, when her old friend Paul Mayhew-Archer, the co-writer of The Vicar of Dibley, asked her to star in his son Simon’s first sitcom, her heart sank. “Good sitcoms are as rare as hen’s teeth,” she says. “I honestly didn’t even want to read it, but Paul is very charming and he’s unsung in many ways. All the credit seems to go to Richard Curtis, but they definitely co-wrote Vicar and he was a very valuable part of it. So, I thought I’d have to reply and be kind about declining this script.” It may not have helped that French first met Simon as an 11-year-old who’d accompanied his dad to a Vicar read-through. But since then Simon has become a producer, making the award-winning This Country starring Charlie and Daisy May Cooper. Meanwhile, Paul has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Writer Simon Mayhew-Archer (right) was inspired by his father Paul’s (left) Parkinson’s …

Dining at Claude Monet’s table

Dining at Claude Monet’s table

Published by Sam Flores

The restaurant’s “orangerie” dining room. AURELIO RODRIGUEZ Oscar, the second Giverny restaurant from Michelin-starred chef David Gallienne (Le Jardin des Plumes), has been welcoming both local and international visitors seeking lunch in this Normandy village since March 2024. Set beside the Museum of Impressionism and steps from Claude Monet’s House, the restaurant offers an oasis away from the site’s tourist bustle. Diners settle onto a shaded, well-spaced terrace, a welcome respite after shuffling through the painter’s home alongside crowds more focused on snapping selfies than admiring the cascade of reproductions covering every inch of wall space. The most spectacular room in Monet’s house is the kitchen – a chapel of blue-tinged azulejos tiles surrounding a stove that looks out onto the garden. Monet was clearly a bon vivant, the inventor of the “œufs Orsini” and a fan of sauced fish recipes he compiled in a notebook still available today. At lunchtime, Oscar naturally stands out as an escape from the local ham-and-butter sandwiches sold for €9. You have 75.64% of this article left to read. …

What’s on the table at Downton Abbey?

What’s on the table at Downton Abbey?

Published by Miika Tikkanen

Formal dinners are constantly dying off and roaring back into fashion, and predicting their rise and fall is as simple as watching Wall Street’s stock tickers. When we’re feeling flush, a sensation most of us haven’t enjoyed in quite some time, some of us invest in matching plates and flatware. Families and couples of a certain age might even haul out grandma’s treasured china and give it a good dusting — that is, if you didn’t offload it at a garage sale or eBay. We might even try our hand at preparing a menu with multiple courses. But who has the time or the energy to polish silverware, transfer mains and sides into nice dishes, and lay a table? Follow-up question: Who has the room in their home for a dedicated dining table? As it turns out, I do have a modest space for that express purpose that has seen its share of fancy dinners … long ago. While I still experiment with la grande cuisine, as Julia Child invited us to do every now …