10 Essential Bottles for Your Bar

Stocking a superlative liquor cabinet boils down to two categories: spirits meant to be sipped and those ideal for mixed drinks. Add some exquisite modifiers— we suggest Antica Formula Red Vermouth, Noilly Pratt Dry Vermouth, Angostora Bitters and Orange Bitters and Luxardo Maraschino liqueur—and you’re ready to offer anything from a killer martini to an epic margarita.

By Claire Willett

1) Macallan 25 Year Old Sherry Oak
(Scotch)
Every single malt connoisseur has his favorite, but you can’t go wrong with this smooth, perfectly balanced Scotch from one of Scotland’s oldest and most revered distilleries. A quarter century in Spanish sherry oak casks gives the Macallan its lush coppery hue and heady, ginger and cinnamon nose. Thanks to a mellow, baking spice and fig palate, it drinks like a brandy, but with a lingering, smoky finish.
~$650/750 ml

2) Brugal 1888
(Rum)
Sure, a mojito makes a refreshing end to a hot summer’s day, but Brugal’s latest release is a year-round pleasure. A double distillation and anywhere from five to 14 years of cask maturation in both American white and Spanish oak results in a top-notch rum whose aroma is deliciously leathery  and layered with notes of coffee beans, raisins and dried fruit.
$49.99/750 ml

3) Partida Reposado
(Tequila)
The agave used in this barrel-aged tequila grows for 10 years in volcanic soil, which allows the plant’s sugars to concentrate and gives them a distinctive mineral, briny flavor. While you could use it in a margarita, a reposado of this complexity is best savored undiluted.
~$49.99/750 ml

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It was mid-November in Paris, and I was hungry. Every evening, after classes got out, I’d wander down the skinny cobbled Marche du Passy and gawk at the roasting pheasants, the mounds of polished pink turnips and golden carrots, the little ceramic pots of oozing Camambert. And then, completely overwhelmed, I’d go down into the Carrefour and buy another baguette, another tub of hummus, another kilo of granny apples. But now my mother was coming for Thanksgiving, and I was determined to show her how adroitly I’d adapted to my adopted home. With no idea of what to cook (there was very little chance of my procuring a turkey, and even less of my being able to cram one into my mini-oven), I went down to Shakespeare & Co in search of an English translation of a French cookbook. Shakespeare & Co’s cookbook section is sprawling and unpredictable, but among the the requisite 85 copies of Mastering, several backless editions of Moosewood and one

prominently displayed leatherbound version of Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire,  Clothilde Dusoulier’s Chocolate and Zucchini caught my eye. Two pages in, and I was hooked. Spirited, whimsical and heavily anecdotal, Chocolate and Zucchini was divided into desire-based categories like “Simplicity” and “Impromptu,” and read like a series of personal essays with appended recipes. Which made sense, I soon found out, because Chocolate and Zucchini the book originated from Chocolate and Zucchini the blog. The former’s mustard chicken stew saved my Thanksgiving, the latter served as my rabbit hole. To say I have never lacked for recipes or reading material since sounds like hyperbole, but it is closer to truth.

I found food blogs at the end of 2007, thirteen years after a Swarthmore sophomore named Justin Hall had created the first online diary and ten years after Jorn Barger smooshed “web logs” into “weblogs.” In 2007, Chocolate and Zucchini was four years old, as were Heidi Swanson’s 101 Cookbooks and Elise Bauer’s Simply Recipes. Molly Wizenberg’s Orangette was three. Julia Powell’s Julie/Julia Project was five, though it had long since lain fallow. Powell is often credited as being the first food blogger, which she is not. In my research, the oldest food blog I came across was David Lebovitz’s; the respected American pastry chef began adding regular updates to his professional site in October of 1999. The second oldest was Bruce Cole’s Saute Wednesday, launched in 2001, which documented the Edible San Francisco editor’s musings on food, the food industry and Bay Area food news. After Cole, titles get a bit hairier, especially around 2003, which births, among others, Chez Pim, Pim Techamuanvivit’s globe-trotting gastro-diary and Gastropoda, Regina Schrambling’s scathing odes to New York’s restaurant industry and its so-called critics.

Food bloggers finally made into the cultural mainstream around 2006, the year Ed Levine grouped together some of the country’s best food bloggers to form Serious Eats, and The New York Times grouped together some of the country’s best food writers to form their Diner’s Journal blog. Suddenly, everybody knew somebody who had a food blog, and the types of food blogs mushroomed. There were regional food blogs, molecular gastronomy blogs, sustainable food blogs. 101 Cookbooks precipitated a healthy-eating blog craze that, last June, saw tickets for the 3rd Annual Healthy Living Summit in Chicago sell out in a matter of hours. There are bloggers who only bake cupcakes, bloggers who only bake raw vegan cupcakes, bloggers who make diet versions of soul food, bloggers who make full-fat versions of junk food. Bloggers get book deals and the occasional movie deal. Going the other way, we see Ruth Riechl heading up Gilt Groupe’s food blog, Gilt Taste, and Amanda Hesser launching the community recipe-sharing site Food 52. Citizen journalism encompasses the culinary, too.  Food blogging came to Boston in the spring of 2003, when an already active political blogger named Rob Sama started Deus Ex Culinaria with his close friend Chris Kausel. Slowly, others joined them, including Helen Rennie with Beyond Salmon and Beatrice Pelatre with La Tartine Gourmande (see no. 6 below). Reading the earliest entries of these blogs, you get a sense of bewilderment, of shouting into the ether. Writing about food was nothing new, but writing about food to nobody, or to nobody you knew and nobody who knew you—this was new. But then, a few months, a year, maybe even two years in, the blog’s voice and beat solidify, the photography improves, the audience engages and the writing becomes discernibly more editorial.  Today, Boston’s local food blog scene is flourishing. Boston Food Blogs lists 363 local food blogs on its site, food bloggers are frequently spotlighted in the Globe and on WBUR, and new restaurants like Aragosta and Ashmont Grill throw blogger-only dinner parties in a bid for buzz. “I’m continually impressed by the quality of talent we have within Boston’s food blogger community,” Boston Food Finds’ bloggess Audrey Giannattasio told me, and I couldn’t agree more. This is a community that really celebrates the history and culture, culinary and otherwise, of the city and region we all call home. It’s also a community that loves to loves to give recommendations and organize events, and if you know where to look, you’ll never need a guidebook again. The blogs featured below portray different slices of Boston and its food scenes. As mentioned, we are a city blessed in food bloggers, but the seven I chose here stood out because of their fiery appetites, curious eyes and intelligently, holistically realized posts. Read one, and your knowledge of local CSAs will skyrocket. Read another, and you’ll know just where to go for frozen hot chocolate. One will tell you about cooking classes and food tours; one will teach you how to bake your own Cheez-Its. Two will make you really wish you’d paid more attention in that tenth grade photography class. All of them will make you very hungry.

The Blog for Foodies: Confessions of a Chocoholic

• Author: Bianca Garcia • Profession: Media Supervisor at Overdrive Interactive, Grad student at the Harvard Extension School, writer for the Harvard Square Examiner • Started blogging: April, 2008 • Favorite Posts: “Kesong Puti” and “Nose to Tail Eating” • Top local dishes: Burger at Craigie on Main, cannolis at Modern Pastry in the North End, and the omakase at O Ya.

Poor Proust only had madeleines; Bianca Martinez had lengua, avocados shaken down from the tree in her front yard, chilled Belgian chocolate eaten late at night in her parents’ bedroom. She had fresh mangoes, which she hated, and kesong puti, the soft, fresh white cheese Filipinos spread on bread and fruit, which she loved from birth. She shares these food memories, and the current day restaurant dishes and recipes that trigger them, on her food blog Confessions of a Chocoholic. “Having a blog magnified my belief that food is really meant to be enjoyed and savored, not feared nor taken for granted,” she says. Some bloggers cover everything, but Bianca focuses on what she likes, meaning we get a bounty of events, restaurants, food trucks, festivals and farmers markets around Cambridge and Boston. A warning: this bounty may not max out your credit card, but it will hurt your waistline. Less than 24 hours passed between my reading her post on the Bon Me truck’s fatty, crunchy, spicy opf banh mi and said sandwich entering my digestive system. As for her round up of the city’s trendiest offal dishes…I’ll just say I’m glad sweater season’s approaching.
The Blog For Food Producers: Grow, Cook, Eat

• Author: Julia Shankman • Profession: Founder and owner, Julia Shanks Food Consulting, cookbook author • Started blogging: May, 2008 • Favorite Posts: Those on farming/gardening (tagged “Tales from the farm”) and sustainability/food policy (tagged “Soapbox”). • Top local dishes: Cubano at Chez Henri, Spicy Fideos at Oleana, Lengua at Toro and the pad thai at Brown Sugar Café.

