Tasting Menu

This was the last illustration I did for Gourmet magazine. The article was about tasting menus at restaurants. The magazine had changed since I'd started doing art for it twenty years earlier. Looking back on it, most of the art I did was cartography, fun illustrated maps, because Gourmet was as much about places as it was about the food. But I'd also been a great fan of Marvin Friedman, a longtime contributor whose wonderful line illustrations captured the interior spaces where food was prepared and eaten. This image is very unlike his, more like Bemelmans, really, but it's an homage of a kind, a celebration of the kinds of places we like to spend time in.