People, Places, Things is a regular, essential news report on all things culture and style.
Put a Scotch Egg on It
While there are countless ways to cook eggs, chefs currently seem fixated on the most hedonistic option: hard boiling and then coating them in a layer of ground meat before breading and frying them. Known as Scotch eggs, the treats are said to have been pioneered by the London epicurean shop Fortnum & Mason in 1738, after which they quickly became a fixture of British pub cuisine. The chef Ed Szymanski, 31, of Lord’s in New York recalls the Scotch eggs he encountered growing up in London as both ubiquitous and “quite bad.” His version features Madras-style spiced lamb in place of the usual pork sausage. “It’s like a supercharged croquette with an egg in the middle,” he says. In Seattle, the chef Sean Arakaki, 30, is also seeking to elevate the flavors of his childhood. Born and raised in Hawaii, he grew up eating loco moco: a hamburger patty served over gravy-drenched white rice with a sunny-side-up egg. At Itsumono, his restaurant in Seattle’s Japantown, his loco moco Scotch egg arrives atop rice and gravy with a side of macaroni salad. “You cut through the crumb to get to a runny yolk,” he says. For his Portland, Ore., food cart Tokyo Sando, the owner Taiki Nakajima, 36, makes a rendition with ajitama — soy-marinated boiled eggs — enveloped in a gyoza-inspired mix of ground pork and chicken with ginger and soy. Encrusted with panko and deep-fried, the eggs are sandwiched between slices of Japanese bread with mayo, roasted black garlic and cabbage. And in Mumbai, India, the chef Hussain Shahzad, 37, of O Pedro wraps his version in chile- and vinegar-laced ground lamb, drizzling on vindaloo sauce when the egg comes out of the fryer. “It’s not a monotonous dish,” he says. “You get crisp crust, juiciness from the meat and the runny yolk … playing on the palate at the same time. There are so many layers to it.” — Mehr Singh
A Classic Chair, Finally in the Material the Designer Wanted
The day after the Germans invaded Paris in June 1940, the French Modernist designer Charlotte Perriand boarded a ship in Marseille bound for Kobe, Japan, where she’d been invited to advise the government on how to make products for the West. Two years later, World War II made it impossible to return to Europe, so instead she moved to French-occupied Vietnam, where she met and married her second husband, Jacques Martin. In 1943, pregnant with her only child, she designed a chaise longue called the Indochine. Since her preferred tubular steel was unavailable during the war, she had the prototype built with rattan. Now the Italian furniture house Cassina, in collaboration with her daughter, Pernette Perriand-Barsac, has released a new version in the material that Perriand, who died in 1999 at age 96 after a 70-year career, had originally wanted. Painted ivory, light blue, green, black or, as shown here, gunmetal, and with a fabric or leather seat in any of a variety of hues, the continuous armature is as deceptively simple and effortlessly unbroken as her stream of creativity. Charlotte Perriand Indochine chaise longue for Cassina iMaestri Collection, $5,605, cassina.com. — Nancy Hass
Photo assistant: Pietro Dipace
An Alpine Hotel With Fireside Fondue
Val d’Isère, the winter sports resort in the Savoie region of southeastern France, is known for both great skiing (over 185 miles of high-altitude slopes, with snow from late November until May) and good times (endless raclette and plenty of places to have a beer). Over the past few years, the town has evolved from a somewhat under-the-radar spot drawing a mostly French crowd to an international travel destination thanks to some new hotels. The latest — Experimental Chalet Val d’Isère, a ski-in, ski-out property from the Paris-based Experimental group — is set to debut in early January. The 112-room hotel, which occupies a stone building in the heart of the village, has a spa, a craft cocktail bar, a large brasserie and a smaller restaurant for fireside fondue. The designer Dorothée Meilichzon, who worked on the brand’s properties in Venice, Biarritz and Minorca and grew up skiing in Val d’Isère, oversaw the renovation of the 45-year-old structure, drawing inspiration from both classic American ski lodges and traditional Savoyard culture. The stone fireplace in the lobby and the rustic log-and-twig furniture, for example, would look right at home in Colorado, while the wooden carvings on the restaurant walls are modeled after local butter molds and baking tools, reflecting the region’s history of bread making. Rooms from about $437 per night, experimentalchaletvaldisere.com. — Monica Mendal
Earrings With a Cascade of Diamonds
Yellow diamonds have been highly coveted for several decades, but Laurence Graff, once a scrappy apprentice in London’s Hatton Garden jewelry district, now the paterfamilias of an international empire, was among the first to champion them. In 1974, he bought the Star of Bombay, a 47.4-carat square, canary-hued gem held by an aristocratic Indian family, challenging the centuries-old primacy of pure, colorless stones. Since then, the company, now headed by his son Francois, has acquired many of the world’s most spectacular specimens, which get their golden shade from impurities in the nitrogen they contain. Over the years, the house has also amassed a cache of smaller yellow diamonds, which its artisans incorporate into effervescent modern pieces. These cascading earrings are set in gold, with 62 fancy pear-shaped stones together totaling nearly 17 carats. Almost invisibly linked to each other, at rest they suggest late Art Deco architecture; in motion, they become shimmering sunlit curtains. Graff fancy yellow diamond earrings, price on request, graff.com. — N.H.
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Set assistant: Joseph McCagherty
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