Year: 2024

Woman of the Hour (R)

An aspiring actress in 1978 Los Angeles goes on The Dating Game where one of the bachelors is a serial killer in Woman of the Hour, a movie about real-life killer Rodney Alcala directed by and starring Anna Kendrick.

Cheryl (Kendrick) reluctantly accepts her agent’s offer to be a contestant on The Dating Game because it will get her seen and earn her a paycheck. Intercut with scenes of her preparing for the episode, we see scenes of Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto) throughout the 1970s meeting and murdering women across the country. Sometimes it seems like he’s close to getting caught but — as you learn when you dive down the Wikipedia rabbit hole — aliases, moving and the general non-centralized nature of ye olde law enforcement means he is mostly free to kill again even after arrests and periods of incarceration.

The Dating Game episode itself isn’t terribly exciting — Rodney’s appearance on the show is just a weird footnote to his life. And a story line about a woman in the audience at the show who recognizes him doesn’t add the urgency that I suspect is the reason for being for the character. What the movie does do chillingly well is show all the times Cheryl — all the female characters really but especially Cheryl — has to negotiate what is happening in the moment between her and some man. Look too angry or act too brainy with some men, and it could lose her a job. Rebuff an advance and maybe she loses a friend or maybe the man in question becomes violent. It’s well done, the subtle shifts she tries to make to placate men whose anger could be dangerous — professionally, socially or even physically. The tension in this movie is all in whether the woman in any given scene can pull it off, can use self-effacing giggles and light humor to get away from someone she realizes could be dangerous. Can she pull it off and what happens when she has to acknowledge out in the open that she’s in danger — boo, there’s your depressingly real spooky season scare. B-

Rated R for language, violent content, some drug use and a sexual reference, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Anna Kendrick with a screenplay by Ian McDonald, Woman of the Hour is an hour and 35 minutes long and distributed on Netflix.

The Wild Robot (PG)

A robot gains heartbreaking emotions due to the “crushing obligation” of parenting a gosling in The Wild Robot, a beautiful and beautiful-looking animated movie based on the book by Peter Brown.

Roz (voice of Lupita Nyong’o), as the robot is eventually called, is a bipedal Siri-like entity meant to solve problems and do tasks for its human customers. After crashing onto a forest-covered island, Roz finds her only potential customers are animals whose language she eventually learns to speak but who mostly just think she is a death-bringing monster. And she does accidentally crush a nest housing a bird and most of its eggs, but one egg survives. After securing the egg from Fink (voice of Pedro Pascal), a fox looking for a meal, Roz also accidentally becomes the gosling’s maternal figure once the egg hatches. A possum mother, Pinktail (voice of Catherine O’Hara), who has seen it all with her regular litters of half a dozen or more, informs Roz that her task now is to feed the little chick daily, teach it how to swim and teach it to fly to prepare it for the fall migration. Fink takes pity on Roz/sees a way to get some easy food and a protector, and helps her find eats for the little goose and even helps her pick a name for him, Brightbill (voice of Kit Connor). They build a house and become something of a family, with Roz learning patience and how to teach Brightbill to swim and eventually how to fly. Along the way, Roz becomes increasingly attached to Brightbill, even though all her efforts are aimed at helping him live without her.

And though it isn’t particularly subtle, this portrayal of parenthood feels well-observed, blending the “crushing obligation” as Roz calls her new responsibility and heartbreaking preparations for independence with the moments of sweet cuddliness. Its jokes about parenthood are along this vein — and manage to be funny, for both kids and parents amazingly, without sliding into hokiness. This story of family and eventually community is told with some exceptional animation. It has a rich storybook look that plays up the beauty of its natural setting, with color and light helping to underline the emotions. A

Rated PG for action/peril and thematic elements, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Chris Sanders (based on the book by Peter Brown), The Wild Robot is an hour and 42 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Universal Studios. It is also available for rent or purchase.

It’s What’s Inside (R)

College buddies get together on the night before one gets married in It’s What’s Inside, a twisty dark-comedy thriller.

