Latest news with #BonAppétit
Pink Villa
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Pink Villa
Bon Appétit, Your Majesty: YoonA takes on tyrant king Lee Chae Min with fiery cooking after Park Sung Hoon's exit
Bon Appétit, Your Majesty (previously known as The Tyrant's Chef) is a South Korean fantasy romance drama about a present-time French chef and a Joseon dynasty king, who is also a food enthusiast. On May 29, the drama production team tvN released the first look stills of the main cast, YoonA and Lee Chae Min, generating excitement for the series' premiere. It reportedly went on floors on January 23, following its previous male lead, Park Sung Hoon's exit and is eyeing a 2025 release. Bon Appétit, Your Majesty: First look of leads The historical series follows Yeon Ji Yeong (played by YoonA), a French chef with a cheerful and determined personality and unparalleled cooking skills. She somehow ends up time travelling 500 years back, into the Joseon era and is asked to cook for the king. In the recently unveiled stills of the drama, Yeon Ji Yeong is seen focused on preparing a Michelle-level dish, with high flames erupting from a deep pan. She's likely cooking for Lee Heon (played by Lee Chae Min), the ruthless king of Joseon, who's also a discerning gourmet with a refined palate. In the latest stills, he is seen sitting regally with a cold, stern expression that hints at his tyrannic demeanor. As the story unfolds, he develops a fondness for Yeon Ji Yeong's culinary skills and invites her to live with him. With two individuals from different eras and backgrounds now living together, it remains to be seen if romance will blossom between them. Bon Appétit, Your Majesty: Why did Lee Chae Min replace Park Sung Hoon? Squid Game's Park Sung Hoon was supposed to be paired up with YoonA in the upcoming drama. However, owing to his NSFW controversy, the actor had to opt out of the project, and Hierarchy's Lee Chae Min replaced him. Park Sung Hoon received heavy backlash following his December 30 Instagram story of a cover poster of an AV parody, featuring Japanese actresses. Although he immediately deleted the story, the damage was already done. Now, with Lee Chae Min set to play the lead, fans are eagerly anticipating his take on the character after his recent standout performance in the rom-com Crushology 101.
Business Insider
17-05-2025
- Lifestyle
- Business Insider
I'm a food stylist married to a Wall Street guy. We host a weekly dinner and still spend under $100 a week on groceries in New York City.
My husband and I make good money and live on the Upper East Side but are frugal with groceries. We keep our weekly grocery bill under $100 a week, and that feeds us plus a Sunday dinner party. Our secret involves a mix of creative cooking and a little financial savvy. When I moved from Nashville to New York, I expected new experiences. However, one thing I still can't get over is how casually people spend on food. I noticed ordering delivery or grocery shopping daily to satisfy a craving was more common. At first, I was excited to explore the city's culinary scene and began eating out more and indulging myself. However, I quickly grew tired of spending $14 for a tuna sandwich that I could make at home in four minutes for a fraction of the cost. My husband and I make good money. He works on Wall Street, and I'm a food stylist, meaning I make food look beautiful for NFL campaigns, fashion editorials, and magazines like Bon Appétit. At home, though, I cook like a freelancer on a budget. We live on the Upper East Side, and while we could spend more money on food, we share a core value: our money should work harder than we do. So, we keep groceries simple — and cheap. Our weekly grocery bill rarely tops $100, and that's including shopping for the dinner guests we host almost every Sunday. That $100 ends up feeding the two of us for five breakfasts and dinners, plus one dinner party for six. Our secret? A mix of creative cooking and a little financial savvy. Sunday supper is the key to my success Each Sunday, I cook a meal for six and always take the time to make extra, ensuring there are leftovers. This food becomes the foundation of meals for the week. Roasted veggies go into Monday's grain bowl. Extra herbs become a seasoning for homemade dressings. All the meal prep I do for Sunday becomes ingredient prep for the rest of the week, saving me both time and money. No scraps or leftovers go to waste — we save everything. On set for my job, there's a golden rule: never throw anything away. It's not just for sustainability, we might need to re-shoot a veggie sandwich eight hours later, which means rebuilding the exact same sandwich without needing to buy new ingredients. That habit of saving partial ingredients to get the same — or sometimes better — results followed me home. Now I see leftovers as ingredients in disguise. A few slices of cheese from Saturday's snack board top tuna toast on Wednesday. And with a quick broil, a sad tuna salad becomes a delicious tuna melt. That's $14 saved. We used to eat out three or four times a week, but since I've stopped seeing leftovers as scraps for trash and started seeing them as opportunities, home cooking has become easier than takeout. Now, we have to justify a date night because our fridge is full of food we want to eat. We also save by stocking up on staples and buying in bulk We love Japanese, Italian, and Tex-Mex cuisines, so we always have tamari, rice, tomato paste, olives, tortillas, and salsa on hand. With these ingredients, I can make something delicious from whatever's in the fridge. Buying in bulk also helps. Our freezer is stocked with almond flour tortillas (half the price at Costco compared to the corner store). We get 10-packs of Beyond Meat patties for what two cost elsewhere. They're quick, versatile, and a lifesaver on busy nights. A few Saturdays ago, we were short on time before heading to Yankee Stadium. In the fridge were kale stems, tired bell pepper slices, half an onion, mushrooms, and garlic. I sautéed everything with a Beyond patty and taco spices, then added tortillas, eggs, and leftover cilantro from Sunday's fried rice. In 15 minutes, we had protein-packed tacos that kept us full until we hit the concession stand. The trick to spending less than $100 a week on groceries isn't restrictive diets or rigid meal plans. It's barely wasting a thing and using what we already have in smart, flexible ways. It's scrappy, satisfying, and surprisingly elegant.
