MARIANI’S
Virtual
Gourmet
"Dinner at Eight" by
Leslie Staalberg
❖❖❖ IN THIS ISSUE SEDONA AT THE CROSSROADS By John Mariani NEW YORK CORNER NORA THAI By John Mariani NOTES FROM THE WINE CELLAR CAMERON HUGHES AND THE ALLOCATION SHUFFLE By John Mariani ❖❖❖ SEDONA AT THE CROSSROADS By John Mariani Photo by John Mariani
Wordsworth
wrote of London, “earth hath not anything to
show more fair.” But then, he’d never been to
Sedona, Arizona.
Arizona has been blessed with extraordinary
natural wonders—the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley,
Havasu Falls, the Petrified Forest, Sagauro
National Park—along with unique man-made marvels
like Hoover Dam and the Native American cliff
dwellings of Canyon de Chelly. Sedona’s Red Rock
country flanking the town, with its magnificent
Castle Rock, Bell Rock and Butte Courthouse Rock,
ranks among the finest, most iconic destinations
in America, making it a top tourist and hiking
site, with 300 miles of trails. For some it is
considered a spiritual place full of energy
vortexes; others arrive hoping to witness a UFO
sighting. Others float above it all in a balloon.
Though small in size—only about 19
square miles—Sedona’s natural beauty and
accessibility, as well as a Native American
history that dates back 11,500 years, has brought
not just a barrage of tourists, but also an influx
of seniors and second-home buyers who have put the
town’s traditional character in considerable flux.
With a year-round population of only 11,000
people, whose median family income is only
$56,000, Sedona has been swollen by tourism and
development, with the median cost of a house now
$562,000.
In
January, City Manager Justin Clifton told The
Arizona Republic there were more than 1,000
vacation rentals in the city, accounting for
20% of Sedona's total housing inventory.
Sedona’s Chamber of Commerce President and CEO,
Jennifer Wesselhoff, told Wrangler
News that she is “receiving
complaints from business owners fearing that the
lack of availability of affordable housing is
driving away workers.”
Indeed, while I was in Sedona I heard
nothing but high praise for the Mexican workers
who make the town’s hospitality business possible.
“They are the hardest working, finest people
you’ll ever meet,” a local restaurateur told me.
“Without them, we’d have to close all the resorts and
restaurants.”
Rampant tourism and development is a
double-edged sword everywhere in the world,
whereby cities and regions grow rich while their
essential character may be forever changed. It is
always a battle over displacement, and long-time
Sedonans have been fighting to keep their beloved
town a place of unique enchantment.
While I did not indulge in the hunt for
vortexes or UFOs, I certainly found the kind of
wonder every visitor seeks in Sedona, which you
begin to encounter in the mesas and red rocks
about an hour’s drive out of the smoggy air of
Phoenix, and they loom larger and larger as you
approach Sedona, whose pretty but prosaic name
derives from Sedona Arabella Miller Schnebly, wife
of the city’s first postmaster. That name may lack
the tough western twang of other Arizona towns
like Rough Rock, Tombstone,
Wolf Hole, Bitter Springs and Skull Valley, but
Sedona is as yet a quiet, well maintained oasis of
gentility in the state. The town itself lies along
Route 89A, lined with antique stores, restaurants
like Silver Saddle and Cowboy Club, and resort
spas named Poco Diablo and Enchantment.
(I’ll be writing about where to stay and to eat in
an upcoming article.)
The
town’s tourist map ads list numerous jeep tours,
galleries, a Center for the New Age offering aura
photos, UFO sighting tours, Creekside Healing and
Past Life Regression. Twice a year The Sedona
Solstice brings in musicians, astrologers and
healers. Sedona
also has an out-sized commitment to the arts.
There’s the highly regarded annual International
Film Festival and a Blue Grass festival; an
extensive chamber music season; and the year-round
Sedona Arts Center.
One of the more appealing sites for me was
the Sedona Heritage Museum (right) in
uptown, on the National Register of Historic
Places. It is not a modern museum with a famous
architect’s name on it—no Frank Gehry warped
titanium, no Renzo Piano walls of glass. Indeed,
the intent has been to preserve the Walter and
Ruth Jordan family’s 1931 farmstead, which Ruth
sold to the city in 1998 in order to save it from
becoming a housing development.
It is quaintly delightful. The
old rooms, kitchen, appliances and rock-faced
attached garage cover 3,000 square feet, and
inside it is packed with original artifacts that
exhibit the hard work and simple pleasures of an
Arizona farm family during and after the
Depression. There is also a 40’ x 80’ fruit
packing shed, built in 1946, that
still houses the Jordans’ tractors and an apple
grading machine. A tenthouse was added in 2007 as
a replica of early pioneer housing whose ease of
dismantling made it a kind of mobile home.