Longtime couple Shelby (Brittany O’Grady) and Cyrus (James Morosini), social media influencer Nikki (Alycia Debnam-Carey), punk-ish Brooke (Reina Hardesty), hippie-ish Maya (Nina Bloomgarden), goofball Dennis (Gavin Leatherwood) and groom Reuben (Devon Terrell) were all buddies in college and have stayed close-ish since. Forbes (David Thompson) was also part of that group but was kicked out of college after a raucous party that involved his high school-age sister Beatrice (Madison Davenport) getting drunk and aggressively hitting on Dennis. He went to California to become a tech bro but has returned to attend this party and brought with him one of his famous party games. As trailers suggest, the game involves a perception shift, one that would seem particularly risky in this group of people with past, current and unrequited romantic attachments, but then perhaps that is also the appeal.

It’s What’s Inside plays with the vibe, story beats and setting (the weird-art-filled mansion of Reuben’s late mother) of a horror movie but is solidly in thriller territory, injecting a sense of naughty humor into the movie inside of jump scares. The movie asks a little more of its cast than standard horror movie run-and-scream and I think they all deliver well enough, which is an impressive little accomplishment. B-

Rated R for pervasive language, sexual content, drug use and some violent content, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Greg Jardin, It’s What’s Inside is an hour and 44 minutes long and is streaming on Netflix.

House of Spoils (R)

Is chef Ariana DeBose going crazy because of toxic restaurant culture or because she’s trying to open a fine dining eatery in a haunted house? — is the central question of House of Spoils.

Specifically, the upstate New York-or-something house where she is living and restauranting is perhaps haunted by witches, including the ghost of the witch who used to own the property and tended a witchy garden. A witchy garden with some good greens, as DeBose’s character, who I think is just called Chef, discovers. She also discovers that, as she says, some garden items are tasty friends and some are foe that send her to the bathroom with digestive troubles. This new restaurant’s owner, Andres (Arian Moayed), grows increasingly worried about the crazy eyes DeBose is developing, especially since the last chef he tried to get to open the restaurant went bananas and ran off into the forest. But the more DeBose borrows from the witch’s garden, the more culinary success she has — though is she going to nurture people with earthy greens and roots or is she about to witch-poison all her diners?

Along the way, she is awful to her sous chef, Lucia (Barbie Ferreira), saying things as horrible and sexist as any male chef would say even though DeBose’s chef has also experienced the pressures of that kind of kitchen under her previous famous-chef boss. She is also tormented by rabbits (as many a gardener is) and by an infestation of sometimes real, sometimes not, bugs, and is maybe being followed by the witch’s ghost and also maybe just facing some really unrealistic expectations for her food. Certainly all of the fancypants high-end micro-green-placed-with-tweezers dishes are pretty unappetizing-looking, perhaps a commentary on food so elevated it’s lost all food qualities of nourishment and comfort.

Probably because I expected basically nothing of House of Spoils, I had fun with it. Some of the Points We’re Making are a little more spelled out than they need to be, but overall the movie has a light touch with its mix of horror and psychological suspense, all covered in flakes of a dark sense of humor. DeBose does a good job of riding the line between exacting, unjustifiably harsh and exhaustion-borne “going a little bit nuts.” I enjoy how, not unlike the holiday movie arms race between various streamers, this burst of October spooky-tinged movies pushes the ideas of horror off into weird and fun directions. B

Rated R for language and some violent content, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Bridget Savage Cole & Danielle Krudy, House of Spoils is an hour and 41 minutes long and streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

Revenge of the Tipping Point, by Malcom Gladwell

Revenge of the Tipping Point, by Malcom Gladwell (Little, Brown and Co., 368 pages)

Malcolm Gladwell had never written a book when he began, with a mix of “self-doubt and euphoria,” the manuscript that would become The Tipping Point, published in 2000. That book explored the ways in which an idea or a product will languish, until suddenly it doesn’t — ultimately becoming a “social contagion” that spreads rapidly, like contagions of disease.

