Table of contents for April 2018 in Esquire

You may not have lusted after a meat slicer before, but then you see a Berkel and things change. The Dutch company, founded in Rotterdam in 1898 by a butcher named Wilhelmus Adrianus Van Berkel, is perhaps most famous for its elaborate manual flywheel machines used to slice expensive hunks of prosciutto in restaurants. This electric model, the 250 ($989; theberkelworld.com), retains the standout style in a smaller, easier-to-use package. You’ll still need to provide the cured meats, however. For more gear (and recipes) to entertain your guests with, turn to page 58.…

I drank the Kool-Aid, then chugged it—ad nauseam. I rocked Myspace after dabbling in Friendster. I posted pixelated selfies on Flickr, polished my résumé on LinkedIn, and joined Facebook when only college students were allowed. I had a blog, then a Tumblr. I once Yelped about my dentist. I joined Twitter in 2007, four years before the term tweet would be recognized by Merriam-Webster. When I first embraced social media, I had a hunch that these digital platforms would change the world for the better—“bring the world closer together,” as Facebook’s mission statement boasts. The widespread sharing of information and political organizing powered the Arab Spring, fueled Obama’s 2008 campaign, and birthed the Numa Numa Guy. But there’s a considerable trade-off when the majority of us are consuming this stuff…

In some alternate universe, Don Draper shuts the blinds of his corner office, lifts an attaché case made of attractively grained walnut onto his lap, snaps open the clasps, and raises the lid. A warm glow illuminates his face. He unbuttons his jacket, grasps the joystick in front of him, and starts playing Street Fighter II. The work of Swedish designer Love Hultén tends to give you peculiar thoughts. “I like to rock the boat a little and present strange alternatives,” says the 33-yearold Gothenburg native. He does this by taking the injection-molded plastic arcade-game consoles of the 1980s and 1990s and lovingly alchemizing them into things of minimalist beauty. The blocky graphics and finger-numbing game play remain blissfully the same, but everything else around them has been upgraded. “These…

We understand the appeal of a good functional detail. That little thrill you get when discovering a hidden pocket? We get that, too. But there are some cases where it’s okay to let function take a backseat to form. Cases like the tasseled loafer. Know that these are still eminently practical shoes. They will protect your feet as you move between points A and B. They’ve been doing just that since the late ’50s, when they became standard issue on prep-schoolers and undergrads across the country. And while nostalgia may be partly responsible for their resurgence, we’re pinning it on the go-to-hell charm of those tassels. Look at them, the freeloaders. Completely useless. They don’t attach to laces, or count your steps, or jingle when you walk. They don’t do…

Few things get us going here at Esquire as much as the Great Hat Debate. Are they even cool? And how do the men who wear them well pull it off? Two outspoken Esquire staffers make their cases. HAT HATER MATTHEW MARDEN It’s not that people haven’t looked good in hats. David Bowie looks amazing in his fedora in The Man Who Fell to Earth, for example. But the chances of anyone else looking that good are insanely slim. That’s the problem with hats: People try to copy others they admire—celebrities, for instance—but they will never look like that. A hat is hard to pull off authentically unless it’s part of your uniform. Like a cowboy, maybe. VS. HAT MAN MICHAEL HAINEY If you are a guy with any sense…

... If you come over to my place at any point after, say, 4:15, the first thing I’ll offer you is a cocktail. I’ll rattle off the classics: manhattan, negroni, margarita. Seventy-five percent of the time, people go for the margarita. Why? Because: It’s a margarita. In Spanish, I believe the word translates to “party-starter.” The drink is prepared with just enough theater—the squeezing of fresh lime, ice rattling in a shaker—to set a “you’re in fun hands” tone to the evening. The standard recipe will do. One of these variations will bring the house down. 3 MARGARITA Variations Gimmick-free twists on the classic Margarita Royale From Giuseppe González of Suffolk Arms, New York. Proof that bubbles can make everything better. 1 ½ oz tequila • ½ oz grapefruit juice •…