It’s safe to say Julia Shanks has one of the biggest footprints in Boston’s food scene. Currently at the helm of her eponymous, and thriving food consultancy business, she’s worked as a chef at some of the city’s best restaurants, founded a home cooking school, Interactive Cuisine, and just published a cookbook, The Farmer’s Kitchen, The Ultimate Guide to Enjoying Your CSA and Farmers’ Market Foods. In Grow, Cook, Eat she covers all the food production bases, from composting and vegetable gardening to butchering a pig, to creating a visually savvy menu and sussing out the cream of the local sustainable crop for its components. A longtime advocate of sustainable eating, Shanks acknowledges that blogging has focused and deepened her connection to locavorism. “As I write more and more about the local food movement, it feels increasingly hypocritical to not support local farmers whenever possible, compost and recycle,” she writes. Her posts are thorough and thoroughly researched without being didactic or impersonal. Read one and you will feel inspired to plant that kale, bake that leek tart and hey, maybe put some flesh on that restaurant dream.

 The Blog for Locavores: Food on the Food

• Author: Tammy Donroe • Profession: Freelance writer and mother of two • Started blogging: November, 2006 • Favorite posts: Tortilla Soup for Optimum Marital Health and Strangers with Mushrooms • Top local dishes: Turkish breakfast at Sofra, apple cider from Box Mill Farm, lentil soup at Cafe Algiers, golden raspberries from Drumlin Farm, Sel de la Terre’s rosemary fries, the Number 2 cocktail at Hungry Mother and blue cheese from Great Hill Blue, West River Creamery and Jasper Hill Farm.

When Tammy Donroe was very young, her parents would bring her along on their fancy restaurant dates because she “wouldn’t make a peep–I’d just stare at everything wide-eyed.” Today her popular blog maintains that wide-eyed perspective,but the silence has been replaced with stories of food, family and the immense pleasures in backyard eating. “I want these local growers, producers, and artisans to be around for a while. That will only happen if we support them,” she says, and support them she does. In a quip-laden deadpan, she blogs about her experience participating in the Eat Local Challenge, the three CSAs she belongs to, the neighborhood farmer’s markets she frequents, the mushrooms she forages for in nearby woods with resident naturalist Russ Cohen. Joining these topics are recipes (her great aunt’s pecan tassies, her great grandmother’s apple butter, her own baklava) and somewhat more serious posts on how food helped her successfully battle breast cancer. “I try to keep a balance between providing recipes and telling stories because it’s not just about the food–it’s about what’s going on around the food,” she writes. It’s a balance so addictive it’s secured a well-deserved cookbook deal. Donroe only knows one phrase in Italian: “mangia e traccarse,” eat and shut up. Luckily for us, she knows a great many more in English.
The blog for David Foster Wallace fans: Mike Kostyo

• Author: Mike Kostyo • Profession: M.A. student in Gastronomy at Boston University • Started blogging: February 2009 • Favorite post: “What Do Robots Eat?” • Favorite neighborhood: The North End • Top local dishes: Eggs benedict at Athan’s Bakery, Crazy Quesadilla at The Friendly Toast, The Great Experiment at the Marliave.

In a nonfiction writing class I took my senior year of college, we read “Consider the Lobster,” David Foster Wallace’s already seminal essay on the Maine Lobster Festival, the biology and history of lobsters and, above all, the ethicality of lobstercide. It was my introduction to deep map food writing–writing which at its crux is about food, but addresses a lot of other tangentially connected things. Mike Kostyo takes Wallace’s deep map and runs wild with it. On his eponymous blog, the B.U. Gastronomy student makes beautiful, fairly slow food and wraps non-culinary, pop culture-laden anecdotes around each recipe. So an examination of the advertising of health food as junk food leads into a recipe for chinese 5 spice- smoked almonds, a humorous essay on the over-saturated modern epicure ends with garlic scape pesto, and a lament on the carnie sensibilities of AMC’s The Killing signs off in coffee cake cupcakes with brown sugar buttercream. “Anyway, the whole show takes place in Seattle…And Seattle has a lot of coffee. Here are some coffee cake cupcakes.” Inspiration for Kostyo’s recipes can come from a Cheez-It contest or an Indian buffet, and many of their ingredients come from local speciality shops like Polcaris and Easter Bakers Supply, a characteristic he attributes to blogging. “When you read other food blogs and see how other people are enjoying their local food scene, wherever that may be, it makes you more cognizant of your local food culture,” he writes.

 The Blog for Dining Out: Boston Food Finds

• Author: Audrey Giannattasio • Profession: Founder and owner of Boston Food Finds, which conducts food tours and  and sells local cookbooks and speciality foods at its online store. • Started blogging: January 2011 • Favorite post: “What a Doozy (It Takes All Kinds)” • Top local dishes: Burger at Craigie on Main, sticky buns from Flour, chickpea fritter sandwich from Clover.
In April, Cleveland Circle’s beloved Roxy Grilled Cheese food truck disappeared, leaving behind only a series of mysterious tweets and a self-portrait astride an eighteen-wheeler on an unnamed highway. Audrey Giannattasio, who blogs at Boston Food Finds, was determined to get to the bottom of all this, and through a series of tweets and some outside sleuthing, she figured out that Roxy was one of the eight trucks competing on the Food Network’s “The Great Food Truck Race.” A post about a disappearing food truck is just one of the many quirky gems you will find on Boston Food Finds. Founded just six months ago, the blog arm of a food tour and speciality shop is already brimming with buzz on the city’s mainstream and quirky culinaria, from restaurants, cooking classes and afternoon teas to food trucks and farmers’ markets. During the Bruins’ finals, there were supportive cupcakes from Kickass Cupcakes, brownie “pucks” from Dancing Deer Co and black & white (and gold) cookies from Fancy Pants Baking Co. In the days leading up to July 4th, readers learned where to go for pre-made picnic baskets and how to make their own patriotic desserts. Every week, there’s an interview with a local chef about what they cook on their day off (in case you were wondering, Jamie Bissonnette makes a mean ‘Gansett chili). “I have the same sense of curiosity that a tourist does, and am always looking for something new and different in the local food scene to both enjoy myself, and to share with others,” Giannattasio writes.
The Blog for Serious Gourmands: La Tartine Gourmande

• Author: Béatrice Peltre • Profession: Food stylist, photographer and writer • Started blogging: November 2005 • Favorite posts: “There were moutons, poules and potatoes, and we ate quail eggs en • cocotte,” “Lulu et les madeleines” • Favorite local food: Strawberry picking at Verrill Farm, apple picking in the fall at any organic farm, a picnic from Sofra

“There’s nothing better than turning what you like the most into a profession,” Beatrice Peltre, professional food photographer, regular columnist at the Boston Globe and newly-minted cookbook author tells me. If you happen to have Peltre’s talent and passion for cooking, photographing and writing about food, then you too may be able to build a dream career out of your blog. Peltre is our Molly Wizenberg, our Clothilde Dusoulier–only with better photos. Her bilingual blog, La Tartine Gourmande, features sun-up to sun-down recipes guided by Peltre’s Lorraine Franconian background. Fresh, seasonal fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and organic eggs, meat and dairy from area farms (the sheep and chickens at Drumlin make frequent cameos) form the basis of pumpkin pots au creme, roasted spring garlic, whole red snapper en papillote, molten chocolate tahini millet cake… Even if you have no intention of using anything more than a microwave, Peltre’s accompanying photography makes her blog a must-goggle. Her sense of colors and composition is so keen that a simple bowl of eggs atop a calico tablecloth or a shot of the windswept dunes at Cranes beach are print-out-and-frame-worthy. And her writing is soulful and pure. “I knew she was looking forward to having her hands and lips stained red once again,” she wrote of her daughter Lulu, after a day of strawberry-picking at Verrill Farm.

