As I was planning for our month-long voyage through five countries, I received an email from one Trevis Gleason, a chef I’d met in Dingle three years earlier at the home of a mutual friend (he and I prepared the Dingle lamb there that trip). Last year we had a couple pints in the snug at Dick Mack’s. His email:

Wondering if you and Ann are coming back to Dingle for the writing course again this spring. If ye’re free any night, we’d love to have you over for a simple dinner.

I know when I’m on a junket, the thing I crave most is a simple roast chicken, too much wine, and a bit of craic. If ye’re amenable, I’ll invite Paul and Ellen, my American butcher friends you met briefly last year.

If ye’re flat out while here, at least we can meet up for a pint or six.

Safe travels and let me know if this is of interest at all.

Cheers from The Kingdom of Elsewhere

Trevis

Trevis is not your typical story. Born in Seattle, he spent years in the Coast Guard before ending that career and taking up cooking. He attended the erstwhile New England Culinary Institute, and went on to become a versatile chef, even doing a stint as an instructor at his alma mater.

When he was in his mid-thirties, he was diagnosed with MS, a physical reality that collapsed his world. Here is a description of his excellent memoir about the experience, Chef Interrupted: Discovering Life’s Second Course in Ireland with Multiple Sclerosis.

When Trevis Gleason, a former chef at the top of his professional culinary career, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, he lost everything—his job, his marriage, even his perceived persona. Surveying the ruins of his former life, he saw an opportunity to fulfill a long-postponed dream. He would travel from Seattle, Washington, to the wilds of west Kerry, Ireland for the winter.

In that Saveur article on Dingle I keep referencing, I conclude with the powerful sense that Ireland has an uncommon ability to transform a life. As it did Trevis’s. Not only did he become a fine writer (witness the memoir), he went on to myriad other occupations, but most importantly writing about living with MS.

Now, 25 years after the diagnosis, he may be the longest chronicler of the disease on the internet, having been asked early on to blog about life with MS. Thank fortune. While he has not-unserious ongoing issues, he walks easily with a cane and can whip up a roast chicken dinner for seven without breaking a sweat.

On arriving the magical house …

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Ten years ago, on assignment for Saveur magazine, I wrote about Dingle, a town on a peninsula in southwestern Ireland. I covered its thriving food scene and also its emotional power. Where once the weekly menu consisted mainly of boiled beef and cabbage, followed the next by potatoes and cabbage, followed by bacon and cabbage, Ireland now seemed a land of culinary plenty.

I’ve returned here almost every year with Ann, who co-runs a writers’ workshop each spring. A sign we see outside our B&B proclaims it the number one foodie town in Ireland. Regrettably, while it remains a fertile land with good food, its culinary status has fallen a considerable degree. Two of the main chefs and restaurants I wrote about have quit their business.

My friend Martin Baelin closed his restaurant, Global Village, because he couldn’t find the staff for the kitchen after Covid. Kevin Murphy couldn’t support his very fine cuisine and departed for Dublin. Our beloved Chart House closed.

Even our dear B&B, Bambury’s Guesthouse, no longer offers a full Irish breakfast in the morning, owing to the fact that the proprietor can’t find any cooks. It still has a few good restaurants—there’s a new one we’re eager to try, 505, across from the cinema being refurbished by Cillian Murphy—and Kennedy’s butcher shop was taken over by a young American couple and still sells some of the finest lamb in the county.

But what it’s always been known for, and remains the best for, are pubs and traditional music.

The best food scene, and best by quite a bit, can be found south of Dingle in the coastal town of Kinsale, County Cork. (We’ve read that Abbeyleix and Carrick-on-Shannon are likewise great but both are way inland and we love the coast.)

It’s a colorful town as the photos show. Of note here above, the best fish and chips we’ve had ever was at Fishy Fishy; a truly fine used bookstore/winebar called Prim’s; smoked duck breast with a soy dipping sauce at the excellent Black Pig; some of the last hand-cut crystal can be found at Kinsale Crystal; I was happy to see several live-aboards tied up to the stone wall of its harbor; and crab toes are in season!

From Donegal to Cork …

There is simply no easy way to travel north-south in western Ireland, a problem that is especially acute when you find yourself on the northern coast of Ireland and have a room waiting in Kinsale on the southern coast.

