Latest news with #Michelin-star

Time Out

2 days ago

Entertainment
Time Out

A skewer of oysters in blankets is the

It's been a big few months for Tom Brown. First, the Michelin-starred chef opened up his eponymous fine dining restaurant at The Capital in Knightsbridge, and now he's added to his empire with a joint venture alongside Birmingham boy and fellow Michelin-star wonder Brad Carter. Island – floating on the top deck above Mare Street Market in King's Cross, festooned with plants and quirky, recycled material chandeliers – is designed as a surf and turf restaurant. Seafood savant Brown helms the surf side and Carter, the turf. Vegetarians, you may as well stop reading now: there is nothing for you here. Common People of snacks If the idea of surf and turf brings about memories of lunch at the local Harvester, then Brown and Carter have taken the old school concept and given it a thoroughly modern makeover. Each dish is playful in the ways you'd hope from Brown who, at the now-closed Cornerstone, invented the oft-copied potted shrimp crumpet. Split into small, large and tiny 'islands' (essentially starters, mains and sides), plus skewers and oyster options that includes one laced with lamb doner sausage, it's a menu that's meant to pique your interest. We begin with sumac mignonette oysters that come tucked under a pile of chunky purple pickled bits with a pot of crispy, smokey fried onions on the side. If you were to take an oyster down the pub, it might emerge like this. Beef tartare, loaded with chopped gherkins and with the traditional egg yolk swapped out for a lighter, cleaner dollop of oyster emulsion, is a standout. It comes with a bowl of prawn crackers, extravagantly dusted with a prawn cocktail powder that makes them taste like massive Skips. The idea is exceptional; the execution, a little heavy handed. Knock off about two-thirds of the dust and it'll be a winner. A skewer of oysters in blankets, with a fruity pot of brown sauce for dunking in, is the Common People of snacks: a posh morsel in working class cosplay. Their star dish, the Island mixed grill for two, however is proudly extravagant. A pair of scallops, served in the half shell and submerged in a robust, citrus-zingy sauce is truly fantastic. Chicken wings, filled with a prawn mousse that gives them the vibe of a meaty siu mai, we're told have been divisive but get a firm thumbs up for us. There are tender lamb chops and thin slivers of oyster steak, a lesser-known cut that entirely melts in the mouth. Little squids stuffed with sobrasada sausage don't pack as much of a punch as they promise, but as a plate it's at least a show-pauser, if not a full showstopper. If fun twists and clever cooking with a relatable swagger are the order of the day at Island, then when it comes to pudding they've dialled it up to ridiculous levels. Malibu and pineapple soft serve is akin to a rum and raisin ice cream with a fake ID. With raisins soaked in the coconutty booze so beloved of teenage drinkers, it's nostalgic in the most specific of ways. An absolutely enormous slab of salt-studded chocolate fudge cake, meanwhile, could feed at least four. It is, we're told, a homage to Bruce Bogtrotter's infamous cake in Matilda: delicious, excessive, insane. You can imagine these two chefs having fun concocting Island's menu and it shows. Brown and Carter's surf and turf reinvention still has room for tweaks but there's already a lot to love.

Gaza becomes 'most expensive place to eat in the world'

Metro

2 days ago

General
Metro

Gaza becomes 'most expensive place to eat in the world'