The blog for fresh-churned butter-lovers: Fresh New England

• Author: El • Profession: Founder and owner of the recently launched food photography business Fresh New England, which mouthwateringly documents New England’s farms, speciality food producers and restaurants. • Started blogging: May, 2009 • Favorite post: Love and Milk Chocolate Macarons. • Top local eats: The tuna fish salad at Ipswich Shellfish Fish Market, Giovanna’s Gelato, the “sanity saving mid-winter apples” at Carlson Orchards in Harvard, MA

“During my first trip to France, tears literally welled up in my eyes when I bit into a big, flaky Parisian croissant,” El, the blogger behind Fresh New England tells me. Over the past two and a half years, El’s delicately composed ode to regional and continental sweets has amassed a large and loyal following: bakers and lovers of baked goods, mothers, gardeners, dyed-in-the-wool New Englanders. All are drawn by El’s deep passion and its skillful results–this is a woman who, as a very small child, stood nose-to-display case watching the neighborhood baker pipe flowers onto her birthday cake, and a few years later, taught herself how to make French breakfast puffs in the wee hours of a Sunday morning. Today you’ll can find its recipe on Fresh New England,

along with those for exotica (vanilla bean macarons, meyer lemon and chantilly cream verrine), gussied -up takes on childhood favorites (smores, Fudge Town cookies) and homegrown standbys (chocolate whoopie pies, Jordan Marsh blueberry muffins). Each forms the crux of quiet, meditative stories and lush, sepia-toned photographs guaranteed to have you craving picnics, wildflowers and a romp through the apple orchard. “I hope that my work inspires people to choose New England food and support our region of the country,” she writes. As a native, I may be biased, but personal, inviting food plus beautifully captured scenery sounds like a winning recipe.

Sleep disorders affect more than 60 million Americans, and we’re sleeping 20 percent less than we did a quarter-century ago. How much sleep do we need and how can we get it?

1. Most of the day, I’m sitting behind a desk—how much sleep do I really need? Sorry, desk jockeys: “You still need good sleep no matter what you do during the day. Your body has a biological need for sleep that is based on how long you have been awake,” says Dr. Bryce Mander of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. He recommends seven to nine hours for most adults.

2. I don’t sleep much at night, but I nap frequently. Will that work? While sporadic catnaps can help in the short term, they’re not a healthy longterm option. “It’s best to get a good amount of ‘anchor sleep’ at night,” says Dr. Mander.

3. I’ve read that sleep boosts memory. True? Absolutely. Dr. Elizabeth Kensinger, an associate professor of psychology at Boston College, notes that “sleep can help to improve our memory across a range of domains,” including motor skills, new knowledge retention and creativity.

4. I take sleeping pills. Should I worry about getting hooked? Nonbenzodiazepine hypnotic prescription pills (Ambien, Lunesta) are not physically addictive; benzodiazepine hypnotics (Ativan, Restoril) can be. And both types “can cause users to form a dependence on them, which is sometimes just as bad as an addiction,” notes Dr. David Volpi, director of the Manhattan Snoring and Sleep Center.

5. What about so-called “natural sleeping aids” —effective or placebos at best? These remedies shouldn’t be taken casually. Melatonin is a hormone your body uses to organize its biological rhythms. “The amount in your system at any given time matters, and messing with it may not be a good thing,” says Dr. Mander. As for valerian, Dr. Michael Breus, author of The Sleep Doctor’s Diet Plan, notes that while the root “does cause a relaxation response in humans,” it isn’t regulated by the FDA.

6. What’s the best way to prevent jet lag? Preventing jet lag entirely is virtually impossible, especially if you’re flying eastward or over multiple time zones. Your best bet, says Dr. Mander, “is to slowly shift your sleep schedule—an hour per night, for example—to the time zone you will be going to before you leave.” If you can’t do that, try to build in time to adjust at the arrival end of your flight.

7. What should I look for in a mattress? When it comes to choosing a mattress, look to Goldilocks: Too firm and you’ll be constantly tossing and turning, too soft and you’re at risk of developing back pain.

8. Does losing weight help you sleep better? “Not only that, but a good night’s sleep may help you lose weight,” says Dr. Kensinger. When you don’t get enough sleep, your brain produces more ghrelin, which stimulates appetite, and less leptin, the “satiety” hormone.

9. I exercise at night, but it keeps me up. Any advice? Exercise stimulates the heart, brain and muscles, which fends off sleep. For those of you who must hit the gym at night, Dr. Mander suggests doing something relaxing right before bedtime.

10. I’ve recently been diagnosed with mild sleep apnea, but I don’t want to undergo surgery. Can you recommend a noninvasive treatment? If you have obstructive sleep apnea, CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machines, oral appliances and tongue retention devices can keep the airway open. A certain type of CPAP machine may help patients suffering from the rarer central sleep apnea as well. And if you’re overweight, “weight loss is probably the best way to try to reduce sleep apnea,” says Dr. Volpi.

For more information, contact Dr. Elizabeth Kensinger, elizabeth.kensinger.1@bc.edu; Dr. Michael Breus, info@thesleepdoctor.com; Dr. Bryce Mander, bamander@berkeley.edu; Dr. David Volpi, info@nycsnoringsleepapneacenter.com or 212.873.6036.

Walt Disney holed away with Hollywood bigwigs at Club 33, Parisian cinephiles built a cinema beneath the Trocadéro. International artists create forever hidden work in abandoned New York subway tunnels. Man’s fascination with the clandestine is strong. Today, secret places are more likely to be luxe and exclusive than dangerous or debauched. The following 10 have the additional bonus—and challenge—of being rather difficult to find. Something hidden this way lies …

01. CURIO AT GILT BAR, Chicago

Curio, the basement lounge tucked beneath popular gastropub Gilt Bar, is not for the faint of eyes. Not that you’ll find any shocking activities taking place on the cognac tufted leather couches—but in the dim candlelight, you wouldn’t be able to see them anyway. In constructing Gilt’s little sister, owner Brendan Sodikoff was inspired by the tavern La Louisianne in Inglourious Basterds (though the end result is a bit swankier). Depending on where you stand you may catch glimpses of a functioning Victrola, a curio cabinet stuffed with vintage trinkets, and, at the bar, a magnificent century-old brass cash register.

230 W. Kinzie St., 312.464.9544, giltbarchicago.com

SITE: Chicago

NAVIGATIONAL SKILLS: Proficient

ENTRY BARRIERS: None

02. WOLVESMOUTH, Los Angeles

Fun fact: Canis lupii have very refined taste buds. Just ask one of the diners lucky enough to score seats at Wolvesmouth, Craig Thorton’s spectacular underground supper club. If the formula is simple—open your kitchen to the public, hire a friend to help clean up—the 10 to 15 courses of “reflective cooking” are anything but. The former personal chef to Nicolas Cage has a way with molecular gastronomy, and gelées, ices and foams abound. In a dish Thorton calls Wandering the Forest, an upturned rabbit haunch lords over a black truffle “soil” studded with douglas fir needles, chanterelles and cipollini onions. What you pay for it is up to you, but unless you’re booking a private dinner, the amount of time you’ll have to wait for a seat (up to a year), alas, is not.

thewolf@wolvesmouth.com for reservations and address, wolvesmouth.com

SITE: Los Angeles

NAVIGATIONAL SKILLS: Novice

ENTRY BARRIERS: Reservations, waiting list

03. NEEDLE AND THREAD AT TAVERN LAW, Seattle

Needle and Thread may look like your grandmother’s parlor, but the customized cocktails at this pocket-sized speakeasy pack a serious punch. Rather than hand you a menu, the dapper bartender will ask you to pick a spirit and a flavor profile, and then build a concoction based on your selection. Go during peak drinking hours, and nabbing one of Needle and Thread’s 25 seats might be tricky, but pick up the old rotary phone next to the vault door inside Tavern Law anyway. If the place isn’t too busy, or if the bartender likes the sound of your voice, you’ll be buzzed in. The embroidered armchairs aren’t as comfortable as they look, but the low-key, cloistered ambiance makes the entry rigmarole worth it.

