From the Archives: Calvin Trillin Three Ways

One of Kansas City’s favorite literary native sons is coming back to town on a book tour soon. He’s touting a new collection of some of his classic magazine journalism, including landmark reporting on the Civil Rights movement of the early 1960s. It was some years later when Trillin’s “American Journal” reports began catching my eye in The New Yorker, and then a decade or so more when I began writing about Trillin during my days as Book Review Editor of The Kansas City Star.

I’ve dug deep into the files to unearth one of those book related stories, which included an interview in Trillin’s Greenwich Village pad.

Twice in the 2000s I managed to accompany Trillin on food tours of his beloved lower Manhattan, which turned me on to some of the more interesting corners of the village and Chinatown.

For now, I’m posting jpeg clippings. Hope that works for all.

Now, a food tour, 2005. My syndicated piece published in the Honolulu newspaper.

Seven years later, 2012, mostly new places, but some old favorites.

This food thing: A sweet and melancholy affair

I have a large appetite. Food is not just nutrition but celebration. And life is too short to eat boring food, just as it’s too short to drink unremarkable wine. So I splurge sometimes. I cook with focus, adventure and a kind of subdued passion. I go for new tastes.

Yet, lately, I tend to eat less. Call it diabetes discipline. That’s optimistic. The numbers are good, though my liver would tend to disagree. Still, if tempted with a whole roasted fish or an oozing burrata with smoked trout roe, I’m all over it, at least for a few bites. Turns out that a heaping plate of crispy beef from a local, old-reliable Chinese restaurant can remain the centerpiece of four leftover lunches. I mean, why stuff yourself?

These thoughts began arising as I read a new collection of the late Jim Harrison’s food-and-life essays. The book’s title, A Really Big Lunch, refers to a spectacularly excessive, 37-course feast (or was it 42?) put on by a French chef and friend of Harrison’s. Even Harrison, whose appetites clearly were larger than mine, felt overwhelmed, almost defeated at one point. Harrison holds nothing back as a writer, and some readers might be turned off by his lecherous confessions and old-school impropriety (the essays reach as far back as the 1970s). But looking past all that, which, in the current sexual-harassment environment, becomes admittedly harder to do, he has wise and entertaining things to say about food and wine. I plan to cherry-pick some of Harrison’s wine writing for a paper I’m planning to give at a Hemingway conference, in Paris, in 2018. And imagine my surprise when I realized recently that in my modest collection of bottles I’ve got a Domaine Tempier Bandol from a few years back, which apparently was Harrison’s favorite wine in the world.

So, food, wine and cooking. From time to time I pay attention to the appetites.

On a fall Saturday, with nothing much else going on, I turned some of the last of our yard tomatoes into a marinara. They were not lovely orbs. They weren’t even deeply red, but they would do for a kitchen improvisation. It took a while in boiling water to loosen their skins, but when that was done I set them aside to cool. Chopped onions and garlic and the last of some baby carrots in the fridge. I was hoping to add tomato paste to the simmering stew, to add some color and heft, but alas I could find none on the shelf. Here’s a suitable substitute: a small jar of prepared tapenade; hmm, red peppers, some kind of cheese, why not? The tapenade turned the marinara a bit orange, but with salt, pepper and dried herbs, it all tasted pretty fine nearly two hours later when I turned off the burner. I put some of the marinara in a bag to freeze, and held out a good portion to eat the next day.

One Sunday, we found some frozen lamb chops in the freezer. I chopped onion and garlic. I opened a red wine (a mass market red Zinfandel) and a jar of vegetable stock I’d made around Thanksgiving. Ta da: braised lamb, with little potatoes and carrots. We ate lamb chops for days.

