Molto Sirio

It’s a rare film about haute cuisine that manages to come down to Earth and stir deep emotions, too; Big Night is an easy exception, but there are many more misses than hits in the ouevre. And great documentaries about food are rarer still. So I was pleased to see the excellent documentary LE CIRQUE: A TABLE IN HEAVEN on the schedule for HBO on Monday, December 29th. Completed in 2006, the film, which debuted at IFC’s Stranger Than Fiction series in April of 2007, documents the rise-and-fall-and-rise-again of restaurateur Sirio Maccioni and his famed eatery, Le Cirque, once the most celebrated restaurant in New York. Catering to celebrities, Presidents, and, famously—thanks to Sirio’s legendary hospitality—seemingly anyone who walked in the door, Le Cirque became a symbol of the good life, dreams achieved, abbondanza.

The film opens with scenes of Le Cirque 2000′s heyday at the Palace, when Henry Kissinger was a regular, and jumps to its closing in 2004, beset by the cold financial realities of Post 9/11 New York. Much of the rest of the film depicts the fraught lead up to its glittery reopening 2006, on East 58th street, and the internecine conflicts among Maccioni and his three sons that tear at the very fabric of the family. And then there’s the bruising two-star review from Frank Bruni after the party’s over.

 ”As his sons prepare to assume leadership of a revamped Le Cirque,” the IFC premiere night notes read, “the two generations battle over the relative merits of catering to celebrities, spotlighting a cutting-edge chef, and always including prosciutto with melon on the menu. An extraordinary exploration of a family business caught in the world’s spotlight.”  

Ultimately, for me, A TABLE IN HEAVEN resonates as a study of one family and its paterfamilias, the charming, implacable Sirio. As the larger-than-life headwaiter turned toast of the New York dining scene confronts his own sons and a changing industry, Director Andrew Rossi and producer Charles Marquardt (both veterans of 2004′s celebrated CONTROL ROOM) never veer into schmaltz, but instead unfold the tale with grace befitting their subject, especially scenes shot in Maccioni’s homeland, in Tuscany. Highly recommended.

This week’s New Yorker features an unexpected treat by staff writer Burkhard Bilger. Call it the Barack Obama of beer articles: a ten-page analysis of the craft beer industry—and one of its provocateurs, Sam Calagione, of Dogfish Head Brewery—that sucker punches conventional wisdom. There’s much to savor here, with passages such as the following:

“Calagione strapped on a pair of safety glasses and peered into the oak and hickory embers. “If there are no second-degree burns, I’ll call this a success,” he said. Then he heaved in a rock, sending up a shower of sparks. “Let me know if they start to explode,” he told one of the cooks.”

Bilger’s description of Calagione’s unorthodox brewing methods, including the use of Palo Santo (a rare, aromatic Uruguayan wood three times harder than oak) to ferment a burly stout is riveting—and brings back a lot of fond journalistic memories.

My oft-beer-writing-partner-in-crime Seth Fletcher and I wrote about Calagione’s use of Palo Santo in the October issue of Men’s Journal in which we named the resulting beer one of the best in America, only after tasting it with Calagione while huddled at the tiny copper-topped bar of Dieu De Ciel, a brewpub in Montreal’s Plateau district. We’d ventured up for the Mondiale Du La Biere Festival, and arranged to meet Calagione, well armed with samples—including the Palo Santo-aged beer. Another interesting passage for me was Bilger’s on-site interview with Brasserie D’Orval brewmaster Jean Marie Rock, who I met, too, in 1997 while in Belgium on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship doing research that would become the basis of my first published article, from the (now defunct) Brewing Techniques magazine (and an award-winner). 

A toast to Burkhard, Sam, and beer drinkers everywhere who’ve been calling for full respect of the good stuff for a long time. I’ve got to sign off now, or I’ll be late for a tasting at Gramercy Tavern. On the menu? Beer, of course.

Here, some out takes from my too-short visit to Sardinia’s most noted producer, including crates of just-picked nasco, a white varietal that’s also unique to Sardinia.

RELATED: VIDEO – Kenny shows Conan O’Brien on LATE NIGHT exactly how to make a Conan Burger, among other things. Disappointingly, the NBC censors did not have to work very hard on this one.

ALSO: Here’s Calvin Trillin’s profile of Kenny in The New Yorker.

For the last five years I’ve had the incredibly good fortune to join my friend Seth Fletcher in rating the best beers in the land (or sometimes the world) for MEN’S JOURNAL, a somber task we approach with monkish restraint (OK, we enjoy it mightily, but if we actually finished the hundreds of bottles we sample each summer the story would never happen. Much returns to Earth from whence it came. And we have notebooks, piles of them. We swear.)

This year’s list is on newsstands now, and this time, the premise was deceptively simple: if you like ‘X’ mass beer, try ‘Y’ craft variation. Are you a Guinness drinker? Then try Oregon’s Deschutes Brewery Black Butte Porter, available in 19 states and counting. With an eye toward America’s smallest, most artisanal craft brewers—some with only a handful of employees—we dedicated ourselves to coming up with a list of exceptional American (and in one case, Quebecois) craft beers that are a bit harder to find, but so worth the effort. Many of these beers are available in NYC, on tap or in bottles at bars like The Blind Tiger, Bar Great Harry, DBA, Against The Grain, Spuyten Duyvil, The Diamond, the Brazen Head, and more. There’s also a mini-profile of beer provocateur Vinnie Cilurzo (of California’s Russian River Brewing Company). Enjoy!

RELATED:

- Our previous offerings: 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007.

- The hard-to-please imbibers online at BeerAdvocate.com discuss our picks (via www.beeradvocate.com)(cheers, guys).

- Photo album: Outtakes from my 12 month tour through 14 countries, 59 breweries, and 330 beers on the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship in 1996-7.

- Interesting piece by Nick Kulish on the German beer scene today (NYT).

“The first, indeed the only, requirement of a diet is that it should lose you weight without reducing your alcoholic intake by the smallest degree.” On why serious drinkers should own a separate refrigerator for their implements: “Wives and such are constantly filling up any refrigerator they have a claim on, even its ice-compartment, with irrelevant rubbish like food.” On the benefits of sangria: “You can drink a lot of it without falling down.”

See you at the bar, friends.

EVERYDAY DRINKING

The Distilled Kingsley Amis

By Kingsley Amis

302 pages. Bloomsbury. $19.99.

“One woman wanted to see Mr. Aliquo eat a berry before she tried one. “What, you don’t trust me?” he said.

She replied, “Well, I just met you.”

Another guest said, “But you met him on the Internet, so it’s safe.”

Also interesting was the fact that a bar set to open in Portland, Oregon, the Beaker & Flask (you go, hometown) has experimented with miracle fruit foams in cocktails. The question is, how much miracle fruit is too much of a good thing?  [Via NYT, and Thrillist]