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    What to Do in Miami, According to the ‘Griselda’ and ‘Narcos’ Creator Eric Newman

    The magic of Miami is that “you can still discover places,” said the writer and producer Eric Newman. “It doesn’t feel like people have a chip on their shoulder. There’s a healthy civic pride and gratitude.”Mr. Newman, who created the Netflix show “Narcos” and produced “Griselda,” starring Sofia Vergara, has, over the years, spent months at a time on location in Miami. To Mr. Newman, a California native, the appeal of this southern Florida playground isn’t just what it is — it’s also what it’s not. “There’s an appreciation in Miami that you don’t see in other places,” he said. “Maybe it’s because a lot of people here came from somewhere else. Maybe you came to escape East Coast winters, or you came to escape Castro, or you came to escape taxes. People in Miami are genuinely happy to be here.”Mr. Newman, 53, produced the Academy Award-winning movie “Children of Men” and, more recently, was the executive producer of “Painkiller” and “Narcos: Mexico.” He favors a side of Miami not easily found in guidebooks. An after-hours salsa club, a Xanadu hiding in plain sight, the best Cuban sandwich around: These are the secrets that Miami has slowly revealed to him.Over the years, Eric Newman has spent months at a time on location in Miami.Scott Baker for The New York Times“The diversity of Miami makes it feel like the least American city, which is kind of what makes it incredibly American,” Mr. Newman said. “It feels wonderfully foreign and yet uniquely American.”Here, his five favorite spots in the city.1. Café La TrovaLa Trova is beloved for its impeccable drinks and its theatricality.Scott Baker for The New York TimesThe décor is deliberate — a long bar lined with red barstools, low lighting and an impressive wall of spirits.Scott Baker for The New York TimesWe 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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    36 Hours in Austin: Things to Do and See

    9 a.m.
    Embrace Austin’s breakfast taco addiction
    Breakfast tacos are essential in Austin, and Veracruz All Natural is a top spot for them; the yummy smoothies are a gratifying bonus. The sisters Reyna and Maritza Vazquez opened their first Austin food trailer in 2008, and now there are seven Veracruz locations, including East Austin, South Austin and inside the Line hotel — visit whichever is closest. The meat is consistently tender and well seasoned, and the tortillas are pillowy. Try the popular migas taco, with fluffy eggs and avocado, or the (somewhat) healthier La Reyna, which is loaded with veggies. Pair with fresh juices like the Mr. Verde, a combo of celery, green apple, spinach and more, or smoothies like the Mexico Lindo, with lime juice and cantaloupe, for an ideal, all-in-one morning stop. Most tacos and smoothies cost around $5. More

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    ‘Veselka’ Review: Serving Up Support for Ukraine

    Subtitled “The Rainbow on the Corner at the Center of the World,” this documentary offers a warm tribute to an East Village landmark.You would be hard pressed to find a New Yorker unfamiliar with the name Veselka. The pierogi and borscht eatery, established in 1954 by a Ukrainian émigré, is a staple of the East Village, where its genial diner atmosphere — overseen by Jason Birchard, the founder’s grandson — draws everyone from university students to seasoned old-timers.“Veselka: The Rainbow on the Corner at the Center of the World” pays tribute to the cultural landmark by taking viewers inside the restaurant during an uneasy period: Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Directed by Michael Fiore, the documentary establishes Veselka’s Ukrainian roots and then chronicles Birchard and his staff’s real-time campaign to support their besieged home country.The film’s most stirring through lines revolve around the stories of employees, including Vitalii, a Veselka manager who convinces his mother to flee Ukraine and live with him in the United States. Seeking routine, Vitalii’s mother even accepts a position in the Veselka kitchen, where she finds others who speak her language, appreciate her stress and offer a measure of community.Tugged along by superfluous narration (by David Duchovny), the film also documents the participation of Veselka workers in a variety of fund-raisers and symbolic appearances. These events are, admittedly, more exciting in principle than as documentary cinema. But even if some scenes want for energy, the compassion of the “Veselka” subjects — and its filmmaker — never wavers.Veselka: The Rainbow on the Corner at the Center of the WorldNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Keith McNally, of Balthazar, Discusses His Filmmaking Past

