Who Knew: Long Live the Playhouse

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‘Who Knew?’ is sponsored by Walter Stewart’s Market. * * *

Shared experience is powerful stuff. 

Where, once upon a time, all the world lined up to see Gone with the Wind, The Godfather, or E.T., we now sit in separate little rooms on separate little screens watching algorithmically programmed little dances performed by strangers and their cats and then read torturous think-pieces that ask when we all stopped getting along. Movies often get made now for focus-grouped market segmentations for maximum merch sales, not for all of us, and as a result, there are, at my last count, several thousand installments of the Transformers franchise. Movie palaces around the country (and as nearby as Darien) have been razed to become mixed-use buildings, providing more little rooms for more little screens. I’m sure I sound like a nostalgic old-timer here, but I’ve missed those golden late 80’s afternoons at the Orinda theater (a classic movie palace of the highest order) where le tout 7th grade would also be in attendance, and also, since I’m leaning into my new persona, would you please get off my lawn?

The First and Possibly Only Annual Who Knewies: A Very Subjective Compendium of What’s Best Around Here

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‘Who Knew?’ is sponsored by Walter Stewart’s Market. This month, my husband and I will celebrate our tenth anniversary of calling New Canaan home. While it sometimes feels like it’s only been a week, this has been an action-packed decade. Like Junior Nutmeggers out to earn our advanced badges, we studiously spent our nights and weekends checking out tried-and-true local haunts, finding the best backroad shortcuts, and adopting the cares and cadences of a Fairfield County life. 

Like anyone who harbors secret dreams of being an ungodly hybrid of Oprah and Martha, flying between my stately homes in Montecito and Maine with a trunkful of Loro Piana and a terrified personal staff, I’ve been quietly collecting personal favorites, a definitive list of Approved Things™ to share with friends and visitors to our fair corner of the world. This month, I’m making that list public, so I can share something back with a community that’s given me so much to enjoy.

Who Knew: You Guys, There’s a Secret Ice Cream Club

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‘Who Knew?’ is sponsored by Walter Stewart’s Market. You don’t need to watch The Bear (although if you haven’t, let’s remedy that immediately–I’ll wait) to know that the heart of every culinary business is community, not commodity. We eat to stay alive, of course, but what makes being alive so darn enjoyable is the variety of things we get to eat and the people we get to meet along the way to find our next meal. To that end, it might behoove you to know that New Canaan has a homegrown, handmade micro-batch ice cream business that specializes in artful, adventurous flavor combinations, created by local chef and mom Karla Sorrentino. She dreams up kinds of ice cream that you’d have to travel far to find elsewhere, ones that would make Willy Wonka blush.

Who Knew: New Canaan’s DNA

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‘Who Knew?’ is sponsored by Walter Stewart’s Market. Is it too on-the-nose to start a column about historical exploration in New Canaan with a Back to the Future reference? Because I’m about to. 

I’ve stood at the corner of Main and Elm streets and wished for a backpack full of Doc’s plutonium rods and a DeLorean whose dials I could fiddle with endlessly. It would provide the perfect front-row seat to the past nature of this place. What kinds of dinosaurs roamed these fair fields during the Mesozoic era?

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Who Knew: We’re Picking Up What ‘Blackbird’ Is Putting Down

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‘Who Knew?’ is sponsored by Walter Stewart’s Market. Concept restaurants are older than you might think. Long before the Polo Bar traded in clubby, manufactured exclusivity, and even before Olive Garden hatched the infinite breadstick, 11th-century Chinese restaurateurs conducted an early prototype of market research. Though it’s unlikely that focus groups were convened behind one-way mirrors, and data-mining for diner insights had yet to be invented, Song dynasty restaurant visionaries noticed that many of their patrons were visitors from other regions and tailored their menus to these specific tastes. Thus, a merchant visiting Hangzhou from Kaifeng might find a familiar bowl of noodle soup, and the buzzy hotspot was born. 

Ten centuries later, a Friday night reservation for four was procured for Blackbird, Z Hospitality Group’s latest restaurant concept.