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People, Places, Things
Plus: a guide to Madrid’s newly fashionable Gran Vía, a wristwatch for stargazers and more from T’s cultural compendium.
Aug. 13, 2024, 5:01 a.m. ET
People, Places, Things is a regular, essential news report on all things culture and style.
The Illicit Appeal of the Tonka Bean
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The tonka bean, a wizened-looking South American seed, is beloved for its complex almond-vanilla scent, often appearing as an ingredient in perfumes. Outside the United States, it has also long been utilized by chefs, but studies have indicated that coumarin, a chemical compound in the plant, can cause liver damage in animals, and the Food and Drug Administration banned the bean in commercial foods in 1954. Now, with reports that the minuscule amounts used to impart big flavor are harmless (and the F.D.A. seemingly not particularly interested in enforcing the ban in recent years), tonka is showing up on dessert menus here. Thea Gould, 30, the pastry chef at the daytime luncheonette La Cantine and evening wine bar Sunsets in Bushwick, Brooklyn, was introduced to tonka after the restaurant’s owner received a jar from France, where it’s a widely used ingredient. Gould says the bean is an ideal stand-in for nuts — a common allergen — and infuses it into panna cotta, whipped cream and Pavlova. Ana Castro, 35, the chef and owner of the New Orleans seafood restaurant Acamaya, discovered tonka as a young line cook at Betony, the now-closed Midtown Manhattan restaurant. Entranced by the ingredient’s grassy, stone fruit-like notes, she’s used it to flavor a custardy corn nicuatole, steeped it into roasted candy squash purée and grated it fresh over a lush tres leches cake. And at the Musket Room in New York’s NoLIta, the pastry chef Camari Mick, 30, balances tonka’s richness with acidic citrus like satsuma and bergamot. Over the past year, she’s incorporated it into a silky lemon bavarois and a candy cap mushroom pot de crème and whipped it into ganache for a poached pear belle Hélène. “Some people ask our staff, ‘Isn’t tonka illegal?’” she says. Their answer: Our pastry chef’s got a guy. — Tanya Bush
How Madrid’s Most Famous Street Became Cool
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Praising Madrid’s Gran Vía is like talking up the Champs-Élysées in Paris or New York’s Fifth Avenue. But unlike those touristy shopping corridors, Spain’s most famous street is also central to the coolest parts of its city, whether its major museums — the Prado, Thyssen-Bornemisza and Reina Sofía — or the nightclubs and restaurants just north in the gay-leaning Chueca district. (Don’t miss La Llorería, a casual counter where three former high-end chefs serve inventive small plates like oyster escabeche with jalapeños.) But Gran Vía has also become a neighborhood unto itself: More than a dozen luxury hotels have opened there in recent years, including an Edition, a Mandarin Oriental Ritz, a Four Seasons and a JW Marriott. Restaurants and bars good enough to attract Madrileños back to a hectic area they’d long avoided came next, many of them inside the hotels. At the Thompson, the brand’s first European outpost, the Omar serves sweet tomato salads and laminated pastries, and Hijos de Tomás, a piano bar, is known for its classic cocktails. One of the busiest of the many rooftop venues in town is El Jardín de Diana, a 10th-floor terrace at the Hyatt Centric that offers views of the architecture, as well as forest mushroom fondue. Nearby is Angelita, a wine and cocktail bar that pairs drinks with ambitious takes on local dishes, like octopus salad with sunomono dressing; Ikigai Flor Baja, the city’s top sushi place, featuring fresh Spanish ingredients (a second location recently opened in Salamanca); and Wow Concept, a colorful avant-garde clothing and design store decorated with oversize hot pink human sculptures. This winter, the designer Philippe Starck will make his debut on Gran Vía with the Brach, a second location for the Paris boutique hotel of the same name. — Kurt Soller
A Diamond-and-Emerald David Yurman Necklace That Channels Halley’s Comet
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