Avocado Mousse 1 avocado (pitted and peeled) • 1 egg yolk • 2 tbsp fresh tarragon (picked and chopped) • 2 tbsp chives (sliced) • ½ cup heavy cream • 1 tsp kosher salt • 1 clove garlic • 1 tbsp lemon juice • ⅔ cup extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for drizzling • crunchy salt (Maldon or fleur de sel) 1. Combine the first 8 ingredients in the bowl of your blender. 2. Roughly blend all ingredients until combined (a few seconds). 3a. Immediately pour in the olive oil—slowly, in stages, while blending on high speed until all of the oil is incorporated and the puree is silky and smooth. 3b. If you have a tamper tool, use while blending to scrape the sides. If not, turn the blender…

... Last spring, I examined the combination grill-and-smoker in the yard of my small Brooklyn co-op—at eight years old, it was flimsy, corroded, collapsing. I decided to replace it and settled on a modest improvement: 800 pounds of quarter-inch steel, welded into a massive, drumlike barrel and a four-shelf tower by Yoder Smokers of Hutchinson, Kansas. This “Loaded Durango” has three temperature gauges, multiple thermometer ports, a heat-management plate, and its own unique serial number. It cost $3,216.90, more than a quarter of which was shipping. It arrived by tractor-trailer. My co-op neighbors and I nicknamed it Choo-Choo. How had I become the guy who casually(ish) drops three grand on a nearly half-ton barbecue? Once, I’d been content to grill burgers and dogs over Webered briquettes. But soon I’d started…

“I NEED TO MAKE THINGS MINE. IT ANNOYS ME TO BUY SOMETHING THAT IS IMPOSED ON ME.”—LAPO ELKANN “SI, I WAS A BIT OF A PLAYBOY. WHY NOT?”—GIANNI AGNELLI “MOVE SLOWLY IF YOU MUST BUT DON’T STOP. ACTION GENERATES INSPIRATION.”—ROBERT EVANS “SLEEP? WHO NEEDS SLEEP?”—ARISTOTLE ONASSIS…

STORE INFORMATION For the items featured in Esquire, please consult the website or call the phone number provided. The Code, p. 39: Giorgio Armani loafers, armani.com. Joseph Abboud trousers, josephabboud.com. P. 40: Loafers: Church’s, church-footwear.com. Esquivel, 949-642-4423. Fratelli Rossetti, fratellirossetti.com. Siki Im Cross anorak, T-shirt, shorts, and leggings, barneys.com. Nike sneakers, nike.com. Undone watches, undone.watch. P. 41: Rolex watches, rolex.com. Berluti shoes, 212-439-6400. P. 42: Officine Générale jackets, T-shirt, trousers, and loafers, officinegenerale.com. Officine Générale tank top, 212-249-4053. Officine Générale women’s trousers, lagarconne.com. P. 43: Officine Générale jackets, striped shirt, and loafers, officinegenerale.com. Officine Générale jeans, tenetshop.com. Officine Générale white shirt, taborclt.com. Officine Générale trousers, mrporter.com. P. 44: Z Zegna suit, shirt, and tie, zegna.com. P. 45: Todd Snyder + Champion sweatshirt, toddsnyder.com. Bonobos T-shirt, bonobos.com. Dockers trousers and belt,…

A BRIEF MONTHLY EXPANSION ON A TOPIC EXPLORED ELSEWHERE IN THE ISSUE (SEE PAGE 58) The carrot, celery’s eccentric cousin, is a vegetable known for producing the feeling that you’re definitely going to eat something tastier and a lot less healthy later on. Because of its color and texture, it is an essential ingredient in salads, soups, and the Jolly Green Giant’s turds. The part of the carrot most commonly eaten is the orange-colored taproot, which, like Reddit users, is generally unattractive and grows up without exposure to sunlight. The orange hue is a product of beta-carotene, a pigment that is regularly cucked by alpha-carotene. Carrots may also be purple or yellow, if they are trying to get back at their parents. Although the word carrot derives from the Latin…

