An old friend who works in the culinary world pointed me toward two interesting articles this week:

Blue Hill at Stone Barns is the Most Important Restaurant in America — this is the restaurant where my friend works, and its executive chef, Dan Barber, was a guest on the finale of Top Chef‘s most recent season. He is also soundbyted in a spread on “green living” in the latest issue of GQ.

Barber was nominated for the 2008 James Beard Foundation Chef of the Year Award but lost to Grant Achatz of Alinea, an extremely progressive and high-end Chicago restaurant. This New Yorker profile is fascinating and details Achatz’s process of recovering his palate from, of all the terrible ironies, tongue cancer. At one point Achatz lost all sense of taste:

He explained, “You make yourself a vanilla milkshake. Grab some Häagen-Dazs vanilla, add whole milk. You think you know what it’s going to taste like, and it tastes like nothing. All you get is thick texture. You get vanilla because you can smell it, but there’s no sweetness. It’s bizarre.”

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