Transcript: My last meal on earth ---- well, it would involve pork and it would probably involve pasta and wine. I can have wine at my last meal, right? Absolutely. So I had an amazing Harlin cab. I'd have a Harlin Cab and I'd have like a really amazing lasagna with beef, pork, veal and you know with mozzarella and it would be gooey and rich and really filling and you know what I wouldn’t be able to eat the last bite and that would be great. That would be my last thought. I am full. I am happy. I am ready to go.

Recorded on: 3/7/08

Transcript: I thank my mother for this and my grandmother. I have unbelievable genes. My grandmother was nick named Slivers and my mother could have had that nickname, had someone thought of it. So it’s genetics honestly because otherwise I would have to work out which I really don’t want to do to stay thin and the other thing is that I have a bit of camel’s approach to food. I'll go out for a week and then I tend not to go out for a week and then I will eat less. So I'll eat and eat and eat as long as I am eating, but I try to have balance and so either I balance by the week or if its look like I am not going to be able to balance by the week I balance by the plate and that means that I will have had everything. So back to the kitchen or to my husband he is delighted when works out this way, he gets half of everything that I have and so it’s all about moderation and people say “you have this job” It’s true. I take a bite of something from the test kitchen and if you eat in the test kitchen all day and you are full or I do and I am full, I don’t eat at night. So that’s the other thing knowing when you are full. Very common diet advise if you are full don’t eat.

Recorded on: 3/7/08

Transcript: Well. I have a well privileged position being able to eat out any day any night and eating the food from the test kitchen all the time. So I really feel its important to not be so self involved in things that are --- what about everybody else and there are lot of people in New York city who go hungry, who confront either paying the rent or paying for food and this is people who are working people and City Harvest which is a hunger relief organization in New York solves that problem by generally picking up food from places that have too much and delivering it to soup kitchens and places that will turn it into meals for those who are hungry and I want to find out a way to help City Harvest. I am on their board. And I am not a big fan of galas. So I wasn’t going to buy 10 tables which would certainly help City Harvest, but I wanted to think of a way, a grassroots way, to help hungry New Yorkers and the idea became skip lunch fight hunger. So for one day we asked New Yorkers to donate the amount of money that they would have spent on lunch to City Harvest. So that’s great because some people would have spent 10 dollars on lunch, which is the idea like really $10 will make a difference. $10 could help feed two kids for a month. It’s extraordinary, but that’s because the efficiency of City Harvest that they pick up with the exists and they bring into a place that will turn into meals, but right, um, $10 can make that much of difference and lets say use about $100 on lunch. That would be amazing in terms of helping feed these kids and we do it in May which is just before kids get out of school. So we are trying to bridge that summer food gap because kids often will have subsidized lunch, which as you can read in the paper sometimes they don’t want to take subsidized lunch. There is a little tainted, but --- so helping kids get through the summer and so there is a big emphasis on helping feed these kids. So the way it's organized is we look for team captains and the team captain could be a team of five. There is one person who is willing to go out and ask their colleagues to give them money, to give to City Harvest to help feed hungry kids and hungry people in New York City.

Recorded on: 3/7/08

Transcript: We love Degustation, Welsley Danforth, I pretty sure his name is, he does really beautiful little tasting plates. I love the team at Bar Blanc, they have just opened and they are and their foods are great and it’s interesting because there are some people in New York who've had restaurants before like Harry Heffernan who is about to open on Central Park south, and I am dying to see what he is going to do, I think his food is so sophisticated and elegant. So he is not new with that restaurant only new to the scene. I am a huge fan of Michael Psilakis who has with you know, Donatella, an incredible empire. So café on the west side its about to move. Anthos which is Greek, I was talking about the Greek trend that restaurant is just dazzling. That’s where I send everybody who says “I am sick of everything.” Go to Anthos. They have just opened Mia Dona, which is really generally priced and has some phenomenal dishes. They have something that’s deconstructed lasagna, made out of something that is sort of like an Italian pasta cuff bracelet with a red tomato sauce with a dollop of fresh ricotta on top and smoky mozzarella inside and garlic. It is so good and then they do a salt cod. I hate salt cod I hate salt cod and they do just the lightest most delightful deep-fried, elegantly deep-fried, salt cod and they do a deep-fried rabbit, I've never seen it, and they serve it as if its calamari like in a basket. It’s brilliant. This guy is brilliant anyway. So there is a lot happening here.