1406 12th Ave., 206.322.9734, tavernlaw.com

SITE: Seattle

NAVIGATIONAL SKILLS: Novice

ENTRY BARRIERS: Reservations

04. BOHEMIAN, New York

Gaining access to this Japanese izakaya—located in Andy Warhol’s old NoHo loft—takes some work, but once you reach Bohemian’s unmarked door (hidden at the back of a Japanese butcher shop), you’ll be greeted with warm towels and an even warmer welcome. A twist on the Tokyo original, Bohemian serves mostly traditional Japanese small plates and sake in a graywalled mod-meets-Asian space. For carnivores, there’s a heady foie gras soba and an almost custardy washu beef short rib sashimi. Pescatarians can dig into bracing uni croquettes, salmon roe rice bowls and a crispy whole branzino. First order of business: Sink into one of the low-slung loungers or sofas that circle the six tables, ask for a bucket of oysters and a bottle of sparkling sake from Bohemian’s extensive list, and let the adjacent miniature Zen garden work its magic.

playearth.jp

SITE: New York

NAVIGATIONAL SKILLS: Expert

ENTRY BARRIERS: Reservations, invitation

05. PX LOUNGE, Alexandria, Va.

If the Jolly Roger flies from the second floor window of Old Town fish and chips spot Eamonn’s, it means the PX Lounge is open. Climb the stairs that lead to an unmarked wooden door—the blue light in the lantern tells you you’re in the right place. Ring the bell and wait for approval from the post-hipster staff. If you make the cut (dresses please, ladies; for gents, jackets help), you’ll find yourself in one of three lovely rooms filled with tinkling cut-glass chandeliers, gilt-edged mirrors, plush velvet lounges and lots of well-polished cherry. Push your way through the gaggle of pretty young things nibbling on boiled peanuts, order a Smoker’s Delight (bourbon, Old Virginia tobacco and Virginia honey) and banish all thoughts of politics and office grievances. This isn’t your granddaddy’s speakeasy—and that’s just the way you like it.

728 King St., 703.299.8384, restauranteve.com/eamonns/PX

SITE: Alexandria, Va.

NAVIGATIONAL SKILLS: Proficient

ENTRY BARRIERS: Good manners and adherence to dress code

06. LE TRÈS PARTICULIER, Paris

Tucked behind a Louis Bénech-designed garden on the grounds of l’Hôtel Particulier Montmartre (previously the estate of the Hermès family) is this tiny salon, whose hushed atmosphere and bespoke cocktails add a certain je ne sais quoi to an already quirkily charming boutique hotel. To experience this yourself, you first must make a reservation; during the winter months, cocktails are only available Thursday to Sunday. The hotel is located at the end of a leafy passageway between Avenue Junot and Rue Lepic; ring the bell outside its wrought-iron gates and ask, politely, if you might “boire un verre, s’il vous plaît.” There’s chess and a live jazz pianist inside, but the biggest attraction is David Vignaud, New York expat and mixologist extraordinaire. Tell him your poison of choice, and watch as he shakes your cares away.

23 Avenue Junot, Pavillon D, 33.01.5341.8140, hotel-particulier-montmartre.com

SITE: Paris

NAVIGATIONAL SKILLS: Proficient

ENTRY BARRIERS: “It suffices to try.”

07. LEI DOU, Hong Kong

What is by now a familiar tune—unpublished address, unmarked door—thrills thanks to Lei Dou’s location (an alley in the nightlife-heavy Lan Kwai Fong neighborhood of Hong Kong) and fin de siècle opium-den vibe. Sure, that haze is due to imported Montecristos and too much aged single malt, but ingested amidst the expats and exiles who frequent Lei Dou, these take on their own illicit allure. In Cantonese, lei dou means “right here,” and here is a very pleasant place to be, even if your taste runs more to dirty martinis or Italian mojitos (prosecco, rum, lime, simple syrup) than scotch.

Dr. Martin Vinokur, 203.322.9803, tenniseuro@aol.com, tenniseurope.com

SITE: Hong Kong

NAVIGATIONAL SKILLS: Expert

ENTRY BARRIERS: None

08. THE SALTOUN SUPPER CLUB, London

If Sartre had managed to land a spot at Arno Maasdorp’s dinner table, he might have withdrawn that bit about hell being other people. Twice a week, the food stylist and photographer welcomes up to 16 foodies into his charming Brixton flat for an edition of the Saltoun Supper Club. Maasdorp’s artistic inclinations translate into brilliant colors, intricate shapes, Saveur-ready platings—but it’s the concentrated flavors and spot-on textures in dishes like mussels with banana and saffron sauce, and leek and pecorino gnocchi that steal the show. Throughout the four-course meal you can watch Maasdorp at work in the open kitchen, admire the South American baskets and flea market ephemera that dot the exposed brick walls, and get to know your dinner mates over copious amounts of BYOB wine. Sure, you’ll be fit to burst by the time the towering Eton mess arrives, but that’s what belt notches are for, no?

maasdorp@hotmail.com for reservations and address, eatwithyoureyes.net

SITE: London

NAVIGATIONAL SKILLS: Novice

ENTRY BARRIERS: Waiting list

09. THE PALE BLUE DOOR, South America

When Tony Hornecker first introduced The Pale Blue Door to London’s burgeoning food scene in 2008, pop-up restaurants were unheard of. Two years later, you’d be hard-pressed to find a city that doesn’t have a few, though none quite match the zany creativity of the original. An installation artist and set designer, Hornecker imbues each instance of the now-globetrotting Pale Blue Door with a rustic, Mad Hatter whimsy: fairy lights abound, sculptures and paintings tilt rakishly against metal cafe tables, silk cushions are heaped upon newly constructed tree forts. In the midst of this artistic chaos, Hornecker serves homestyle British dishes: a proper Sunday roast, mushy peas, crumble pudding. After sojourns in an abandoned mansion in Buenos Aires, a farmhouse in Glastonbury and a garden in Berlin, South America beckons again, with an expected stop in Valparaiso, Chile.

thepalebluedoor@gmail.com for reservations and address, tonyhornecker.wordpress.com

SITE: South America

NAVIGATIONAL SKILLS: Proficient-to-expert

ENTRY BARRIERS: Waiting list

10. THE RUM DIARIES, Sydney

Through an unmarked brick archway on Sydney’s Bondi Road there lies one of the forces behind Bondi Beach’s after-hours vitality. The Rum Diaries, which takes its name and its attitude from Hunter S. Thompson’s cult novel, brings a well-lubricated but distinctly adult energy to the surfer ’hood. Anyone can sit at the funky weathered bar, made from recycled railroad sleepers, but it’s the Oscar Acosta room you’re after. Named after Thompson’s oft-turned-to attorney, the room features a cozy fireplace, twinkling chandelier and, behind a wall-length bookcase, a private cigar library.

288 Bondi Rd., 61.02.9300.0440, therumdiaries.com.au

SITE: Sydney

NAVIGATIONAL SKILLS: Novice

ENTRY BARRIERS: Oscar Acosta room, invite only

The camps on this list provide opportunities for your children to develop their passions, whether they’re travel or sports, computers or the outdoors. But if you’re interested in signing your child up, don’t delay—slots in these camps don’t stay open long.

01 THE EXPERIMENT IN INTERNATIONAL LIVING

The Experiment in International Living offers a monthlong adventure in the country known as the Land of the Blue Sky. Orientation takes place amid Ulaanbaatar’s humming outdoor food and crafts markets and solemn monasteries, and participants will see Mongolia’s famed wrestlers, archers and jockeys during Naadam, the country’s Olympics. Then it’s off to the steppes, where students join in the life of the Mongolian frontier, bunking with Mongol families in gers (round tents).

Contact: Chris Frantz, 800.345.2929, chris.frantz@worldlearning.org, experimentinternational.org

SITE Mongolia AGES Completed grades 9 to 12 DURATION One monthCOST $6,600 (includes airfare)

02 LEADERSHIP IN THE BUSINESS WORLD

From September through May, Wharton is populated by future masters of the universe, but in July one of the country’s top business schools turns its Philadelphia and San Francisco campuses and faculty over to a handful of elite high school kids. “Leadership in the Business World” makes good on its title—courses focus on leadership and management, and the group business plan competition, judged by a panel of venture capitalists, has fostered viable ideas like low-cost prefabricated housing and Medsafe prescription safety cards. Although the requirements for getting in are steep—top-notch SATs, a personal essay and two letters of recommendation—those accepted are treated to guest lectures by various luminaries (past speakers have included the CEOs of Overstock.com and Tower Investments and top execs at Google and Deloitte) and site visits to Wall Street firms and Google.