1. Hour drive to Donegal airport.

2. Short flight to Dublin.

3. Taxi to Heuston station.

4. Train to Cork.

5. A bus to Kinsale, concludes the 10-hour journey.

But Ann had her sights set on a boutique B&B in remote Donegal as our first destination, just outside the town of Dunfanaghy. It was a gorgeous and restful entrance into the country, and the B&B itself, Breac.House, is one of the most elegant, easy, and refined places we’ve stayed in a long time. The owners, Niall Campbell and Cathrine Burke, could not be more welcoming.

The design of the place, Scandanavian in feel, is natural and practical and spare. We would find morning breakfast in small cubby in our room, placed there from the hallway, so we wouldn’t be interrupted or have to leave our bed for our morning coffee.

We could enjoy a late morning walk to the coast and its spectacular views and treat ourselves to a seaweed bath in the afternoon. In the evening, cocktails using local gin and using local whiskey, were prepared for us in the living area. (The bath and the cocktails we learned on our last night were complimentary.)

Above, Breac House and the sleek decor of a warm and elegant home; gin and tonics with seaweed with a game of Spite and Malice. Picnic lunches are included and come in nifty little containers. About a mile from the house is the northern coast and an extraordinary beach.

For dinners, we had plenty of options. We found an unexpectedly fine meal at The Olde Glen Bar and Restaurant on our first night, thanks to Chef Ciaran Sweeney. You wind your way through a traditional, ordinary-looking pub to a back room where a topflight kitchen is in operation offering several amuses and three complex courses. We ate fabulous smashburgers at Batch in nearby Falcarragh and excellent pizzas at the Rusty Oven in the center of Dunfanahgy. We caught some traditional music after, next door at Patsy Dan’s pub.

I loved how easy and impromptu the gathering of musicians is, all the beer bottles covering the table.

So Dublin to Donegal, Donegal to Kinsale …

And at last to Dingle …

One of the pleasures of the writers’ workshop this year has been hosting Luis Urrea, who read a killer short story to the group, his wife Cindy, and a surprise guest, our friend Mary Norris, famed for her work as The New Yorker’s Comma Queen, who, naturally, gave a talk on the comma (one of our favorite topics, grammar nerds that we are). Her T-shirt read “Let’s eat kids.” And below it, “Let’s eat, kids.”

One of the highlights of the weeklong workshop is the day off when we head to our friend Colleen Herlihy’s house, and I prepare racks of lamb for faculty and spouses.

I promised to tell Colleen how I cook the lamb—and Kerry Co. lamb is some of the world’s best—so herewith a very simple method with delicious results. (The lamb itself comes from Paul Malcolm and Ellen Campbell, mentioned earlier, expats who took over Gerry Kennedy’s butcher shop to create The Dingle Butcher. More on Paul and Ellen in a future newsletter.)

Kerry County Rack of Lamb with Rosemary and Garlic

Of course, giving lamb some heat over live coals is never a bad idea, but when I don’t have that option, I always pan roast it, searing it on the stovetop first, then adding lots of butter to the pan along with garlic and rosemary with which to baste the meat.

The two most important factors in cooking a perfect rack of lamb are these:

1. Leaving the lamb at room temperature for about four hours so that it’s well tempered before cooking. You don’t want to start a rack straight out of the fridge, when it’s 40 degrees inside.

2. It must rest for a good ten minutes once it comes out of the oven. This way, all the temperatures equalize and it finishes cooking in the center.

Other than that, it’s dead simple.

I like to serve two ribs per person. A rack typically has nine ribs, so one rack for four people, with a little extra chop for the cook.

We were a dozen strong, so I cooked several racks. But the method is the same.

• 2 nine-rib racks of lamb

• salt and pepper to taste

• oil for sautéing

• 4 ounces, or one stick, butter

• 4 to 5 cloves garlic, peeled and lightly smashed

• 4 to 5 large stems of rosemary.

1. Salt and pepper the lamb when it comes out of the fridge. (You can rub the fatty exterior with oil to ensure salt and pepper stick there.)