San Francisco Chronicle
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
S.F.'s century-old bakeries make my favorite versions of this suddenly popular cake
The United States is discovering princess cake. Just ask Eater, which last week published a piece by Bettina Makalintal titled 'The Princess Cake Gets Its Princess Moment.' This might be a head scratcher for San Franciscans, where legacy bakeries like Schubert's (established 1911) and the Victoria Pastry Company (1914) have been perfecting the domed Swedish cakes, layered with custard, whipped cream and raspberry jam, for generations. I grew up eating and adoring them, my childlike fascination with their smooth technicolor veneer giving way to an adult appreciation of their not-too-sweetness. The best versions are like a trifle, reassembled into a cake format. I had assumed that, like Black Forest cake or pineapple upside down cake, princess cake was ubiquitous — or, if not widely available, at least known. Not so! When I worked at Bon Appétit, our sister website Epicurious ran a series of articles and recipes on cake, and I offered to write an ode to princess cake. Many of my colleagues had never heard of it. Did it have something to do with Disney? I lived in New York, a city of 8 million people and nearly as many bakeries, for 20 years and never spotted a princess cake in the wild. But we are in the midst of the great mainstreaming of princess cake, perhaps thanks to Hannah Ziskin's hot Los Angeles restaurant Quarter Sheets, known as much for its cakes as for its pizza. According to the Eater article, Ziskin grew up eating princess cake from Gelson's Market in L.A., but I have to imagine her years pastry cheffing in the Bay Area (Quince, Bar Tartine, Nopa, among others) solidified her love for the marzipan-coated confection. Her version of the cake, constructed in long logs rather than the traditional domes, is a runaway hit, with over 75% of tables ordering a slice. She filmed a video about it for Bon Appétit last fall. Last month, British cookbook author Nicola Lamb published a streamlined recipe for princess cake, built in a bowl like a bombe, in the New York Times, with its own accompanying video, and she also dropped a paywalled variation substituting mango for raspberry on her Substack, Kitchen Projects. The very next day, Food Network star Molly Yeh posted an even easier hack for the finicky cake, building a sheet cake version in an 8x8-inch pan. I can't vouch for either recipe — although Nicola and Molly are generally quite reliable developers, I find — but I can tell you that the versions at San Francisco's bakeries stand the test of time. (Ambrosia Bakery, a relative newcomer at 37 years old, also sells them.) They may hail from Sweden, but I will always think of princess cakes as a San Francisco treat.
