Domaine Stéphane Tissot Arbois Savagnin, Jura France 2011 (£31, bbr.com) A handful of elderberry leaves and barley may not be enough to recreate the austere beauty of a dish from Noma.
The house has an austere beauty.
Her austere pots – mainly dishes and bowls – were glazed to give a rugged and pitted surface, the perfect kinds of pot to sit on a sideboard in a light-filled Modernist apartment.
After eulogizing Chicago style deep dish and condemning its austere east coast progenitor, the team jumped into its dance routine to a self-styled parody of "Baby Got Back" called "Pizza Got Crust".
At Alfredo de Gran San Bernardo, the Milanese businessmen's restaurant where I first tried the dish, cassoeula was delicious but austere, a sort of cabbagey pot-au-feu whose highlight was a slippery scrap of boiled pig's forehead.
In the gap between his austere descriptions and the deliciousness of the dishes themselves – the reporter from the New Yorker loved every mouthful, up to and including a "scrap salad" that tasted faintly of the kitchen sink – there hovers the amazing possibility that, in our wastefulness, we are actively missing out when we chuck stuff away.
Beef thenthuk ($6.99), a dish from the nomads on the austere steppe of Amdo, has a mellower broth that clings to gristly cuts of meat and raggedy noodles that have been stretched and torn by hand, with a texture close to dumpling skins.
Convivio may not win hearts with its austere, oversleek design, but its full-flavored updates on dishes from around the Boot are spot on.
His restaurant is austere and so are his cookbooks — photographs of his sometimes grisly dishes are set against acres of white space.
Marcus, whose earlier books were austere excursions into what you might call anti-narrative, and who famously dished on Jonathan Franzen in an article defending experimentalism against its supposed detractors, seems to have decided to have it both ways this time: Wittgensteinian curtailments of meaning, alongside cackling villains and suspenseful escapes.
