Kopanisti Cheese: Divine and Cycladic

Although its white to bluish-white hue and light, fluffy texture could be said to resemble picture-perfect clouds on your plate, what makes Kopanisti cheese so divine isn’t just its taste. As legend has it, Aristaios, the son of Apollo and the huntress Cyrene, was sent by the gods to bestow the divine art of cheese-making on the people of Greece. Some myths even suggest that Kopanisti cheese gets better and better with time. One taste of its rich, peppery taste and you just might believe it.

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Sweet, Sour, Bitter (and Just a Little Salty) at fond

There are moments when that indescribable Swedish air around things becomes less allusive, when you can almost pinpoint the qualities that makes these things so deliciously…well…Swedish. Maybe you know exactly what I’m talking about? It’s a mix best clumsily described as gloomy and sublime, what you feel during an Ingmar Bergman film, or listening to ABBA’s The Winner Takes It All. You could also call it a mix of sweet, sour, bitter, and just a little bit salty, which, coincidentally, is exactly how Gothenburg restaurant fond introduces their autumn menu.

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Brooklyn Edible Social Club

They say they first step in any recovery is admitting the situation at hand. So, let’s all take a deep breath in, exhale, and say it together: the last few years have been pretty tough. Enough has been said about the global economic crisis to leave that thought there. The next step in recovery is usually acceptance, and part of acceptance is learning to focus on the positives, and the future. Give yourself a nice warm mental hug because you have much more confidence in your strength and resourcefulness than you did 5 years ago. That’s the best thing about hard times, that the focus shifts to resourcefulness, and yes, that means creativity. Whether restauranteurs in need of lower overhead, or lovers of food with a shrinking budget for the luxury of eating out, in the world of food this creativity funneled itself into the boom of the supper club.

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Tronchón: Quixotic Cheese

Quick, what’s the most Spanish thing you can think of? You’ve probably been somewhat influenced by the photo above to think about food, so I’m guessing tapas might have been the first thought you had. Or maybe soap? Without any visual prodding, I’m sure Don Quixote would still be a notable mention, at the very least. Frequently listed among the best literary works of all time, it even spawned an adjective whose pronunciation has been a head-scratcher at times to the best of us. Normally meant to mean “unrealistically optimistic,” I like to think of quixotic slightly closer to the story of the man himself, of a mind of normal reason overturned and conquered by the romanticism of a singular concept. I also like to think that it’s no coincidence that Tronchón cheese was mentioned twice in Don Quixote, because it could certainly overturn a rational mind to crazed devotion to the Teruel countryside. A cheese to get quixotic over.

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Inis Meáin Restaurant & Suites Named in Nicholas Lander’s Delectable Dozen

Congratulations to White Line Hotels Edit Inis Meáin Restaurants & Suites for being named among a prestigious list in Financial Times restaurant critic Nicholas Lander’s Delectable Dozen: Best Restaurants of 2011. Read the rest of this entry »