Contact: Dr. Anne Greenhalgh, 215.746.8765, greenhaa@wharton.upenn.edu, wharton.upenn.edu/academics/lbw

SITE San Francisco, Philadelphia AGES Completed grade 11 DURATION One month COST $5,500 ($75 application fee)

[More...]

This is the season of plastic bags stuck in trees. Stray shopping bags–many of them white, with handles, perhaps from a deli or a fruit-and-vegetable store originally–roll along the streets, fill with air, levitate like disembodied undershirts, fly, snag by their handles in the branches. Trees wave them in the breeze. They luff an whirr like spinnakers and twist into knots. Daniel, a guy who works at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, was removing a plastic bag from a Japanese flowering cherry tree at the eastern Parkway entrance with a leaf rake as I walked by. He held the rake above him at arm’s length and snatched at the bag with the tines. It took him a while; finally, he pulled the bag down and squashed it into a ball in his hand. I asked if I could see it. Its blue logo read, “MARTIN PAINT…’It Ain’t Just Paint.’ “

-Ian Frazier, “Stuck in Trees”

I came across Ian Frazier’s now iconic New Yorker essay the other day, in a May, 24, 1993 issue of the magazine I’d found, jumbled amongst late-80s Gourmet’s and 70s Good Housekeeping’s, in the consignment store down the street from my apartment. In a nation of people largely apathetic to plastic bags, Frazier stands out. Not content with mere grumbling, Frazier and two of his friends, Tim and Bill McClelland, formed a “Bag Snagger” society and started spending their Saturdays patrolling the sidewalks and parks of the five boroughs, using an improvised elongated rake to snag the bags from their treeside perches. Eventually the men had their snagging device patented, and started what is now, in Frazier’s estimation, a “multi-hundred dollar” company, Bag Snaggers Inc.

The Bag Snatchers garnered a fair amount of success, earning Parks and Rec volunteer cards, an order from Bette Midler for the clean-up crew she sponsors, a free lunch from an elderly woman on the UES, a $1 bill, trips to the banks of the Mississippi and Los Angeles Rivers on snagging missions, and a standing invitation to remove the mylar balloons that dot the starry green sky of Grand Central’s dome. Frazier wrote two follow-up pieces for the New Yorker, “Bags in Trees II,” and “Bags in Trees: A Retrospective,” appeared as himself in the film Blue in the Face, talking about bags.

In their heyday,the Bag Snaggers removed hundreds of bags a week, upwards of ten thousand a year. That leaves approximately 999,990,000 bags floating down our streets, clogging up our landfills, strangling marine life, and, yes, hunkering down in our trees. The easiest way to decrease that number is, of course, to put a ban on the production and dispersal of plastic bags, as California attempted to do with AB 1998, a measure put forth by Julia Brownley (D-Santa Monica).

Among the bill’s stipulations:

• After July 2011, stores are forbidden to provide customers with plastic bags.
• Stores must either make reusable bags available for purchase or, for a .$25 fee, provide paper bags.
• The paper bag fees go straight to a Paper Bag Pollution Cleanup Fund, administered by the state treasury.
• The treasury must deliver a report on the bill’s effectiveness, along with suggestions about further implementation of resuable bags, to the state legislature on or before January 2015.

AB 1998 is a very straightforward measure, but from its introduction this past February, the bill has been the subject of heavy controversy. Among the ayes were the California Grocers Association, environmental groups, municipal legislatures, and state governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The nays included many Republican and some Democrat senators, who worried that the loss of jobs caused by the bill would override and environmental benefits, and the American Chemistry Council, which oversees the plants that produce plastic bags, and ran radio and television attack ads along with an extremely forceful and well-funded lobbying campaign.

Because Belgrave Trust is a green company, we’re often asked for our opinions on environmental issues, and while it’s hard not to go with our personal gut feelings, doing the research to validate or rescind them is worth the extra legwork. In the case of AB 1998, the facts, from a carbon-cutting perspective, are not decisive: on the one hand, plastic bags are made from polyethylene, a petroleum byproduct, they are not fully–nor cheaply–recyclable, not biodegradable, and emit dioxins and heavy metals when burned. On the other hand, to make paper bags, you need to kill trees, nature’s carbon capture devices, and you need to use 4 times the amount of energy you do in producing plastic bags. Add in paper’s 12% share of landfill methane (compared to plastic’s 4%), and the fact that, while some people do recycle their paper bags, most end up as cardboard, ie the demand for the bags doesn’t lower, and you’ve got yourself a pretty even battle.

The fact is, if you want to help the environment, you need to go the reusable bag route, which AB 1998 encourages but doesn’t mandate. Yes, plastic bags are horrid, and they certainly supply a very visceral reminder of how a seemingly trivial habit can damage the planet, but from an ecological and environmental perspective, paper bags aren’t much better—and in some cases, they’re worse (click here for a detailed visual breakdown on paper vs plastic).

So while, symbolically, the ratification of AB 1998 would have represented a huge step forward in the “Americans DO care about the environment” movement,” those in favor of it should take its rejection as a cause to create a more comprehensive, and more environmentally beneficial, plan of action.

1.) Pisticci: Pisticci may be city’s first 100% carbon neutral restaurant, but don’t expect any eco-sanctimony from this cheery Morningside Heights Italian. While a lot of thought has been put into the decor–the small, brick-walled space is decked out in full Victorian study regalia, with faux bookshelves, tufted leather couches, and twee floral wall paper–the focus here is clearly on the food. The balsamic vinegar on your insalata tre colori has been aged 15 years, the mozzarella di bufala on your grilled squash is flown in from Naples weekly, and the pastas–tossed with prosciutto and spinach here, wild mushrooms there–are all homemade. Throw in free jazz on Sundays, a charming, if cramped, patio, and rotating exhibitions by local artists, and you’ve got yourself a no-fail date night.

125 La Salle Street, 212.932.3500, pisticcinyc.com

2.) Gustorganics: Okay, so maybe “Changing the world, one meal at a time” is a slight overstatement, but the grub at this bustling West Village spot is entirely organic and, more importantly, delicious. The food is mostly Argentine and Italian, with farm-to-table and spa influences. Carnivores, vegetarians, and vegans can break bread at the same repurposed wood table, thanks to a Argentinian-Italian menu that includes a grass-fed beef and sweet corn risotto, a plump “hempanada” stuffed with mushrooms, zucchini, and generous amounts of mozzerella, and a detox-friendly Earth Plate Sampler, a mix of grilled and steamed vegetables, quinoa, tofu, and lentil stew. Offset all that healthy eating with a basil daiquiri or a pepino (vodka, cucumber, mint, orange juice, and agave), or ward off those nasty summer colds with an Immune Booster (spinach, celery, green apples, asparagus, peeled lemon, and ginger). There’s also a crepe-heavy breakfast menu, dulce-de-leche-filled alfajores and magdalenas, and, for Goop mommies, gourmet pureed baby meals.

519 Avenue of the Americas, 212.242.5800, gustorganics.com

3.) Dirt Candy: Sure, Dirt Candy is made from recycled and sustainable materials, and the food is organic and locally-sourced, but chef/owner Amanda Cohen just wants you to embrace the vegetable. At her minimalist aquarium-styled East Village joint, the award-winning chef assembles colorful and intensely flavored paens to this generally mistreated food group. Appetizers and entrees bely their one-word titles: “Mushroom” gives you a pot of portobello mousse, another of pear and fennel compote, and crisp toast points slathered in truffle butter; “Corn” mixes stone ground grits–the city’s best, as per the Village Voice–corn cream, pickled shiiitakes, and huitlacoche, topped with a tempura poached egg. There’s only one “Snack,” the jalepeno hush puppies, and they’re a must-order, chubby and crispy, their heat offset by a slather of maple butter. Top it off with a fennel funnel cake and a glass of Clos Du Chateau De Cadillac–and rethink that whole vegetarians “are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit” thing.

