Not to minimize the approaching millennium and concomitant Y2K anxieties, but to me the primary significance of 1999 lies in it being the 50-year anniversary of M.F.K. Fisher’s English translation of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste. What makes this landmark 1825 treatise on the culinary arts such an…

My wife turns to me and notes that we are walking on grass — noteworthy, I suppose, because we’re inside a restaurant. “If the menu has a Hee Haw theme, we’re outta here,” I tell her. But as the words leave my mouth, I start taking in the room and…