Original in its own way on the property is
a telegraph office, relocated to the Museum
grounds in 2014, that was built for the 1947 John
Wayne movie “The Angel and the Badman,” and the
inside is festooned with western movie
memorabilia.
The
old romantic road Route 66 never ran through
Sedona, and Jack Kerouac seems not to have visited
the town, but when twilight ends, standing under
the endless umbrella of stars, I thought of what
that restless traveler wrote about the vastness of
the West in his book On the Road: “The
air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of
every cobbled alley so great, that I thought I was
in a dream.”
❖❖❖ NEW YORK CORNER
By John Mariani NORA THAI
179 N 9th Street (between Bedford and Driggs) Brooklyn 718-302-1499 Williamsburg, which borders the East River at the Willamsburg Bridge, has long been a quiet neighborhood for Hassidic Jews, but for a while now has been gentrifying, so that more than a couple of media articles have referred to it as a “hipster hood.” Yet these days it’s more of a place you’ll find million-dollar Millennials’ condos than hipster cafés. It’s also the home of Brooklyn Brewery and a slew of new restaurants that join the century-old Peter Luger Steakhouse. One of the newest is Nora Thai, whose distinction is in its divergence from the entrenched Northern Thai menus elsewhere by offering the food of Southern Thailand, from which owner Kittigron Lertpanaruk (better known as Kim Oh) emigrated to live out his American Dream. It’s certainly worked out for him: He’s built a small empire of Spice restaurants around New York, and now owns the revered Arun's in Chicago. Nora is short for “manora,” a traditional Thai dance originating in Southern Thailand, and the 80-seat premises, once a warehouse, are theatrical indeed, with walls of reclaimed wood, intricate carvings, a handsome bar up front and a stunning large bronze statue of a fairly slender Buddha. There are plans for a DJ and live music on weekends, but for now the background music is international and a bit loud. Southern Thailand, whose principal city is Phuket, is a long finger of land edged in by the Bay of Thailand and the Indian Ocean, so seafood is stressed in the region’s kitchens. Nora’s menu is a wide and colorful palette of seafood and meat, and the distinctions between appetizers and main courses are hardly noticeable. So you might start with plump chicken and shrimp dumplings with sweet and sour glaze ($8), or chor muang ($10), another form of blue, flower-shaped dumplings with peas, palm sugar and chicken (left). Or perhaps to begin, a summer roll in an egg wrap filled with tofu, mushrooms, bean sprouts, sweet pork sausage and cucumber with a tangy-sweet tamarind sauce ($8). There’s a papaya salad called som tum with poached shrimp, peanuts, garlic and fish sauce ($10), as well as a green mango salad ($9). Cua kreang is rich in flavors of minced pork or chicken with Thai chili, lemongrass and shrimp paste ($14), while gaeng som is more of a delightful spicy-sour curry with shrimp and bamboo or papaya ($14). Pad Thai is ubiquitous in Thai restaurants and, contrary to ill-informed belief, very popular in Thailand. Nora’s version is complex, with the flavors of sautéed rice noodles in a lime-tamarind sauce with egg, scallion, crushed peanuts and meat or tofu, along with the unusual addition of zucchini ($18). Of six noodle dishes, I loved most the kao-soy (right) with chicken in a beautifully yellow curry with mustard greens, red onion, snow peas, lime and boiled egg topped with crispy egg noodles ($15). There are seven fried rice dishes cooked to various degrees of spiciness ($12). The savories go on and on: a juicy pork chop with garlic and Thai pepper marinade, sautéed vegetables and a barbecue sauce ($17.50) that shows just how overrated Sriracha is. Duck is always on a Thai menu, and the generous half-duck with basil and chili garlic is only $22 and feeds two. A mango whole fish, also meant for sharing, is a big crispy red snapper with mango salsa, cashews and cherry tomatoes ($28). No matter how many dishes fill a table, there seems no end to invention, but palate fatigue simply did not occur during our long evening at Nora, because this is not a heavy cuisine. But do not miss the desserts, which are an amalgam of Thai and western flavors: Death by Chocolate Cake ($9); mango sticky rice ($9); and Thai tea panna cotta ($6). The food is certainly the main attraction at Nora, but the place excels in its design by comparison to most Thai restaurants in the city, making it more than worth a trip over the bridge to this quiet, pleasantly gentrified neighborhood. Open daily for lunch and dinner.
