James Kent, a distinguished chef and successful Manhattan restaurateur who seemed poised to become a food-industry tycoon, died on Saturday. He was 45. His death was announced by Saga Hospitality Group, the holding company of his two restaurants, Crown Shy and Saga, and his cocktail bar, Overstory, which are all in the same building in…
In 2015, in the back of Star Casino in Sydney, Australia, Paul Carmichael began something extraordinary. As the new chef at Momofuku Seiobo, the first of David Chang’s Momofuku restaurants outside the United States, Mr. Carmichael turned what had been a fine-dining venue with European, American and Asian influences into a bastion of thoughtful Caribbean…
The layered cake known as Death by Chocolate debuted as a special in 1982 at the Trellis, a polished American restaurant in Williamsburg, Va., and built a cult following long before a dessert could find instant fame on social media. It’s worth noting that those were pretty weird times for chocolate. Its pleasure was distorted,…
Jasper White, a chef who put New England’s traditional foods on the fine-dining map in the 1980s and mentored a generation of Boston-area chefs, died on Saturday in Boston. He was 69. His death, at a hospital, was caused by a brain aneurysm, his wife, Kathleen White, said. At Restaurant Jasper in the North End…
In cooking, timing is everything. So much so that if the chef Kei Kobayashi spots diners heading to the restroom as he sends a dish out from the kitchen, he stops them. Nature’s call can wait; his culinary offerings should be tasted at peak flavor. Such imperiousness and exactitude align with what Mr. Kobayashi, the…
Josie Duran overheard Matthew Kenney’s pitch many times. As a lead server at Plant Food + Wine in Venice Beach, Calif., Ms. Duran often waited on Mr. Kenney, the restaurant’s chef and owner, as he entertained potential investors on the restaurant’s fig-tree-shaded patio, persuading them to trust him with their money for his ambitious culinary…
I’m from a lush land. Green abounds in the South. Our climate is so dewy, so thick, that we learn how to breathe through our skin down here. The nearly neon green kudzu, not just a romantic notion, climbs. The vines creep over our lives, over corners, around hills, down slopes, into gutters. We pulse…
On Feb. 22, 1797, while George Washington celebrated his 65th birthday at a ball in Philadelphia, his celebrated chef, Hercules Posey, slipped from the meager enslaved quarters at Mount Vernon, the president’s Virginia estate. Stepping into the damp night under the light of a waning moon, he found his freedom, only to be lost to…
Carla Hall’s tarot card reading was running long. Astrology, numerology, psychics, the Chinese zodiac — she’s open to all manner of metaphysical messaging. I slipped off my shoes in the foyer of her century-old house in the Takoma neighborhood of Washington, D.C., out of respect for a recent million-dollar gut renovation. Then I went to…
As would-be diners approached a nondescript door on a placid block in Greenwich Village on Wednesday night, they were stopped short by a tall, lean man wearing a black fur hat and red carnation boutonniere. He pressed stickers over the lenses of their phones. No photography was allowed, he insisted. As they complied and disappeared…
