Food news antipasto

Our first news nugget for this week falls under the ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ department: Anna Sanders, a reporter for the New York Daily News has an unusual and interesting food-related hobby. She likes to paint portraits of bagels. Food & Wine recently caught up with Sanders to discuss her bagel art.

We have some sad news to report: influential chef Gray Kunz has died at age 65. Kunz is best known for his work at the now-shuttered Lespinasse restaurant in New York, and for inventing a tool called the Kunz Spoon. Gray was voted Best American Chef by the James Beard Foundation in 1995. More recently, he was working at a hotel group in Asia where he led several locations of his restaurant Cafe Gray. He co-authored The Elements of Taste with Peter Kaminsky.

Yotam Ottolenghi may not have any outposts in Australia, but his fans should be happy to hear that one of his protégés has returned from working with the renowned chef and has opened her own deli. The Otis deli is run by Emily Herbert, who spent four years honing her skills at Ottolenghi NOPI in Belgravia in the UK.

Today was International Women’s Day. In recognition of this (really, it’s on the day that gets shorted by the start of DST in the US?), Food52 has 21 stories about the strongest women we know. They profile well-known women in food like Joyce Chen, Anna Del Conte, and Padma Lakshmi. In addition there are stories about people you might not know, such as Joan Gussow (the woman who gave Michael Pollan his ‘Eat Food’ line), and Freda DeKnight, a pioneer of African American cooking.