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    When Kristen Kish, ‘Top Chef’ Host, Hits the Mute Button

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    The reality TV star and author of the new memoir “Accidentally on Purpose” on airplane snacks, tongue-scraping and the problem with women’s pants pockets.In her new memoir, “Accidentally on Purpose,” Kristen Kish reflects on her childhood as a Korean adoptee in Michigan, coming out as gay in her late 20s, winning Season 10 of “Top Chef” and struggling with anxiety.Yet Kish, who now hosts the Bravo competition series, is known for her laid-back interactions with contestants. “If my anxiety level was at a million growing up and being a young adult, it is certainly now in the hundreds,” she said. “It has drastically reduced because I’ve given time and energy to managing it in the best way I can.”Kish, 41, in her book recounts an upbringing filled with meatloaf, casseroles and Sunkist candies. Such down-to-earth predilections have stuck with her despite her upscale culinary career.“People ask what my guilty pleasure food is,” she said. “I don’t feel any guilt around anything. I want it, I like it, it’s delicious — I have no shame.”In a phone interview last month, the globe-trotting restaurateur shared her favorite travel snacks, how she keeps in touch with her parents and the thing you’ll probably see her doing while she’s cooking. These are edited excerpts.Fit Joy PretzelsOne of my favorite airplane snacks. The honey mustard flavor is specifically glorious, especially when you’re flying — you know how they say your taste buds go a bit muted. These are salty, there’s enough sweetness from the mustard, and the crunch is exceptional. I would rather eat five little packs of these over one meal they’re offering.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Meghan Markle Channels Lifestyle Mavens in ‘With Love, Meghan’ on Netflix

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      The Duchess of Sussex has tried to channel the likes of Martha Stewart for years. Can “With Love, Meghan” get her there?“With Love, Meghan,” the new Netflix lifestyle series premiering next week, is a culmination of sorts for its creator and star, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. The show casts the princess as a perfectly groomed domestic goddess, cooking and entertaining for friends at home in coastal California, a role to which she has seemingly aspired for more than a decade.Meghan’s ambitions to be the “millennial Martha Stewart of Montecito,” as a recent New York Times guest essay put it, were delayed first by her courtship and marriage to Prince Harry, in 2018, and then by the couple’s public feud with the British royal family.In 2020, Harry and Meghan announced they would step back from royal duties, causing a flurry of palace gossip and recriminations. The couple spent the next few years cannily telling (and monetizing) their side of the story in a series of media ventures — a sit-down interview with Oprah Winfrey; a six-episode Netflix docuseries, “Harry & Meghan”; and a best-selling memoir by Prince Harry, “Spare.”But all along, Meghan displayed flashes of her Ina Garten side. Remember when she showed Oprah her chicken coop? Or when a London bakery posted a photo of the handwritten thank-you note on personalized stationery she had sent to its staff?In a 15-second video on Instagram last year, Meghan finally announced her new kitchen and lifestyle brand, American Riviera Orchard. Details were scant, but a trademark application sought approval for a retail store, cookbooks and tableware, as well as jellies, jams, marmalades, fruit preserves and nut butters.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Does This Taste Funny?’: How Stephen Colbert’s Family Cookbook Came to Be