The Tipping Point itself was something like that. At Gladwell’s first book event, two people showed up, a stranger and the mother of a friend. But after a while, the book “tipped” and went on to spend years on the New York Times bestseller list. At one point Bill Clinton called it “that book everyone has been talking about.”

Six other books and a podcast later, Gladwell is back to revisit the tipping point from a darker place. While The Tipping Point talks about how we can leverage the principles of social contagions to achieve a social good, Revenge of the Tipping Point posits that in this pursuit, there can be unintended negative consequences. We can tip over into something worse. Gladwell’s latest book is a cautionary tale that will appeal mainly to fans of The Tipping Point. As an author,he is something of an acquired taste. People seem to either love him or to doze off before the end of the last chapter. Let’s just say his books require an attention span.

Gladwell began his career as a journalist: first for The Washington Post, then The New Yorker. He still writes as a journalist, weaving together his own interviews and news accounts to tell stories in his own conversational voice and then to link seemingly unrelated events in the service of his own ideas. Along the way, he offers “rules” he invents to describe his views of how the world works.

Revenge of the Tipping Point follows that formula, from the quirky Gladwellian rules to the whiplash-inducing pivots between seemingly unrelated stories.

Take, for example, Gladwell’s treatment of “Poplar Grove,” a pseudonym for an affluent, homogeneous community that experienced a cluster of teen suicides (a focus of the 2024 book Life Under Pressure by Anna Mueller and Seth Abrutyn). Gladwell took his own tour of the town, finding a real estate agent who took him around and explained the dynamics of the family-oriented community. Then he linked the town’s tragedies to … a fertility crisis among cheetahs.

In this bewildering journey, readers are suddenly thrust from the leafy suburbs of domesticity to a veterinary clinic where scientists are grafting skin samples from domestic cats onto captive cheetahs, trying to figure out why breeding programs fail so spectacularly.

And then, before we even have time to get attached to our new cheetah friends, boom — we’re back in Poplar Grove.

And so it goes, while Gladwell gradually reveals the point he is trying to make, which is that in a monoculture — “a world of uniformity” — there are “no internal defenses against an outside threat.” In the case of both a “perfect” homogeneous community and cheetahs with little genetic diversity, “The best solution to a monoculture epidemic is to break up the monoculture,” Gladwell writes.

Gladwell then takes us to a community in Palo Alto, where a planned development on what was called the Lawrence Tract was supposed to solve the problem of “white flight” from American cities.

That community was developed with the stipulation that one-third of the homes be owned by whites, one-third by Blacks and one-third by Asians, in order to prevent “tipping” in the neighborhood — one ethnic group taking over the neighborhood. The word “tipping” had begun to be used in this way as neighborhoods changed by ethnicity.

“For a time in the late 1950s and early 1960s, if you used the phrase, people knew exactly what you meant,” Gladwell writes. Real estate agents would talk about “tipping a building” or “tipping a neighborhood.” They were demonstrating, as Gladwell maintains, that “tipping points can be deliberately engineered” — especially once you venture beyond “the magic third.” (Which is another Gladwellian rule.)

“People, it is clear, behave very differently in a group above some mysterious point of critical mass than they do in a group just a little below that point,” he writes. And people who know this sometimes act to manipulate the tipping in ways that aren’t in a community’s — or a country’s — best interests.

For the New England reader, there is plenty of regional interest in this book. For instance, in Gladwell’s discussion of what is known as “small-area variation” — bewildering differences in outcomes among otherwise similar areas — he examines research that took place in Middlebury, Vermont, and Randoph, New Hampshire.

Despite both towns having almost identical sociological profiles when it came to insurance, income and levels of chronic illness, there were notable differences in hospitalizations, surgery and Medicare spending, with much higher numbers in Randolph. Similarly, when looking at two Vermont towns — Waterbury and Stowe — the same pattern emerged. “The people were the same — except, that is, that the children of Waterbury tended to keep their tonsils and the children of Stowe did not.”

Gladwell also ventures into Massachusetts with his examination of why Harvard University has a rugby team — when hardly anyone goes to see the games, and the players have to be recruited outside of the U.S. — and, later, the infamous Biogen conference in Boston in February 2020 that turned into a superspreading Covid-19 event.

