Fuchsia Dunlop

I spent a few days in New York for the James Beard Foundation Awards – a wonderful trip, as you can see from the photo! (Here‘s a link to the relevant article in Lucky Peach.) It was fantastic to run into so many good friends, and the weather was New York at its shining, brilliant best.

The most beautiful building, glimpsed through Gramercy Park

Foodwise: delicious crisp tofu and bulgogi beef sliders at a newish Korean place, Danji; an utterly perfect, simple lunch at the Gramercy Tavern; and a lavish, dreamlike brunch for Daniel Boulud’s 20th New York anniversary. Oh, and I cooked a Sichuanese feast for the friends who put me up, with fresh produce from Chinatown. (And apart from the food, it would almost be worth going to New York

just to have another look at the portrait of Sir Thomas More by Hans Holbein in the Frick Collection.)

A piece I wrote after my last visit to New York appeared in the Financial Times this weekend.

Here’s a brief excerpt:

Something as pure and scintillating as a raw oyster demands your full attention. You must sniff it for the whiff of sea breeze, the almost-sound of seagulls and waves breaking. Ease it from its shell, add a squeeze of lemon, a dash of sauce mignonette or even (here) a dollop of ketchup laced with horseradish. And then hold it up, the rough shell against your lip, and let it slide into your mouth, giving yourself over to its icy voluptuousness and the silvery taste of the ocean.

There is something sweetly decadent about being a woman in a restaurant alone, well-dressed and content, enjoying a platter of rugged oysters on their bed of ice. I don’t do it often, but when I do, it makes me feel like a “fast” woman of the 1920s, wearing trousers and smoking cigarettes; or a swashbuckling English missionary of the 1930s, crossing the Gobi Desert on a cart drawn by mules; even, at times, Mata Hari. Eating oysters alone, and enjoying them as much as I do, makes me feel that I am capable of anything…