Recorded on: 3/7/08

Transcript: Istanbul. Istanbul is not undiscovered by any stretch, but it has for a long time had restaurant food that was essentially continental. Continental is not something anyone should search for in restaurant food my opinion. Its basically an amalgam of European sort of generic food, but now there is Turkish home cooking which is phenomenal that’s moving into restaurants. So I think Istanbul is a growing foodie destination and some foodies I know actually have gone as far as buying apartments that are closer too closer to the food. Its really really great. A foody mecca right now again not undiscovered but so huge is Tokyo. Tokyo is the most exciting food destination on the planet and it’s amazing. It was also interesting to me that there are so many Tokyo food exports. I don’t mean soy sauce which we actually find, we do have great soy sauce. I mean ingredients too, but in Tokyo there is ramen on the shops and these persons has been making ramen were actually ---- this fellow is making ramen for hundreds of years. He is an expert. So we have that exported here and that Izakaya which is exported here. I am just --- you could actually go to Tokyo and eat for a year each month following a different individual trend are not if I said trend, but a different sort of food historically Japanese or the new foods or you go to Tokyo and then eat all Italian food as Allen Richmond did for GQ which is sort of fascinating. There is one place where you go and eat in the dark and your hands are lit which is unbelievable and its just so cool and what does that mean. The focus is so completely on the food. You have the exquisite unbelievable sushi restaurants and at the Chiki market where you can have – you can see the whole fish and then you can see your table. There is Kai Sakae and again these are not --- I am not talking about anything that’s new. These have deep deep traditions, but, you know. the way that they are expressed is so incredible and what I find is that chefs around America but also around the world they used to go to France to stage and then there has been an interest in Spain. I mean there was a pilgrimages to Ferran Adria's El Bulli. People still do those two things but where are they really going? I think they are going to Japan because there are so many masters there and they are also going to South America. So there has been a huge ---- there hasn’t been a huge movement as I think they should be in South America, but I think people have to go to Lima. They have to explore the foods of Lima and then they have to go to the Amazon and it's not like there are couple of maybe amazing restaurants in the Amazon, but really it’s just that there are foods that we will never see exported and if you want to have a unique food experience as some many people do, you go to the Amazon there are thousands of varieties of fruits and vegetables and just ingredients spices we have never seen and we probably won’t ever see in large quantities.

Recorded on: 3/7/08

Transcript: Kitchens have been ---- so we went from white kitchens to stainless steel kitchens and now I think we are going to move into color kitchens and it's just ---- stainless steel is quite cold and it’s not that easy to take care of. The reason stainless steel came sort of into vogue was because you know people emulating the chef kitchens and there are so many chefs on TV and that’s so great. So they wanted to be the little chefs at home for the chefs with the hats at home but now I think that as a kitchen has become more of a living room if living rooms have color why can’t kitchens have color, kitchens with moveable furniture. There is a great emphasis in the kitchen on speed. So there's ovens that will do it faster for you. TurboChef has --- who is an Oven Manufacturer---makes oven that will cook things in general 15 times faster than your normal oven.

I think there is a rise of some small gadgets which I am pretty gadget averse because I have a small New York City kitchen, but I have been convinced that certain gadgets are absolutely worth it like a rice cooker. I don’t know but people swear by it and it changes their lives. Other changes in the kitchen I think the biggest change in the kitchen is moving the kitchen outdoors. So we have fancied up our kitchen as much as really possible beyond our abilities for sure and now we have moved to the outdoor kitchen because people now --- people cook outside four seasons. I have great letters from people in Chicago or in Canada saying “oh yeah of course you know I grill all winter and I just got my coat. I run out --- I flip my sticker and I come back in and it’s fantastic. There is so little cleanup.” So now the kitchen united with the living room because you basically have in island and you can do your homework or you can do your work work whatever. Ultra kitchen the same thing. Its not just one huge grill, a grill, a refrigerator, a sink and furniture all together and its amazing because being sort of New York centric, it’s not something we see as much but when you travel the country Texas, California in the South they have the most magnificent outdoor living setups, Florida it’s phenomenal.