It is the opioid crisis, however, that Gladwell begins and ends with. He uses the saga of OxyContin and the Sackler family to argue that epidemics, both medical and social, have rules and boundaries but it is human beings who create the stories around them and it is human beings who are ultimately responsible for where epidemics go. “It’s time for a hard conversation about epidemics…. We need to be honest about all the subtle and sometimes hidden ways we try to manipulate them,” he writes.

Gladwell has said that for the 25th anniversary of The Tipping Point, he’d intended to simply update or “refresh” the original book, but decided to do the harder work of taking it into another place. That paid off for the established Gladwell fan, but it’s unclear whether he will win new ones with this complex and meandering collection of stories. B

Album Reviews 24/10/24

Sara Serpa, Encounters & Collisions (Biophilia Records)

I’m sorry, I can deal with a lot of things — improv jazz, noise-jazz, lots of things — but this just isn’t my cup of tea. That may be because I gravitate to a rather conventional Earl Grey, and sure, I appreciate that a lot of critics would tell me that this Portuguese singer is an acquired taste that’s beyond my ken, but I’m not a fan of self-indulgent sounds of any sort. This LP starts out with a spoken-word soliloquy about how her name is pronounced “SAH-rah,” not “SAIR-ah,” and some other gobbledygook I didn’t bother with, and then it’s on to an exercise in off-Broadway performance art, riding bumpily along on a purposely rickety float comprising cello, sax and piano. I’ll admit that a lot of (never-released) tension does emanate from Serpa’s constant edging toward dissonance, stuff that most normies would diagnose as being off-key. But I don’t need it, really. Your mileage may vary, of course, and if you want intimacy in your acoustic, academic-sounding chamber-jazz, this’d be it. C

Various Artists, Pulp Fiction: 30th Anniversary Soundtrack (Interscope Records)

I don’t know how anyone reading this could say they’ve never seen this 1994 movie, but then again, I’ve never watched The Shawshank Redemption or Deliverance all the way through, so there’ll be no charge for your hall pass. The soundtrack gave (more or less) rise to a surf-rock resurgence in pop culture; the film’s opening tune, Dick Dale’s “Miserlou,” starts things off here, leading into some dialog between John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson (yes, the bit about how the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder is called a “Royale with cheese” in France). Next is Kool & The Gang’s stomp-funky “Jungle Boogie,” which was a pleasant surprise for me to hear on the original soundtrack; I’d listened to it quite a bit in the 1980s while writing an album and doggedly attempting to expand my spectrum of musical influence (back then, I honestly believed no one else had ever even heard the dumb thing before). Director Quentin Tarantino (nowadays #MeToo-canceled, last I checked) had a pretty bizarre range of influences himself; I never understood the appeal of Urge Overkill’s “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon,” but it’s here too. The draw here is that it’s being released on day-glo vinyl, which is as Tarantino-schlocky as things could possibly get I suppose. A

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Right on time, Oct. 25 will see a Friday-load of new albums, from bands, overrated synth-pop artists, and nepo babies who sing off-key! Twerking like demented circus clowns, they’ll bang their Who-boombas and clang their ba-zingas and annoy me with all the noise, noise, noise, noise! What am I to do, fam, demand hazard pay? Ask all those bad bands to take music lessons? No, there is nothing I can do but report on these new albums, so that you’ll know what to do with whatever money you have left after rent, your Roku subscription and your weekly supply of ramen noodle packets and cans of beans! But wait a second, before I whip out my Gatling gun of snark and really go to town, here’s some good news, a new album from Amyl and the Sniffers, titled Cartoon Darkness! You know, I’d thought I was the only kid on my block to admire this Australian pub-punk band, but the other week someone posted about them on my Twitter and my hope for humanity was instantly lifted juuust a little bit. Don’t know about you, but I fell in love with these criminals when I saw the video of “Some Mutts (Can’t Be Muzzled),” like, the singer makes Courtney Love look like Martha Stewart, and all I wanted out of life was to go on a Dave & Buster’s date with that girl and see how long it would take to get arrested. You people really need to go check them out, but in the meantime I’m going to see if they’re still completely feral, by checking out the video for “Chewing Gum,“ from this slappin’ new album! OK forget it, it’s awesome, she’s trying to be the next Lydia Lunch and succeeding, she’s got lipstick all over her insane rictus grin, and she’s holding a cigarette whose ash is like 2 inches long, go see this video, kids, I beg of you, you need to.