    Hundreds of moviegoers went to rare screenings of the New York restaurateur’s little-known 1990 film. Afterward, he treated them to half-price dinners at Balthazar and Minetta Tavern.On Thursday night at the Roxy Cinema in Lower Manhattan, a throng of scarf-bundled cinephiles attended the sold-out screening of a black-and-white psychological thriller, “End of the Night,” that was being shown for the first time in more than 30 years.The film’s obscurity wasn’t what drew the crowd: They were there because of its unlikely writer and director, Keith McNally, the downtown restaurateur who runs Balthazar, Minetta Tavern, Pastis and Morandi.Before he shaped New York’s nightlife with his brasseries, Mr. McNally had serious filmmaking ambitions. His first full-length feature, “End of the Night,” premiered at the Directors’ Fortnight showcase during the 1990 Cannes Film Festival, appearing alongside Whit Stillman’s “Metropolitan.” It went on to be a minor hit in Europe before it became a cinematic footnote.In advance of the screenings at the Roxy, an 118-seat art house cinema located in a hotel in TriBeCa, Mr. McNally drummed up interest with a post on his popular Instagram account: “ANYONE WATCHING THIS FILM AT THE ROXY CAN EAT AT BALTHAZAR OR MINETTA TAVERN THAT SAME NIGHT FOR HALF-PRICE,” he wrote in his typical all-caps style.The post also quoted from a Cahiers du Cinéma review that described “End of the Night” as a “noirish tale of self-destruction” that provides an “unsettling look at a man whose life is turned upside down during his wife’s pregnancy.”Mr. McNally at his SoHo apartment. “I think my talent as a filmmaker was minimal,” he said.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesWe 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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    36 Hours in Joshua Tree, California: Things to Do and See

    7 a.m.
    Hike to the site of a real-life Western drama
    California’s high-desert scenery often feels like the backdrop of an old western (in Pioneertown, northwest of the park, a set used for many films of the western genre still stands). For the nonfiction version of Wild West-like drama, enter the park via the west entrance and hike to the site of a showdown near the Wall Street Mill, once used to process gold mined in the area. In 1943, two neighbors entered into a fatal duel over a property line disagreement along what’s now the trail. On the path, a sign commemorating the shootout reads, “Here is where Worth Bagley bit the dust at the hand of W.F. Keys.” The sign is a replica of the original one that Keys, the mill’s owner, made and installed himself. At the end of the path, you’ll reach the ruins of the mill, flanked by rusted-out antique cars. The relatively easy hourlong round-trip feels like traveling back in time. More

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    36 Hours in Melbourne, Australia: Things to Do and See

    12 p.m.
    Explore a lane that’s gone from rags to riches
    Flinders Lane was the center of Melbourne’s rag trade, as its textile industry was known, until production moved offshore starting in the 1960s. Today, it’s home to a number of gorgeous shops and restaurants. The city’s most beautiful retail space must belong to Alpha60, a local brother-sister fashion label (think boxy shirts and breezy culottes), whose store inside the Chapter House building occupies a cathedral-like space with lofty, vaulted ceilings, pointed-arch windows and a baby grand piano. Across the road, Craft Victoria, a subterranean gallery and store, features experimental Australian ceramics and textile art. After your shopping, drop into Gimlet at Cavendish House, a glamorous restaurant where crisply dressed waiters sail by with caviar and lobster roasted in a wood-fired oven, but you don’t have to go all out: Squeeze in at the bar right after the doors open at noon for an expertly made gin martini (29 dollars) before the lunch rush. More

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    ‘Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros’ Review: A Beautiful Collaboration