❖❖❖ NOTES FROM THE WINE CELLAR
By John Mariani HOW TO BUY ALL THE HIGHLY ALLOCATED WINES YOU WANT . . . AT A CHEAP PRICE An Interview with Cameron Hughes John Mariani
The
last time I interviewed Cameron Hughes, CEO
of the giant wine distributor under his
name, he told me about how some of most
illustrious cult wines of California, whose
bottlings win 95-point ratings from the wine
media and sell for hundreds of dollars, sell
off their excess to negoçiants like him who
in turn sell it everywhere from local wine
shops to Costco for prices below $50.
Now, after several very bountiful
vintages from 2012 to 2019, with a glut of
California wines in the market, his deals are
getting better than ever. Over
dinner in New York, the 47 year-old Hughes
told me, “The state is drowning in wine. For
wineries that pride themselves on small
production and selling only by allocation,
it’s a little embarrassing to find their
warehouses bulging with thousands of gallons
of wine. Still, they don’t want to see their
wines selling in Costco because of the
perception of lower quality.”
He
cited one well-known cult wine that was
selling for $65 a gallon, now available in the
market for just $20.
“Allocating wine is just a game,” he
said, drinking a Loire Valley Sauvignon Blanc
with a dish of foie gras. “People who buy at
the high end do so for the experience of
drinking a $300 bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon.
It’s not really about the wine itself, so the
producer says tells this wine shop owner or
restaurateur he can only get a case or a few
bottles, when in fact, his wines are stacked
up in a warehouse.”
Hughes, who lives in San Francisco and
who bears a resemblance to actor Luke Wilson,
gains tremendously from playing the game,
though he does get frustrated when he sees a
wine get a very high rating from Wine
Spectator or Wine
Advocate but a much lower one for the
same exact wine that he
sells under a different label for a quarter of
the price. He hasn’t forgotten the time a wine
was rated an “Editors Choice” with 93 points,
selling for $125. “We bought the surplus of
the same wine under our Napa Valley Lot 51
Coomsville label and sold it for $27.” In the
industry this is called a “shiner,” a wine
already bottled but without a label affixed. In
the U.S. four companies distribute 80% of the
wine sold.
The
same practices go on in Europe, where wine
laws delimit the amount of wine that may be
bottled under the French denomination
contrôlée, so that if a First Growth
Bordeaux or Grand Cru Burgundy estate enjoys
an abundant harvest, some of its finished wine
must be sold off, either under a second label
or to a négoçiant like Hughes, who labels it
himself or negotiates the sale and export of
the excess
wine.
Born in the Modesto, CA, wine
country, Hughes started selling his own
label—he’s never owned a vineyard—called Sinergi
Brand Kitchen Sink out
of the trunk of his car. Over the last fifteen
years he has built up an enormous range of
growers, sellers, and winery owners. He is
also now in the beef business, selling highest
quality USDA Prime and Japanese wagyu.
While the huge harvests of the last
decade would seem a boon to winemakers, Hughes
notes that 2019 sales will be flat, and that,
in fact, the American wine industry is bracing
for a precarious future. “It’s not so much
overproduction,” said Hughes, “but it’s more
due to Americans’ drinking habits. The boomers
have cut back on their wine consumption, while
the Gen-Xers and Millennials are more into
brown goods and beer than wine.”
The
Report also noted that the “cumulative impact
of negative health messaging — absent
offsetting promotion of the health benefits of
moderate wine consumption — is negatively
influencing consumption, particularly for the
millennial consumer. . . . Due to many
factors, including their limited financial
capacity, a preference for premium spirits and
craft beers, delayed careers, negative health
messaging regarding alcohol, and the
legalization of cannabis, the millennial
consumer has temporarily stalled in growing
their wine consumption.” Hughes
is also concerned by global warming and
drought, although he notes that “grapes use less than half the
water in Central Valley – and even less in
Napa and Sonoma—but provide twice the economic
impact (efficiency) of almonds. Grapes don’t
really need a lot of water.”
He’s as concerned about what he calls
“designer yeasts” in wine, which he says may
cause warm weather wines’ alcohol levels to
rise. (It should also be mentioned that some
genetically modified yeasts have been
developed to do the opposite, by diverting
more of the grapes’ sugars to glycol rather
than alcohol, but glycol also tends to make
wines taste sweeter.)
Still, Hughes is very optimistic about
Americans’ desire to drink high quality wines
that he can supply cheaply because of the
current wine glut. It’s kind of his Kumbaya
moment: On his website, he has a video
resembling an inexpensive Super Bowl ad, with
Hughes and his dog bounding through
vineyards and a living room, plucking
wine bottles from the air and from the hands
of “the privileged, the few,” then leading a
pack of very young, smiling Millennials along
what appears to be San Francisco, . He
brandishes a bottle of his wine and exclaims,
“This
is what liberty smells like! This
is what democracy tastes like!” It’s
not exactly Mr.