430 East 9th Street, 212.228.7732, dirtcandynyc.com

4.) Birdbath: There are three Birdbaths in Manhattan, but if you can, you should try to go to the one on Prince street in Soho, which occupies the old Vesuvio Bakery. Maury Rubin, the owner of Birdbath and City Bakery, has retained Vesuvio’s iconic bright green facade, gilt window lettering, and pressed tin ceilings; the rest of the space serves as a testament to green building. The entire operation is wind powered. with wheat walls, corn cups, and recycled paper countertops. The baked goods are mostly excellent–in the mornings, try a rice-milk-raisin scone with strong drip coffee, while a generously chunky vegan chocolate chip cookie makes for the perfect afternoon snack. Skateboarders and cyclists, take heed: your wheels entitle you to a 25% discount.

223 First Avenue, 145 Seventh Avenue, 160 Prince Street, 646.722.6565, buildagreenbakery.com

5.) Otarian: The words “fast food” and “low carbon” don’t seem like they’d occupy the same territory, but then again, Otarian (a mosh of “oxygen” and “vegetarian”) traffics in the ready-made, Whole Foods-style fast food, recycled cardboard containers with feel-good messaging and all. The chain was created by Radhika Oswal, the wife of Aussie ammonia king Pankaj Oswal, which might explain the sky-high prices. Less easy to explain are the menu categories–we’re still not sure what an “obsession” is or why bean and cheese tacos qualify as “hearties” while burgers do not. Everything but the Coke comes with a carbon footprint estimate and a comparison to its high-carbon equivalent, and some of it, like the tangy, silken tandoori “Mushroom O Paneer” (1.12kg CO2e) and the earthy “Pea O Spinach” soup (1.03kg CO2e), tastes pretty good. The rest, including an appealing-sounding “Indian Chutney burger” with the unfortunate consistency of dry clay, tends to be bland and stintingly portioned. Of course, when the first question the counterperson asks you is “How would you like to reduce carbon today?,” you can probably guess food is not Otarian’s primary concern.

154 Bleecker Street, 212.614.6834, 947 Eighth Avenue, 212.489.3270, otarian.com

Queens Boulevard stretched long and wide, its twelve lanes hemmed by convenience stores, Chinese restaurants, and combo law office/taxi driving schools. “Stop!” I cried. The tiny woman and her non-wheelie suitcase scrambled to the median after giving us a relieved finger. We kept going. And going. “So that’s Lefrak City,” my driver said, after a while. Later, “So that’s the circus mural from Annie Hall.” I kept waiting for “so that’s Cafe Arzu.”

Cafe Arzu is a Bukharan/Uzbek/Uighur restaurant, and it was for the last ethnicity’s food that we were making this epic trek. My father has been the legal counsel for seven of the Guantanamo Uighurs since 2004, and every time he comes to New York, I tell him “there’s this Uighur restaurant we have to go to,” and every time it is too far from midtown. Last night the restaurant in question (Cafe Kashkar in Brighton Beach) was still too far, but Cafe Arzu, in Forest Hills, was not.

When we arrived (finally!), my dad-is-going-to-complain-I-only-ever-take-him-to-rat-infested-god-knows-what’s-in-their-storeroom-hole-in-the-walls radar was beeping persistently. The room boasted metal and foam community-center chairs, laminated table cloths, generic ketchup, dusty sugar cubes, and landscape paintings using the limited, if calming, palette of seafoam, sky blue, and brown. But! There were loads of Russians and Uzbeks, the menus only had pictures of food on their covers, and the multitude of foodstuffs laid upon the laminate looked appealingly foreign.

We were sat by a brusque server who immediately wanted to know what we’d be ordering.

“You don’t speak Uighur, do you?”

“I’m Russian,” she said, not very apologetically.

“But–”

“What do you want to drink?” My father persisted.

“But you do have Uighur food, right?”

“Yes. We have.” By this point the rest of us had found the Uighur portion of the menu.

“Here it is Dad,” I said, as he squinted at the cyrillic.

“Ah. Excellent. I’d like a beer first.”

“We don’t have.”

“Wine?” This got a smile out of her. I watched an old man at the table across the way pour something clear from a flask into the paper cup in front of him while his wife scowled.

“No. You bring.” Defeated, my father settled on green tea. And then we ordered, oh, EVERYTHING on the Uighur menu, along with some lamb and chicken kebabs just in case, and pickled vegetables for health.

The bread and pickles came first.

“These taste just like Jewish deli pickles,” one of us exclaimed. But the pink cabbage and green tomatoes tasted distinctly Russian, I thought, as I picked tarrogon out of my teeth. The bread, plate-sized disks called lepeshka, was wonderful—craggy salt crust and pillowy innards—perfect for dipping into our lagman, a brothy soup with chewy, hand-pulled noodles, beans, carrots, and chunks of beef. I’d already begun to feel full when our kebabs arrived, only they weren’t kebabs. They were swords, pierced by crackly, dripping pieces of lamb and chicken. The lamb was better, richer and more gamy, but the chicken was quite good, juicy and fatty where it’s typically dry and shriveled.

We weren’t even halfway through, though, when the samsa, or meat (I think ground lamb, though traditionally it’s mutton) pie appeared, followed in quick succession by manty, the Uighur version of dumplings, and a cracker the size and shape of a large mixing bowl.

“You break,” our server told us, impatient to put the hot manty plates down. Timidly, I tapped the cracker bowl. Nothing doing. My father bore his first down imperiously, and one of the pieces of cracker flew into our server’s eye.

Broken, the cracker lost its appeal, but the samsa and manty were lovely. The samsa reminded me of a pasty, only smaller and spicier, flecked with poppyseed and chopped onion. The same meat filling plumped out some of the manty, but the ones I liked better had only pumpkin, and tasted to me more like a light ravioli than a dumpling, in part because their wrappers were quite thick.

I don’t think the menu had dessert on it, and at any rate we were too full to think of it. My father did, in the last stretch, manage to snag a knife for his samsa. The bill, for four exceedingly stuffed иностранец, came to $60. Add in two cases of Simpler Times or a bottle of Georgi and you’ll still get out for under $20. This is what we’re going to do next time, after our trip to the much-vaunted Forest Hills Spa. Get excited…

Cafe Arzu
10105 Queens Blvd, Flushing, NY 11375
Phone: 718-830-3335

All Curious Cooks Posts

When I tell people about this project, the question I get asked the most is a variation of “what region has the best blogs?” Deep South is a close runner up, but Mid-Atlantic takes this one. The Mid-Atlantic bloggers as a whole have a talent for nuanced, quietly striking descriptions. Deadpan, along with a sort of giddy piled-on sarcasm, is common, as are close camera scenes. Place and seasons, particularly in the New Jersey blogs, are prominent, either as the crux or introduction of posts.

To me, the Mid-Atlantic bloggers were not only the best writers, they were the most cohesive. And yet, the region wasn’t one I’d heard of before starting the project, and searching for Mid-Atlantic literary regionalism was decidedly unfruitful. What I did find useful was the region’s historical, ethnic, and cultural geography, which from its nascence has been ruled by religious pluralism, ethnic diversity, and a symbiotic farm/factory/market system. The pursuit of Capital, be it financial or intellectual, has always been the Mid-Atlantic’s raison d’etre, its driving force. According to Frederick Jackson Turner, it is the Mid-Atlantic (and not, as I always thought, the Midwest) that is the “typically American region..democratic and nonsectional, if not national, easy, tolerant, and contented…rooted strongly in material prosperity.”

The bloggers are not content (which is not to say they are unhappy), and many do not seem at all rooted in material prosperity (which is not to say they are not prosperous– many of them appear to be at least upper middle class). The rest of Turner’s characterization holds true though: democratic, nonsectional, and tolerant. By Democratic I don’t just mean left-leaning, but also imbued with a need for things to be fair, a passion for citizens’ rights, freedom of speech, equal distribution of privileges and on.

The Mid-Atlantic is extremely urbanized, and the glut of and need for microcosms, sense of insignificance and not infrequent Napolean complexes that accompany big cities are all present in the region’s bloggers, who often describe local restaurants and parks, places that are new or special to them,the people that populate their day-to-days, and their frustration or anxiety over not getting exactly what they could have, should have, need to have in order to stay in the rat race. The rat race is very much present in the younger blogs.

Mid-Atlantic bloggers are openminded, yes, and they are also generally open about their own lives. Therapy and childhood abuse are addressed in matter-of-fact asides by more than one blogger; divorce, family illness, affairs, and eating disorders, though less common, are treated in the same frank manner.