'Where in the world is food more expensive than London, Dubai, and New York?' It sounds like a setup to a cheap joke but the harrowing answer is Gaza. Under a suffocating Israeli blockade, food, fuel and humanitarian aid have become luxuries for Palestinians. The result? People are starving. Not metaphorically, not gradually – literally. What little food remains has been pushed to black-market extremities, as shown by prices shared with Metro by Christian Aid workers on the ground. A 25kg sack of flour is now more expensive than a Michelin-star dinner in Paris, costing as much as £414, compared to £8.80 before the start of the war. A kilogram of sugar is £88, in stark contrast with the price of £0.60 less than two years ago. Staples like oil, bread and eggs – when available – have all become entirely out of reach for Palestinians. Speaking of the impact of the unfolding famine, Ranin Awad who works for Christian Aid's local partner in Gaza, Women's Affairs Centre (WAC), said: 'My colleagues and I only eat one meal a day, depending on what we can afford and what is available. We are dealing with fatigue, dizziness, and overwhelming weakness. 'Recent months have been filled with death, fear and displacement. It is like a nightmare that has devastated our hopes, memories, and houses. 'Our home was destroyed and we were forced to flee many times. All of our memories have been obliterated. 'My son was just a month old when the war began. He had a new, lovely room with pretty furniture and toys. There is nothing left for him now, all is ash.' Gaza's Health Ministry has recorded six more deaths in the past 24 hours due to famine and malnutrition, including two children. This brings the total number of starvation deaths to 133, which included 87 children. Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner-general for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), said: 'People in Gaza are neither dead nor alive, they are walking corpses.' He said that one in five children in Gaza City is malnourished – a number increasing every day that unhindered humanitarian aid is denied. In a post on X, Lazzarini warned: 'When child malnutrition surges, coping mechanisms fail, access to food and care disappears, and famine silently begins to unfold. 'Most children our teams are seeing are emaciated, weak and at high risk of dying if they do not get the treatment they urgently need.' Amid the starvation, Egyptians have launched an initiative called 'From sea to sea – a bottle of hope for Gaza'. Plastic bottles are being filled with grains, rice and lentils and hurled into the Mediterranean Sea in the hope that they will reach the enclave – even though the Israeli Defence Forces have banned Palestinians from entering the water. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video While largely symbolic – aimed at highlighting Israel's purposeful starvation of civilians, several bottles appear to have reached Gaza. A video shared on TikTok by creator Saqer Abu Saqr, from the north of the enclave, shows him thanking Egyptians for sending him a bottle filled with yellow lentils. Waving the gift, he says: 'This came by the sea from the young people in Egypt. Thank you, may Allah bless you.' Another Palestinian creator with some 2.5 million followers on Instagram, Mohamed Al Khalidi, shared a video titled 'The most expensive city in the world.' Walking through Gaza City's crumbling streets, Mohamed highlights some of the prices of basic goods – £37 for a kilogram of flour, £66 for a kilogram of sugar, and £22 for a kilogram of lentils. He says: 'The famine is intensifying significantly. Even the simplest items now cost 10 times their normal price, and only a few things are available. Everything is scarce. I keep thinking about those who have no money at all.' Israel has been facing growing criticism over the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza as indirect ceasefire talks in Doha between Israel and Hamas have broken off with no deal in sight. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu lashed out at the United Nations over the weekend to stop blaming his government for what the WHO chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, described as 'man-made mass starvation'. This came hours after the military said it would pause operations for 10 hours a day in three areas – Al Mawasi, Deir al-Balah and Gaza City – and permit new aid corridors. Jordan and the United Arab Emirates airdropped 25 tonnes of food and supplies to the enclave – which is still less than what one of the hundreds of humanitarian aid trucks stuck outside of Gaza could bring in if allowed. But Lazzarini stressed that aid airdrops will not reverse the starvation and added: 'They are expensive, inefficient and can even kill starving civilians. It is a distraction and screensmoke. More Trending 'A manmade hunger can only be addressed by political will. Lift the siege, open the gates and guarantee safe movements and dignified access to people in need. 'Allow the UN including UNRWA and our partners to operate at scale and without bureaucratic or political hurdles. 'At UNRWA, we have the equivalent of 6,000 trucks in Jordan and Egypt waiting for the green light to get into Gaza. 'Driving aid through is much easier, more effective, faster, cheaper and safer. It's more dignified for the people of Gaza.' Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@ For more stories like this, check our news page. MORE: What's stopping Keir Starmer from recognising Palestine as a state? MORE: Keir Starmer says state is 'inalienable' right of Palestinian people MORE: Pro-Palestine protesters block Israeli cruise ship from docking on Greek island

They're Rich. They're Anti-Trump. And They Don't Want Their Big Tax Cut.

Yomiuri Shimbun

4 days ago

Business
Yomiuri Shimbun

They're Rich. They're Anti-Trump. And They Don't Want Their Big Tax Cut.