“Oh, there’s a big one,” Iliana Regan says. She’s standing at the edge of a pond holding a long stick that’s capped with a three-pronged spike, like Poseidon’s trident. Night has fallen, but Getty Sikora, a childhood friend of Regan’s, illuminates her way with a flashlight. With a quick flick, Regan plunges the shaft into the muddy fringes of the pond. When she lifts it up, there is a plump bullfrog pierced and wriggling at the end. She drops the frog into a bag with a bunch of its amphibian brethren and we set out to find more. It’s the weirdest hunting expedition I’ve ever been on, not least because it takes place on a suburban golf course about an hour south of Chicago, where Regan, one of the most…

On September 11, 2001, the Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad was sipping an Aperol in a Venetian café and calling her colleague Carlotta Gall, The New York Times’s Balkan correspondent, when she heard Gall answer with a gasp: “A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center!” Seierstad, now 47, returned to Oslo immediately. Armed with a wad of cash, a satellite phone, and a visa to Tajikistan, she joined up with Northern Alliance forces as they fought their way to Kabul. A month later, while most Western journalists in Pakistan were waiting for permission, Seierstad crossed the Hindu Kush with a group of nomads she had befriended. She arrived in Kabul on November 13, the day after it fell, passing scores of dead Taliban fighters strewn across the road. Since…

DISCOVER THE TASTE Going Great Lengths for Ingredients Talenti doesn’t take shortcuts in recipes. That means traveling to Belgium for some of the richest and highest quality chocolate around the globe. Thoughtful Traditions Making gelato is a centuries–old tradition. Talenti uses original methods with modern recipes to create unique and interesting flavor combos. Standing the Test of Time You can’t rush great gelato. Talenti spends extra time infusing flavor into each batch, and uses slow cooking methods to develop an unmistakable taste. DISCOVER TALENTI’S 40 AUTHENTIC GELATOS AND SORBETTOS AT TALENTIGELATO.COM…

• • • The more guys realize exercise is essential and not just a hobby, the better designers get at creating fitness gear that actually fits into our lives. German-Korean designer Siki Im nails the look with Siki Im Cross, a collection of windbreakers, shorts, tights, and tees made to take you from morning sweat sessions to Sunday-afternoon drinks. Yes, these monochrome pieces are packed with performance tech. And yes, the easy-to-layer elements will come in handy if you’re overheated or caught in a downpour. But they pass a tougher test, too: Mix this stuff in with your normal weekend wear and nobody will look twice (unless it’s to clock your style). ON MY WRIST THE CASE FOR CUSTOMIZATION • • • Most watch start-ups in the $200-to-$500 price bracket…

Dry cleaning is exorbitant, inconvenient, and so bloody abrasive that it obliterates your clothes. So join us in heralding the arrival of Techmerino, the fancy new Z Zegna performance fabric that can handle soap and water. The material is wool, but not the scratchy-sweater kind. This suit jacket feels light and loose, with a soft shoulder and an unlined body. Matching trousers cinch up with a drawstring, like sweatpants. Branded as Wash & Go, the suit functions as athletic gear you can wear while biking to and from work—and if you happen to be all sweaty when you get home, just strip it off and throw it in the laundry.…

Men hate the doctor’s office. Compared with women, we’re nearly half as likely to visit. And when it comes to two very prickly, male-specific health issues—erectile dysfunction and hair loss—going in for help feels especially uncomfortable. So a new school of start-ups aims to catch a younger generation of guys where they’re most at ease: on their phones. At home. Alone. Call it he-medicine. Companies like Roman (getroman.com), which prescribes ED meds, and Hims (forhims.com), which offers ED and hair-loss products, are putting a new face on medical conditions usually fronted by chisel-jawed baby boomers in TV commercials. Both use tech to cut out the pain points that prevent guys from getting help (the months-in-advance scheduling, the time lost in waiting rooms, the hurried consultation). Users answer questions online, which…