Most bloggers are not writers outside of their blogs; the Mid-Atlantic group is the exception, boasting novels, a cookbook, and freelance work. These are not professional, extension-of-my-career blogs either (that would be cheating!), but they are blogs whose authors clearly pay attention to their craft, as posts are generally focused and researched, the words deftly arranged, with a nice mix of substantive literary and low pop-culture references.

This is a fairly well-traveled bunch: with long soujourns abroad, road trips to nearly all 50 states, and many outdoorsy getaways.

To get at stylistic traits, I had to break it down state by state. In Paging New Jersey: A Literary Guide to the Garden State, James Broderick quotes author John Cunningham on his home state: “[New Jersey] is both factory and farm; it is High Point and Cape May. Diversity–that’s the spirit of New Jersey” (3). Early Jersey writers like James Fenimore Cooper, Philip Freneau, and Walt Witman embraced a language that was “patriotic, romantic, celebratory, pastoral, voluminous” (4). They criticized the narrowmindedness of their countrymen, and outlined the American credos of “freedom, democracy, self-reliance, love of nature, optimisim, endurance, a rough-and-ready posture…a small helping of genteel European cultivation and a large does of Daniel Boon-like courage and cunning”(15). In two hundred years, little has changed, though the optimism and patriotism have abated–it is hard to be both patriot and cynic! Still, there is a definite love of the idiosyncratic, eccentric, even ridiculous that is allowed to flourish in America. In BaRou is the New Brooklyn, Colleen Kane writes of her return to New York:

On spying a Brooklyn Brewery logo on a bar, I wanted to start running like George Bailey at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life: ‘Hello Newark Airport! Hey ohhh all you Italian-Americans!’ [kisses one] The feeling reappeared the next day, as I went to pick up the bf in Williamsjerk (he’d taken a car from the airport): ‘Merry Christmas, Hacidic Jews! Happy Halloween, hipsters on old-time roller skates!’

Interestingly, the love of nature is something unique to the Jersey bloggers. Robin Damestra, who decorates her Caviar and Codfish with a plethora of sepia shots of the outdoors and rough-hewn kitchen tables topped with tarts, soups, racks of lamb (all locally sourced, naturellement), wrote early this fall that “one day, the world will be green and warm; the next, bone-chilling with a rainbow of reds, oranges, and yellows. The change into fall can make a person think—about the new sweaters she must acquire, and the changeover from tomatoes to apples in her salads…” In Damestra’s writing I see the “freshness of expression and bold embrace of the sensory world” Broderick attributes to Jersey’s best-known poet, Walt Whitman.

These attributes are flush in Colleen’s writing as well, and especially so in Robin Lee’s “The Girl Who Ate Everything.” Lee’s vocabulary is a mash of lolcat misspellings and scrambled syntax, and she jabbers and shouts (via CAPS and bolding) in a way that is very conversational, personable, and real. During a recent trip to D.C., after trips to Ray’s Burgers ( “After I finished off my portion I thought, ‘NOOO, I WANT MOAR, OH GOD.’ “), and Dolcezza for gelato (“There was no rush of memories of eating gelato in Italy—just an emptiness from the lack of warm, nutty happiness.”), Robin ends up in a 7-11, where she is assaulted by the chain’s “LIQUID ARTILLERY SLURPEE. EXTREEEEME! WILL HIT YOU WITH THE POWER OF FLYING SHRAPNEL AND MISSILE LAUNCHERS ANNNND FROZEN BEVERAGE SLUSH AND SORTA FUTURISTIC-LOOKING FONT IN CAPS.”

The most striking characteristic of the NJ bloggers is the attention paid to their surroundings. A NJ blogger will not just give you quotes, she’ll give you context–the cafe the conversation took place in, what music was playing in the background, what each had to eat, what the weather was like… You get a lot of deep maps of small areas in these blogs.

Sometimes, the maps are humorous (though never cruel), as in Colleen’s description of Saints fans lining up outside Academy Sports after the team qualified for the Super Bowl:

The newscaster interviewed various inarticulate but very happy line-standers, already bedecked in black and gold Saints gear about what new Saints gear they were planning to purchase. Most answers were variations on, “T-shirts, caps, sweatshirts…WHO DAT!” One more creative reveler answered in song and wove in the lyrics to “Pants on the Ground.

More often, though, they are wide-eyed and appreciative. Of her neighborhood in Instanbul, Lisa Lubin of LLWorldTour writes:

It is a former Bohemian enclave currently full of expats and artists turned yuppies and hipsters. Nearly everything you need is right here. There is a small produce stand selling plump fresh cherries, apricots, and veggies on every corner. There are grocery stores, bars, cafes, a gym, and an odd plethora of pharmacies. Sounds permeate the air harkening back to an old European village:
“Hot Simit (a kind of Turkish sesame seed ‘bagel’)!! Fresh, hot Simit!!”
“Junkman!! I can take away all your nasty junk!!!”
“Waterman!! I will bring big bottles of spring water right to your apartment!!”
One of my favorite sounds is, strangely enough, the gas man. When I first heard the sweet tunes tinkling out of his truck as he drove around the ‘hood, I thought it had to be an ice cream truck: “Aygaz…get your sweet delicious Aygaz!

And Anna, an art creator who writes Living the LBD Life uses her “beloved city of Washington as my gym. I walk 3 miles uphill to work each day, then downhill again in the evening. Because I live downtown, I tend to walk everywhere for errands, social functions, shopping, etc… I love that the exercise I do relaxes me, enables me to enjoy my city, and gets me in the fresh air.”

If a keen sense of observation, devotion to natural and man-made spaces, gentle humor, and generally well-honed rhetorical skills are characteristic of New Jersey, what can be said about the other two Mid-Atlantic States, New York and Pennsylvania? Let’s start with the former: New Yorkers also possess the pen skillz of their Jersey neighbors, but their posts are more essayish, and much wordier. MRM, a recently unemployed young Manhattanite, describes thanksgiving with her family in the manner of a very sober Bridget Jones:

Tomorrow night, as you all sit down to dinner with your families and get to answer questions from your family about when will you finally get married, why aren’t you married yet, what’s wrong with you that you don’t have a boyfriend- are you a lesbian, when will your mother get to finally have grandchildren because she isn’t getting any younger, should you really be eating that second piece of pie, are you sure that’s the most flattering haircut for your face, and while your cousins are running around screaming and knocking things down and getting in your way, take a look around the table and realize that while they may have a funny way of showing it, these are the people who love you and will be with you and until the end, no matter what.

Too, the New Yorkers tend to zoom in on people, and the places they do describe are man-made and either lie in their neighborhoods (cafes, bodegas, playgrounds), or carry internal (nostalgic) or external (trendy) value.
In general actually, they are quite aware of words’ connotative values. Pierre, who writes the very Nick Hornsby-ish MetroDad, discussing being single at 41, writes:
“When I was younger, I dated vastly different kinds of women because I wanted to expose myself to a diaspora of individual personalities. Now that I’m older, I tend to find myself far more selective. Or maybe the proper word is discerning.”

New Yorkers also love literary and ironic pop-culture references, either embedded or in list form. Here’s Lindsay, the blogger behind “Hipstercrite,” on her and her parents’ flip-flopped musical tastes:

In high school, I would play my Mom’s Zappa records while I laid on the basement floor, imaging her doing the same thing at my age in 1967. Right when I was at the point having a completely fictional LSD trip, she would kill my buzz by shouting, “Wow, I can’t believe I actually listened to that crap.”
I’d make my parents recollect their stories of seeing Hendrix, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, all while bugging me to score them tickets to see John Mayer at whatever closest uber-dome there was (John Mayer + Parents is a whole another blog post in itself).

And Pierre again:

The 5 Best Books I’ve Read In The Past 5 Weeks
1. Nick Hornby’s “Juliet, Naked”
2. Lorrie Moore’s “A Gate at the Stairs”
3. Stefanie Wilder-Taylor’s “It’s Not Me, It’s You.”
4. Colston Whitehead’s “Sag Harbor”
5. Michael Lewis’ “Home Game”

5 Best Quotes I Have Recently Read
1. “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” – Soren Kierkegaard
2. “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” – Frederick Douglas
3. “If you care about what others think of you, then you will always be their slave.” – James Frey
4. “Tina is my baby girl. She’s my sister from another mother of a different color. I’d do 25 to life for her. She is down like four flat tires.”" – Tracy Morgan
5. “Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.” – Tom Stoppard

High, low, middlebrow, stuff white people like… New Yorkers read it all. They read! (And listen to burgeoning, finely-wrought indie!) But I like it, that they read. I like that their blogs are well-written, that I don’t have to tiptoe over grammar errors and gaping sentences.

