The Enlightened Traveler: This is London

The first in a series of reports over the next few weeks
on what's new and noteworthy in London.

Just when you thought that you had to drop everything and head straight for Dubai, Shanghai, or Berlin – or risk compromising your "I've been everywhere cool and you haven't" status – along comes no-nonsense London with a few surprises of its own.

Not to be outdone by upstarts, the British capitol is on the ascendant. Or should we say, London continues to rise, perennially reinventing itself in ways that underscore its rank as one of the planet's favored destinations.

The hottest table in town for some time to come is Dinner by Heston Blumenthal. Opened a fortnight ago, it is the latest conceit from the brilliant, experimental chef who brought modern British cooking to the forefront at his three-Michelin-starred restaurant, The Fat Duck.

Dinner by Heston Blumenthal's dining room

This time around Blumenthal has dipped into Britain's culinary past for inspiration. He reportedly spent 18 months researching recipes that go as far back as the 1300s. Of course, he doesn't just recreate them for modern diners. What fun would that be? He has reworked them into a menu of "perplexing unfamiliarity," one that is a "startlingly original read," according to one newspaper critic.

Meat fruit

Hmmm?

His signature Meat Fruit (c. 1500) consists of chicken livers whipped into a mousse, formed into the shape of an orange, and covered with mandarin jelly. There's also the quaintly named Rice and Flesh (c.1390) which rests braised calf tail on a bed of saffron rice, and Ragoo of Pigs Ears (c.1750) with anchovies, onions and parsley.

And those are just the starters!

The main courses sound tame by comparison. Sirloin of Black Angus (c.1830) comes with mushroom ketchup, red wine juice and triple cooked chips. There's also a Spiced Pigeon (c.1780) with ale and artichokes, Cod in Cider (c. 1940), and Beef Royal (c.1720). This last is a short rib of angus cooked for 72 hours sous vide, the vacuum sealed water submersion method Blumenthal pioneered. (Intensifies the flavors but diminishes the texture, according to those who know a thing or two about food.)

At least some of London's food critics have worked themselves into an unabashed frenzy of adulation.

"If there has been a more flawless and exhilarating restaurant opening in the past decade, I missed it," gushed Matthew Norman in The Telegraph.

Others are offering a more restrained view. The Daily Mail labeled Blumenthal’s "interpretation" of traditional British food "a brilliant and original concept," then opined, "Yet eating at his new restaurant remains an interesting experience, rather than a delicious one."

Time Out's Guy Dimond was only moderately impressed. The restaurant is just "another smart, five-star-hotel restaurant, not the culinary equivalent of the Second Coming." Apparently he didn't ask the patrons who have to wait until June to get in or the guy who already has auctioned off his booking on eBay.

You'll find Dinner by Heston Blumenthal at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Knightsbridge. The airy dining room overlooks Hyde Park. Service is professional and friendly, not stuffy.

Finally, it's not cheap. Although by London standards it's not exactly exorbitant either. Check how your stocks are doing to see where you stand on the issue. Or go for the set lunch at a reasonable £28 – if you can get a reservation.

Want to know more? Here are a few recent reviews and articles from British publications: The Telegraph, The Independent, The Daily Mail.

Dinner by Heston Blumenthal is at 66 Knightsbridge, London SW1X 7LA, tel. +44 (0)20 7201 3833, www.dinnerbyheston.com.

Click here to read our other articles on London.
 

Watch This Space!

Where have
we been?

Dear Faithful Reader,

You have noticed no doubt that we haven't posted much over the last few months. That is because we have been busy – very, very busy all Fall, in fact – finding remarkable gifts for our beloved customers.

The good news is that we've got lots of nifty new luxury products to tell you about. In addition, we're planning stories on a variety of compelling topics – hot new restaurants and shops in Paris, luxury trends in China, the array of unique, world-class museums planned for Abu Dhabi, Heston Blumenthal's celebrated new London eatery, and the $625 2,438-page book on the science and technology of cooking that is the talk of the culinary world.

Watch this space over the next few weeks for all this and a good deal more. Please come back frequently for our latest reportage.

We think that you will be delighted.

Things Not Available In The U.S.: Moet & Chandon's Golden Jeroboam

We like to think of the U.S. as the land of plenty, but sometimes it's plenty of nothing.