    For his 44th documentary, Frederick Wiseman journeys to the French countryside to examine the workings of a family-owned, Michelin-starred restaurant.Frederick Wiseman’s transporting documentary “Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros,” centers on a dynasty of French chefs who live and work in a pastoral region in central France named Ouches, some 65 miles west of Lyon. There, amid rolling green hills and under the canopy of a century-old oak, the Troisgros family has a celebrated restaurant whose beginnings date back to 1930. The current paterfamilias, Michel, who’s in his mid-60s, has been cooking his whole life, and while you could say he makes food, it feels more like an expression of love.Making food sounds too pedestrian for the meticulously prepared, strikingly plated dishes that come out of the kitchen at their restaurant, Le Bois Sans Feuilles (The Woods Without Leaves), and certainly this is cooking on a rarefied level. It has long been acclaimed, receiving its first Michelin star in 1956 and holding on to its third since 1968. (It’s gone through several iterations and name changes.) Michel’s father and uncle, Pierre and Jean, were widely considered to be nouvelle cuisine pioneers, emblematized by a famous salmon and sorrel dish they invented. The chef Daniel Boulud includes the Troisgros salmon recipe in several of his cookbooks.“Menus-Plaisirs” is Wiseman’s 44th documentary and the first that he’s made since “City Hall” (2020), which notionally focuses on the administration building for the city of Boston. (In between “City Hall” and “Menus-Plaisirs,” he made one of his rare forays into fiction, “A Couple,” about Sophia Tolstoy.) Wiseman’s great subject is institutions, though more rightly the tension between organizations — with their spaces, norms and rituals — and the people moving through them. The bluntly descriptive titles of his movies are an authorial signature (“Hospital,” “High School,” “Boxing Gym”) and suggestively and purposely generic; one of the profound satisfactions of his work is seeing how he turns the general into the specific.Wiseman directed, edited and served as one of the producers on “Menus-Plaisirs,” which runs a heroic four hours (about a half-hour shorter than “City Hall”!). It’s absorbing from start to finish. Much of it takes place inside the bright, nature-inspired Le Bois Sans Feuilles, which is part of a larger complex set in a mid-19th-century estate that the family restored a few years back and includes a boutique hotel overseen by Michel’s wife, Marie-Pierre. Wiseman also pops into another Troisgros restaurant, Le Central, in the neighboring city of Roanne, making a more leisurely visit to a third, the nearby La Colline du Colombier, which is in the countryside.Wiseman’s approach is analytical and dialectical, and only seemingly straightforward. As is customary with his movies, “Menus-Plaisirs” doesn’t have music, voice-over narration, onscreen descriptive text, chapter titles or any other standard hand-holding. Wiseman instead uses images of specific physical spaces — the movie opens on the Roanne railway station and then cuts to its bustling, sumptuously stocked farmer’s market — that immediately establish a strong sense of place. In other words, he grounds you in the world of the movie and then, face by face, shot by shot, scene by scene, steadily fills in its details.The movie is arranged in distinct sections that suggest the rhythms of running a restaurant. The inaugural segment (call it Prep) introduces Michel and his sons: César, who cooks alongside his father and some dozen others at Le Bois Sans Feuilles, and the younger Léo, the chef for La Colline du Colombier. The sons run into each other at the market, where they’re hunting and pecking among the perfectly arranged leafy greens, bouquets of beets and radishes, and astonishing clusters of oyster mushrooms. In this section, the sons also meet with Michel to discuss menu options, and then the movie shifts to Le Bois Sans Feuilles.It’s there in this restaurant’s spacious, quietly humming open kitchen that the movie begins to gather momentum as Wiseman moves about focusing on one and then another station: One chef expertly filets a large salmon while another trims and butchers some ribs. Elsewhere, Michel and a sommelier discuss some outrageously priced Burgundies, and a brigade of servers ready themselves for the fast-approaching service. “Menus-Plaisirs” has all the virtues of a Wiseman movie, but its focus on beautiful food that’s prepared and served with equal beauty makes it especially seductive, even if you’re not keen on everything on the menu. I now know, for instance, more than I ever cared to about cooking veal brains.Once the customers arrive (call this section Service), the rhythms of the kitchen appreciably accelerate. Anyone who’s ever watched great cooks in action (in life or on TV) knows how enjoyable, even hypnotic it can be watching people with superb craft and technique at work, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. Wiseman is sensitive to the sights and sounds of kitchens, including the tempos of chopping knives and the syncopated hiss and burble of pots on a hot stove. He also underscores the hard work on an individual level and when the chefs are in the flow together. These kitchens thrum with quiet intensity, not ego.As “Menus-Plaisirs” continues, its focus widens as the chefs meet with some of their providers — at a small cattle farm, a vineyard, a cheese cave — where the mutual respect is palpable and the talk is sincere and often turns to sustainability. Each of these interludes could be spun off into a separate documentary, but together they expand the prismatic portrait of a family for whom cooking is an aesthetic, a passion, an expression of love, an ethic. There’s individual genius in the Troisgros kitchens, no doubt, but also enormous collaborative effort, which makes the documentary a nice metaphor for filmmaking itself. “Everything is beautiful,” a visibly moved Michel says of his estate; the same holds true of this deeply pleasurable movie.Menus-Plaisirs — Les TroisgrosNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 4 hours. In theaters. More

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    36 Hours in Acadiana, Louisiana: Things to Do and See

    10:30 a.m.
    Time travel to a historic village
    When the British forcibly removed the Acadians from parts of Canada in the mid-18th century, an event known as Le Grand Dérangement, the French-speaking Acadians started making their way down the Mississippi River, creating settlements in South Louisiana. Vermilionville was the name given to Lafayette when it was established in the 1820s as one of those settlements. Today, Vermilionville, a 23-acre, open-air living history museum along the banks of the Vermilion River, tells the story of that migration and how the Acadians’ mingling with Creole, Spanish and Native American traditions created the unique culture of today’s Acadiana. Visitors can embark on a guided boat tour of the grounds, be entertained by costumed actors and historical reenactments, or join Cajun dance lessons and jams. The on-site restaurant, La Cuisine de Maman, also hosts an all-you-can-eat Sunday brunch. Adult admission, $10; handicap-accessible. More