2. When ready to cook, heat the oven to 400˚F. and get a heavy duty sauté pan hot over high heat. Add some vegetable or olive oil and when that is hot add the lamb, fat side down and cook it till it’s golden brown. Timing can vary, so use your eyes: when the fat side is nicely brown, turn the rack and cook the other side. You may want to hold the bones upright to brown so the entire exterior of the rack is browned.

3. Add a stick of butter to the pan, and when that’s melted, add the garlic and rosemary and swirl the butter to coat these aromatics. Baste the lamb.

4. Put the pan in the oven and cook for 20 minutes or so for medium rare, basting every five minutes with the frothy rosemary-garlic butter. (It should be firm-squishy, not spongy squishy, which would mean it’s still rare; lamb’s best medium rare).

5. Remove the lamb to a cutting board and pour what butter remains over the racks. Let the lamb rest for ten minutes. Slice the lamb between every second rib and serve. (Colleen had bought a nice mint sauce, which of course goes well with it.)

Serves 8

What we’re drinking …

Guinness, Guinness and more Guinness. Because you can only get it here, where it’s fresh and always held at the right temperature. Yes, there are taps of it all over the world and cans and bottles, but the experience of drinking a freshly drawn and rested pint of Guinness at a good pub in Ireland compares in pleasure to none other.

And there is no better sip of like-no-other libation than the very first, when the sweet creamy head mixes with the rich yeasty stout. I rarely drink Guinness outside of Ireland so when I’m here I take my fill!

The End of Slate’s Culture Gabfest … Say It Ain’t So! …

I listen to two podcasts religiously: The Daily and Slate’s Culture Gabfest. Every Wednesday I’ve looked forward to the thoughts and critical commentary of Dana Stevens (above, center), Julia Turner, and Stephen Metcalf. Eighteen years they’ve been gabbing, and as some have noted, they were among the first to show that a cultural criticism podcast can attract a big, devoted audience.

We’ve been listening to them so long I feel like they’re actual characters in my life. Julia is the mom figure, Dana the cool big sister, and Stephen her fraternal twin who always appears carrying a copy of the London Review of Books stuffed into a volume of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. I love these people and what they do so much, I once applied for a part-time assistant when they put out an offer. Seriously.

I’ve relied on Metcalf’s judgment to inform my own, and Stevens’s movie critiques, and just the three of them, their overall thoughtfulness and intelligence and sheer chemistry. I don’t reckon they can be replaced. They are, as Metcalf might put it, sine qua non. Damn, will they be missed.

What we’re reading …

Stopping in Prim’s bookstore/winebar in Kinsale after dinner, dim and candle lit at that hour, Ann immediately spotted a Ray Carver volume we didn’t know: No Heroic’s, Please (1992). It’s a collection of previously unpublished and published material, early stories, essays on Chekov and Hemingway, and criticism. His words on revision are worth the price of the book.

We returned to the place the next day to look some more and Ann found a book by Irish writer Sebastian Barry. Do you know him? He wrote a book Ann loved called A Long, Long Way, and she was delighted to find The Secret Scripture. I was trapped in a mediocre novel and Ann gave it to me.

Why are Irish writers. So. Damn. Good? Like Niall Williamson, Barry’s deep perception and sheer storytelling are astonishing. Here, a thoughtful doctor tries to determine whether a 100-year-old woman should be released from the mental institution she’s in, uncovering her haunted, shifting past as well as his own grief and misdeeds.

, The Promiscuous Reader, weighs in with this week’s endorsements:

I’m back to Rebecca West with her charming novel, The Fountain Overflows. In it, West uses her own unusual, eccentric family story to bring the reader through Scotland and London with an unstable father, a brilliant mother, and four children forever teetering on financial ruin. Delightful and harrowing in equal measure, I love Elizabeth Janeway’s description: “A real Dickensian Christmas pudding of a book….”

My beloved and I wandered into Prim’s, possibly the loveliest used bookshop anywhere, in Kinsale and as if it was waiting for us to arrive, Raymond Carver’s posthumously published No Heroics, Please jumped out at me. As my beloved notes above. But I want to reiterate both my love of the bookstore and the book. I wrote the following before I read his own book notes; you can see we are exactly like minded!

