The Starkside

SELECTING WINE FOR THE HOLIDAYS

October 26, 2016

SELECTING WINE FOR THE HOLIDAYS BY HENRY STARK   Many of us wrestle with a conundrum at holiday time: if I’m the host, what wine should I serve with dinner, and if I’m a guest, what wine should I bring the host? Here are some suggestions to help you resolve these questions. Let’s start with the easiest. If it’s a special occasion, like celebrating the arrival of the New Year, a sparkling wine is always appropriate. French Champagne is certainly the most authentic and traditional, but not necessarily the cheapest. (To legally label a wine as “Champagne” it must come Read More

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GROWING GRAPES IN NEW YORK

October 21, 2016

  GROWING GRAPES IN NEW YORK Henry Stark     Does it seem a bit far fetched to compare the geography of France and New York State in a column about grape growing and wine making? Well, having lived in both places it seems perfectly natural to me. Even though France is almost four times larger than New York (213,000 to 55,000 square miles), both have multiple, and varied, grape growing regions. Going from north to south in France there’s the Champagne Region and the Loire River Valley, and in eastern France, running north to south, is Burgundy. On the Read More

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The Anatomy Of Wine Tasting

July 28, 2016

Your server pours a small amount of wine in your glass, you swish it around, taste it, and have an immediate sensory experience. The complexities involved in this seemingly simple process are really interesting, so let me use this column to explain. Let’s start with a crucial physiological fact: Each of us has 10,000,000 olfactory receptors for the sense of smell, but only about one hundredth as many taste buds. Much of what we “taste” is based on aromas we detect. When tasting wine, sniff the wine and take a small amount into your mouth and swirl it around. The Read More

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Chili and Peppers

May 1, 2016

“Chili” means different things to different people. This popular dish has so many variations that debates about which version is best can get as heated as the chili peppers themselves. The origins of chili are unclear, but the story I’ve heard is that before refrigeration, Texans used hot chili peppers to help preserve their beef. One day a Texas dude was eating chili (beef with chili peppers) along with a side dish of beans. For some reason he had the idea to combine both dishes. It obviously caught on and many of us now think of beans as integral element Read More

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Pleased with Cheese

April 1, 2016

Recently I hosted a party and had to figure out some wine and cheese pairings. At that time it occurred to me that Americans in general, are not as familiar as Europeans with serving cheese and I thought it would be helpful to pass along some ideas. In a world where thousands of varieties of cheeses are available, an understanding of how to serve quality cheese is a skill worth cultivating. When planning to serve cheese to guests, the hardest decisions for me are: how many cheeses to serve, what kinds to offer, and what quantity would be appropriate to satisfy each Read More

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Children in Restaurants

December 22, 2015

In my last column I described a number of “pet peeves” I experience based on the actions of restaurant managers and servers. As I was writing, I realized that some of the things that bother me the most are attributable to fellow adult diners with accompanying children. Loud and intrusive behaviors of children can bring discomfort to those around them. When choosing a restaurant, particularly for dinner, I find myself gravitating to establishments that don’t attract families with children. Being a parent myself, I can empathize with parents who must decide whether to bring their offspring to a restaurant or Read More

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Restaurant Pet Peeves

November 3, 2015

“Are youse guys ready to order?” These were the first words my friends and I heard after we were seated at our table for a recent lunch. Perhaps I’m being overly demanding but I actually prefer to be greeted by my server before we get down to business. A simple “hello” will suffice. A smile and a “Welcome to (name of restaurant)” puts me over the top. So when you combine the absence of a greeting with a grammatically incorrect inquiry, you can imagine that no one at the table, including me, was happy. You had to be there to Read More

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More Thoughts on Tipping

August 26, 2015

I’m not clear why you and I are asked to subsidize sub-minimum wages for servers through tipping. The jobs they perform are every bit as essential to restaurant operations as those of cooks and dishwashers. Actually, the idea of increasing servers’ wages is catching on and there are now about a dozen restaurants in the country that have adopted the policy of forbidding tipping. I thought you might be interested in an example. According to Gene Johnson of the Associated Press, the management of Ivar’s Salmon House on Seattle’s Lake Union decided to institute the city’s $15 minimum wage two Read More

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Tipping Topics

August 24, 2015

I’m happy to be resuming my regular food and beverage column at WCNY CONNECT. This first discussion will be a topic that has interested me for a long time: tipping. Frankly, I’m uncomfortable with the custom and wish that restaurant owners would simply pay servers a fair salary. If they did it would send the topic of tipping to the dust bin of irrelevancy. I’m not clear why you and I are asked to subsidize restaurant owners to pay servers who are just performing their assigned jobs. Actually the idea of increasing servers’ wages is catching on and there are Read More

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