• Awesome and groovy, I’m already ahead of the holiday album curve, because your generation’s Elton John, Ben Folds, is releasing an album of Christmas songs, cleverly titled Sleigher, see what he did there! I am pleasantly amazed that the Christmas albums are already coming out, because it seemed like there weren’t any at all for me to write about here the last few years, let’s go see what this wacky piano person is doing to “Jingle Bells” or whatever. Yup, it’s good, this version of “The Christmas Song,” but let’s be real, even Gilbert Gottfried could have made that song appealing. He’ll be appearing at the Cabot Theatre in Beverly, Mass., on Nov. 10, but I’m sure the last 18 remaining tickets will have been sold by the time you read this, sorry for your loss.

• A lot of you old people remember the 1980s, when Tears for Fears was doing so many drugs that they were going around saying they were bigger than The Beatles, ha ha, remember those days? Well, they have a new live album coming out on Friday, titled Songs for a Nervous Planet! Now, don’t worry, fellow old people, Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal are still leading the band, and they still (mostly) sound like Tears For Fears as of their last album, The Tipping Point, so let’s cut to now, when they sound like a sleepy wedding band on the live version of “Everybody Wants To Rule The World” that’s on board this one. But who cares, guys, it’s Tears For Fears, amirite? I miss big poofy hair, don’t you?

• Last but not least on our plate is the new album from 1980s Boston-indie-rock legends Pixies, The Night The Zombies Came! “Motoroller” is a decent mid-tempo goth-rocker, with Frank Black doing a passable Marilyn Manson impersonation, sort of, if that’s even what he was even intending to do, who knows.

Apple Bars with Brown Butter Shortbread

Shortbread

  • 12 Tablespoons (1½ stick) salted (normal) butter
  • ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt or kosher salt
  • 2 cups (240 g) all-purpose flour
  • 1/3 cup (66 g) white sugar
  • 1/3 cup (66 g) brown sugar
  • ¾ teaspoon baking powder

Filling

  • 2 eggs
  • 1/3 cup (66 g) white sugar
  • 1/3 cup (66 g) brown sugar
  • 2 Tablespoons flour
  • 2 Tablespoons heavy cream
  • ½ teaspoon cayenne or other dried chili powder
  • ¼ teaspoon salt
  • 1¼ lbs. (567 g) sliced apples – weigh them after peeling, coring and slicing them

Preheat oven to 350°F.

Melt the butter in a small pan over medium-low heat. Keep cooking it, stirring it occasionally, until it stops spitting and turns a darker color. This is what bakers call “browning” the butter. Some of the butter is pure fat, but there are some milk solids in it as well. As those solids fry in the melted fat, they start to brown, giving the whole pan of butter a darker color. This is a baking trick that is very, very impressive but extremely straightforward. The only thing you have to be careful about is overcooking it. You want it to get to about the color of a graham cracker, but take it off the heat just before it gets to that point, because the milk solids will continue cooking in the hot fat for another 30 seconds or so.

Stir ¼ teaspoon of salt into the browned butter, and set it aside to cool.

Combine the ingredients for the shortbread, adding the butter/salt mixture last.

Set ¾ cup of the dough aside, and press the rest into an 8×8” baking pan lined with parchment paper. Bake for 15 minutes or until it just starts to turn golden brown. Remove it from the oven, and set it aside to cool. Turn the oven up to 375°F.

Beat the eggs in a large bowl, then add the rest of the filling ingredients together, one at a time.

Spread the apple filling over the baked shortbread, then scatter the reserved shortbread dough over the top.

