Appetizers

ABC (Always Be Chardonnay-Upselling)

I spent the last five days in sweltering, coiffed Miami. I of course partook in Cuban coffee, pastries, and açai-adjacent health foods. But to really Get in the Spirit, I knew I had to visit a clubstaurant. Which my friends and I did: the three-story establishment Amazónico, essentially a Rainforest Cafe, but with more people doing drugs in the bathroom. 

Amazónico is loud, despite its carpeted ceilings. The second floor is the club, with bumping music and dolled-up Miamians shuffling around, drinks in hand. We were seated at the first-floor restaurant, featuring a vaguely bossa nova band and a large open kitchen spurting surely unnecessary bursts of fire. 

I won’t get into a review of the food, but the drinks! Unsurprisingly, drinks at Amazónico are expensive. The cheapest cocktail is $18, the most expensive $48. Wine, meanwhile, runs the gamut. The relatively unknown grapes on the lower end aren’t too bad: $14 for criolla blanca and $16 furmint. But suppose you walk in, looking for a crisp glass of white to help you cool off from the humid ninety-degree air. “Sauv blanc,” you say, without batting an eye or looking at the wine menu. “Coming right up,” your server says. Some hours later, the bill arrives and the glass turns out to cost $75. A pour of Chardonnay will run you anywhere from $21 to $42. None of this is surprising! And a $14 glass of wine honestly is pretty good for a clubstaraunt. But specifically choosing higher-end vintages for well-known grapes, now that’s a strategy I’ll drink furmint to. —Cale

We Used To Be a Proper Country

At a recent dinner party, we had just reached consensus on the topic of those fancy Spanish potato chips that come in the cute tin (totally fine, expensive, underseasoned), when my dear friend Emily casually dropped a bomb. She said that her mom, who grew up in Delaware County, PA, is always waxing nostalgic about “Charlie Chip,” a long-gone company that delivered tins of freshly fried potato chips to the doorstep of her childhood home on a weekly basis, by standing order, milk man-style. My mind reeled. Could such a beautiful service have possibly existed? How civilized, how dignified, how correct to think of thinly sliced fried potatoes not as some low luxury, but rather a basic dietary necessity, one of the cornerstones of human happiness. Imagine going about your day-to-day life safe in the knowledge that an entire company was working tirelessly to ensure that you never ran out of potato chips. What’s more, dare to dream of a moment in our culture wherein enough people agreed that this was important—nay, essential!—to make such an enterprise financially viable. Oh, how far we have fallen!

I can’t get it out of my mind. A bit of research suggests that she was likely referring to Charles Chips, a brand that has changed hands a handful of times since its founding in 1942 but still vends snacks in handsome brown tins to this day. What’s less clear is when, exactly, it ceased door-to-door delivery service—aka the precise beginning of American civilizational decline. According to an archived story in the Harlan Daily Enterprise, the delivery business was still going strong as of 1984. Do any Gourmet readers have memories of this glorious phenomenon, or the mournful day when Charlie Chip left and never came back? I need to know. —Amiel

Mummy Tummy

Researchers in Italy report that they have successfully baked sourdough bread using yeast collected from the stomach of Ötzi (also “Oetzi”), the roughly 5,300-year-old “Iceman” preserved in an Alpine glacier after getting bowed down by an arrow in the back. Since his discovery by German hikers in 1991, he’s been kept chilled—like your cocktail glasses should be, but at a cool 21.2°F, the temperature of the ground in which he was found. Probing the accidental mummy, the scientists “discovered four different yeasts that can survive sub-zero temperatures in Oetzi's guts, skin and ‘brownish’ water that melted off his body when he was partially unfrozen.” Naturally, they cheffed up a sourdough starter and used the mummy yeast to power the fermentation. The first loaf sucked, but our intrepid scienziati pressed on. After three months of futzing, they pulled a new one out of the oven. The verdict? “Very, very good sourdough.” Thanks to FRoG (Friend of Gourmet) David Chun for the cold tip! —Alex

P.S.: Too bad Ötzi lived when he did. He was only about thirty miles and a few thousand years from some of the finest Gewürztraminer in the world.