Eva Hagberg

Assurance Agent (CITY)

Column, Published April 2008

It starts with a misunderstanding and ends with butter. It starts when I meet John, my friend who is a boy, and we’re talking the usual getting-to-know-each-other talk, and I mention that I like cooking a bit, and he mentioned that he likes food, too, and once cooked dinner for 18 people. And so, from this I infer, given my state of absolute unabashed limerence that leads people in these situations down all kinds of inferring roads, that John is a brilliant chef. I do not pay attention to the fact that John doesn’t cook when we’re at his house. Ever. I only pay attention to what I hear, and what I hear is that he is a cook, and a good one at that.

So, for six months, we scramble for dinner. We order in. We go out. Somehow, int hat New York way, we never really focus on what we’re going to eat, or really ever have complete meals. But here and there, we cobble together our survival.

And then I realize that I miss messing around with bowls and spoons, so I start small, with a few things. I tell him I’d like to use his kitchen for some experiments, if he doesn’t mind, and so I start experimenting, but only with things I know how to make, like pancakes. And then, New Year’s Day, I look in his fridge and see that his butter expired. A long time ago. Like, in 2005.

Flash in the Pan (CITY)

Column, Published March 2008

Three eggs. One cup milk. One cup flour. Two tablespoons sugar. One teaspoon baking powder (optional). That’s it. That – my family’s pancake recipe – has been a mantra since I was old enough to wake up early and get out a bowl, measuring cups, and a wooden spoon. Those five – sometimes four – ingredients were the ones that went together to make our Sunday-morning pancakes (a minor peacekeeping) when I was a (majorly cranky) teenager. Then, when I moved to New York, they were at the center of my friends’ Sunday-morning brunches, my way of plying attention from a six-year-old, my first step towards dinner parties. Those pancakes, the only recipe I cant remember ever not knowing, are the lens through which I can look at my entire biography.

 

The Storytellers (Architect's Newspaper)

Published April 16, 2008 (link)

“We like to think of ourselves as the most open-minded clients we’re going to have,” said Greg Bradshaw, principal of the downtown architecture/interiors/fashion/book/concept/ethos/lifestyle/design firm AvroKO, which he heads along with Kristina O’Neal, Adam Farmerie, and a very tired—that evening, at least—William Harris. The four of them were sitting at the end of the bar at PUBLIC, their first venture as their own clients, and were talking about everything from the just-completed transformation of the restaurant Park Avenue Winter into Park Avenue Spring (on which Harris has been working non-stop), to their plans for a new restaurant on the rapidly gentrifying Bowery, to joking about what exactly O’Neal’s SAT scores were, and what exactly they mean.

The four, who met when they were eighteen, each have different approaches, personalities, and skills, but together they make up a coherent and collaborative whole. Initially, however, they operated as two firms, Avro Design (Bradshaw and Farmerie) and KO Media Studios (O’Neal and Harris). After many years of collaborating, the two firms merged while working on PUBLIC. Their ethos is research-driven as much as it is fantastical, interpretive as much as creative, and conceptual as much as style-conscious. The firm has become known mostly for its historically referential restaurant design, clear in everything from the Lower East Side’s Stanton Social, which adopted the neighborhood’s long history of tailoring with a herringbone-riffing wine wall, to PUBLIC—the restaurant they own and above which they work—where they took the discarded fixtures of municipal buildings from the 1930s and recast them, so that an old library card catalog is used to store old menus.

Tailor (Wallpaper)

Published January 2008

Rarely has a first-time restaurateur's first joint been awaited with such a particular mix of media frenzy and outright impatience as Sam Mason's Tailor, which opened on a Soho side street in September. Mason, trained in the Wylie Dufresne (who strolled into the dining room one fall Thursday) school of New York-style molecular gastronomy, offers up a menu of twelve small dishes, nominally divided into Salty and Sweet. As we discover when we dive into our searingly intelligent snapper with avocado-pistachio ice cream or caramel panna cotta with corn sorbet, those are more guidelines than rules, and the cocktails – including a cheerleader-pink bubblegum martini and the curiously-titled Blood & Sand -- only further this grand experiment. Mason's got some real hits, like an un-missable pork belly with miso butterscotch, but some plates, like a "we're still not sure if we love it or hate it but boy are we glad we tried it" foie gras and peanut butter terrine, will only get better with age. Which, we're sure, they'll get to.

Starchefs (Wallpaper)

Published January 2008

The International Chefs Congress starts out friendly enough, at Geoffrey Zakarian's Gramercy restaurant Country. There are cocktails and hors d'ouevres and chefs, chefs, chefs, most of whom have strolled in from their Manhattan restaurants, taking a break from slinging halibut and drizzling sauces but some of whom have flown in from San Francisco where they're fighting against the locavores and others who are just in from Washington DC or Miami or even Cleveland. It's a who's who of cooks: Noriyuki Sugie from Asiate at the Mandarin Oriental; molecular gastronomist Wylie Dufresne of WD-50; Gramercy Tavern's Michael White, making his mark in the wake of Tom Colicchio's departure; the irascible--and seemingly everywhere--Will Goldfarb.

Scar Tissue (Arcade)

Published December 2007 (link)

There's a scar at the top of my right leg. It looks like the British Isles, maybe Denmark, maybe Iceland. I'm not sure, I'm not a geographer, but it's a cluster of small brown shapes, some merging together, some trailing off to the left. The little dots look like the tail end of a comet compared to the big center of the scar, like the dust cast off by one giant moment.

Mad Platter (CITY)

Published July 2007 (link)

It takes me three times around the block to find the place. We jump from the 1600s to the 1800s, from the BP gas station at the corner of Halsted and West North to the Black Duck Tavern on Halsted and Willow. I know we are looking for 1723 North Halsted, the address embedded in my memory the way the chef’s resume—French Laundry, Trio, here—is. We turn around, turn into the parking lot of the Steppenwolf Theatre, curve back around, again, and this time we’re slow enough at 1721—a children’s dentist, an unlikely neighbor—to catch the Valet Parking sign. Right next door, we find it: a two-story black brick bay-fronted building, the place I’ve been waiting for the last two years to visit: Alinea.

We are early, of course. (Late? To this place?) Someone has already told me about the door, how it slides open like a Star Trek bulkhead, so I’m expecting something a little different, a lot unusual. I’m not expecting the forced-perspective rabbit hole of an entryway, all scalloped walls and glowing red light, which slopes down and angles in, ending on a sculpture of horizontally suspended steel pins, pieces that will make at least one more encore. I feel like I’m in a combination of Alice in Wonderland and Battlestar Galactica and, once through the faux-elevator doors, like I’m in an otherworldly townhouse that bends to one man’s rules. I am. It does. “Chef would like to meet you.” I panic. I am Alice, and I am falling. I’m just not so sure I’m ready.

Hostess With the Mostes' Jitters (New York Times)

Published November 18, 2004 (link)

Seated to my right was a former college fraternity president. To my left was a Condé Nast editor. The low roar of conversation — about personal trainers, one-night stands and the unlikely pleasures of calf roping — was interrupted by a spate of impromptu dancing, squeals of laughter and a brief wrestling bout. The tuna-noodle casserole was going over well, as were the Nutella and Skippy sandwiches.

The Postal Service, an indie-rock band, played in the background. A case of inexpensive wine was flowing, augmented by Grey Goose martinis and red plastic cups of Johnnie Walker Black, neat.

Dorothy Draper's advice was working.