Aroma - a wine bar with good food

Aroma - A Wine Bar with Food!

In the fashion world, the new look is all about color. In restaurants the fashion seems to be EGGS! Not only here on the East Coast, but also on the West Coast in the San Francisco Bay Area. Poached eggs, quail eggs, deviled eggs and more. There's probably an egg in some form or other on most menus these days and the menu at Aroma was no exception.

Paul and I have been eating out less but trying to explore different types of restaurants that afford smaller portions, interesting wines, outdoor seating and sometimes a bar with music. Aroma is in NOHO near the East Village. A cozy spot, with an excellent wine list, has an interesting menu with small portions and yes, an egg appeared on the frisee salad just like in Paris. The chef uses fresh seasonal ingredients; Paul's salad and pasta was just what he was looking for and my beet salad which came warm, layered with cheese and a sprinkle of nuts served with a drizzle of balsamic and little balls of deep fried Gorgonzola. It was more like a dessert then an appetizer. The soft shell crabs which followed were a delight and perfectly sauteed on a bed of greens. The white wine recommendation, which I've already forgotten, was a perfect choice and Paul enjoyed a red Italian as much. The bread, always our downfall was plentiful, warm, crusty on the outside with a flavourful center. Our only disappointment was the uninteresting meat platter we shared. The selection was bland and uninteresting as was the small slice of toast with a coating of red sauce. Espresso was excellent and judging from the smiles at the next table, the ice cream must have been great.

"aroma" Caesar salad, parmigiano reggiano, poached egg, sicilian anchovy

orecchiette, sweet fennel & spicy sausage, broccoli rabe, pesto, pecorino

warm beets, gorgonzola, fig jam, walnuts, warm beet dressing

puntarelle, rocket, frisée, bosc pear, gorgonzola dolce, toasted walnuts, white anchovy vinaigrettee

Villa Ile Barbaresco 2000 (Piedmont)

Feudo Principi di Butera Insolia 2006 (Sicily)

Barbara Walters - Audition - A Memoir

Book Description
Young people starting out in television sometimes say to me: “I want to be you.” My stock reply is always: “Then you have to take the whole package.”

And now, at last, the most important woman in the history of television journalism gives us that “whole package,” in her inspiring and riveting memoir. After more than forty years of interviewing heads of state, world leaders, movie stars, criminals, murderers, inspirational figures, and celebrities of all kinds, Barbara Walters has turned her gift for examination onto herself to reveal the forces that shaped her extraordinary life.

Fareed Zakaria - The Post-American World

Book Description
One of our most distinguished thinkers argues that the "rise of the rest" is the great story of our time.

"This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else." So begins Fareed Zakaria's important new work on the era we are now entering. Following on the success of his best-selling The Future of Freedom, Zakaria describes with equal prescience a world in which the United States will no longer dominate the global economy, orchestrate geopolitics, or overwhelm cultures. He sees the "rise of the rest"—the growth of countries like China, India, Brazil, Russia, and many others—as the great story of our time, and one that will reshape the world. The tallest buildings, biggest dams, largest-selling movies, and most advanced cell phones are all being built outside the United States. This economic growth is producing political confidence, national pride, and potentially international problems. How should the United States understand and thrive in this rapidly changing international climate? What does it mean to live in a truly global era? Zakaria answers these questions with his customary lucidity, insight, and imagination

John Grisham - The Appeal

I returned to Grisham reluctantly. His recent books have been self-indulgent exercises.The reviews had given me hope this would be different. Well, after a slow beginning, overly weighted with anti-corporate diatribes he does deliver a good story with a plausible ending. Ultimately, there are no true villains and heroes, just people.

Book description -

John Grisham was reportedly the best-selling author of the 1990s, and The Appeal, his 20th novel, will likely be yet another massive commercial success. Unlike some of his previous legal thrillers, however, this work has managed to garner an impressive amount of critical respect as well. Although a few reviewers found Grisham's characters one dimensional, his plot hackneyed, and his writing poor, most saw much to admire in the author's convincing and scathing portrayal of judicial corruption. As the Los Angeles Times opined, [I]n this presidential election year, [The Appeal is] a far more blunt, accurate and plain-spoken indictment of our contemporary political system's real failings than you're likely to find anywhere on the nonfiction lists. The verdict: it's informative and compelling, but it's still Grisham.

Geraldine Brooks - People of the Book

This book gets really tedious; fast. There is just so much I (or you) want to know about the history of this Haggadah and book making.


