Best Table in the House

by Frank Cutrona. Photography by Eric Stoner.

Fortunately, I have a business lifestyle that takes me to places where there’s plenty of great bistros, cafés and restaurants.

What I like to do is take one fabulous meal and roll it around over in my mind for a while before I lay one word down in my journal. It takes time to enjoy what comes over the palate and turn it into a qualified opinion I can communicate to readers.

I weigh the mix of experience, ambiance, the feel of the location and the service. Sometimes I’ll mull over a meal for weeks before I can comfortably say the establishment has all the unique qualities that make it a “Best Table” topic.

Before you go off thinking I’m some kind of snoot… some of my “Best Table” candidates have no tables at all, like that terrific stand-up joint on Hollywood Boulevard that serves up the best burritos you can get in gringo-land. Or the sauerkraut dog I bought from a street vendor while tooling around Times Square. What matters is the experience. You can eat anywhere you like, but if you don’t enjoy it, then (in my opinion) you’re just not living right.

Here’s to you, from the best table in the house. I hope you enjoy my collection – in San Francisco, Aspen and New York City.

Cheers!

Click here to read the entire article from the first issue of REST Magazine.

Wine as Medium

In keeping with Artiste’s painterly theme, its wine-tasting room looks like an Impressionist studio. There are canvases and art journals where people can paint and bright yellow walls with finished paintings hung salon style. Each wine label is an Impressionist work of art, each blend named after the artwork.

Like Aldo Luongo from Antonello Ristorante, Christina LoCascio is another wine label artist. Her subject matter is wine – vineyards, grapes, wine bottles, with a tasteful number of nudes scattered here and there. The colors of wine – vibrant reds, burgundies and violets – pervade her paintings.

While working at Artiste in the tasting room in 2004, Christina, an art school graduate from the University of California at Santa Barbara, initiated painting classes using wine as paints. “The first thing you do when tasting wine is look at the color and admire how beautiful it is,” she remarks.

Since then, Christina has used only wine and pastels to paint. To achieve darker colors, she reduces wines. She adds tartaric acid for more acidity and sodium hydroxide to create rich purples, and sprays her pieces with protective coatings.

“I’m not so worried about the entire spectrum of color,” she says. “It’s about wine, about the nature of the grape.” Some of her images were created for Artiste labels; others are sold at the winery and locally. “I’m almost certain the paintings are going to change over time, but that’s a beautiful thing. Wine changes, too.”

Click here to read more.