Tag • #food and drink

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My top restaurants and food discoveries from 20 years of writing about France

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Saturday, 23 March - 07:00

From roadside picnics to Michelin-star restaurants, the former editor of France magazine picks her most memorable foodie moments

Standout moments from nearly 20 years of writing about travelling and eating around France include meals in legendary restaurants and the joy of a shared dinner at a chambre d’hôtes . That said, there’s a venue that can’t be underestimated as an opportunity to enjoy France’s culinary delights: the car boot picnic.

Standing under the shade of an open car boot, I have discovered some products so delicious they didn’t make it as far as a gîte kitchen or dining table. It might have been a chunk of comté so fruity it didn’t get beyond the car park on market day. There was the punnet of gariguette strawberries bought from a farm in Brittany’s Plougastel-Daoulas, famous for its microclimate. My family and I each took a bite and stared unbelievingly at each other – the sweetness was off the scale.

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A street food tour of Genoa

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 14 March - 07:00 · 1 minute

From fluffy focaccia to creamy pànera , local Michelin-starred chef Ivano Ricchebono introduces our writer to a taste of the Italian port city

Genoa-born chef Ivano Ricchebono looks like a Hollywood actor playing a chef in a movie. His restaurant The Cook is in a 14th-century palazzo in the old town, and as I step into the dining room I stop and stare – the entire place is covered with frescoes. It’s wildly romantic. “People get engaged here all the time,” Ivano says with a smile. Awarded his first Michelin star in 2010, he has cooked for Stanley Tucci, and has an international reputation for excellence. But today he’s my tour guide – not to the blossoming fine dining scene but to the affordable (and equally delicious) fare enjoyed by locals every day.

Once a mandatory stop on the 19th-century Grand Tour, and known as “La Superba”, Genoa centre is full of impressive architecture that tells of this under-rated port city’s past as a rich and powerful republic. Squeezed between the sea and the Ligurian Alps, it’s just an hour and a half by fast train from Milan, and about the same down to the Cinque Terre. Among Italians the city is renowned for its culinary riches – almost everyone agrees that the pesto and focaccia here are the best in the country (there’s even a foccacia festival in May). Our plan is to walk through several neighbourhoods and taste as many of Genoa’s gastronomic delights as possible.

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Steaming in: Galicia’s scenic – and free – thermal baths

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Tuesday, 12 March - 07:00

In the northern Spanish town of Ourense, locals and visitors luxuriate in hot spring waters at a series of free public baths – or enjoy a private spa for a fiver

A bronzed, willowy veteran in black Speedos glides into the shallow, round-ish thermal pool snuggled into a grassy riverbank. It’s one of a huddle of rock pools, with trees and a modest wooden changing hut. We’re the only people here bathing beneath a cement-coloured sky that seems to inhale the steam billowing from the baths. It could be an onsen in rural Japan, except I’m about 10,000 miles from there, in north-west Spain.

The Outariz and Burga de Canedo thermal baths in Galicia are the largest of the council-run thermal areas in Ourense, with six thermal pools and two cold plunge pools, linked by a white, curved metal footbridge. Today, it’s almost empty and, most importantly, free to use, like most thermal baths here.

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Relaxed old-school glamour: springtime in Cefalù, Sicily

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Saturday, 9 March - 07:30 · 1 minute

With its extraordinary architecture, maze-like streets and ever-present sunshine, it’s no accident that so many film-makers have used the town as a location

I was eating homemade crostata (jam tart) on a roof terrace in the Sicilian town of Cefalù and reading about Helius, the ancient Greek god of the sun. Sicily is supposedly the inspiration for the deity’s island in The Odyssey and this makes perfect sense – with more than 300 days of sunshine a year, Helius would like it here. The island is especially lovely in spring, when it’s quieter, cooler and more peaceful than in the scorching summer.

Cefalù is an ancient fishing village almost exactly halfway along Sicily’s north coast. It’s prized by Italians as one of the island’s loveliest beach-side places. Barbara De Gaetani, a licensed tour guide who grew up here, told me the allure of the place is difficult to explain: “Many other places are gorgeous but not as seductive. You can feel life flowing here, and it’s no accident that many film-makers have used the town as a location.”

Compared with Sicily’s ritzier spots, to me it feels more authentic and has a sort of relaxed old-school glamour. It’s also easy to reach by train from Palermo (about 50 minutes); from Catania, on the other side of the island, it takes around four hours, including a change in Messina.

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20 of the best UK pubs with bedrooms, for lunch and a winter walk

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Saturday, 25 November - 07:00

What’s better than a winter pub lunch? Staying the night afterwards. Our pick includes coaching inns, a 12th-century abbey and a Game of Thrones hotspot

Fireside lunches in cheerful pubs are one of the great pleasures of the UK winter, and this score of snug venues all come with somewhere to stay as well as cobweb-clearing walks from the door.