This is a Carver fans dream come true—all sorts of collected bits and bobs: poems, reviews, essays, a treasure trove of delights. His reflections on revision alone are worth the euros.

What we’re watching …

I downloaded the sumptuously filmed first episode of Lord of the Flies for a plane. I liked it well enough to wait for Ann to see that one as well, so we can watch the rest together. Recommended. The kid who plays Piggy, above left, is amazing.

I have been having a helluva time sleeping on this trip. After reading, after a podcast, after Sleep Sounds didn’t work, after just-lie-quietly-and-be-patient didn’t work, I looked to see what was available here on Netflix. I found Rafa, a documentary on Rafael Nadal, which opens with his decision to retire, then goes back through his life. After a pleasant 53 minutes I thought, Where the hell is his greatest rival, Federer? This is no documentary! But I was tired, I lay back and at last slept. I saw in the morning that it is indeed a documentary SERIES, three episodes. As it was both a pleasant watch and paved the way toward sleep, I’m eager to have the other two in pocket.

But that’s it, as we’ve been on the road and tend to watch zero screens except on planes.

Links …

• Read more about the lovely retreat, Breac House, from The Times travel (where Ann first read about it), and its commitment to local crafts, food, and drink.

• I am not a Knicks fan, but I am a New York fan. So I loved the look back to 1973 NYC 53 years ago when the Knicks last won a championship and the town was gritty, in danger of default, and just an ugly mess. This from the Gothamist is a catalogue of events.

• This, from The Guardian, is a pictorial view of that same year. Both excellent.

• I’m fascinated by old crafts and craftsmanship, so I devoured this story about the men who thatch roofs in England and the interior debate over authenticity.

• As a language lover, I was fascinated by this piece in The Times about why English makes for such compelling spelling bees.

• And for you scribes and fiction writers, here’s a fascinating display of visual information: the structure of your narrative in colored graph form. By the mathematician and author, Manil Suri.

And finally …

Here’s a sharable link, again from The Times, on Paul McCartney’s dark side. But generally he seems a completely lovable guy, as this touching tribute to John Lennon describes.

That’s it for now. Off to Finland and The Baltics tomorrow. But we’ll be checking back in on comments. We do our best to read and respond to all—they’ve become one of my favorite parts of this newsletter, in fact! So thank you!

—Michael

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My wife Ann, our Promiscuous Reader, does not love a turkey club. Rather it is her sandwich. It’s the default lunch order. And she wants it perfect. Meaning … well, she once ordered 3 club sandwiches at three different places in Minneapolis at a book festival, and not a single restaurant got it right.

At the third restaurant, she clarified with the waiter: “Turkey club, yes? It will be cut in four triangles, held together with toothpicks?” “Absolutely, of course,” our server assured us.

Twenty minutes later he delivered us a turkey sandwich with bacon, lettuce, and tomato between two slices of bread, cut in half. In rectangles, not even on the diagonal.

Astonishing.

To set the record straight, a proper turkey club is essentially a BLT on top of a turkey sandwich. Three layers of bread. Real turkey, roasted by the restaurant and sliced. Cut in quarters diagonally. Frilly toothpicks holding all the parts together.

See the photo above, the Turkey Club at Bus Stop, Bethune and Hudson, our local diner. It is perfect.

So what’s your favorite, and more important, why? Also, do you have a sandwich that you hate, or a sandwich that makes you mad? I’d love to know. See the polls below.

Sorry, Substack doesn’t allow me to include more than five options per poll, nor does it allow me to give you an option to write one in, but you can do so in comments.

Don’t see your fave? What did I leave out?

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It is the season of chicken salad, one of the great deli mainstays and classic sandwiches (it’s Paul Simon’s favorite). Spring somehow lends itself to lunches, generally, with warming weather, graduations, wedding showers and so forth, and there may be no better course to prepare for a group of people than a great chicken salad.

My daughter and I visite…

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I’ve just listened to a new book on chefs, The Secret History of French Cooking: The outlaw Chefs Who Made Food Modern, by Luke Barr, grandnephew of the great food writer M.F.K. Fisher. While I don’t know how “secret” it is, there’s much to be considered in the story this new book tells. Such as, how has it taken someone so long to write this particular, fascinating tale?

