The hot new veggie hybrid, shredding guitars, and a newly-favorite fizzy wine
It’s been nearly two years since I started this newsletter, which was intended as a way to keep in touch and share things with my friends and acquaintances—just in a slightly broader way than personal texts or emails—while hunkered down upstate with my father. Two of the more random things I vividly recall from that time: making my own face masks with instructions my aunt in Scotland had sent me, and mastering the technique for that foamy coffee drink everyone was making. For some reason, I keep returning to my memories of that spring (nostalgic isn’t the right word…more like an obsessive compulsion), far more easily than I could this time last year. I wouldn’t say my reminiscences are necessarily rosier, but I can reflect on them without a reflexive shudder. I guess that’s something, right?
1.
I loved reading Nabil Ayers’ recent piece on our complicated, but enduring, love-hate relationship with guitar solos for the New York Times. Not just because Nabil is a friend as well as a terrific writer, but because his knowledge and access to musicians (he’s a record-company exec), provides the kind of insight you might only gleam from a guitar hero’s memoir. And it makes me excited for the next opportunity to experience live music, something that I haven’t done nearly enough lately. By the way, speaking of memoirs, Nabil has his own debuting this June. Get it!
2.
Garden-variety gossip— Ok, there’s kale, and there’s brussels sprouts: two once-maligned veggies that reemerged sometime in the late 2000s with the kind of hype and new branding we’d normally associate with Hollywood career comebacks. Let’s call them the John Travoltas (c. Pulp Fiction) of the produce department. But what I didn’t know until a recent visit to a DC-based farmer’s market: they made adorable little babies called kalettes!!!! Now why aren’t these cuties on more NYC restaurant menus…?
3.
If you have one night in DC, get your tails over to Silver Lyan, the cool and sophisticated new cocktail bar burrowed within the vaults of the Riggs Washington DC (a historic bank-turned-hotel in the Penn Quarter). It’s the first stateside project by Ryan Chetiyawardana, aka Mr Lyan, with an exciting list of drinks and bites that draw from the local area’s past, and often with an element of surprise, too. Last weekend, my friend Patrick and I were able to catch the final night of a collaborative residency with NYC’s Kitana Kitten, themed around DC’s famous cherry blossom season. It was such an entertaining experience, we left asking everyone if there was an after-hours party we could crash later. (There was. We didn’t.)
4.
Grub Street’s recent commentary on the closure of Forlini’s, an old-school red sauce joint that found itself with a newfound, somewhat flimsier generation of fans after a Vogue-hosted party there, tapped into a part of me that struggles every time I learn of an ancient—but suddenly cool again—establishment. Should I check it out out myself, for the sake of forming a proper opinion? Should I stay off the bandwagon? It’s old and it’s been around forever, but what if it closed tomorrow? Would I be basic if I patronized it now? As the article stated, it was the new generation of fans that helped keep the lights on, a fact that makes the issue even less cut-and-dry.
5.
My friend Colu pulled this gorgeous organic sparkling rosé out of her fridge the last time I came over, and now it’s the only frizzy-fizzy wine I really want to drink these days. I love that it’s produced by a family-owned Portuguese winery, too. (Oh, and should anyone see the pink label and write this off as cheap swills for the “hella-yay-all-day-yes-way-rosé” crowd, that’s fine. More for the rest of us.)