Food & Drink
Family Style
The region’s top chefs
and wine director
share their favorite
holiday meals and
traditions
BY LIZ JOHNSON
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOSEPH CIARDIELLO
On Thanksgiving morning, the streets
of New York are lined with happy people
cheering on the Macy’s Thanksgiving
Day parade. By noon, though, the crowds
have gone home to their families and the
streets are litter-strewn and eerily quiet.
José Andrés, a Spanish immigrant who
is now one of America’s foremost chefs,
found himself wandering those empty
streets in 1991, on his first Thanksgiving
in America.
“My first Thanksgiving, in terms of
sitting down with a lot of friends and
cooking,” Andrés recalls, “that didn’t
happen. And when you are away [from
home], you are very lonely. From then
on, I made sure for Thanksgiving I was
going to be with someone.”
Togetherness, of course, is a universal
theme for the holidays—regardless of
which you may celebrate. But when we
asked three of the Northeast Corridor’s
top chefs and one of its best wine direc-
tors to give us advice on making our
holiday meals the best they can be, we
never thought their answers would lead
us back to the camaraderie at our own
tables. That’s not to say we didn’t learn
quite a bit along the way.
All four of our food and wine gurus—
Andrés, Tony Maws, Michael Solomonov
and Belinda Chang—have something
to celebrate this year: Each was named
top in his or her field or region at the
James Beard Foundation Awards in May.
In a competition that is considered the
Oscars of the food world, Solomonov,
owner of Percy Street Barbecue, Xochitl
and Zahav in Philadelphia, won Best
Chef Mid-Atlantic; Maws, owner of Crai-
gie on Main in Cambridge, won Best
Chef Northeast; and Chang, the current
GM and wine director of Monkey Bar
in Manhattan, won the Outstanding
Wine Service award for her work at The
Modern restaurant. Andrés, who owns
America Eats Tavern, Jaleo, minibar,
Oyamel Cocina Mexicana and Zayti-
nya, all in Washington, D.C.—and who
recently expanded his empire to Las
Vegas and Beverly Hills—was named
Outstanding Chef.