Yahoo
12-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
How One Man's Obsession with Fruit Created the UK's Most Exquisite Spirits
All products featured on Bon Appétit are independently selected by Bon Appétit editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, Condé Nast may earn an affiliate commission. Photograph by Barney Wilczak 'The fruit is coming.' The urgent phone call that Barney Wilczak anticipates typically comes in the middle of the night. The caller is one of his local farmer partners who has just walked their orchards to touch, smell, and taste the fruit. The brief exchange notifies Wilczak that the quince, perry pears, blood oranges, raspberries, or damson plums destined for distillation are ready to harvest. A distiller of groundbreaking eaux de vie, Wilczak describes his work as being 'in service to the fruit.' Part of that service is to represent the fruit at its highest level of flavor, to harness its essence. So the processing must begin right away. Wilczak takes the farmer's call as his cue, rises in the early darkness, and prepares to receive by the truckload literal tons of fruit. Wilczak built Capreolus Distillery in 2016, on the same property as his childhood home in Cotswold, southwest England. His eaux de vie have an almost unnerving ability to transport the drinker to those abundant fields. The region is known for its endemic fruits, many of which don't appear in other parts of the world. The name Capreolus refers to the deer that frequent Wilczak's garden. 'They're the most beautiful native deer we have and they're so ephemeral,' he says. 'You see them and then they disappear. It felt apt, as we try to capture things that only last for moments.' That late night/early morning phone call from Wilczak's farmer collaborator wouldn't have been a surprise. Wilczak firmly believes that production revolves entirely around the wisdom of the trees and the people who cultivate them, not marketing drives or quarterly sales targets. Every piece of fruit that arrives at the distillery is hand-sorted to check for outliers of 'too much softness or spring,' before it is hand-pressed and guided through distillation and bottling. You might say that Wilczak practices a type of conservation: His farming supports much-needed biodiversity, and drinkers around the world can experience hyperlocal plants they wouldn't otherwise have access to. The quince evokes notes of cinnamon, fig, and dark cherry. It tastes of earth yet bright twig and leaf—to drink these eaux de vie is to be situated in terrain. 'Last year we spent 7.5 hours sorting 700,000 individual raspberries. That's 3.6 tons,' Wilczak says, with a look of bewilderment. All that fruit, time, and effort across a team of four people, yielded roughly three hundred 375-ml bottles. With a sense of pride and maybe surrender, he adds, 'It's ridiculous.' Wilczak has fans, if not acolytes, of his so-called ridiculousness. Among them, famed cocktail bartender Ryan Chetiyawardana, professionally known as Mr. Lyan, who features Capreolus eaux de vie at Seed Library in London's Shoreditch, Washington D.C. bar Silver Lyan, and Super Lyan in Amsterdam. He credits Dawn Davies of The Whisky Exchange for introducing him to the spirit. 'It was revolutionary to try an eau de vie that represents my favorite fruits as a UK native,' Chetiyawardana says. 'Barney sees the whole essence of the plant as not just a biological creature, but what it stands for. I was flabbergasted.' Wilczak found distilling through his love of nature. As a student he thrived in botany and biology, but couldn't make sense of working nonstop in a lab. He pivoted to study photography and specialized in conservation. In brief, he became a plant photojournalist. 'I was photographing habitat restoration on six continents, building media libraries for botanic gardens in 118 countries.' Alongside his studies, he developed a hobby for making ciders, exploring the technicalities of distillation and méthode traditionnelle, a style of winemaking that involves a secondary fermentation in the bottle. The leap to distilling was not a huge jump. 'It all comes down to a love for plants.' As he approached age 30, Wilczak experienced 'a bit of a life crisis.' He didn't want to only document plants for visual archives. He wanted to promote the growth and appreciation of those plants for others. 'I realized that people are obsessed with varietal differences in wine, but it's also true of every single fruit.' When Wilczak launched Capreolus, his bank account was overdraft by eight pounds, but supported by his partner Hannah Morrison, whose taste became imperative to Wilczak's process. Everything was once done by hand and muscle, though he's since acquiesced to buying a mill. He committed to work with farmers within a fifty-mile radius of his home-distillery, and just recently purchased meadowland to plant quince trees, which will soon bring that particular eau de vie production within range (it was previously the lone outlier). His focus on local farmers came down to pay equity. 'Early on I was talking to someone in Finland about wild-picked cranberries and they said, 'We'll get them to you for 2 euros per kilo.' I knew that was really really cheap for wild-picked fruit,' he explains. The fruit would be picked in Russia. 'What are the labor laws there? What are people getting paid?' Wilczak wanted to work with people he could meet, with operations he could see. 'We wanted to pay people a proper wage, focused on farming well,' he says, a nod to the price point of his lineup, which can range from about $90 to $185. With his local focus, he learned that there was not 'a single piece of overlap in flavor or aroma.' The realization inspired him to learn how these individual expressions manifested. He spent about seven years studying fruit distillation practices in epicenters of Austria, Germany, Italy, and France, and translating non-English books on the subject. After distilling perry pears from 200-year-old 45-foot trees, Wilczak was shocked. The distillation didn't smell like fruit. 'It smelled like sun-warmed bark, ripe and unripe wood, autumnal leaves, and almost like the grass around the trees,' he says. 'My self-guided education had a huge focus on a technological, yield-driven way of working, but that robbed the eau de vie of complexity and organic structure,' he continues. 