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“Consuming Passions”: Kitchen Fever
With Martha Stewart’s future up for grabs in the wake of allegations of funny business trading stocks, it’s hard to imagine what people will do with the fancy kitchen tools they have acquired over years of watching her; years of acquisition of tools, pots and pans, pastry tubes, cookie cutters and cheese cloth, and coloured sprinkles and …[Read more]
September 2009 By Reggie Nadelson Manhattan’s Il Posto Accanto is Roman cooking at its best. Nothing fancy. Just utter perfection. It’s midday Sunday, a very mellow time at Il Posto Accanto, the little Roman-style trattoria on Second Street in Manhattan’s East Village. Sun streams through the glass panes of the doors. 
In the Heart of Mayfair, John Saumarez Smith presides over what many consider the best little book shop in the english-speaking world. "Try that," he says, extracting a book from a messy, tempting pile as if he'd been expecting me, though it's months since I've been in London. "I think you might like it," John Saumarez Smith 
Hermès, which turned basic accessories into modern icons, takes the lid off what's luxe now. Reggie Nadelson reports from 24 Rue Faubourg St.-Honoré. Once upon a time in a suburb of Paris, a guy kissed a bag, though it was no frog and did not really need a kiss. It was at the Hermès workshops in 
In seafood shacks, at gourmet tables, and especially during a stomach-defying live-fish auction, Reggie Nadelson discovers the true—and a new—Hawaii. It's 5 a.m. at Honolulu's fish auction, and I'm eyeballing a quivering Hawaiian opah, a pink and silver moonfish, round and flat as a plate. 
Redesigning your mother's engagement ring is serious business. Reggie Nadelson travels to Gstaad and master jeweler Andrew Grima to get it done right. "Shall I surprise you?" Surprise me! Andrew Grima, a big man with a generous smile, sits behind his desk in his shop in Gstaad and scribbles a design for a diamond ring 
I love ice cream. I mean, I really love it, as much as sex, almost as much as Frank Sinatra, more than Manolos. I'll eat anything sweet and frozen (and have): yogurty vanilla ice cream in Red Square in the dead of winter as Soviet soldiers ate their own; an exquisite prune-and-Armagnac flavor at Berthillon, on Paris's Ile St.-Louis; Vassar Devils (hot fudge and marshmallow sundaes served on brownies) accompanied by many gin