And the other thing in the kitchen is eco-materials. So people worrying about off gassing, people worrying about VSU paint, people worrying about what is their countertop,  there are so many new materials that you can find that are beautiful and adorable and eco. I'm really excited about that trend. Then the other thing is that wine coming into the kitchen, so now wine fridge is everywhere in the kitchen, but in the den, people’s bedrooms. I actually have one in the bathroom closet, but ---- whatever. That's cause I don’t have that much space, but wine sellers with kitchens attached. Again kitchen is migrating all over the house. So you can go downstairs to a cellar, but there is a kitchen there and then there is another little room where you can have dinner adjacent to your cellar, part of the huge wine drum, little burners and in upstairs kitchen so that you don’t have to travel the house.

Laziness and the size of the American house. So as the American house has grown so big, you know you don’t want to go all the way to the kitchen anymore and you have this extra little space you aren’t sure what to do with. So you have a little --- it’s basically a morning set up and a nighttime set up. So you would have your break fast in your bedroom, in your bedroom suite in these big American houses, in the development house. Yeah it’s kind of fabulous, beverage centers everywhere, beverage center in the living room, so refrigerator drawers everywhere.

Well. You know all our recessions last a certain amount of time and then we come out of them. I have not seen any movement towards a smaller house less for footage and there is a sort of perennial American interest in new. So yes it will slow down, but I don’t think it’s the end of anything. I think what might happen is that people instead of selling their houses because the housing market is so problematic. What they will do if they really itch to be some place else is fix up their kitchen. So we will see some great kitchen upgrades that make people feel like they have gone to another house because they live in their kitchen of course. So just walk through that door and there could be a new space if they do a renovation as opposed to move completely.

Recorded on: 3/7/08

Question: How do you pair wine with food? 

Transcript: My personal view on pairing wine with food is you can drink what you want and eat what you want and I mean there are very very few wine killers, asparagus is a horrible wine killer. So eat the asparagus, eat like a mouthful of potatoes and then drink your wine, but in my view there is probably 10% of perfect wine pairings in the world, 10% tragic wine pairings in the world and there is 80% of ---- you know, that’s pretty good. Not too worried about it. So that’s my overall philosophy. That’s said, there are certain things that are naturally more compelling, pairings that are more compelling. So for example a rule to keep in mind is if you want either contrast the wine with the food. So if you have a really really rich white creamy heavy dish, you are going to want a light sprightly wine. That’s where you contrast. On the other hand you can also do they enhance each other. You take a really heavy dish and you have a really rich wine and they sort of bring out the heaviest and the best in each other. So almost every pairing that you'll ever hear of is going to come down to reduce those two things. I can spin out any number of details, but at the end of the day you either wanted to cut the fattiness, cut the richness or enhance it. So like a huge California cab, you are going to want to have with a steak. Right big with big. You got a huge California cab with a delicate white fish, you wouldn’t taste the fish and it wouldn’t be so nice together. Although that said, there are dishes where you could have a nice meaty fish like a salmon in a syrah sauce and then you can have something that’s heavy with it. So and the same goes with everything if you are having spicy food you can have something that has a little spice too. So it’s all spicy. We will have something that’s going to mellow out the spice. So it’s a little rounder. So keep those two things in mind and you're gonna be fine.

Question: What’s the most unusual wine pairing you’ve ever come up with?

Transcript: The most unusual and then it turns out to me it wasn’t so unusual at all, is champagne with every thing. It turns out that champagne is really one of the greatest pairings in the world. Why? It’s effervescent. So no matter what you are eating. If you are eating something light it’s quite light. If you are eating something heavy, it cuts the richness that those two little principles at work again. So having a great champagne of course with an appetizer oh sure that was dessert, but when I was having champagne and roast chicken that was great.

Recorded on: 3/7/08

Transcript: If there is an issue with the biodynamic wines. It is ---- let’s step back. What is a biodynamic wine? There is a guy named Rudolf Steiner who founded the biodynamic wine movement, and he had very quircky ideas about making wine, but many of these practices have proved to improve the sort of the vineyards, the health of the vineyards and that’s what really we are talking about having healthy wines and healthy grapes. He was interested in harvesting in the moonlight. He was interested in cow horns filled with dung planted in the vineyard. So there are some quircky things that go along with biodynamic wine, but basically we talking about the health of the vineyard and if you have a healthy vineyard you should have a really great wine with organic its actually a tricky proposition because in terms of wine making what you are looking at usually is organic grapes, but there is an entire organic wine making process that sometimes wine makers will not carry through. So it’s the labeling a little dicey. I think what we'll see is wines made from organic grapes probably not the entire process. The wines that are green and that are not always reliable are the wines that are made without sulfites and so in France it was an enormous movement and there is wine bars that just have these great wines, green wines without sulfites. Those wines aren’t very stable because the sulfites help to stabilize the wine. So that I think is where you can get an amazing wine without sulfites but boy you have to be careful when you are making it.

