Weekly roundup of great reads on food and wine #106

Which simple recipes should your children be able to cook? Recently, I came home to find the remnants of a hollandaise sauce smeared across the inside of a kitchen bowl. I ran my finger through what was left. It was perfect: foamy and rich with that necessary acidity. Apparently my 17-year-old son had knocked it up from watching YouTube videos. Not long before, I had introduced him to the glories of eggs benedict. (Look, he’s a restaurant critic’s child. What do you expect?) He wanted to eat one so Googled the instructions for the sauce. He had no idea that it’s tricky to get the temperature of the bain-marie right, so the eggs don’t curdle as you whisk them. He just did it. Sometimes ignorance can be a wonderful thing.

Michelin men: Claude Bosi, Terence Conran and the return of Bibendum: In the gutted upstairs room of Bibendum on London’s Fulham Road, I’m suddenly feeling my age. The flagship Conran restaurant is in the process of a makeover. Floors and walls have been stripped and the famous Michelin blue stained-glass windows and great arched conservatory glass roof look down on an interior of rubble and scaffold. The windowless kitchen behind the cathedral-like dining room has been half-removed by the contractors giving it the look of a medieval vault. I’m surveying its gloom with Claude Bosi, recently installed as the new head chef for the restaurant’s reopening in April. Bosi, who won his first Michelin star at 26, and still carries that forward-looking sense of exuberant possibility, points to the few tiles that still cling stubbornly to the kitchen walls, as if at a cave painting: “Most of this stuff is from 1987!” he suggests, marvelling at the antiquity.

Q&A: Chef Michel Guérard, a Pioneer of Low-Calorie Cuisine: “The new gourmet law: hold the butter,” reads the strapline of the European edition of TIME’s Feb. 9 1976 issue, alongside a cartoon of the French culinary master Michel Guérard, then 42. Fast forward four decades and the debate over butter and fat intake is still magazine-cover-worthy. But now it’s a far more saturated conversation: evidence of links between certain fats and heart disease changes on a regular basis, as does the merit of plant-based dairy alternatives, made from almonds or coconut or walnuts. Thanks to prominent campaigns, the clean eating movement and savvy restaurateurs, healthy eating is more in the zeitgeist than ever before.

Does Fame Have a Recipe? Dominique Crenn’s Fast Rise: Five years ago, Dominique Crenn was just another hardworking Bay Area chef running a small, ambitious restaurant. She had been cooking since the early 1990s, when she arrived in this city from her native France, but she was still off the radar for many American food lovers. She had never won a James Beard award or served as a judge on “Top Chef” or hit any of the other marks of culinary stardom.

Food waste is a scandal, but to blame it on millennials is nonsense: When I die, I would like to be buried in a large, biodegradable, click-n-lock Tupperware coffin, my hair glistening beneath a rubber-seal lid, my feet resting against the firm clear sides like a pair of carrot batons. I want to be remembered in death precisely as I was when I lived: absolutely up to my armpits in leftovers.

This restaurant in Italy will give you a 5% discount if your children are well-behaved: A restaurant in Italy is offering a 5% discount if the children accompanying a party of diners turn out to be well-behaved. The owner of the wine bar in Padua, a city in the country’s Veneto region, Adrian Ferrari said he thought of the deal when he saw a group of children sitting “with much composure” while waiting for their parents to finishing their meal.

Burgundy simplified: Burgundy is one of the most famous wine regions in the world and one that confuses a lot of folks. There are many reasons for this: the number of appellations (100 but over 600 if you count all of the Premier Cru Vineyards separately); vineyard names on labels; village names on labels that look very similar to vineyard names; and the classification of the vineyards and the appellations. But it doesn’t have to be so confusing. After all, there are really only 2 grapes used for wine. If you are drinking white, then it’s Chardonnay (most of the time). If you are drinking red, then it’s Pinot Noir (most of the time). That’s the easy part. Once you understand a few simple facts about the region it all makes sense. Burgundy is not confusing, just complex.