Bake for 65 minutes, then remove it from the oven and let it cool for an hour or so, then turn out of the pan and cut into nine to 12 portions.

Eat one of these bars, feeling a growing sense of joy and wonder build inside of you.

You will taste the apple filling first, which will be familiar and comforting.

Then, as you chew, you will start to get a little kick from the cayenne pepper, and your eyes will go wide. But then, just before you can get all judgmental, the flavor of the brown butter shortbread will kick in, soothe your outraged taste buds, and leave you with a pervasive feeling of well-being.

“HONEY!” you’ll shout — which will be awkward if you live alone or with roommates — “Come here; you have to taste this!”

At this point your partner, if you have one, will tell you, no thank you, they’re fine.

“Seriously, come taste this!”

“Not right now; I’m busy!” they’ll reply.

The next 10 minutes, as you chase your partner around the house, trying to force an apple bar into their mouth, won’t be pretty, but will be a testament to how shockingly good these apple bars are.

Featured Photo: Photo by John Fladd.

In the kitchen with Caroline Arend

Caroline Arend is the Chef and owner of Caroline’s Fine Food (132 Bedford Center Road, Bedford, 637-1615, carolinesfood.com) and The Pot Pie Bar (132 Bedford Center Road, Bedford, 432-1927, thepotpiebar.com).

She is a graduate of Boston University and The Culinary Institute of America. She has worked as an executive chef and catering chef in high-end restaurants and catering companies throughout New England. After moving to New Hampshire, she took a break from cooking professionally, but found that she missed it. Her catering and prepared food business, Caroline’s Fine Foods, designs seasonally curated menus and prepared and bespoke dishes for customers. The Pot Pie Bar offers 14 different pies, from classic chicken or vegetable pot pies to more innovative choices such as a bratwurst, beer and cheddar pie, or a lobster pie made with whole lobster claws.

What is your must-have kitchen item?

I love my mandoline! It is a surprisingly versatile tool which produces consistent product with great ease.

What would you have for your last meal?

Italian Wedding Soup. It was my grandmother’s family recipe that originated in Naples near Isernia, Italy. It brings back fond childhood memories of wonderful and soulful meals spent together.

What is your favorite local eatery?

Smokehaus Barbecue in Amherst, a great small business serving delicious barbecue staples. I’m a big fan of the Hog Wings!

Name a celebrity you would like to see eating in your restaurant.

Johnny Depp. My family and I have always loved his movies and unique sense of humor!

What is your favorite thing on your menu?

Seared sea scallops with lemon caper aioli and snipped chive. These are always a crowd-pleaser at any occasion.

What is the biggest food trend in New Hampshire right now?

Pickled and fermented foods. We’re seeing a big uptick and newfound appreciation for all things pickled and fermented.

What is your favorite thing to cook at home?

Chinese takeout! Why take work home?

Just kidding. My family loves freshly steamed mussels in a white wine sauce with chorizo, tomatoes, topped with remoulade and fire roasted bread for dipping. We serve it in one giant mixing bowl and everyone dives in! It is a wonderful way to come together and connect over an interactive family dinner.

Coconut Curry Mussels with Crusty Bread

1 bag of mussels
2 Tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1/2 cup Spanish onion, small dice
1 teaspoon garlic, minced
2 Tablespoons red curry paste (you can find this at your local Asian market; my favorite brands are Maesri and Mae Ploy)
1 can of coconut milk, full fat
2 Tablespoons cilantro
1 Tablespoon scallions, thinly sliced
salt & pepper, to taste
1 baguette, thinly sliced

Clean and debeard mussels in cold water and set aside.
In a stock pot, over medium/low heat, add olive oil, onion and garlic and sauté lightly until aromatic, 1 to 2 minutes.
Once onions are translucent, add red curry paste and sauté for approximately 30 seconds.
Add coconut milk and season lightly with salt and pepper, and mix well. Bring mixture to a simmer.
Add cleaned mussels and cover over medium/low heat.
Cook until all mussels are fully opened, approximately 5 to 8 minutes, stirring occasionally.
While mussels are cooking, cut your baguette thinly on a bias. Each slice should be about 1/2” thick.
Toast your bread — I prefer to brush mine with olive oil and season lightly with salt and pepper and throw on the grill for some extra char!
Once all mussels are cooked and open, transfer to your serving bowl and garnish with cilantro and scallions.
Serve with toasted bread and enjoy!