Recorded on: 3/7/08

Transcript: The wine trend that I am really interested in seeing play out is the green wine trend. So everybody got very attached to local food easily. We got attached to organic food very easily. No in viticulture there of course are the parallel challenges you want your grape vines tended without too much intervention. There are a lot of winemakers who have been making organic wine or wine from organic grapes for a long time and they're finally going to start marketing that. Is that going to work? I don’t know. I am interested in seeing how that plays out because I think there is a huge opportunity that’s real and there is the opportunity as marketing. Unless those things come together there's gonna be terrible wine. The other trends, that I am really interested in --- I am interested in the better whites. So chardonnay---- such bad reputation. It has been over oak in America for so long and now we have pulled back. So you can actually get a really great chardonnay that’s made in America and of course in France always been possible, but the other whites that have come on the scene they have so much flavor and I think that it is so light and refreshing and people sort of rejected them because they know if they are going to be drinking the wine they should drink red, but I just want to be a white wine booster. So I really love white wines, a great Gewurztraminer, a great Viognier, a great Alberino, a great Moscato. I am really interested in that. I am interested in, and not just me there, there is a swelling of interest in the boutique champagnes. So champagne has been dominated by the really big brands which are fantastic, but now there are these little small houses doing incredible boutique champagnes and they are now coming to the States. It used to be that they just make it enough, it wasn't worth the export, but now you can see these phenomenal champagne list in restaurants and in wine stores, interested in that. I am interested in reds that are not California cabs. So I am interested in the local global varietals if that makes any sense. So I am interested in Melbac. I am interested in the Greek grapes whose names I absolutely cannot pronounce. I am interested in having them. I mean I could but I am not going to try. I am interested in those, the introductions of the Greek wines because Greek wine and food is such a huge trend and I am glad because its very healthy, very fresh cooking and great in the wines have come along with that. So there is so the wine world because of the global interest in higher quality in geek terms they have reduced yields which means that they are not producing wines that are as may be or thin but they are better concentrated, they are better taking care of vineyard people say wine is really made in the vineyard which means they care more about their grapes and so there is a lot of great great wine around the world. We have known a lot about the wines from Tuscany, Chianti where --- they are great, sense of it is great, but the truth is there are wines in the south of Italy like Campania, Sardinia, Sicily and those wines had not come into the States before and so I encourage everyone to go look for you know Sardinian wines and have some Fragula while you're at it which has always sounded very Jewish to me, Fragula, but its not. It’s Sardinian pasta and the wines of Campania and not just get stuck on the wines of Tuscany.

Recorded on: 3/7/08

Transcript: The time I have been here since birth but New York food scene at birth was very French oriented and as we know there are some closings of really classic, beautiful, wonderful old French-style restaurants. So there has been a huge shift in since then but let’s say since ---- coming to Food & Wine which is the mid ‘90s. First of all there are so many more choices. There is great food at every level. There is great value food. There was never great barbeque in New York. There was now some really fun barbeque. There are so many more fantastic Italian restaurants, the rise of the celebrity chef you can see the fingerprints of that all over New York City. I mean think of Mario Batali his amazing series of restaurants. I think that the number of cuisines that you can have and feel really great about has increased so much. There is no Spanish food. Now there is great Spanish food. Japanese food was all sushi and sort of tempera, but in the most basic Americanized sense and now your sushi options are phenomenal. Actually I should stop. I could go on because it’s really --- its sort of night and day the small pocket restaurants which have you know 60 seats, great quality, ok prices. That’s pretty new. How the avantguard cooking like inaudible There is none of that of course in the early ‘90s. So ---- and then there is the rock star you know high-end chefs that have been doing it a long time and are still sublime, John George at the name sake restaurant. Eric Repera at El Bernadin at his many many restaurants Daniel the flagship with Bar Boulud, Café Boulud. So, yeah, it’s endless.

