Last night's episode of No Reservations took Anthony Bourdain out to Finland at the exhortation of a man with a Facebook group. Alongside musician Sami Yaffa, Bourdain has his blood drained at a spa, drinks beer on a tram car, eats a lot of reindeer, crashes in a VW Bug while folk racing and seeks out the perfect Finnish grandmother who will cook for him. Now, on to the Quotable Bourdain — feel free to add your picks in the comments.
Welcome to Vintage America, a column in which Eater Wine Editor Talia Baiocchi takes a hyperfresh look at all things wine related.
Joe Beef [Photo: Talia Baiocchi/Eater]
If there's one thing that sommeliers in any urban area in North America can envy about Montreal is its unwavering preference for the classic wines of Europe.
"You look at our customers, especially the older French-Canadian people," says David McMillan one half of Montreal's Joe Beef, a restaurant that's become a sort of mecca American chefs and other food obsessives. "You put a glass of big Australian Chardonnay in front of them and it's like 'Get this the fuck away from me—what is this?'"
For the American sommelier the thought of their audience—particularly the 40-60-year-old portion of it—shunning Aussie Chardonnay in favor, of say, Cotat Sancerre or Pépière Muscadet is nothing more than fodder for some sort of utopian fantasy.
Charles Phan, chef at San Francisco's The Slanted Door, will release his Vietnamese Home Cooking cookbook in September, but here's a video preview of Phan talking about his project that'll satisfy early appetites. He says his seven-chapter book shouldn't be intimidating: "If you can drive a car, you can cook, I think. Or even if you don't drive a car. It's simple. It's not that hard."
[Photo: Gabe Ulla / Eater]
On Saturday morning, Andoni Luis Aduriz, chef of Mugaritz in San Sebastian, took a cab down from Kitchen Arts & Letters on Manhattan's Upper East Side to Minetta Tavern in the Greenwich Village. When he got there, he enjoyed a cigarette outside, before slipping into a booth at the restaurant and ordering a burger and a beer. For the next hour and a half, he did as he had done in the days before, sitting and answering questions to promote his new Phaidon book. Here's the first part of that interrogation (translated from Spanish), which deals with Aduriz finding his own voice, the experience he hopes to create at Mugaritz, and how he views words like "good" and "delicious."
There's a sentence at the beginning of the book where you say that after cooking with Adrià and Berasategui, you realized that you had to carve out your own style. I imagine it's something lots of cooks go through, but how'd you go about it?
Before opening Mugaritz, I worked for two chefs with a lot of personality: Ferran Adrià and Martín Berasategui. It's a rather natural thing to imitate the spaces you're in for an extended time. If I move to New York, for example, I'll try my best to become a New Yorker to survive, and it's not much different when you stage somewhere. You learn how to think there, you learn how things are done, and you go to absorb. And when you leave those experiences, it's hard sometimes to even notice how much they've marked you and come through in your thinking and cooking.
When we got to Mugaritz, I definitely had a bunch of ideas that I wasn't able to work on while at other restaurants, but at the same time, it took years to develop my own style. I tend to say two years, but it was probably more.
Komé in Austin, Texas. [Photo: Raymond Thompson/Eater Austin]
Since we can't all of us hop on a plane to Japan when we're craving fine sushi, we have to settle for what we can get here in the United States. Bon Appétit has listicled their ten best new sushi restaurants in America, for which anyone who doesn't live in a major metropolitan area will pretty much have to jump on a plane anyway.
For a great "cleansing" piece of sushi per BA, try Komé in Austin, Portland's Bamboo Sushi or any of their eight other recommendations.
Loading comment form... 
Two big media stories out of Los Angeles today: a critic's been unmasked, and a magazine is closing. First, LA Weekly food critic (the new Jonathan Gold, as it were) Besha Rodell 
9(unknown*no*no*0)&guid=ON&x_utmac=MO-189494-26){kind=small}
