the year 2015

“mmmm! goddamn, jimmie! this is some serious gourmet shit! usually, me and vince would be happy with some freeze-dried taster's choice right, but he springs this serious gourmet shit on us! what flavor is this?”

“knock it off, julie.”

“what?”

“i don't need you to tell me how fucking good my coffee is, okay? i'm the one who buys it. i know how good it is. when bonnie goes shopping she buys shit. i buy the gourmet expensive stuff because when i drink it i want to taste it. but you know what's on my mind right now? it ain’t the coffee in my kitchen…”

Philippe Petit (the high-wire artist who walked on a tightrope across the World Trade Center in 1974), Michael Bierut (a partner at the design firm Pentagram), Joan Brierton (a historic preservation specialist), John Stern (the president of the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, N.Y.) and Bobbie Greene McCarthy (the director of Save America’s Treasures and former deputy chief of staff to First Lady Hillary Clinton) are at Phillip Johnson’s Glass House enjoying a five-course meal that alludes to five different decades, prepared by the chef Nils Norén of the French Culinary Institute in New York.

It sounds like the beginning of a particularly highbrow joke, but in fact it was just a pleasant Friday lunch in New Canaan, Conn. Christy MacLear, the executive director of the Glass House, invited the aforementioned guests, plus a few others, to discuss the concept of “Trophy” and how it pertained to Phillip Johnson’s life, his work and the Glass House itself. The event was part of a series of “conversations” that MacLear has been organizing as a way of keeping alive the spirit of intellectual exchange that Johnson encouraged throughout his life; previous discussions have tackled topics like “Simplicity,” “Legacy” and “Solution or Sacrilege.” The exchanges are recorded and may eventually be published in book form.

from covenger + kester:

Ripe for Revival? Pictured above, in all its “Bauhaus-meets-butcher-shop” glory, is Zum Zum—the Atomic Era sausage eatery once located in the main lobby of the swanky Pan Am Building at 200 Park Avenue in Manhattan.

This wasn’t the only Zum Zum location; founder Kurt Widmer, a “master Swiss-born sausagemaker,” established a dozen or so other shops around town (on Broadway across from the Wintergarden Theater; on University Place near NYU) and elsewhere across the country (including Harvard Square). But it was definitely the coolest, quickly becoming, as the author of Take Ivy has noted (in Japanese) “the restaurant where Madison Avenue boys have a glass at lunchtime.”

Given that the menu consisted of bratwurst with sauteed onions on a caraway roll, various sausages with choice of mustard (Das Hot, Das Sweet), wienerbrod, warm potato salad, heavy on the vinegar, and large steins of imported German beer drawn from wall-mounted kegs, we would’ve been right there alongside them. Sadly, Zum Zum vanished sometime in the late 1980s (or earlier).