Honey dinner

Celebrating bees with a sweet menu

According to Jeff Cole of Barr Hill Gin, Bee’s Knees Week — a national campaign, which includes Friday’s Bee’s Knees Dinner at the the Westbrook Inn (49 S. Main St, Derry., 965-6228, thewestbrookinn.com) on Friday, Oct. 25 — began as a small, almost grass-roots promotion.

“It started out as a restaurant-only program,” Cole said, “where the restaurant would make a ‘bee’s knees’ cocktail, which is a pre-Prohibition cocktail … and they’d donate a portion of every cocktail to the Bee Cause Project, which helped raise awareness for people about pollination and the importance of it. And one of the things they did was put bee observation hives into elementary schools and children’s museums.” This is a cause that was and is important to Barr Hill, because unlike most other spirits, which are distilled from grain, Barr Hill’s gins and vodka are distilled from honey.

The Bee’s Knees event grew, and today it is one of the biggest charitable promotions in the liquor world.

“Something like 3,000 to 3,500 restaurants and retailers participate,” Cole said. “It is a big deal. It’s the largest activation, I guess you’d call it, in the spirits industry.”

How to make a bee’s knees cocktail
Combine 2 ounces very cold gin (Barr Hill would work well for this), ¾ ounce honey syrup, and ¾ ounce fresh squeezed lemon juice with ice in a cocktail shaker. Shake enthusiastically for 30 seconds or so, until you hear the ice start to break up inside the shaker. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Sip with raised eyebrows and a contented smile.

Mark Saragusa, Manager of the Westbrook Inn, said the Bee’s Knees Dinner marks a turning point in the Inn’s year. “We regularly host weddings and events May through October,” he said, “and then during the fall and winter season, outside of our peak wedding season, we were introduced to [Barr Hill]. So this dinner will be unique in that we’ll bring honey tasters for each guest, but also we ask Chef Chris [Chris Viaud of Greenleaf Restaurant in Milford] to feature honey from Bar Hill in all of his courses. He will use local ingredients and set a menu that’s specific to what’s available that week. There will be an instrumental musician playing during the night. There will be a cocktail hour, then the doors open followed by a four-course menu.”

Saragusa said that one of the special aspects of this dinner is the interaction guests have with the chef. “Typically when you go to a restaurant,” he said “you’re not really seeing the chef at all. Between each course, we ask the chef to come out and explain what they did, where they sourced the ingredients, but then also the thought behind that individual plate. And so having Chris and then even Emilee [Pastry Chef Emilee Viaud] with the dessert just gives a different interaction with the guests and the chefs.”

Chef Viaud is looking forward to the Dinner. “This dinner is going to be a fun one,” he said, “where we’re incorporating honey in each course. We are making sure that we’re kind of finding creative ways to highlight the honey so that way you can taste it throughout each course.” He used the main course as an example: “We do a take on a honey-glazed ham. So we’re going to do a coriander and a pink peppercorn honey glaze mix. [We take] a pork loin from one of the local farms and roast that just gently and then brush it with the honey glaze, then reduce that down with a little bit of butter to create a pan sauce. My wife is the pastry chef at my restaurants as well, so she’ll be making a honey panna cotta.”

“I think it’s going to be a fun-filled dinner,” Chef Viaud said.

2nd Annual Bee’s Knees Dinner
When: Friday, Oct. 25, from 6 to 9 p.m.
Where: Westbrook Inn (49 S. Main St., Derry, 965-6228, thewestbrookinn.com
Tickets: $95 at Eventbrite.com.
The four-course dinner will be cooked by two-time James Beard Award-nominated Chef Chris Viauld of Greenleaf Restaurant and Pastry Chef Emilee Viaud.

Featured Photo: Chris Viaud. Courtesy photo.

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