Natural Wines
Standing at the front of the Tria Fermentation School classroom one recent afternoon was Jenny Lefcourt, one half of wine importers Jenny & François Selections and an engaging storyteller. Lefcourt was here to introduce the city’s wine experts to her portfolio of natural French wines — often organic, often biodynamic wines, fermented without laboratory yeasts, added sulfites or other unpronounceable stuff, from handpicked grapes. A bonus of this determinedly low-tech backlash to “industrial” wine: appealingly offbeat winemakers who name wines after fairytales, become a vintner after years as a steelworker, and sail boats around the world.
These stories add a lovely aroma of romance to the wines, but the city sommeliers — there was representation from many local restaurants, among them Davio’s, Panorama, Le Bec-Fin, even, briefly, and volubly, Georges Perrier himself — couldn’t be enticed by stories alone. They came to taste the results of these back-to-basics methods in the bottle. I could get technical about it — well, Lefcourt could get technical, explaining how plowing the vineyards increases acidity, why not using chemicals in the growing process allows for the use of indigenous yeast — but these quirky, personal wines are memorable — love them or hate them — on taste alone. It is wine that, as Tria wine director Michael McCaulley noted over the din of wine chatter, inspires conversation.
Start talking at Tria’s Sunday School, the restaurant’s weekly wine deal. This week you’ll find the mellow cab franc-based Domaine Cousin-Leduc Anjou Rouge, from winemaker Olivier Cousin, who plows his Loire vineyard with his horse Joker.
Photo, Zoey Sless-Kitain
Standing at the front of the Tria Fermentation School classroom one recent afternoon was Jenny Lefcourt, one half of wine importers Jenny & François Selections and an engaging storyteller. Lefcourt was here to introduce the city’s wine experts to her portfolio of natural French wines — often organic, often biodynamic wines, fermented without laboratory yeasts, added sulfites or other unpronounceable stuff, from handpicked grapes. A bonus of this determinedly low-tech backlash to “industrial” wine: appealingly offbeat winemakers who name wines after fairytales, become a vintner after years as a steelworker, and sail boats around the world.
These stories add a lovely aroma of romance to the wines, but the city sommeliers — there was representation from many local restaurants, among them Davio’s, Panorama, Le Bec-Fin, even, briefly, and volubly, Georges Perrier himself — couldn’t be enticed by stories alone. They came to taste the results of these back-to-basics methods in the bottle. I could get technical about it — well, Lefcourt could get technical, explaining how plowing the vineyards increases acidity, why not using chemicals in the growing process allows for the use of indigenous yeast — but these quirky, personal wines are memorable — love them or hate them — on taste alone. It is wine that, as Tria wine director Michael McCaulley noted over the din of wine chatter, inspires conversation.
Start talking at Tria’s Sunday School, the restaurant’s weekly wine deal. This week you’ll find the mellow cab franc-based Domaine Cousin-Leduc Anjou Rouge, from winemaker Olivier Cousin, who plows his Loire vineyard with his horse Joker.
Photo, Zoey Sless-Kitain
Man, I love gougères. Bite-size and French, golden with gruyère and brimming with temptation, these petite cousins to the popover are the perfect savory snacklike Munchkins, all grown up and gone to heaven (or, at least, to Paris). 
Unless you’ve been to Trinidad, you’ve probably never had a double, a common island street snack consisting of a spicy turmeric-laced chickpea curry (warning: it stains very easily) stuffed between two small rounds of fried flat bread, about the diameter of a tuna fish can. They are slightly messy, the way a good sandwich should be, and best accompanied by some fiery West Indian hot sauce. 
It may very well be the original comfort food. At dinner, it completes a square meal; it’s a better partner to cookies than butter is to bread; and there it is again in the morning, cool and creamy, to soften our coffee and our Cheerios. So why do I now have to do a double take before grabbing my gallon of 2 percent? Well, because I might be grabbing anything but. At my three go-to markets I’ve spotted some serious milk-shelf competition.
Anywhere you go in India, whether a beach, park, outside the Taj Mahal, in a mountain village, or on the train that (eventually) gets you to any of the aforementioned places, there’s always a chaat walla nearby. “Walla” meaning guy who sells. And “chaat” meaning any of a long list of savory fast-food snacks that Indians like to eat at tea time, late at night, or any other time when a meal might be a few hours away.