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      Comedy defangs the taboo, so Stephen Colbert and Evie McGee Colbert have decided, at last, to tell the dreaded spoon story. The two have celebrated milestone anniversaries, welcomed three children and one dog, and now released the cookbook “Does This Taste Funny? Recipes Our Family Loves.” Secure in that solid foundation, Mr. Colbert and Ms. McGee Colbert conceded the time had come to revisit what has come to be one of the defining moments of their union.It goes like this: The Colberts were just married and living in Chicago, where Mr. Colbert launched his career performing with Second City, when Ms. McGee Colbert took a metal spoon out a drawer and scraped it across the surface of their pristine set of Calphalon nonstick pans.Off in the distance, but almost visible from the porch of their home on Sullivan’s Island in South Carolina where this interview took place, Fort Sumter marks the ground where the Civil War broke out in 1861. The stakes of this inciting incident were only somewhat less consequential.“We move into this apartment,” Ms. McGee Colbert recalled, “and I think we’re going to be chopping basil and cooking together and drinking wine and listening to Chet Baker.” Her new husband wasted no time disabusing her of those notions. “He’s like, ‘You shouldn’t do that,’” she said.“I believe I said, ‘How about a wooden spoon?’” Mr. Colbert countered, head in hands.Ms. McGee Colbert dropped her weapon and withdrew. She took one look at the man to whom she had pledged her troth and declared that there would be no more “having a fabulous time” in the kitchen. Mr. Colbert could have his mise en place and sparkling cookware. In the parlance of “Top Chef,” she packed her knives and went.“I was like, ‘I’m out,’” Ms. McGee Colbert said. Next to her on a rattan couch in the humid Charelstonian summer, Mr. Colbert wiped his brow and groaned.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Stephen Colbert’s Family Cookbook Came to Be

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      Comedy defangs the taboo, so Stephen Colbert and Evie McGee Colbert have decided, at last, to tell the dreaded spoon story. The two have celebrated milestone anniversaries, welcomed three children and one dog, and now released the cookbook “Does This Taste Funny? Recipes Our Family Loves.” Secure in that solid foundation, Mr. Colbert and Ms. McGee Colbert conceded the time had come to revisit what has come to be one of the defining moments of their union.It goes like this: The Colberts were just married and living in Chicago, where Mr. Colbert launched his career performing with Second City, when Ms. McGee Colbert took a metal spoon out a drawer and scraped it across the surface of their pristine set of Calphalon nonstick pans.Off in the distance, but almost visible from the porch of their home on Sullivan’s Island in South Carolina where this interview took place, Fort Sumter marks the ground where the Civil War broke out in 1861. The stakes of this inciting incident were only somewhat less consequential.“We move into this apartment,” Ms. McGee Colbert recalled, “and I think we’re going to be chopping basil and cooking together and drinking wine and listening to Chet Baker.” Her new husband wasted no time disabusing her of those notions. “He’s like, ‘You shouldn’t do that,’” she said.“I believe I said, ‘How about a wooden spoon?’” Mr. Colbert countered, head in hands.Ms. McGee Colbert dropped her weapon and withdrew. She took one look at the man to whom she had pledged her troth and declared that there would be no more “having a fabulous time” in the kitchen. Mr. Colbert could have his mise en place and sparkling cookware. In the parlance of “Top Chef,” she packed her knives and went.“I was like, ‘I’m out,’” Ms. McGee Colbert said. Next to her on a rattan couch in the humid Charelstonian summer, Mr. Colbert wiped his brow and groaned.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Russell Morash, ‘This Old House’ and ‘The French Chef’ Producer, Dies at 88

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      Hailed as a pioneer of D.I.Y. programming, he oversaw groundbreaking how-to shows on public television in the days before HGTV and YouTube.Russell Morash, a public television producer and director who helped turn a cookbook author, Julia Child, into America’s chef and transformed bathroom tile replacement and roof repair into addictive TV with “This Old House,” died on June 19 in Concord, Mass. He was 88.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his wife, Marian Morash, who said the cause was a brain hemorrhage.Hailed as the “father of how-to television” by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, which gave him a lifetime achievement Emmy Award in 2014, Mr. Morash helped usher in the D.I.Y. era with the enduring instructional shows that he helped create for the Boston PBS station WGBH.“The French Chef,” which debuted in 1963, with Mr. Morash as director and producer, and which became Ms. Child’s vehicle to mass-market fame, changed the way American’s thought about food with her distinctly American approach to French cooking. And “This Old House” proved an instant hit in 1979, and remains a ratings powerhouse after 45 years. As of last year, the show and a sister show, “Ask This Old House,” together had received 20 Emmy Awards and 119 Emmy nominations.Long before the Food Network, HGTV and other outlets created a how-to revolution on cable, Mr. Morash seized on the idea that craftspeople with no television experience could become stars of the small screen by sharing their insider tips and insights.“This Old House,” for example, made household names of Bob Vila, who previously ran a home renovation business, and Norm Abram, a carpenter whom Mr. Morash had originally hired to build a workshop in his backyard in Lexington, Mass.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Harry Hamlin Got Into Gardening Because of ‘The Martian’

