According to the James Beard Awards, the prestigious annual celebration of America’s culinary excellence, the US’s best restaurant is not in the gourmet capitals of New York, Chicago or LA, it is in – are you ready? – Birmingham, Alabama.
In May, the awards declared Highlands Bar & Grill to be America’s most Outstanding Restaurant of 2018. It named the restaurant’s pastry chef, Dolester Miles, the best in the country, too.
If you’re tempted to dismiss this as a fluke, think again. Highlands has been a finalist an astonishing nine times. Clearly, they’re doing a lot of things right.
Like most great ideas, the concept behind In Situ is so devilishly simple you wonder why someone hasn’t done it before. Invite a selection of the world’s top chefs to contribute a dish then create a restaurant to showcase them.
Headed up by three Michelin-starred chef Corey Lee, In Situ features recipes by more than 80 gastronomic greats – including Rene Redzepi, from Noma, David Chang, from Momofuku, and Peter Gilmore, from Quay.
The inspiration for the restaurant came from its setting inside the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The museum presents a curated selection of the world’s finest art; In Situ does the same for food.
The hotel restaurant used to be something of a last resort. Often housed in a bland, unflatteringly lit space, it was a convenient option when you were too tired to go anywhere else. The menu was normally unadventurous (club sandwich anyone?), the service lacklustre and the experience functional rather than fabulous.
How times have changed. Nowadays, celebrity chefs are falling over themselves to collaborate with high-end hotels. Particularly in cities such as London and New York where real estate is at a premium and competition is cut-throat. The benefits for both parties are obvious – a well-known chef lures guests to the hotel and the restaurant gets a steady supply of customers. In short, everybody wins.
Where do you go to learn how to make moonshine? Moonshine University, of course. Christian Avignon and Ryan Thompson had no experience distilling spirits, so they figured they’d better learn from the best before starting a distillery in the ski resort of Vail, Colorado. Clearly they were given good advice at Kentucky’s Moonshine University, because since launching in 2014, the 10th Mountain Whiskey and Spirit Company has already moved to bigger premises and is now sold in more than 700 outlets around the state.