Still, I prefer New Jersey, whose bloggers have a talent for writing their lives without seeming entirely self-occupied. There is no escaping the inner “I” and all its psychoanalysis in the New York blogs. In Danielle Abroad, Danielle writes about that persnickety demon, self-doubt.

I’ve spoken of confianza before, but never of the opposite, and I believe that is where my problem lies. Yet I say this not because I’ve been doubting myself, quite the contrary actually; I have been so not doubtful that I’ve stumbled upon myself treating my body, mind, and soul with the utmost respect by default. Why yes, I have been yoga-ing for the past two days… how could you tell?

Tina, who writes about her Florida-expat life in La Douleur Exquise Since1984, gives self-doubt an instigator:

Okay I said.. and when my roll is flopping over I don’t wanna hear shit about it.. he tried to sound like the good guy and say he has never said anything about it.. but he has .. one time.. I lost track of my conscious thought and let it go and he said damn babe .. that’s a big stomach…I reminded him about this and he said so do something about it.. I reminded him that I have NO time to do something about it.. and also said wait woahh buddy your body isn’t hot either you and your fucking beer belly from drinking so much…

Okay, so not all NY blogs are well-written. And self-indulgence is only fun if it’s smart.

And Pennsylvania? Two PA blogs stood out to me, the first (Blogging Barbie) due to its spewing confessions doctored in lolcatz and aimspeak, and the second (Life Goes On, I Think) because the writing is so spare and gorgeous. Blogging Barbie was one of the first blogs I read—I found it through 20SB, which I joined in an attempt to attract readers to my own blog—and it was (and still is) one of the blogs that drew me to this new world.

Blogging Barbie is both intensely private (she is careful not to drop any identifying details about who she is, and where; there are no photographs, and her profile picture is Barbie’s beaming head), and very upfront about her emotional turmoil, past and present heartaches, financial worries, and family drama. Nothing appears edited, and the language is very playful in its deliberate misspellings, truncations, and neologisms. Hers was probably the blog that introduced me to expressions like “oh hai,” “craycray,” “crazykins,” and SHOUTING, EXTENNNNDED EXCLAMATIONS! BB’s voice is a mix between Cher from Clueless and country balladeer, with loads of woven-in quotes and snappy recaps.

I suppose its okay if I want to channel my inner 5yr old. Because, today? On my last day of my pediatrics rotation? Well, I kinda got my evaluation and grade. Long story short, my instructor said that she would be honored to write a recommendation for me. And that, I quote, “pediatric nursing is where I belong.” Oh, and I got an A in my clinical grade. It made me feel like this:

Followed by a picture of kids jumping on a trampoline.
The language and back-and-forth is maintained even when the tone turns somber:

He knew that I was naive, and he played me like a piece of chess.He got what he wanted. Someone to pay his way for him, and all the while got to accomplish his hidden agenda. My family and close friends knew that soemthing just wasn’t “right” about him when they met him….but when I looked at him? I just finally saw someone that finally loved me. A relationship, a happily ever after. For once, in a very long time, I was part of the ‘LOOOK AT ME! I HAVE A Boyfriend TOOO, and therefore my world is PERFECT!!!’ crowd. Nevermind that I was blinded by a facade, explaining away red flags that my gut told me indicated something seriously, seriously wrong.

As its title might indicate, Life Goes On, I Think also contains plenty of heartache and emotionally-wrought confessions (think lots of therapist visits, a mother who recommends plastic surgery and liposuction for her teenage daughter, self-isolating instincts, and soul-crushing break-ups), though its rhetoric—literate and full of “show-don’t-tell” moments—is a far cry from BB’s lolcat trills. The blogger, Paige Jennifer, is actually a writer, mostly of short stories (from what I can tell, at least), and it translates in posts that crafted like flash fiction, edited to for maximum dramatic effect. A phone conversation with her mother is loaded with action descriptions, used both to add context to the dialogue and to convey Paige’s emotions:

For whatever reason, “accident” triggers the vision of him dropping a cereal bowl from his grasp, milk splashing across the tile floor. Never mind the fact that it has been a decade since my father had the dexterity to carry a bowl of cereal.
“He’s in the ICU with brain trauma,” my mother continues.
I fall back into the pillows, glance at the television, turn my gaze to my sliding glass doors. The soft glow of a street light shines like a halo against the dark night sky.

Most of the posts have a defined beginning, middle, and end—the above post started with a discovery that turning over the couch cushions would stave off buying its replacement. In “It’s Just a Phase,” Paige describes the past months’ phases, from clementines to pomegrantes to frozen dinner hibernation. The bulk of the post is devoted to this last phase, and how, finally, Paige is able to burrow her way out, shoot an email to an old friend asking if he wants to meet up for drinks, buy tickets to Jamie Cullen, and plan trips to visit family in Sarasota and friends in D.C.:

Eating some homemade guacamole, listening to the plows slide piles of snow elsewhere, I realized I was done with hibernating. The novelty of seclusion had worn off. My isolation phase had passed. Instead of embracing the quiet, enjoying the space, I felt punchy. It was so bad, I considered all of the different colors I could paint my living room. People, I hate everything about paint, from picking out the color to rolling it on the wall.
Without skipping a beat, I opened my laptop and booked flights for a Sarasota trip, making sure my visit overlapped with Leslie and the kids. Then I bought tickets for a concert, finalized plans for Valentine’s Day, researched what plays I want to see, and started planning my annual springtime visit to hang with my favorite DC based girls. Before I knew it, my calendar was loaded up with social activities, all of which make me squeal with delight. So I guess you could so I was on to my next phase.

Pennsylvania is more of a hodgepodge than New York and New Jersey: it is both literate and teenybopping, open and private (the majority of the bloggers don’t include identifying details), edited and uncut. Like New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians write rarely of natural surroundings; unlike New Yorkers, man-made surroundings are also ignored. Of the three states, Pennsylvanians are the most introspective, and much of their writing has an air of self-explanation and even catharsis.

The Mid Atlantic states are not typically viewed as a region the way the Deep South or New England are, and I didn’t find any literature addressing a cohesive regional writing style, and yet the states share a major characteristic, albeit one manifested in a few ways: their bloggers are wordsmiths. They know how to give dialogue rhythm and punch, they bolster stories with sensory imagery and past memories, they spin quotes and love both high and low pop-culture references. They can be sarcastic and they are always self-aware. And they hook you with plot and developed characters all the more compelling because they are real.

Source consulted:
Broderick, James F. Paging New Jersey: A Literary Guide to the Garden State

“Eco-model” could be an eye roll–inducing label, if only its owner, Summer Rayne Oakes, 24, didn’t cause jaws to drop instead. At 13, she became a member of the Environmental Advisory Council in her hometown of Montdale, Pa.; at Cornell University, she juggled a double major in natural resources and entomology (yep, the study of bugs) with modeling—but only for socially conscious brands. “I’ve turned down some really significant jobs that probably made my agent cry,” laughs the Williamsburg resident. She launched her unique career realizing that “if I were to create real change, I would have to step outside my small science circles and reach new audiences.” Hence her new hosting gig on Discovery’s Planet Green—where she supervised an eco-battle (i.e., a contest to decide who can live greener) between musicians Ludacris and Tommy Lee—and her line of affordable green footwear, Zoe & Zac, for Payless. Now she can add “lifestyle guru” to her jam-packed résumé, as her book, Style, Naturally: The Savvy Shopping Guide to Sustainable Fashion and Beauty hits stores today.

Summer describes the tome as an “irreverent, witty” guide for green virgins. And yet, for all her self-serious references to being a “sustainability strategist,” Summer is wry and savvy, admitting a desire to “obliterate” competing books because hers “looks so much better.” She also acknowledges, “Not everyone’s going to spend $20 to save a polar bear.” A green activist who’s also mindful of the economic climate? Now that’s down-to-earth.

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