Kimberly Hoover has been to most Michelin-star restaurants on the East and West coasts. She and her wife, multimillionaires from their real estate firms, own homes in or near New York City, Washington, Miami and Quebec. Their lives are filled with skiing, fine wine and long trips to Europe. Hoover's accountant estimates that the new tax law that President Donald Trump signed this month will save her several million dollars over the next few years. While many Americans might rejoice at that kind of windfall, Hoover worked hard to stop it from becoming a reality, arguing to lawmakers that she has more money than she needs. 'At some point, it starts to feel wrong. It starts to feel excessive. It starts to feel somehow inappropriate. And at some point, it just doesn't feel good,' said Hoover, who spoke while on break from a sapphic literature conference she helps sponsor in Albany. 'Imbalanced is really not good for anyone, even if you're on the positive end of that imbalance, because it's unsustainable.' Hoover's experience reflects an unusual irony of Trump's signature tax legislation: Many of its biggest beneficiaries fiercely oppose the president – and even oppose policies he is pushing that will make them richer. The mismatch is partly a result of a crucial, if ongoing, evolution of the role class plays in American politics. During the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush, affluent Americans who benefited from tax cuts were more likely to be Republicans. The political party they supported delivered material benefits that boosted their pocketbooks. Democratic voters, by comparison, were more likely to be working or middle class. Now, more than half of upper-income families – defined as those earning more than $215,400 per year – vote Democratic, according to a 2024 Pew Research survey, as more highly educated voters shift to the left. The top fifth of earners went from supporting Barack Obama in 2008 by a 2.5-point margin to supporting Joe Biden in 2020 by close to 15 percentage points. 'Affluent Americans used to vote for Republican politicians. Now they vote for Democrats,' one 2023 paper found. That shift intensified during the 2024 presidential election, when large numbers of Black and Latino voters, who tend to be lower-income, defected to the Republican ticket for the first time in decades, according to several political scientists, exit polls and studies. 'There's been a lot of talk about how even though the Republican coalition has changed and gotten more working class, their policies have not,' said Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State University. 'But there's been less attention to a similar but true fact on the other side – a lot of Democratic politicians were elected by very rich constituents who are more likely to benefit from Republican tax policy than Democratic policy.' As a result, many of the provisions of the GOP tax law will benefit a voting bloc that is increasingly Democratic. The $3.4 trillion legislation extends a lower tax rate for the top tax bracket, rejecting the president's suggestion of a new tax on million-dollar earners. It expands and makes permanent a smaller federal estate tax, allowing up to $15 million to be passed on tax-free ($30 million for couples). It also makes permanent a large deduction for businesses formed as pass-through entities, while raising the cap on what filers can deduct in state and local taxes. (The GOP's 2017 tax law also permanently lowered the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent.) When all these provisions are combined, Trump's second tax bill devotes roughly $1 trillion in tax cuts for those earning more than $400,000 per year – roughly the size of the law's cuts to Medicaid, the federal health insurance program for the poor. (Most of the bill's cost, though, comes from provisions that largely benefit middle-class households, such as a larger child tax credit and standard deduction.) Steve Lockshin, a financial adviser and co-founder of the estate advisory platform Vanilla, represents clients with at least $50 million and whose fortunes are sometimes in the billions of dollars. A tax cut of about 2 percent for a middle-class family translates into about $1,800 per year, according to the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank. But for Lockshin's clients, saving several percentage points in taxes can mean hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, per year. One provision that has become particularly beneficial to his clients is the law's expansion of 'Opportunity Zones,' which allow investors to defer capital gains taxes by reinvesting profits into designated economically distressed areas. The program allows wealthy individuals to delay or, in some cases, permanently avoid paying taxes on capital gains if they make investments in specified zones. 'The general mentality is the same across the board with my clients: 'I want to pay the least I can. I also want the best for my country, and I would invert the two if it had a meaningful impact,'' Lockshin said. 