... Weather can be a bummer in Seattle, but it led chef Renee Erickson to a revelation. She was cooking outdoors when those familiar Pacific Northwest clouds started to roll in. She worried that her team wouldn’t have enough time to cook the salmon before rain doused the fire. Then she had an idea: Let’s throw it right on the coals, she recalls. “It was one of those aha moments.” The method may look perilous, but it’s a breeze if you follow the cues. Most important, you need to wait for the fire to fizzle out—gray coals, not red. At that point, place a whole salmon fillet onto the embers, and cover it with a pot or a bowl so that it cooks evenly. The skin of the fish will…

Shia LaBeouf is nervous about this story—“I have so much fear about this thing,” he confesses to me when we first meet—and it drives him to do what he’s always done when faced with something he cannot fully control: Prepare. Obsessively. For the past two months, he’s conducted practice interviews over the phone with his therapist, anticipating all of the possible scenarios, workshopping his responses to my questions. It’s been a long time since Vanity Fair put him on the cover of its August 2007 issue, wearing a spacesuit over a suit-suit (it looks as awkward as it sounds), and heralded him at age twenty-one as “the Next Tom Hanks.” More than a decade on, LaBeouf’s arc is less a stratospheric ascent than a misguided rocket wobbling across the sky,…

The Sparsholt Affair By Alan Hollinghurst Call Me by Your Name meets Evelyn Waugh in a gorgeous novel about the generations-long aftershocks of a youthful tryst. (Knopf, $29) American Histories: Stories By John Edgar Wideman A new book of short stories probing big matters—race, family, mortality—in singular style. (Scribner, $26) The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath By Leslie Jamison The Empathy Exams author is back with a provocative meditation on addiction. (Little, Brown, $30) On Grand Strategy By John Lewis Gaddis A sweeping analysis of strategy over the centuries from “the dean of Cold War historians.” (Penguin Press, $26) The Corporation By T.J. English The long-awaited followup to English’s epic Havana Nocturne reads like a deeply researched real-life Scarface. (William Morrow, $29) Soon By Andrew Santella Santella reveals the hidden…

Provenance still reigns supreme in watch collecting (why else do you think Paul Newman’s “Paul Newman Daytona” Rolex fetched a record $17.8 million last year?), but visible wear now commands a premium as well. Even more valued are timepieces that left the factory with a flaw. Enter the “tropical” dial Rolexes, some of the most prized models of all. For a few decades in the midcentury, Rolex applied a sun-protective chemical finish to its black dials. But instead of preventing fading, that coating accelerated discoloration. Over the years, the faces have turned a complex chocolate brown, an error compounded by the intense equatorial sun of certain regions. They’re covetable to a small but devoted group of collectors, and because the “flawed” dials were often replaced when brought in for service,…

Wearing pleated chinos used to be the quickest way to mark yourself as a dinosaur, a fossil from the style-sapped age of Casual Friday. After 15 years of flat-front pants, however, some extra breathing room in the top half of your trousers is a welcome change, especially when the leg keeps a clean taper. We’ve noticed this cut on the runway, and on stylish guys like Chris Pine, Ryan Reynolds, and young gun Brooklyn Beckham. Now that Dockers is getting in the game, you can expect to see it everywhere else, too. Might as well start with the mirror. HOW TO WEAR IT POP ART • • • Sprezzatura—the Italian art of a studied, unstudied presentation—is a lot like rhythm: You have it or you don’t, and you can’t really…

Here’s a hot tip: Invest in oil. Scented oil, that is. Unlike their alcohol-based spritz-and-go cousins, these highly concentrated extracts don’t overpower on first application. Rub a few drops on your wrist or neck and the fragrance hangs close to the skin throughout the day, spiking a bit when your body heats up. It’s a sustained, subtle way to make a statement—and when it comes to scent, subtlety should be your byword.…

