“My friends Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon live in a shingled Berkeley Craftsman bungalow that reminds me of my days as the child of local radicals.”

Thus begins Remodelista‘s paean to the literary super-couple’s gorgeous Berkeley home. This piece is something else, you guys. It’s book porn meets real estate porn meets writer porn; all enhanced by Waldman’s anecdotes. Here’s one about their office, which was once a doctor’s consulting room: “‘Someone in the historical society told us he did abortions. I have this image of this warm and lovely guy doing a public service for the women of Berkeley.’ The gilded body cast on the wall is of Ayelet during one of her pregnancies.”

The house is very beautiful indeed: book filled (as you’d expect), faithfully restored, and charmingly appointed with sentimental family tchotchkes—here a candlestick smuggled out of Minsk by Waldman’s grandmother, there are photo of her grandfather’s furrier union in New York City. Art inspired by The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, is found in the living room and study. There’s also a velvet-covered window seat (drool), and a cute havdalah spice box.

But not for nothing does Gawker describe Waldman as a “lifestyle controversialist“: apparently, the photograph of books just scattered about la-di-da at the bottom of the stairs was not staged. What a way to live.

See it for yourself here.

The post Book/Real Estate Porn With Ayelet Waldman And Michael Chabon appeared first on Jewcy.

This past weekend, Mile End, Tablet Magazine, and ABC Home teamed up to present The Future of Jewish Food, where insiders from across the food industry talked Jews, food, and Jews eating food. Top Chef’s Gail Simmons (who wrote “keep cooking” in my copy of her book!) and Mitchell Davis of the James Beard Foundation (the only acronym that night where the ‘J’ didn’t stand for ‘Jewish’) discussed the future of the Jewish kitchen with food writer Joan Nathan, and then David Sax, author of Save the Deli, probed the future of the Jewish deli with the guys behind uber-trendy new-wave delis like Brooklyn’s Mile End, San Francisco’s Wise Sons, Portland’s Kenny and Zukes, and Saul’s Deli in Berkeley.

The highlight of the event was when Nathan asked her panelists to predict what Jewish food will look like in the year 3000. Simmons assured the crowd, perched on stylish chairs in the ABC Home event space, that there would still be matzoh balls. I like to imagine the ensuing sigh of relief as collective and not just mine.

Check out Tablet’s footage from the event, just be sure to wipe the drool off your computer keyboard after. We fully endorse event MC Alana Newhouse’s endorsement of lox:

The post I’ve Seen the Future of Jewish Food, and There Are Matzoh Balls appeared first on Jewcy.