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      “If he can do it on Mars,” said the actor, now starring in the cooking show “In the Kitchen With Harry Hamlin,” “I can do it in my backyard.”The actor Harry Hamlin pronounces “Bolognese” the way Italians do, with the final “e” enunciated. His niece, the chef Renee Guilbault, says it like an American, with that last syllable ending in an “s.”But potato, potahto. With “In the Kitchen With Harry Hamlin,” their five-part cooking series on AMC+ and IFC, they find a happy meeting place — including on the subject of the aforementioned pasta sauce, which ignited a squabble on the reality series “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” back when his wife, the actress Lisa Rinna, was one of its cast members.“Everywhere I go, people say two things to me: ‘Oh God, I love your wife’ and ‘Where can I get your sauce?’” said Hamlin, 72, who also stars in “Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches,” on a video call. He also discussed space travel, the High Sierras and his grandfather’s Canadian gin-drinking hide-out. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Weekly Acting ClassesI’ve been in class my whole career. I chose this profession because it’s impossible to perfect. You can’t become an expert. OK, someone like Meryl Streep, she’s an expert. But I’m going to be a perpetual student. And I learn stuff every week because I’m sort of a character actor stuck in a leading man’s body.2Clean EnergyIt’s the holy grail. It’s how human beings will get their energy for the next 100,000 years, provided that we survive that long.3Hiking the High SierrasIf you’re alone, the animals aren’t afraid of you. The deer come up to you, and the bears don’t run away from you, which can be a problem. So it is quite an amazing experience to trek solo. I go up to 12,000 feet and get to places where even mountain goats would have a hard time getting.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      What Jon Bon Jovi Did After Losing His Voice

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      Alice McDermott, 70, writer There are three kinds of novels I’ve never taken to heart: science fiction, murder mysteries and novels about novelists. So I’ve decided to try my hand at each. If I fail, they’re probably not books I’d want to read anyway. Thurston Moore, 65, musician and author I’m putting the final touches […] More

