The Tonka Bean Is Banned. So Why Is It Popping Up on Dessert Menus?

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The Illicit Appeal of the Tonka Bean

The tonka bean, a wizened-looking South American seed, is beloved for its complex almond-vanilla scent, often appearing as an ingredient in perfumes. Outside the United States, it has also long been utilized by chefs, but studies have indicated that coumarin, a chemical compound in the plant, can cause liver damage in animals, and the Food and Drug Administration banned the bean in commercial foods in 1954. Now, with reports that the minuscule amounts used to impart big flavor are harmless (and the F.D.A. seemingly not particularly interested in enforcing the ban in recent years), tonka is showing up on dessert menus here. Thea Gould, 30, the pastry chef at the daytime luncheonette La Cantine and evening wine bar Sunsets in Bushwick, Brooklyn, was introduced to tonka after the restaurant’s owner received a jar from France, where it’s a widely used ingredient. Gould says the bean is an ideal stand-in for nuts — a common allergen — and infuses it into panna cotta, whipped cream and Pavlova. Ana Castro, 35, the chef and owner of the New Orleans seafood restaurant Acamaya, discovered tonka as a young line cook at Betony, the now-closed Midtown Manhattan restaurant. Entranced by the ingredient’s grassy, stone fruit-like notes, she’s used it to flavor a custardy corn nicuatole, steeped it into roasted candy squash purée and grated it fresh over a lush tres leches cake. And at the Musket Room in New York’s NoLIta, the pastry chef Camari Mick, 30, balances tonka’s richness with acidic citrus like satsuma and bergamot. Over the past year, she’s incorporated it into a silky lemon bavarois and a candy cap mushroom pot de crème and whipped it into ganache for a poached pear belle Hélène. “Some people ask our staff, ‘Isn’t tonka illegal?’” she says. Their answer: Our pastry chef’s got a guy. — Tanya Bush

How Madrid’s Most Famous Street Became Cool

Praising Madrid’s Gran Vía is like talking up the Champs-Élysées in Paris or New York’s Fifth Avenue. But unlike those touristy shopping corridors, Spain’s most famous street is also central to the coolest parts of its city, whether its major museums — the Prado, Thyssen-Bornemisza and Reina Sofía — or the nightclubs and restaurants just north in the gay-leaning Chueca district. (Don’t miss La Llorería, a casual counter where three former high-end chefs serve inventive small plates like oyster escabeche with jalapeños.) But Gran Vía has also become a neighborhood unto itself: More than a dozen luxury hotels have opened there in recent years, including an Edition, a Mandarin Oriental Ritz, a Four Seasons and a JW Marriott. Restaurants and bars good enough to attract Madrileños back to a hectic area they’d long avoided came next, many of them inside the hotels. At the Thompson, the brand’s first European outpost, the Omar serves sweet tomato salads and laminated pastries, and Hijos de Tomás, a piano bar, is known for its classic cocktails. One of the busiest of the many rooftop venues in town is El Jardín de Diana, a 10th-floor terrace at the Hyatt Centric that offers views of the architecture, as well as forest mushroom fondue. Nearby is Angelita, a wine and cocktail bar that pairs drinks with ambitious takes on local dishes, like octopus salad with sunomono dressing; Ikigai Flor Baja, the city’s top sushi place, featuring fresh Spanish ingredients (a second location recently opened in Salamanca); and Wow Concept, a colorful avant-garde clothing and design store decorated with oversize hot pink human sculptures. This winter, the designer Philippe Starck will make his debut on Gran Vía with the Brach, a second location for the Paris boutique hotel of the same name. — Kurt Soller

A Diamond-and-Emerald David Yurman Necklace That Channels Halley’s Comet

The magic of a starburst in the night sky has long captured the imagination of fine jewelers, thanks largely to the contributions of the British astronomer Edmond Halley. In 1705, he predicted, correctly, that a particular comet would streak across the atmosphere exactly 53 years later and, though he didn’t live to see it, the luminous ball of gases and dust was subsequently named for him. By the time Halley’s comet re-emerged in 1835, Georgian-era jewelry makers were ready to celebrate: Ladies began wearing brooches with cascades of precious stones meant to evoke celestial combustion. The fascination has never waned, as evidenced by this white-gold collar, made with an effusion of diamonds and shield-cut Zambian emeralds, by the New York-based jeweler David Yurman. Halley’s comet won’t be visible again until 2061 but, in the meantime, this effervescent necklace keeps the flame alive. David Yurman High Jewelry Liberty Emerald statement necklace, price on request, davidyurman.com. — Nancy Hass

Pierre Paulin’s F300 Chair, a ‘Star Trek’ Staple, Is Rereleased

“Chairs,” as the Swiss-born French architect Le Corbusier purportedly once said, “are architecture.” The French designer Pierre Paulin, one of the singular talents who emerged in his wake, took the notion as gospel. Over his 60-year career as a furniture maker, Paulin, who died at 81 in 2009, created a remarkable number of iconic seats, many still in production — the Tongue, the Groovy, the Mushroom, the Ribbon. But one of his most groundbreaking efforts, the F300, was manufactured only from 1967 until 1984 by Artifort, the Dutch company with which he often collaborated, and thus has achieved mythic status. It was one of the few pieces that Paulin made from fiberglass, with stretch upholstery over a deeply recessed foam seat that gave it a slinglike feeling. Now the chair has been rereleased by the Danish furniture house Gubi in light spring green or alabaster white, as shown here with an enveloping alpaca velvet seat. The original, which was featured in the moodily lit private quarters of the U.S.S. Enterprise on “Star Trek: The Next Generation” (1987-94), conveyed a certain voluptuous futurism; this new model offers an even cushier and more serene proposal. Pierre Paulin F300 lounge chair, from $2,300, gubi.com. — Nancy Hass

Photo assistant: Rebecca Thandi Norman

A Watch Which Tracks the Phases of the Moon

One might assume that counterfeit watches — those low-priced fakes sold by city sidewalk vendors around the world — are a modern phenomenon. But high-end dupes, it turns out, are nothing new in the watch world, with the first examples dating back to at least the 1760s. In the late 19th century, watchmakers in Glashütte, Germany, revered for their exquisitely handcrafted pocket watches, saw the town’s name ripped off by their counterparts in Switzerland, who were inscribing timepieces with the words “System Glashütte.” Not long after, in 1916, the German artisans started labeling their own products “Original Glashütte”: Almost 80 years later, the quality mark inspired the moniker of the brand that evolved from their work. Known for constructing all its movements and even its dials in-house — a rarity in the industry — Glashütte Original is now debuting a new watch for women: the Serenade Luna, which, as its name suggests, features a moon-phase display on its face. The watch is available with a stainless-steel bracelet or an alligator-leather strap in blue or green. The latter, in a mossy shade that borders on khaki, attaches to a matching dial with a sun-ray finish — created through a metal-brushing technique that produces fine lines radiating out from a central point — as well as a diamond-encrusted bezel in red gold. (The metal has a higher copper content than the better-known rose gold.) The hour markers, too, glitter with tiny gems, creating a starry-sky effect to surround the mother-of-pearl moon. — Jameson Montgomery