'And if you are wealthy – but aren't pro-Trump and just along for the ride – most of my network is thinking, 'While Rome is burning, at least I'll save a few dollars in taxes.'' Opposition to tax cuts has surfaced in many wealthy liberal enclaves. At the Harvard Club in New York City, 'everyone under 50 feels this way,' said Bob Elliott, chief executive of Unlimited, an investment firm. 'The classic question is how much do you worry about it benefiting yourself versus the societal consequences – that's the trade-off,' Elliott said. 'Many of the people who don't like the bill are saying, 'Really, even if I get money, it's still at the expense of taking people off Medicaid.'' Nonpartisan estimates have found that the GOP tax law will lead to more than 13 million fewer Americans having health insurance. Some experts say rich people have self-interested reasons to oppose the tax cuts that go beyond the broader social consequences. Many of the law's short-term benefits come with long-term drawbacks, said Constance Hunter, chief economist at the Economist Intelligence Unit, a research firm. That, she said, is because many people at least intuitively understand the concept of 'Ricardian equivalence' – the idea that deficits will need to be paid for eventually through higher taxes, so consumers adjust their behavior accordingly by saving more in preparation. 'I think there are a number of people, some of whom are affluent and that span the political spectrum, who realize we cannot keep expanding our deficits indefinitely, especially at a time when our economy is showing resilience and growing,' Hunter said. 'A lot of wealth is held by business owners, and while certain provisions may be providing tax cuts now, these are likely to be accompanied by greater financing costs for business owners,' as reflected in the higher interest rates needed to combat increases in inflation. Drew E. Pomerance, a Los Angeles lawyer in business and commercial litigation, said that his net worth is in the tens of millions of dollars and that he will probably save tens of thousands of dollars from the law every year. While he said 'it never ceases to amaze me that people vote against their own economic self-interest,' he also said he will benefit from the bill but thinks 'it's terrible for America.' 'Don't get me wrong: I like money. I like having money. I'm not opposed to having money,' he said. 'But at the expense of what it does to the rest of the country, it should not be a priority to give me and other rich people more money.' The willingness of some liberals to vote against their economic self-interest should give them pause before they accuse conservatives of doing the same, said Michael Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. He said Republican voters in lower-income states are often unfairly maligned this way, pointing to the 2004 book 'What's the Matter With Kansas?' 'Nothing is the matter with Kansas. The people of Kansas vote for a variety of reasons, one of which is economic self-interest,' Strain said. Some multimillionaires, such as Morris Pearl, who served as managing director at the investment firm BlackRock, say they are getting money from the tax cut they do not need. (Pearl, like Hoover and Pomerance, is part of Patriotic Millionaires, a group of rich Americans devoted to trying to raise taxes on the rich.) Pearl's mother-in-law died last year, and he and his wife benefited from the 2017 changes to the estate tax. He has taken advantage of the low-tax Opportunity Zone rules, though he does not remember where or how much he has invested. He will probably continue to do so now that they have been extended. 'It's great for me personally, financially,' Pearl said. 'But even looking at my own and my family's long-term self-interest, I would prefer less inequality and less of a country of very rich and very poor, and more of a country with lots of people doing all right.' In August, Pearl is traveling to a fundraiser for Democratic lawmakers in California. Every year, he donates hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democratic politicians, which he described as the first thing he would cut back on if his fortune started to shrink. Thanks in part to the GOP tax law, Pearl added, that is not going to happen any time soon.

Tell Us The Cooking Skill You Thought Everyone Knew — Until Someone Proved You Wrong

Yahoo

5 days ago

General
Yahoo

Tell Us The Cooking Skill You Thought Everyone Knew — Until Someone Proved You Wrong

Remember when Kendall Jenner broke the internet a few years ago because she didn't know how to cut a cucumber? It makes me wonder how some adults can function in society without knowing basic cooking skills. Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that everyone needs the cooking skills of a Michelin-star restaurant chef, but I'm a firm believer that everyone should know how to do basic things like boil water for pasta, chop vegetables, and cook eggs, to name a few. All that said, I'm curious: What's the basic cooking skill you couldn't believe a functioning adult didn't know? Whether they didn't know how to properly cut vegetables or swore by their own *unique* techniques in the kitchen, I want to hear about it. Let me know in the comments! Or if you prefer to stay anonymous, feel free to use this Google form. Hungry for more? Download our free Tasty app to browse and save 7,500+ free recipes — no subscription required.

Washington Post