JANUARY 5, 2018 Before they saw Oprah’s campaign-ready acceptance speech and Tommy Wiseau’s “Imma let you finish” moment, stars such as Laura Dern, Milo Ventimiglia, and Westworld standout Jimmi Simpson (seen above admiring his recent Esquire feature) saluted the nominees at Esquire’s first-ever Golden Globes party, cohosted by Editor in Chief Jay Fielden and philanthropists Mike and Irena Medavoy at their legendary Beverly Hills home. (It was for many years owned by James Cagney.) And if you happen to live near the Medavoys and heard a constant growling-purr, it was not Leonardo DiCaprio and his date, but Maserati shuttling a few lucky guests in the Ghibli, Levante, and Quattroporte.…

... The beef plate rib is the badass of barbecue, bigger than a sparerib, meatier than a short rib, with a gravitas to which baby backs vainly aspire. Pastrami is the high holy of the deli meat counter—salty and fat, with spice and smoke in luscious equipoise. You’re going to bring them together in a single magisterial mash-up: the pastrami beef rib. It won’t be easy. First, you need to procure the ribs—cut from bones six, seven, and eight of a steer’s lower rib cage. We’re talking brontosaurus-scale bones here, weighing in at one and a half to two pounds—each. Special-order them from your butcher, whom you will impress by citing the precise NAMI (North American Meat Institute) ID number of 123A. Or order grass-fed beef plates from Freeraiseddirect.com. Next…

Garrett Oliver, brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery Professor Fritz Briem 1809 Berliner Weisse ($7) Originally an “appellation contrôlée” out of Berlin, the slightly sour Berliner Weisse wheat-beer style can do some neat magic tricks. It’s spritzy, tangy, lemony, and light on its feet, and that gives it real talent at a summer barbecue. It’s a beer that’s equally great with shrimp, ribs, salad, pretty much anything. Many are made in the States these days, but the best is still German—Professor Fritz Briem 1809 Berliner Weisse. Don’t like sour beers? This will change your mind. Never heard of sour beers? Well, you’re in for a treat, then, aren’t you? Belinda Chang, Chicago-based sommelier Laherte Frères Rosé de Meunier Extra Brut ($43) For an outdoor party in the spring, there is almost nothing…

... Rental-kitchen blues got you down? If you’ve been searing your steaks on the stovetop for lack of outdoor space, consider the konro grill. Once a province of yakitori kitchens, these tabletop Japanese grills are making their way stateside for home cooks. “It’s an amazing piece of equipment,” says Josef Centeno, chef at Los Angeles’s Orsa & Winston and P. Y.T. “It’s a superior way to cook everything from fennel and sun-chokes to chicken livers and octopus to perfection.” If you fancy yourself a pit master slinging enough skewers to host a family reunion, check your expectations at the door; these squat tabletop grills aren’t meant to feed an army. What they lack in quantity, though, they make up for in portability and quality—you can carry one to your rooftop…

Emerging from the morning fog shrouding the art galleries and boutiques of Paris’s 7th Arrondissement, the police arrived at the Hôtel de La Salle at 9:00 on November 18, 2014. Once home to the author of France’s code of civil law and, after that, sundry dukes and duchesses, the seventeenth-century mansion was now the headquarters of Aristophil, an upstart investment company founded by Gérard Lhéritier, the son and grandson of a plumber. In just over two decades, the then-sixty-six-year-old Lhéritier—the “king of manuscripts,” as he’d been dubbed by the local media—had amassed the largest private collection of historical letters and manuscripts in the country, effectively cornering the market. Among his 130,000-odd holdings were André Breton’s original Surrealist Manifesto, love notes from Napoleon to Josephine, the last testament of Louis XVI,…

FLUSH WITH OPTIONS This season, you can find suede in every imaginable color. Jackets even come in fisherman’s yellow, just like your favorite raincoat—but try not to get this one wet. BLUE NOTES Even after all these years, BLUE SUEDE SHOES still put the beat in your feet. Whether you’re into Migos or Monk, they’ll fit in at any club. GO TO TOWN IN BROWN In the old days, brown suede was for cattlemen. Today, it’s more sophisticated and meant for city streets. For store information see page 115. Prop styling by JoJo Li for Hello Artists.…