Book description -


Reading Geraldine Brooks's remarkable debut novel, Year of Wonders, or more recently March, which won the Pulitzer Prize, it would be easy to forget that she grew up in Australia and worked as a journalist. Now in her dazzling new novel, People of the Book, Brooks allows both her native land and current events to play a larger role while still continuing to mine the historical material that speaks so ardently to her imagination. Late one night in the city of Sydney, Hanna Heath, a rare book conservator, gets a phone call. The Sarajevo Haggadah, which disappeared during the siege in 1992, has been found, and Hanna has been invited by the U.N. to report on its condition. Missing documents and art works (as Dan Brown and Lev Grossman, among others, have demonstrated) are endlessly appealing, and from this inviting premise Brooks spins her story in two directions. In the present, we follow the resolutely independent Hanna through her thrilling first encounter with the beautifully illustrated codex and her discovery of the tiny signs-a white hair, an insect wing, missing clasps, a drop of salt, a wine stain-that will help her to discover its provenance. Along with the book she also meets its savior, a Muslim librarian named Karaman. Their romance offers both predictable pleasures and genuine surprises, as does the other main relationship in Hanna's life: her fraught connection with her mother. In the other strand of the narrative we learn, moving backward through time, how the codex came to be lost and found, and made. From the opening section, set in Sarajevo in 1940, to the final section, set in Seville in 1480, these narratives show Brooks writing at her very best. With equal authority she depicts the struggles of a young girl to escape the Nazis, a duel of wits between an inquisitor and a rabbi living in the Venice ghetto, and a girl's passionate relationship with her mistress in a harem. Like the illustrations in the Haggadah, each of these sections transports the reader to a fully realized, vividly peopled world. And each gives a glimpse of both the long history of anti-Semitism and of the struggle of women toward the independence that Hanna, despite her mother's lectures, tends to take for granted. Brooks is too good a novelist to belabor her political messages, but her depiction of the Haggadah bringing together Jews, Christians and Muslims could not be more timely. Her gift for storytelling, happily, is timeless.

Linda Fairstein - Bad Blood

Another good thriller from Fairstein. She always delivers.

Book description -

In the exciting ninth Alexandra Cooper legal thriller from bestseller Fairstein (after Death Dance), the Manhattan prosecutor is confronted with the trial lawyer's greatest fear—a witness who's destroyed on the stand. When the defense attorney shows that Kate Meade, the lead witness in Cooper's circumstantial case against Brendan Quillian for the murder of his wife, Amanda, has concealed her affair with the defendant, this revelation of Meade's potential bias has a devastating effect on the prosecution's case. As Cooper struggles to recover, the case takes a whole new twist when a fatal explosion in New York City's third water tunnel, which is under construction, suggests that Amanda's death is connected with other violent acts in the Quillian family's past. While Cooper may engage in a few too many action sequences for legal purists, the crisp writing and Fairstein's enviable capacity to translate her own experience as a prosecutor into an accessible plot puts this series a cut above most entries in this crowded subgenre.

Benjamin Black - The Silver Swan

Well, the reviews were right. Not nearly as good as Christine Falls. It's strongest points are the wonderful descriptions and believable characters. But the story is muddy and lacks any reason for us to care,

Book description -

In this stunning follow-up to 2007's Christine Falls, Black (pseudonym of Booker Prize–winner John Banville) spins a complex tale of murder and deception in 1950s Ireland. Pathologist Garret Quirke, surprised by a visit from a college acquaintance, Billy Hunt, is even more surprised when Billy begs Quirke not to perform an autopsy on his wife, Deirdre, whose naked body was recently retrieved from Dublin Bay. Though everything points to suicide, Quirke knows something's amiss and begins to retrace Deirdre's steps. Black expertly balances Quirke's investigation with chapters detailing Deidre's past, from her marriage to Billy to her shady business deal with Leslie White, an enigmatic Englishman who knew Deidre as Laura Swan, the proprietress of their joint venture, a beauty salon called the Silver Swan. As Quirke digs deeper, he discovers a web of lies and blackmail that threatens to envelop even his own estranged daughter, Phoebe. Laconic, stubborn Quirke makes an appealing hero as the pieces of this unsettling crime come together in a shocking conclusion

Jennifer 8 Lee - The Fortune Cookie Chronicles

Book description
Readers will take an unexpected and entertaining journey—through culinary, social and cultural history—in this delightful first book on the origins of the customary after-Chinese-dinner treat by New York Times reporter Lee. When a large number of Powerball winners in a 2005 drawing revealed that mass-printed paper fortunes were to blame, the author (whose middle initial is Chinese for prosperity) went in search of the backstory. She tracked the winners down to Chinese restaurants all over America, and the paper slips the fortunes are written on back to a Brooklyn company. This travellike narrative serves as the spine of her cultural history—not a book on Chinese cuisine, but the Chinese food of take-out-and-delivery—and permits her to frequently but safely wander off into various tangents related to the cookie. There are satisfying minihistories on the relationship between Jews and Chinese food and a biography of the real General Tso, but Lee also pries open factoids and tidbits of American culture that eventually touch on large social and cultural subjects such as identity, immigration and nutrition. Copious research backs her many lively anecdotes, and being American-born Chinese yet willing to scrutinize herself as much as her objectives, she wins the reader over. Like the numbers on those lottery fortunes, the book's a winner

Drew Gilpin Faust - This Republic of Suffering

Unbearably long and drawn out.

Book Description:

Battle is the dramatic centerpiece of Civil War history; this penetrating study looks instead at the somber aftermath. Historian Faust (Mothers of Invention) notes that the Civil War introduced America to death on an unprecedented scale and of an unnatural kind—grisly, random and often ending in an unmarked grave far from home. She surveys the many ways the Civil War generation coped with the trauma: the concept of the Good Death—conscious, composed and at peace with God; the rise of the embalming industry; the sad attempts of the bereaved to get confirmation of a soldier's death, sometimes years after war's end; the swelling national movement to recover soldiers' remains and give them decent burials; the intellectual quest to find meaning—or its absence—in the war's carnage. In the process, she contends, the nation invented the modern culture of reverence for military death and used the fallen to elaborate its new concern for individual rights. Faust exhumes a wealth of material—condolence letters, funeral sermons, ads for mourning dresses, poems and stories from Civil War–era writers—to flesh out her lucid account. The result is an insightful, often moving portrait of a people torn by grief