At least that's the case as far as Moet & Chandon is concerned.

The French champagne house recently released their Golden Jeroboam, guaranteed to impress not merely because it stands a stunning 19 1/2 inches tall and packs three liters of Moet's finest sparkling wine, but also because the bottle is clad in gold leaf.*

(Some journalists have referred to this as "real" gold leaf. Honestly, is there any other kind?)

Moet has produced just 1743 bottles to celebrate the year of its founding.

And did we mention that if you are lucky enough to snag one of these beauties, it will set you back about $1,050?

It appears that Moet isn't making this particular treasure available in the U.S. or U.K. One place you can get it online is from the Parisian merchant-of-the-moment Collette.

Bonne chance et bonne année!

*You say jeroboam, we say double magnum. We always thought that a jeroboam contained 4 1/2 liters, or six regular bottles, of champagne, not three liters, or four bottles, as Moet avers. Do they know something we don't?
 

Carnations Aren't Just For Proms Anymore

Last year, we lived through bold bangles, harem pants, Barack Obama, social media, smartphones, Glee, and sibling names starting with the same letter (think Khloe, Kourtney and Kim Kardashian).

Not always scorned, carnations were painted by Van Gogh (above), da Vinci, and other masters

This year's trends: food trucks, the Tea Party, chocolate covered bacon, Irish baby names (Connor, Killian, Braden), and – ready for this? – carnations.

For years synonymous with cheap, prom night boutonnieres, the carnation was so reviled that upmarket florists hewed to the mantra, "No mums, no carns!" or risk upsetting their chic clientele.

That's about to change. The lowly carnation is making a comeback, writes Lettie Teague in the Wall St. Journal. She reports that Oscar de la Renta, Martha Stewart and Sarah Jessica Parker are among celebrities who have been seen sporting the flower recently.

Society stylist and event designer Bronson Van Wyck has taken a shine to them, too. During the just concluded Fashion Week, he assembled 30,000 carnations into fat topiary balls hung from the ceiling on fishing lines.

Teague says that today's carnations "look nothing like the flowers found at the corner store. They're much larger and showier, more vibrantly colored."

They come in a wide range of hues—yellow, red, pink, white and even green (natural, not dyed) and are grown primarily in Colombia. The main source for carnations used to be luxe Cap d'Antibes, attesting to the flowers once exclusive lineage.

Read the complete article here.
 

Books We Like to Give and Get: The Complete Lyrics of Johnny Mercer

It's a shame that the American lyricist Johnny Mercer is less well known today than Irving Berlin, Ira Gershwin, and many of the songwriters who were his Tin Pan Alley contemporaries.

Johnny Mercer, the composer and Capitol recording star

If he is remembered at all, it's usually for a group of hit songs he composed, later in his career, with Henry Mancini for films like Breakfast at Tiffany's ("Moon River"), Days of Wine and Roses, and Charade.

It was a different story during the 1930s, '40s, and '50s when Mercer was as popular as Gershwin, Berlin, Oscar Hammerstein, Cole Porter and the other greats who shaped American popular music in the first half of the 20th Century.

He wrote dozens of standards – "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)", "Come Rain or Come Shine," "Blues in the Night," "This Time the Dream's on Me," "I'm Old Fashioned," "Tangerine," "That Old Black Magic," "Too Marvelous for Words," "Fools Rush In."

As if those weren't enough to assure his place in the Pantheon of great songwriters, Mercer gave us the sultry jazz standards "Skylark," "Satin Doll," and "Midnight Sun" in which he rhymed ruby chalice with alabaster palace and aurora borealis

He could also produce clever rhymes that were catchy, disdainfully amusing, and topical at the same time. In his show business anthem "Hooray for Hollywood," from 1937's Hollywood Hotel, Mercer observed:

Hooray for Hollywood!
Where you're terrific if you're even good.

Forty years later the pianist and cabaret singer Blossom Dearie swung these lilting lyrics:

I dig Modigliani,
Jolson doing "Swanee,"
Several maharanees are my intimates, too.
I played with Mantovani,
And that's a lot of strings to get through.
But anyone can see
My new celebrity is you!