This newsletter is a review of Barr’s book, which covers the years 1965 to 1974 in France, within the broader context of the evolution of the American chef beginning in the 1980s.

One of the best books on the evolution of the American chef is Andrew Friedman’s Chefs, Drugs and Rock and Roll (2018), a terrific history of the evolution of American chefs who, starting in 1978, transformed American restaurant kitchens. “They took a centuries-old profession with no real American strain and made it their own,” Friedman writes.

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Interestingly, Friedman starts his story with a chef most people outside SoCal haven’t heard of, Bruce Marder, who opened West Beach Cafe, a block from Venice Beach, in 1978. This is part of why I loved the book. I’ve been studying chefs for three decades now and written about them in a trilogy, The Making of, the Soul of, and The Reach of a Chef, and I’d never heard of the guy. Some chefs have a knack for self-promotion; most, like Marder, do not. But Friedman argues that “Marder was churning out template-shattering food before many of his contemporaries who have attained legend status.”

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That’s my question to you: do we still feel we don’t have time to cook?

A recent dinner with began with her telling me about her first encounter with my work. She’d read a Huffpo rant arguing that the too-busy-to-cook excuse for not cooking was hooey. Author of the book, Dinner: A Love Story: It all begins at the family table, Jenny took issue on her bl…

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When I began living in a 400-square-foot studio apartment in New York City’s West Village more than ten years ago, I lost my cooking mojo. I lived alone and had about three dishes I’d cook—stir-fried beef, curried chicken, steak or chop with sautéed potatoes and…

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Every now and then, before the day’s work begins, Ann will open her NYTimesCooking email, and say, “I want this right now.”

Such was the case with the Gingery Cabbage Rolls with Pork and Rice. It’s a fascinating recipe in that you make what is in effect a dumpling filling but also add uncooked rice to the ground meat, then wrap it up in a cabbage leaf an…

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Best Hamburger in New York City?

The press gets kind of obsessed with naming bests. Readers love it, too. And when it comes to best ______ in New York City, there’s an exciting ring to it. New York City has not only some of the best food in the world, but it’s also incredibly diverse and uncommonly concentrated (New York City is basically 17-miles by 17-miles). You can make lists of the best kofti, best cinnamon buns, best khinkali, best falafel, best club sandwich, best steak, best fried chicken, best bagel.

Of course, there cannot truly be a best of anything. Right? When I was writing my book about peeds heart surgery, I tracked a surgeon who was considered the best in the world at repairing a specific congenital anomaly: transposition of the great arteries. The operation requires the surgeon to transect the aorta and the pulmonary vein and reverse them into the right position on a newborn’s tiny heart. That’s not the difficult part—these vessels are a quarter-inch in diameter. It’s the reattaching of the arteries that feed the heart, which are one or two millimeters, that are the tricky parts.

His name was Roger Mee and his numbers, meaning how many kids survived relative to how many died, were the best in the world. Plus, because he was one of the best, he got the most complicated anomalies, the train wrecks, increasing the degree of difficulty. I asked him, “Are you the best at this?” He said no. Maybe say, he said, “second to none.”

So, taking us out of the ER and back into the city, I can ask what burgers are second to none?

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We’d flown to Florence from JFK the night before, had driven an hour and a half to Bologna, skipped any kind of nap, restored ourselves with wine and a plate of guanciale and salumi rosa, then wandered the markets till it was time to freshen up for dinner. We arrived at the little restaurant, All’ Osteria Bottega, in that lovely, hazy, excited state of …

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Bologna was the first stop on our way to Ann’s writers’ workshop outside Sienna last November. Ann had yet to see the birthplace of mortadella, and it had been 15 years since I was there researching salumi with Brian Polcyn. Hearing of our plan, Ruth Reichl told us about the late Jonathan Gold, peerless food writer; Gold’s favorite restaurant in all the…

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Ann asked to make tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches for my first home-cooked meal after knee replacement surgery nearly two weeks ago. Ultimate comfort.

I hadn’t had this quintessentially American pairing in years, and it was a pleasure.