Recorded on: 3/7/08

Transcript: Well, the New York food scene is really going strong and there are so many new openings. If you look at the Upper West Side, I mean, it is as if a new country has been annexed to New York City. “Wow, there's a whole country here. There's places to put restaurants and there are people who will eat in them.” There are 10 really great new restaurants that have opened. The downturn I think will make ---- some restaurants adjust their menus. I think that in New York City the going out culture is so ingrained in our blood. We will not stop going out. We just don’t. We might not get the caipirnha we might skip dessert. We might be really grateful that’s small plates are taken over now 80% of the restaurant so you can choose small plates, still have a great night out, in little restaurants and go home feeling good about yourself. So I think we might adjust how we order but we are so not stopping going out.

Recorded on: 3/7/08

Transcript: I think there are two enormous food trends that would really entreat me that will play out in the magazine. One of them is a drive towards modified vegetarianism and I think the reason for this is, you know, our concerns about the food source and the rise of farmer’s markets and appreciation of the simplicity of food. So I am not saying that the whole country is going to turn out to be vegetarian, but its more of a vegetable-based diet which some might say in a way its more sophisticated diet. Meat as a condiment not what’s primary on the plate and certainly healthier and the other is diametrically opposed in a way and that is a fascination with really high-quality meat. We have lived through the pork moment and now from the pork moment where people are roasting baby pigs in little Chinese boxes and they are, you know, going to pig roasts and they are devotees of David Chang and Momofuku. I think we are going to see the raise of the celebrity butcher and the celebrity animal farmer, which I think it is fantastic, because I would rather know where my meat came from. So that’s purely on the food front. In restaurants we have seen such a drive towards casual and homey.

So you have a restaurant in New York City like Market Table or you have Tilth in Seattle where its local food, it’s a huge official local trend, but it’s a simplicity of a pork chop, but its a great pork chop and how great in comforting that food can be and has become. So that’s making a little slice of the restaurant world. Interestingly in New York after having no sort of extravagant openings, we have since an extravagant openings, Adore with Ducais, with Adore. I think that’s interesting because you watch the cycles of the economy in the restaurant world. So there was a lot of money when these restaurants were birthed and the idea of them is birthed and now of course the economy is slowing down and in creep the people who didn’t need three years to plan their restaurant, you know, they got a store front and they are filling it with homey furniture and then making homey food which is great for this moment.

Recorded on: 3/7/08

Question: What is Food & Wine?

Transcript:  Well at Food & Wine, we pride ourselves on tracking what’s next in the world of food and wine and often that’s switching out phenomenal talents. So we look for the best new Chefs every year, great program where we identify top talent and then bring them into our family and we follow them and we do stories on them because we feel like they are changing what people are going to be eating in the coming years and when you sit down at a table in the restaurant, it's dazzling. So we are always tracking new talent and we are always looking at the way people experience food in their whole life. So it’s great that you might cook great food, but you probably have another passion and what’s the other passion that you have like what is your whole life because Food & Wine even when you are obsessed those of us who love it so much are, you have to do something else, so it might be you are going out on a ski trip and what you are going to do for food or you might be traveling to Russia and what you are going to eat or you might be a snow boarder or you might be –take your pick, you might be interested in art or every time you travel you --- what could you do, you look for shoes. But you're always going to have your Food & Wine. So that’s our perspective, that we're looking at the person who is passion about our subject and their whole life and the way all fits together and giving the readers an inspiring look of how they can eat and drink and make it part of their whole existence.

Question: What goes into an issue?

 Transcript: That’s the really fun part of it. So we put together issues sometimes when you are in advance because we always have to think ahead for Christmas for example we are strutting Christmas on Monday and today is March 7th. So we think seasonally, but usually when we plot out an issue we are looking to touch those points in readers lives we want them to be able to find something to cook for dinner that night. We want them to be able to have the world’s best dinner party. We want to inspire them to travel some place with spectacular food, there is always travel, and we want their kitchen, their house to look fabulous. There is always on the kitchen. So we have these points we try to hit in every issue and that sort of rounds out the packet with what’s going on today.