Mercer's novelty numbers, some with his own music, have endured, as well, even if we've forgotten who wrote them. "Jeepers Creepers (Where'd You Get Those Peepers?)", "I'm an Old Cowhand (From the Rio Grande)" "Goody, Goody," and "Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive (E-lim-mi-nate the negative)" are as familiar to us today as they were to previous generations.

Johnny Mercer made other significant contributions to American popular music.

In 1942 he founded and for many years was the driving force behind Capitol Records, home to Paul Whiteman, Peggy Lee, Nat King Cole, Stan Kenton and, later, The Kingston Trio, Dean Martin, and The Beatles. As a singer, he was one of the label's first and biggest recording stars. In the 1940s, sales of Mercer discs were on par with those of Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby.

Mercer the performer and music industry giant are forgotten, and today we celebrate him for the marvelous words he wrote.

They've all been collected and annotated in The Complete Lyrics of Johnny Mercer, by Robert Kimball, editor of earlier volumes on the works of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, Frank Loesser, and Lorenz Hart.

This large-format book contains every lyric Mercer wrote, more than 1500 in all. It includes his first song, "Out of Breath (and Scared to Death of You)" along with the complete scores for L'il Abner, St. Louis Woman, and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Mercer's unsuccessful musicals are here, too: Saratoga, Top Banana, the infamous Bert Lahr flop Foxy.

We love leafing through this book, revisiting beloved standards and discovering unknown gems. Anyone who is a fan of the Great American Songbook will find hours of enjoyment within its pages, too.

The Annals of Luxury: It's Official! The Rich Are Just Like You And Me.

Or are they?

Last week The New York Times reported that the wealthy are "tightening their belts."

Until recently, affluent consumers had continued to spend, offering one of the few rays of hope for retailers suffering through these recessionary times.

Next stop, Rodeo Drive!

Now their confidence appears to have ebbed. At least that is the interpretation given the latest retail sales reports by some economic analysts, said The Times.

By affluent consumers, we mean top 5 percent in income earners — those households earning $210,000 or more. They account for about one-third of consumer outlays, including spending on goods and services, interest payments on consumer debt and cash gifts, according to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by Moody’s Analytics.

Any cutback in purchasing by this elite group produces a disproportionate reduction in overall retail sales. Ouch!

The Times cites the usual reasons for the downturn in spending – swings in dividend payments, investment losses, low interest rates on bank savings accounts, uncertainty about the future, and (here's a new one) fear of looking prosperous.

It turns out that some executives and business owners who have laid off employees don't want to buy new luxury cars because they're afraid of how that will look to their remaining workers.

If things get worse, will they leave their Porsches and Lexuses at home and take the bus to the office?

Click here to read the full New York Times article.

The Enlightened Traveler: London's Charlotte St.

Even if you're a frequent visitor to London, you might not know Charlotte St.

Tucked away a few blocks north of Oxford St. and west of bustling Tottenham Court Rd., it's a quiet byway noteworthy for its many restaurants. These aren't London's finest eateries, though many of them are very good.

That makes Charlotte St. your preferred destination when you don't know where you want have dinner. You can work up an appetite as you stroll the area, inspecting your many options.

No phony Sicilian decor at Mennula, just simple, up-to-the-minute elegance

One that currently is attracting attention is the recently opened Mennula at No. 10. Sicilian-born chef-owner Santino Busciglio has worked at some of the city's better Italian restaurants, Rosmarino, Zafferano and Alloro.

We haven't been there yet, but we have been impressed by the reviews.

Time Out notes that Busciglio's "style of cooking is much more contemporary and refined than Sicilian home cooking, a fact underlined by this Fitzrovia site also being self-consciously smarter than London's other Sicilian restaurants."

The Independent writes: "There's nothing particularly flashy about Mennula; the lion's share of the work has gone into getting the food right, rather than "the concept"... If you're after simple Sicilian food, lovingly prepared by a talented chef, this is the place to come."

We cannot wait to try it.

The British Museum, Bloomsbury, Oxford St. shopping, Wigmore Hall, and West End theaters are 5-15 mins. on foot from Charlotte St. Goodge St. is the nearest tube stop.

The arty, chic Charlotte Street Hotel is a show business favorite and a luxe place to stay if your budget allows. Even if you are not in residence, you can enjoy a drink in the hotel's stylish Oscar Bar before dinner at Mennula or another Fitzrovia restaurant.