As a onetime restaurant critic, my radar remains fairly well tuned when we go out to eat. Yet, I failed myself on a recent trip to Toronto. Though I managed to sample a decent variety of tastes in a couple of days – pub food, tapas at a trendy Sherry bar -- I missed the hugely important world of alluring Asian cuisines that seem to define dining in that capital of cultural diversity. Next time, for sure. A recent trip to Atlanta gave us a sampling of that city’s burgeoning fine-dining scene, though we barely scratched the surface. In Boston this fall, at the Neptune Oyster Bar (pictured), I managed to consume some of the finest oysters on the half shell I’d ever met. In Kansas City, I’ve sampled a couple of promising new restaurants lately and always find pleasure and creativity when returning to old favorites (Novel, the Rieger, the Antler Room, to name just three). And I had one of the best meals of the year when birthday splurging in Corvino’s Tasting Room (details in a previous blog). But I always have to remind myself that some of the other best meals of the year occurred in domestic settings: A humbly generous and bustling family meal around an extended kitchen table at the Zia Pueblo in New Mexico; an intimate and poignant Thanksgiving tribute with family members of a close friend who had died just the week before.

With the holidays in full swing, I expect much feasting ahead, some of it happy, some, so it goes, melancholy. The warmth of the kitchen, the clink of glasses, all that love on our plates – sure, we can’t help but feel grateful for what we have.

De Gustibus: A 12-Dish Tour in Corvino's Tasting Room

During my kaleidoscopic career in the newspaper business I spent a few years as a restaurant critic. Once a month or every six weeks or so – along with whatever other writing or editing I was doing at the time - I analyzed meals and experiences at Kansas City restaurants. Every now and then I’d write about food experiences during travels elsewhere (Washington, D.C., Seattle, Paris, an American Royal barbecue immersion). I mostly enjoyed chowing down during a period, not so long ago, when Kansas City was increasingly being led forward by a new generation of creative chefs and food-and-beverage professionals. I can’t deny that restaurant writing and the most hedonistic and self-conscious aspects of the scene sometimes resemble a kind of food porn. So be it. Who doesn’t really like a sexy picture of an assemblage of desirable pleasure on a plate?

I suppose a similar thought occurred the other night more than once during a three-hour dinner in the Corvino Tasting Room. This is the fixed-price, multi-course menu that unfolds out of the view of the sometimes raucous main dining room, or Supper Club, at Corvino and within whisper distance of the kitchen. (Along with four generously sized four-top tables, two counter stools offer ringside views of cooking and chef-ing in action.)

My experience at Corvino had been limited to a dinner, some drinks and some late-night noshing off the attractive (and attractively priced) menu that kicks in at 10 p.m. Food was always good, or at least interesting. Service was sometimes surprisingly ragged. Some recent staff turnover seems to indicate the place is still finding its way. But with a foundation based on Michael Corvino’s exquisite and exciting approach to food, its future is highly promising.

I didn’t intend this post to be a review. But I will say that of the dozen dishes put before us, from the opening amuse bits to the closing sweets, not a single false note occurred. There were rich and tempting notes of chicken liver mousse and foie gras. Sweet and savory danced a pas de deux all night long. An oyster topped with a melon granita and chile, was an early, winning example of the dynamics of texture, color and palate-enlivening sensations that Corvino revels in. I would return to his kitchen if only to savor another bowl of the corn pudding, bedded down with chanterelle mushrooms, trout roe and a dusting of buckwheat. The “main” dishes included a succulent King salmon and a plate with two contrasting cuts of ribeye. After opening with a glass of Champagne (Jacquesson 740), I asked sommelier Ross Jackson to suggest a bottle to carry my table of four through the middles and mains. The Burgundy “Les Bons Batons” (2014), by the female winemaker Ghislaine Barthod, was light, slightly earthy and perfect.

The Tasting Room, to be sure, is not an everyday experience. It’s a special-occasion place, where you should expect to drop a couple of bills per person. Or more. Much more. (We skipped an optional caviar plate and a $50 upcharge for A5 wagyu – the highest rated and rarest version – on the beef plate, though I’m sure there are plenty of big spenders who’d spring for either experience.)

Kansas City’s dining scene continues to expand and excite. With its prominent place in a food-centric vortex of the Crossroads Arts District, Corvino clearly is a trend setter. Its lovely gray-hued main room – the space designed by a top-shelf architecture firm, Hufft Projects –includes a thoughtfully made stage for musicians, a rarity, but a welcome one, for restaurants. Here’s hoping my spheres of food and music friends will continue to happily collide there.