Chris Nordquist
The Holidays are over (everyone exhale), but unfortunately winter’s just getting started. It’s time to fill the chilly winter nights with family and friends, great food and wine and a tasty seasonal cocktail or two. This drink features two delicious winter fruits –pomegranates and mandarin oranges– with a dash of exotic Allspice Dram to add […]
Our friend Catherine is an elegant and accomplished hostess. I picture her on Thursday emerging from the kitchen bearing a huge, perfectly dressed turkey –and without a bead of sweat on her brow or a spot on her vintage Chanel– and I’ll bet there’s little exaggeration in this vision. A week or so ago she […]
Last Friday our friends Visnja and Franck came to dinner in the City. One nice thing about being the cook for the evening, of course, is getting to choose the menu, and I put together a line-up of old favorites: Dried Figs in Red Wine (that I had on hand) with blue cheese and crackers […]
Another great old cocktail with a silly and unappetizing name (which came from a 1922 movie starring Rudolph Valentino). Don’t be put off, though. This crowd-pleasing drink has a big flavor that’s perfect for chilly evenings. At first glance the list of ingredients seems odd: Scotch whisky, sweet vermouth, orange juice and Cherry Heering, a […]
We got lucky in San Francisco. Frances, an excellent new restaurant, opened right across the street from us, and it’s thriving. The space had seem doomed, hosting a series of financially and/or gastronomically unsuccessful ventures (the longest-lived of which was an odd Hawaiian-themed place with Spam on the menu) but Chef Melissa Perello has broken […]
Week before last it was hot in San Francisco. Not just hot for chilly San Francisco, but hot for anywhere, with temperatures over 100F and not the slightest puff of Pacific breeze to cool us off in the evenings. (There are a few days a year that remind you that San Francisco is at about […]
Most Saturday nights in Southampton, as we’re finishing the after dinner-kitchen clean-up, my partner David quietly begins another project: he mixes up a pitcher of his Bloody Marys to serve at lunch the next day. Forget those brash, overly salty cans of “spicy” Bloody Mary mix that you order on long flights (and furtively mix […]
As I was doing a little “research” on this classic cocktail, a friend commented, “Really? That sounds like a such a granny drink.” Well, maybe so, if your grandmother wears a lot of vintage Chanel and tells racy stories about Paris in the 1930s. After a good run allegedly starting in 1900s Paris, the Sidecar […]
Don’t let the dark and stormy appearance of this drink fool you: it’s tart, light and refreshing, perfect for the dog days of summer. Its color and its distinctive flavor are from tamarind, the pod of a tree that’s used to flavor foods in India and the Middle East. It’s also often made into a […]
Here’s a repost of a favorite from last summer — three great warm-weather cocktails to serve as alternatives to the margarita. Warm weather, meat on the grill, margaritas — they all go together, at least at our house. While I can’t really get enough of the first two, I can max out on the third, […]
