WSJ food reporting and more

Over the last couple of years, and with redoubled effort in 2007, the Wall Street Journal has been evolving into a national, general interest newspaper. And doing a pretty good job. Most people are familiar with their wine column, and they now have lifestyle type sections every day (six days a week, since they added a Saturday edition in 2006). The Friday and Saturday lifestyle sections are a step up from the other 4 days.

For me, the February 3 Pursuits section represents a watershed, with the best food reporting I have seen in a daily newspaper other than the NY Times.

These two articles stand out as very good for me. I cannot find them on line, so I will paraphrase a bit.

The first is by their restaurant critic, Raymond Sokolov, whose name seems familar to me, though I cannot think where I know it from. It is about Miami, and his thesis is simple, if grandiose.

...Miami has, after almost a century of pressure from tourists and immigrants, evolved its own way of eating, its own culinary style-and sophisticated new places run by local talent. This Miami style may be the only new regional American cuisine in our lifetime.

It combines local ingredients like conch and ethnic flavors from Latin America (cassava, cilantro and the like) with cutting edge European technique. Like all true regional American food styles, it grew out of a collision between early settlers and the new conditions they encountered - plus in the case of Miami, the growth after 1959 of a flourishing tropical community.

The places he sampled and comments on are Nemo's, Michy's, Karu&Y (all different forms of the Miami cuisine mentioned above), and Casa Tua, which is Miami's upscale Italian destination per Raymond, but is infected with evidence of Miami cuisine as well, since I cannot think of a lot of other Italian places serving "Cubanesque suckling pig."

He also singles out the outdoor cafe at Fairchild Gardens for serving Anglified (Miami) Cuban and a place on the way to Ft Lauderdale at the Griffin Road exit off the Interstate called Rustic Inn Crabhouse as offering good, no frills, Florida seafood.

I cannot comment on any of these places, but I do like Miami as a food destination, and the article sure made me want to go back now. The tone was notable in one way - he generally criticized outsiders' attempts to colonize Miami with outposts of their successful restaurants from elsewhere, and remarked that he expected Daniel Bouley's new place, Evolution, to fail as other's had before because it failed to respect, or even get, Miami cuisine and thus was an undeverving competitor. I found this a refreshing contrast to the Times' generally slavish respect for all things NY.

On the other hand, I really do not like the fact that the requisite restaurant table insert included with these articles generally does not feature any of the places reviewed (or if it does, does so only by happenstance), rather listing Zagat's Best of Miami. Huh?

So that was pretty good, but this was even better.

The waitress brings two big bowls to the table, empty except for a dense, round flat bread at the bottom of each. Tear up the bread into tiny pieces, she instructs us. Then the bowls reappear filled with soup, one lamb, the second beef with cubes of congealed duck blood. The bits of bread have puffed up into little pearls that taste like barley.

These dishes - unlike anything I've ever tasted in a Chinese restaurant despite two decades of eating in Asia for pleasure and for work - are from Shaanxi province in central China. But I'm in a restaurant a thousand miles away...

The article is about Taiwan, by Stan Sesser, and it is both a travel and food piece (with an insert that actually tells you about the places he visited, what a concept!!).

There also is an article about a Super Bowl face-off between Charlie Trotter and Charlie Palmer, which is not so great, but does include recipes. That is an extended version of a normal feature about one chef, which always includes recipes. And Eric Felten adds a column called "How's Your Drink" every week, which is an often wonderful essay on the history and particulars of a single cocktail. That week it was the Gin Pahit, or Pink Gin. I am not much of a cocktail guy, but this column is consistently excellent. On this date, it positions the cocktail with two paragraphs on Somerset Maugham and the British in India, before getting on to the particulars of the cocktail.

This was a particularly good edition of the newspaper for food and drink, but if you run across a Saturday Wall Street Journal, I commend the Pursuits section to you. Beyond food and drink it also offers some other decent features - passing good book reviews, and in this edition columns on Saarinen, Menotti, and Reagan (Ronald) with more than a little substance.

It strikes me that the Journal may be successfully positioning itself as the national newspaper for those who can and like to read (as opposed to say, USA Today?), and it seems to have a leg up on the other contenders in that it genuinely takes a global view of things without the annoying provincialism that crops up elesewhere for obvious reasons.

Because these days their news reporting is very good, too. And to those who object to their general editorial stance (and I certainly am included in that group), which can be best defined as pro-capitalism, it does not infect the rest of the paper very much at all.

I like Raymond sokolov a lot. He has written several food books. One of his best is "why we eat what we eat." It is an interesting history of food. The description on the cover is "How the encounter between the new world and the old changed the way everyone on the planet eats." Another good one is "Fading Feast: a compendium of disappearing american regional food." He is a very entertaining writer.

-Will