Smith Goes to Washington, but it’s
folksy, it’s catchy, it’s brimming with
youthful enthusiasm and it’s persuasive, like
the old Coke declaring, “It’s the Real Thing!”
❖❖❖
KFC
has announced it’s going “beyond”
fried chicken with the introduction of
a vegan imitation plant-based chicken
to its menu in Smyrna, GA, one
Atlanta-area restaurant on Tuesday.
PRECISELY THE
COMPARISON WE WOULD COME
"Frank
Castronovo and Frank Falcinelli (the Franks) are
French-trained chefs who cook Italian. They are not,
however, pizzaioli. But they have a guy. . . Chris
Bianco of Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix, [who] is not only a
pizzaiolo, but maybe the world’s greatest pizzaiolo. . .
. to advise and support and generally share with the
Franks all their naturally-leavened secrets. Which, if
you know anything about bread and pizza, you know is
like having John Coltrane and Charlie Parker agree to
help you play the saxophone.—"F&F Pizzeria,"
New York Magazine.
❖❖❖
Any of John Mariani's books below may be ordered from amazon.com. The Hound in Heaven (21st Century Lion Books) is a novella, and for anyone who loves dogs, Christmas, romance, inspiration, even the supernatural, I hope you'll find this to be a treasured favorite. The story concerns how, after a New England teacher, his wife and their two daughters adopt a stray puppy found in their barn in northern Maine, their lives seem full of promise. But when tragedy strikes, their wonderful dog Lazarus and the spirit of Christmas are the only things that may bring his master back from the edge of despair. WATCH THE VIDEO! “What a huge surprise turn this story took! I was completely stunned! I truly enjoyed this book and its message.” – Actress Ali MacGraw “He had me at Page One. The amount of heart, human insight, soul searching, and deft literary strength that John Mariani pours into this airtight novella is vertigo-inducing. Perhaps ‘wow’ would be the best comment.” – James Dalessandro, author of Bohemian Heart and 1906. “John Mariani’s Hound in Heaven starts with a well-painted portrayal of an American family, along with the requisite dog. A surprise event flips the action of the novel and captures us for a voyage leading to a hopeful and heart-warming message. A page turning, one sitting read, it’s the perfect antidote for the winter and promotion of holiday celebration.” – Ann Pearlman, author of The Christmas Cookie Club and A Gift for my Sister. “John Mariani’s concise, achingly beautiful novella pulls a literary rabbit out of a hat – a mash-up of the cosmic and the intimate, the tragic and the heart-warming – a Christmas tale for all ages, and all faiths. Read it to your children, read it to yourself… but read it. Early and often. Highly recommended.” – Jay Bonansinga, New York Times bestselling author of Pinkerton’s War, The Sinking of The Eastland, and The Walking Dead: The Road To Woodbury. “Amazing things happen when you open your heart to an animal. The Hound in Heaven delivers a powerful story of healing that is forged in the spiritual relationship between a man and his best friend. The book brings a message of hope that can enrich our images of family, love, and loss.” – Dr. Barbara Royal, author of The Royal Treatment. ❖❖❖
❖❖❖
FEATURED
LINKS: I am happy to report
that the Virtual
Gourmet is linked to four excellent
travel sites: Everett Potter's Travel Report: I consider this the best and
savviest blog of its kind on the web. Potter is a
columnist for USA
Weekend, Diversion, Laptop and Luxury Spa Finder,
a contributing editor for Ski and a frequent contributor
to National
Geographic Traveler, ForbesTraveler.com
and Elle Decor.
"I’ve designed this site is for people who take
their travel seriously," says Potter. "For
travelers who want to learn about special places
but don’t necessarily want to pay through the nose for
the privilege of staying there. Because at the end
of the day, it’s not so much about five-star
places as five-star experiences." THIS WEEK:
Eating Las Vegas
JOHN CURTAS has been covering the Las Vegas
food and restaurant scene since 1995. He is
the co-author of EATING LAS VEGAS – The 50
Essential Restaurants (as well as
the author of the Eating Las Vegas web site: www.eatinglasvegas.
He can also be seen every Friday morning as
the “resident foodie” for Wake Up With the
Wagners on KSNV TV (NBC) Channel 3 in
Las Vegas.
MARIANI'S VIRTUAL GOURMET
NEWSLETTER is published weekly. Publisher: John Mariani. Editor: Walter Bagley. Contributing Writers: Christopher Mariani,
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