So as much as we have this timeless stuff we got to have a great dinner party, but you also really want to know is inaudible super food. Is ---- should I be searching out pink bananas? So we tried to answer those really burning questions for readers too.

Question: How do you envision your audience?

Transcript: I love them. The great thing about the Food & Wine reader is that they are really adventurous. They really do want to know if there is a pink banana. Not every readers wants to know --- not every reader of every food magazine wants to know that and our guys for example we did a story on lessons in Moroccan cooking and I did it because I really want to be able to show readers all the difference sides of food like not Italian all the time which again --- I know they would love that, but they are really grabbed on to the Moroccan food or we did this very obscure story about an obscure chef in Scandinavia and they loved it. So they're ready to go with us if we can explain why this is interesting and also the world of food the global world of food has gotten so small. So a reader who is passionate in New York is actually going to be interested of course in the Spain but also in Israel or in some pocket of Russia and it is not what we do all the time, it’s just part of the adventurous spirit. And I love the fact that they’ll go with us like like as long as we are solving some of the basic needs they love to be inspired by style. They love spirits. So as bartenders transmogrified into bar chefs. They were with us. You know, cocktails, that’s great. I love that they cannot get enough about wine. It’s impossible. We’ve added wine, wine, wine to the magazine. Not possible to give them enough. They want to know how to pair. They want to know about the varietals. They just ---- its fun. These guys are fun.

Question: How does a New York-based magazine keep a broader perspective? 

Transcript: We have editors who travel the country a lot, and then we have a couple of editors who travel internationally. But we have 40 stringers around the world. So we constantly are getting information from them, too much almost, you know, and one of the great things about having the magazine at the centerpiece of the brand, so we have online yes, but we also have a cocktail guide and we collect recipes from over a 100 of the greatest bars in America. So you know we fan out and find those bars which give us great resource, and we do a wine guide, and so we have wine reports from all the great wine regions from our wine stringers around the world. So there are ways in which the bigger brand feeds all the information that we have for the magazine proper or for the website and then for the global information we have seen every year called “the go list" and its reports what’s going on in the food scene in 40 countries, 40 cities actually not 40 countries.. So we are like really down on the ground like I know granularly did one restaurant get better this year over last year because the stringers will tell us. So it’s a network we have built and that is a pretty effective.

Recorded on: 3/7/08

Transcript: Well. Food first sparked my interest when I knew how to make a restaurant reservation. So I didn’t start out as a cook, which as the editor in chief of Food & Wine magazine, you would think may be that would be where I started I had a mother or grandmother, a mother who didn’t cook, a grandmother who didn’t cook, a great grandmother who didn’t cook. So going out for restaurants was fantastic, terrible food at home and that was in college I suddenly realized dorm food was terrible. What was the alternative and I would look for the best new places in Providence, Rhode Island, and there were lot of new places in Providence. So I spent a lot of time seeking out great places to go, came to New York City same thing. Where am I gonna go? Certainly I wasn’t going to cook. I am generationally incapable and so my interest in food grew and my interest in life style is what actually brought me to Food & Wine Magazine. So I have been in Vogue magazine, I have been in House and Garden and these people had fantastic clothes and fantastic houses, but they also had great kitchens whether they are cooking themselves I can’t tell you, but when I went over to Food & Wine, it was the same people with the same attributes, but they love to cook more than they loved to shop and over this if they were shopping they were shopping for ingredients. So I brought that notion of lifestyle to Food & Wine rather than my fantastic expertise in food or wine, which was close to non-existent. That’s where the experts and staff were for.

So I arrived at Food & Wine in 1994 and I thought I mean I had thrown a lot of dinner parties mostly to find a boyfriend which didn’t really work out for me, so I had that confidence, but I have learned so much and I cook as much as possible now and I love food. I mean I have become obsessed, so arriving at the magazine and being infected by the passion of everybody around me. I am now a bonafide food-obsessed individual. The wine came a little bit later because it’s a little trickier, the food you have to eat and if you are going to eat you might as well eat really interesting delicious things and the food world has changed so much in that time, but wine is now where I put my effort in learning. I want to learn every American cab maker, but more than that I want to learn about the esoteric wines of Italy. All of these native grapes that are suddenly of interest in wine bars and so I feel this is a never-ending learning curve for both Food & Wine.

Recorded on: 3/7/08