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      in Movies

      Inside the 2024 Oscars Party

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      At the Governors Ball after the Oscars on Sunday evening, the writer-director Christopher Nolan and the producer Emma Thomas stepped off a raised dais after having their multiple Oscars engraved and were greeted by the party’s chef, Wolfgang Puck. In honor of the night’s biggest prizewinners, Puck was serving a selection of British food: Roast beef with Yorkshire pudding and fish and chips were presented to the couple, who were both delighted by a taste of home.Onstage at the ceremony, Thomas said she had dreamed her whole life about winning an Oscar. When Nolan was asked at the party if he had held the same dream, he exclaimed, “Absolutely.”The normally reserved Nolan said he had felt emotional up on that stage, even though he maintained his composure. “The people that know me know when I get emotional,” he said. “Just ask Emma.”Christopher Nolan with two of the seven statuettes awarded for “Oppenheimer” on Sunday.True to form, Thomas added, “If he didn’t leave right when he did he would have started ugly crying.”“And we will leave it there,” said Nolan, before he was whisked away to greet more well-wishers.America Ferrera was still vibrating from Ryan Gosling’s “I’m Just Ken” performance and Billie Eilish and her brother, Finneas O’Connell’s rendition of “What Was I Made For.” Both of those performances “were just simply stunning,” she said. “I think Ryan is so brilliant and really created something so unique and special with his performance.”Robert Downey Jr. with his best supporting actor Oscar, also for “Oppenheimer.”The Governors Ball, held at the Dolby Theater, is the official post-Oscars celebration.Simu Liu, who took part in the number, said: “It was an incredible, surreal moment to be onstage. And also, this came together extremely quickly.” When he got the call from the interlude’s choreographer, Mandy Moore, he said, he and his fellow performers Ncuti Gatwa, Scott Evans and Kingsley Ben-Adir hit the group chats, “and were like, ‘Oh my God, are you doing this? We have to do this.’”On the night, Liu added, “we were so nervous. Doing any sort of live TV is nerve-wracking, and then to do it in that room? There’s not many rooms that are more intimidating.”“There was such a moment of elation when we were done,” Liu said. “I think we pulled it off.”Da’vine Joy Randolph, left, who won for best supporting actress.The French director Justine Triet, with the Oscar for best original screenplay that she won with her husband, Arthur Harari.Anita Hill, for one, won’t forget the movie that inspired it anytime soon. Hill stopped Greta Gerwig on Gerwig’s way to find her husband, Noah Baumbach, to tell her how important “Barbie” was to her. Gerwig, embarrassed by the attention, said with a smile, “We are just making movies over here.”Yet Hill had more to say on the subject. “Clearly she has done an outstanding job and I hope that’ll be an indication to the industry to open up more opportunity to women and people of color,” she said, also mentioning the screenplay win for “American Fiction.” “There’s still not enough,” she said, “but I think this is an important time.”Sterling K. Brown, left, holds the statue that Cord Jefferson, right, won for best adapted screenplay.The party’s menu was overseen by the Austrian chef Wolfgang Puck.The four-time Academy Award nominee Willem Dafoe.The celebration on Sunday was the 65th edition of the Governors Ball.According to the Academy, 1,500 guests were invited.Eugene Lee Yang, who voiced one of the characters in “Nimona,” a best animated feature nominee.Winners and nominees in each category, as well as presenters and other participants in the ceremony, get invited to the party.Billie Eilish with the only Oscar for “Barbie”: best original song, awarded to Eilish and Finneas O’Connell for “What Was I Made For?”Cillian Murphy, left, who won best actor for his performance in “Oppenheimer.”Charlotte Kemp Muhl, at the after party.The Swedish composer Ludwig Goransson, left, who won best original score for “Oppenheimer.” More

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      Gordon Ramsay Isn’t Going Anywhere

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      With a new season of his series “Next Level Chef,” reality TV’s most enduring antihero still reigns supreme. How long can he keep it up?Gordon Ramsay insists he never wanted to be the bad boy. His image as the brash, bellicose chef and restaurateur, as the master of the culinary meltdown, was, he said, largely a matter of getting off on the wrong foot.Ramsay was introduced to British viewers on “Boiling Point” (1999), a five-part series on Channel 4 chronicling his turbulent efforts to open his first restaurant. At around the same time, BBC Two launched “The Naked Chef,” a breezy, upbeat cooking show starring the young chef Jamie Oliver. The two shows, and the two chefs, could hardly have seemed more different.On the one hand, you had Ramsay, a surly perfectionist, firing a waiter for drinking water in view of customers. “And then literally at the same time, on another channel, there was Jamie,” he recalled in an interview last week, “this floppy-haired Essex boy, sliding down the banister doing one-pot wonders.”“The nation fell in love with him,” Ramsay said. Whereas with himself, he added, “the nation wondered what the hell was going on.”Ramsay’s explanation may not entirely account for his enduring infamy as an explosive TV tyrant — it wasn’t Oliver, after all, who named Ramsay’s signature series “Hell’s Kitchen,” and he hardly forced Ramsay to bludgeon countless chefs and restaurant owners with colorful jeremiads for the past 25 years on air. But that Ramsay still brings up old rivalries when discussing his reputation is revealing, a glimpse of the competitive intensity that has been crucial to his continuing success.That competitiveness is one reason that the host of roughly two dozen shows over the years, including “Next Level Chef,” returning on Sunday for its third season on Fox, still devotes so much of his down time to watching other food shows. It’s why, during the pandemic lockdown, he threw himself headlong into social media. And it’s also why, at 57, Ramsay has no intention of calling it quits.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More