When I was a boy in Cleveland, Mom would sometimes have this lunch waiting for me when I’d come in from shoveling the driveway on a snowy Saturday: heaven. Hot rich Campbell’s Tomato Soup—she used a canful of milk, pronounced “melk” if you’re from Detroit, instead of a can full of water—Wonder Bread buttered on the outside, browned in a pan till it’s crunchy, with gooey Kraft singles in between. Fruity acidic soup with the rich cheese and crunchy fried bread. In the immortal words of Neil Diamond, So Good!

It was early April when I hobbled up the stairs to our flat, cold outside, and Ann’s preparation was a great winter’s look toward the bounty of tomatoes in the summer. She uses a mix of canned tomatoes and whole tomatoes that she roasts till charred—riffing off a recipe by Ina—all of it cooked with fresh herbs and blended smooth. Everyone knows winter tomatoes from the grocery store are facsimiles of what tomatoes should be. But canned, well, that’s what you use in the winter. Tomatoes that were picked at the peak of ripeness and canned that same day.

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Leeks vinaigrette are an elegant, bistro classic, simple to prepare and best made ahead.

Leeks are cleaned, steamed till tender, and chilled. Make a delicious red wine vinaigrette to pour over them, and garnish with chopped egg. The quality of the vinegar is critical, so it’s worth buying a good one. The vinaigrette can also be made wit…

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APR 11, 2026

I’ve been living in New York City for about ten years and full-time for the past four. Gotham is, of course, the bagel capital of the world. A couple blocks away from us, at Greenwich Ave and 11th St, is Apollo Bagel, which The Times says makes one of the best bagels in the city. We disagr…

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I’ve been living in New York City for about ten years and full-time for the past four. Gotham is, of course, the bagel capital of the world. A couple blocks away from us, at Greenwich Ave and 11th St, is Apollo Bagel, which The Times says makes one of the best bagels in the city. We disagree and feel the hike, one m…

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A number of readers have asked me for details on the trip to Egypt I’ve been writing about. Here are the places we went and general costs.

Getting there …

We flew Turkish Air to Cairo, connecting in Istanbul. It’s a leave-NYC-at-noon, get-to your-hotel-before-noon-the-next-day trip. Tickets cost about $600. We…

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Your plane from Istanbul lands JFK at midnight and you’re at last back in your snug after two weeks in Egypt. You’re able to get to sleep by four and are able to sleep till 10 am (4 pm according to your body). You move through the day in a haze, unpacking, taking laundry to cleaners, getting organzized.

Your beloved can’t even do that as she’s teaching t…

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Your 11-hour flight from Istanbul lands at JFK at midnight and you are back in the snug West Village after two weeks in Egypt. You’re able to get to sleep by four and are manage to sleep till 10 am (4 pm according to your body). You move through the day in a haze, unpacking, taking laundry to cleaners, getting organized.

Your beloved can’t even do that a…

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A couple of years ago, before my 60th birthday, my wife Ann searched for a trip that would be commensurate with the occasion. Ann is an extraordinary scraper of travel info and ideas and deals we can afford. She discovered a company called Nour el Nil, which takes passengers on the Nile from Luxor, one of the oldest cities in Egypt (originally Thebes), 140 miles south to Aswan. Passengers travel on a Dahabiya, a traditional, wooden Egyptian sailing boat, 50 meters long with ten rooms carrying up to 20 passengers. Alas, I was born in the early phase of Leo, which means, of course, that the Nile at the end of July is about 120 degrees F. in the daytime. Not doable.

She squirreled away the idea of Nour el Nil until we had the resources and time in the winter months to fly to Cairo, see the Pyramids of Giza and the newly opened Egyptian museum. We would then head south to Luxor, to see one of the world’s most important temples, Karnac, and the Valley of the Kings, and drive south to Esna for the boat and a six-day journey down the Nile in south central Egypt, 200 miles form the Sudanese border.

Ten days before we were to leave, the U.S. and Israel bombed Iran, throwing the entire region into turmoil and uncertainty.

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What was it that obsessed me? The photo of creamy baked mac and cheese? The combination of spinach-artichoke that brings to mind the indulgent holiday hors-d’oeuvre (we shamefully refer to it as “White Trash Dip”)? Was it the brilliance of joining classic artichoke dip with pasta? (And is it wrong to refer to this dip as White Trash Dip?)

I think it was …

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