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Study yields new insights into why some people get headaches from red wine

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 20 November - 19:04 · 1 minute

Enlarge / Red wine headache (RWH) might be caused by quercetin, which inhibits an enzyme that processes acetaldehyde in the blood. (credit: Mick Stephenson/CC BY-SA 3.0 )

As the holiday season kicks off this week, many will be making a consequential choice at dinner: red wine or white wine? And if your choice is red, will you be risking a headache? The fact that red wine can sometimes cause headaches in certain individuals (especially those prone to migraines) is common knowledge—so much so that the phenomenon ("RWH") even has its own Wikipedia page . The Roman encyclopedist Celsus wrote in his treatise De Medicina about the pain felt after drinking wine, while six centuries later, Paul of Aegina mentioned that drinking wine could trigger a headache.

But the science to date is largely unclear regarding which components of red wine are responsible, as well as the mechanisms behind the phenomenon. A team of California scientists has narrowed down the likely culprits to a flavonol called quercetin , according to a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, although they have yet to run experiments with participants prone to RWH to test their hypothesis.

It's a knotty issue because of the complexities of both wine and human genetics/physiology. Wine is basically water and alcohol, along with acids, dissolved sugars, and other compounds that lend color and flavor. For instance, the tannins in wine are polyphenolic compounds responsible for much of the bitterness and astringency in a given wine; they're derived from the skins and stems of the grapes, or as a result of aging in oak barrels.

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‘Not just for summer’: France turns to rosé wine as a year-round tipple

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Saturday, 23 September, 2023 - 13:55

Once dismissed as a swimming pool drink, rosé is becoming the go-to wine for the French as traditions change

For the French, a glass of chilled blush rosé was once considered a delicate but not entirely serious “swimming pool drink”; a summer apéritif for lightweight, often female, tipplers.

Real wine lovers would select a red heavy with tannins, or a traditional white – both considered the true expression of French terroir , the untranslatable concept encompassing not just the soil in which the vines grow but also the natural, geological climatic and cultural elements associated with it.

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‘The star was the teriyaki oxtail doughnut’: readers’ favourite restaurants and tapas bars in Spain

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Friday, 25 August, 2023 - 10:00

From a farm restaurant near Santiago de Compostela to a veggie-friendly Málaga diner, our tipsters share their gastronomic Spanish finds

If I had to recommend one place to eat tapas in Spain, it’s Bar Poë in Granada, not only for the food, but for the atmosphere. It’s always bustling (come early to guarantee a seat) with a local and international crowd. Run by a friendly husband-and-wife duo, every drink comes with a free dish, and, unusually, you can choose your tapa. International and big on flavour, the menu includes Portuguese piri piri dishes, salt cod, curries and more.
Jason Rich

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Physicists unlock secret of why champagne bubbles form straight chain as they rise

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 1 May, 2023 - 23:23 · 1 minute

hand pouring champagne from a bottle into two fluted glasses

Enlarge / Researchers investigated the stability of bubble chains in carbonated drinks like champagne and sparkling wine. (credit: Madeline Federle and Colin Sullivan)

Brown University physicist Roberto Zenit has a knack for tying his fundamental fluid dynamics research to everyday phenomena, like enjoying a glass of champagne with friends. He noticed one day that the bubbles rising to the surface form stable vertical columns, unlike other carbonated beverages, where the wake of rising bubbles knocks other bubbles sideways so that multiple bubbles rise simultaneously. Zenit found that this is because surfactant molecules coat the champagne bubbles and encourage more swirling, thereby disrupting the wake, according to a new paper published in the journal Physical Review Fluids.

"Just observing a glass of a liquid super-saturated with carbon dioxide is like having a laboratory in front of you," Zenit told Ars. "It's a very good example of trying to understand hydrodynamic interactions. When two bubbles are moving one behind the other, they usually become misaligned because they create a disturbance in the liquid around them. We realized this was very different for champagne. If you know anything about bubble dynamics, that's not natural, so of course we were instantly intrigued."

Zenit has previously analyzed the fluid dynamics of modern painting techniques and materials pioneered by such luminaries as muralist David Siqueiros and Jackson Pollock, both of whom Zenit considers "intuitive physicists." Siqueiros' famous "accidental painting" technique involved pouring layers of paint on a horizontal surface and letting whorls, blobs, and other shapes form over time. The trick is to place a dense fluid on top of a lighter one to create a classic instability because the heavier liquid will push through the lighter one. According to Zenit, Pollock's dripping technique relied upon the same instability to produce curly lines and spots on his canvases.

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