Wine. Travel. Food.
With the busy fall season fast approaching, my upcoming heavy travel schedule and my wish to just spend some personal time … I’m going to temporarily publish WTF with Phil Roberts every other week instead of every week. The good news is that I’ll be gathering a treasure trove of new and exiting material. See […]
It was July. And it was hotter than hell. We were in France last month when the temperature reached 114 degrees, a record high for the country. Luckily, we happened to be in Nice at the time, where a prevailing soft breeze from the Mediterranean made the temperature endurable. Still, the air was hot, heavy […]
Earlier this summer, Joanne and I had the opportunity to revisit one of our favorite Paris restaurants: LE RÉCAMIER. Situated in the 7th Arrondisement on the Left Bank of the Seine, it’s a short stroll from the Bon Marché department store (site of Paris’ best food hall), and just across the street from the Hotel […]
It was back in the Figlio days when tapas first got on my radar screen, and small plates have been a fixture at our restaurants ever since. So it was that on our most recent trip to Europe, we included Barcelona on the itinerary. The fact that we had grandkids in tow made the destination […]
Among the many joys of dining in France is that every decent bistro or brasserie can be counted on to offer simple, but profound pleasures: local red wines by the carafe; perhaps a small slab of foie gras and onion jam; a garlicky order of escargot with proper French bread to sop up the garlic […]
In 2017 the Catalonian Parliament declared its independence from Spain, granting the region considerable autonomy in political, economic, educational, environmental, and cultural affairs. They are now, with eight million people, perhaps the strongest economy among all the seventeen “autonomous communities” that make up the country of Spain. The only problem is that the Spanish Central […]
Part of the pleasure of following French cuisine is that French chefs debate almost everything …whether ingredients, methods, technique, tricks, texture, flavor or mouth-feel. It’s a shame that Marie-Antoine Carême, probably France’s first celebrity chef, and Auguste Escoffier, the “king of haute cuisine,” didn’t live at the same time, because they’d have gone to the […]