'I became interested in making eaux de vie that are truly organic and expressive of where they come from.' That meant becoming dogmatic about respecting the inherent knowledge of the trees and the ecosystems that allowed them to produce such varied fruit. 'Suddenly, the eaux de vie started to smell like the orchards.' In New York City, Jorge Riera, wine director at Frenchette, Le Roc, and the newly revamped Le Veau d'Or, features Capreolus eaux de vie as the finishing touch on leisurely, decadent meals. 'It's mind-blowing,' Riera says. 'The delicacy, the finesse, the floral notes that Barney gets out of it. I was blown away.' Riera first tasted the lineup in 2018 in Vienna, Austria, at Karakterre, a 14-year-old natural wine conference celebrating producers primarily from central and eastern Europe (the festival now has a NYC iteration going into its fourth year). Riera immediately called his importer, PM Spirits, to see about getting Capreolus to the States. 'With the raspberry eau de vie, you feel the fuzz of the fruit in the nose,' he goes on. 'They work with nature and it's beautiful. But for me, I see the result at the dining table. I see the emotions from people immediately.' One of the more evocative eaux de vie is the damson plum, a quintessential British fruit. 'Old recipes of distilling damson take on this slightly jammy, tart note,' Chetiyawardana says. 'Barney manages to capture the smell of the blossoms as you walk past the bush. It has that white flower elegance. The purple fruit notes encapsulate the tartness of the skin and the yield of the flesh. It pulls through to this wonderful fresh almond note from the kernel.' For this writer, Capreolus eaux de vie feels like falling into a safe, warm memory you didn't know you had. The damson plum is an example of Wilczak's conservation ideology: 'No one knows what to do with a cooking plum; it's something we've lost from our vocabulary. We can let these things slip away. But if we want those genetics as a resource given changing climate, we have to give a justification for them to be grown.' His exquisite bottles make for a compelling reason. The only experience better than sipping Capreolus is to share it with someone as willing to be moved as you. Originally Appeared on Bon Appétit More Drink Stories From Bon Appétit Get Bon Appétit in your inbox with our daily newsletter. Energy drinks marketing themselves as 'healthy.' Are they? Bartenders are turning out inspired milk punch, going all-in on savory cocktails, and taking the zero-proof movement to new heights. These are the trends that define drinking right now. Nonalcoholic beverages are everywhere. This is how to choose the right one for any occasion.
Yahoo
28-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Award-winning Sozai restaurant in Clawson shutters
A notable, small and award-winning sushi restaurant centered on sustainable seafood has permanently closed. Sozai in Clawson's last day of service was Saturday, according to their website. Owner and chef Hajime Sato, reached via email Sunday evening, directed the Free Press to his Instagram and Facebook pages for a statement. The post said that he and his family are returning to the Pacific Northwest. 'After an extended period of reflection, it is clear that the best thing my family is for us to return to the Pacific Northwest,' the post read. Sato, in his social media messages, said it will be 'extremely difficult' to leave Sozai. 'I put everything I had into building something special for my customers and to further my work as a sustainable seafood advocate,' the post read. In 2021, Sato opened the small, 13-seat sushi bar in a W. 14 Mile strip mall. Sato is known for being a steadfast leader and advocate for sustainable sushi, seafood and place of origin fishery movement. Soon after its 2021 opening, Sozai quickly earned accolades and acclaim. Sozai was named the 2022 Detroit Free Pres Restaurant of the Year by Free Press restaurant critic Lyndsay C. Green. The sustainable seafood spot was also named to Bon Appétit's 50 Best New Restaurants 2022 list. Before opening Sozai in 2021, Sato who grew up in Japan, had a restaurant in Seattle for more than 25 years. Related: Clawson sushi chef Hajime Sato wins coveted James Beard Award: Best Chef Great Lakes Grateful for the win, Sato told the Free Press at the time, because it gave him a platform to speak out on ocean sustainability. He delivered that sustainability message during his James Beard Award speach in 2024 and encouraged others to do the same. In accepting his award, Sato's speech included his messages about how James Beard nominations allowed him to speak out on concerns with sustainability and the risks of overfishing. "But something changed after James Beard … people started listening to me. I've been doing ocean conservation and sustainable sushi for 15 years," Sato said. "Oceans (are) not in good shape. As you know, Earth is not in good shape. And a small restaurant like me cannot really do that much. But everybody here … nominations, winners, everybody, now you have a voice, just like I didn't have a voice, but because of James Beard, you have a little bit more voice." It was the second time that Sato was a James Beard finalist. He landed a spot in the 2023 James Beard Foundation Awards category for Outstanding Chef. Sato's win was the first time a Michigan chef earned the honored in the Best Chef category since 2011, according to the James Beard Award website, when Alex Young, formerly of Zingerman's Roadhouse in Ann Arbor, was honored as Best Chef Great Lakes. In 2003, chef Takashi Yagihashi of the former Tribute restaurant in Farmington Hills took home the award for Best Chef: Midwest. Chef Jimmy Schmidt in 1993, then owner of the Rattlesnake Club in Detroit, was named Best Chef: Midwest. At the 2022 Restaurant and Chef Awards, Warda Bouguettaya, owner of Midtown's Warda Pâtisserie, won the title of Outstanding Pastry Chef. Contact Detroit Free Press food and restaurant writer Susan Selasky and send food and restaurant news and tips to: sselasky@ Follow @SusanMariecooks on Twitter. Subscribe to the Free Press. This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Award-winning sushi chef Hajime Sato closes Sozai in Clawson
