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January 31, 2008
Okay, so you don't want to go out to watch the game and cooking is not an option. What can you order besides pizza? Plenty, as you already know (hey, we live in New York City, folks!). But we've found some particularly mouthwatering Super Bowl delivery specials, many of which involve pork. Mmmm . . . pork. Momofuku will deliver their glorious bo ssam -- a whole pork shoulder cooked to tender perfection. It comes...
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When it comes to sushi our tastes skew authentic. Mackerel. Amberjack. Occasionally a tuna and natto hand roll, not Christmas or Dragon rolls. Nevertheless, Gothamist remains a sucker for a gimmick. So when Sakae Sushi, a Singapore-based kaiten – or conveyor belt sushi restaurant – recently opened its first New York City location we couldn’t wait to tear open our disposable chopsticks and begin grabbing tasty morsels as they paraded down the runway. Midtown...
Continue Reading "Now, Isn’t That Special?: Yakitori East’s Shirako "
Imagine that final beach scene in Planet of the Apes, but substitute every small patch of sand for a chain restaurant and that’ll give you an idea of where the NY restaurant scene might be heading – all blown up, with Charlton Heston eventually smashing his fists into a huge pile of thermal cardboard coffee cup sleeves instead of foamy surf. Just a few weeks after Heston’s 2nd birthday in 1926, the very first White...
Continue Reading "In Search of White Tower"January 30, 2008
A study to be published later this year in the Journal of Food Safety proves that George Costanza’s cavalier method of double dipping his chip is, in fact, “like putting your whole mouth right in the dip.” For those who may have missed the Seinfeld episode or somehow not seen it reenacted at every party serving dip since it aired in 1993, we’ve posted the scene below. Suffice it to say that Costanza’s preferred dipping...
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Photographs by Tejal Rao With his wife Martine running the front of the house, chef Alex Ureña has made a few more adjustments to Pamplona, their small East 28th Street restaurant known as erstwhile hell for sconce connoisseurs, but consistently a solid bet for modern Spanish food at a good price point. Following Frank Bruni’s 2 star Times review in November, Pamplona introduced a weekday lunch, soon following that up with a brunch menu....
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January 30, 2008
This week in the Times, Bruni one-stars Lebanese Ilili, saying “Ilili is probably the atmospherically grandest excursion into Middle Eastern cooking that New York has ever seen.” While much of the menu is inconsistent, he loves the kebabs and kaftas. Says the service is “occasionally confused.” And get the essmalieh for dessert. In Dining Briefs, Peter Meehan goes to Abraço Espresso (pictured), says “it’s tiny, it brews excellent coffee, and the little food that it...
Continue Reading "Wednesday Food News: Early Edition"
The 21 Club opened on New Year’s Eve 1930 at 21 West 52nd Street as a speakeasy and restaurant. Legend has it that when powerful gossip columnist Walter Winchell was banned from the club, he ran an item wondering why the 21 Club had not yet been raided by Prohibition agents. (Winchell, of course, was the inspiration for the character of J.J. Hunsecker in The Sweet Smell of Success, which features several scenes at 21.)...
Continue Reading "John Greeley, 21 Club Chef"January 29, 2008
Sure, you could go to a traditional sports bar to watch the Super Bowl, but that would just be so . . . traditional. We've rounded up a few more options for you -- find one to suit your mood. For something a little less ordinary, try the Blind Tiger. Having cleared up their liquor license drama from early last year, they've been up and back in action for some time now. As for...
Continue Reading "Where to Watch the Super Bowl (and What to Eat)?"
At the risk of turning this into a cheese sandwich blog, we pose the following question: What do you get when you take a grilled cheese, arguably the Platonic form of childhood comfort food, and let Anne Saxelby put her spin on it? A decidedly grown-up version known as the Grayson and B&B's Grilled Cheese. As soon as we heard about this new sandwich, Gothamist sped down to the Saxelby Cheesemongers. The first thing that...
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The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is in charge of construction on the new 1 World Trade Center – AKA the Freedom Tower – is now seeking developers to design, build and operate a 34,000-square-foot restaurant on the 100th and 101st floors; whoever wins the bid may also win rights to operate the observation deck planned for the 102nd floor. The Authority is gazing into its crystal construction ball and seeing...
Continue Reading "Freedom Tower Seeks Bids on New Sky High Restaurant"January 28, 2008
This weekend Gowanus Lounge was first to note the unexpected closure of the 2nd Street Cafe at Seventh Avenue in Park Slope. The decade old restaurant, which on weekends had all the charm of a daycare center on adderall, had undergone a major renovation last summer. OTBKB hears word from a former employee that he/she was given just two days notice. Part of the ever-widening quicksand consuming New York restaurants? No word yet on the...
Continue Reading "Park Slope’s Growing Ghost Town"
Chocolate, cheese and beer are all part of a well-balanced epicurean diet. Each starts with humble ingredients – cacao pods, sugar, milk, barley, malt and yeast – that are transformed by a seemingly magical process. Gothamist recently learned about all three from passionate experts in a “Chocolate, Beer and Cheese Pairing,” that took place at Jimmy’s No. 43. As anyone who’s ever had a cheese plate at McSorley’s can tell you, beer and cheese isn’t...
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Luigi Di Palo, a youthful 56-year-old better known as Lou, runs Little Italy’s century-old Di Palo’s Fine Foods with his brother and sister. The store started out as a latteria, selling only fresh cheese, milk and butter. Di Palo likes to say that he and his family are among the “last of the real, original Little Italy people.” These days the store is a little Italy in its own right with hundreds of Italian specialties...
Continue Reading "Luigi DiPalo, Di Palo's Fine Foods "January 25, 2008
Padre Figlio: In Italian, the name means father and son, so it’s no surprise that this new Italian steakhouse is run by Mario and Antonio Cerra, the father and son team behind Da Antonio. After ten years, they’ve sold that establishment and are joining forces again to focus on high-end Italian meats, such as rib eye and a porterhouse of Piemontese beef for two. Exotic meats include New Zealand venison, buffalo, ostrich and boar. There’s...
Continue Reading "Openings Roundup: Padre Figlio, Sakae Sushi, Persephone"
While we're always on the hunt for both the new and the unfamiliar in New York's kitchens, we also have standby favorite restaurants. One place we find ourselves returning to over and over again is Bedford Street's 'Ino, the sliver of a cafe and wine bar specializing in panini, tramezzini, bruschetta and a laundry list of wines (mostly Italian), with a handful available by the glass or half-bottle. Intimacy comes to mind in a...
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January 25, 2008
At the Ethnic Market highlights international specialty foods and ingredients that you're very unlikely to find at your local Gristedes. What you see before is bag of dried hibiscus flowers, or karkade, as these dried little blossoms are known in Egypt. You can boil them up to make a wonderfully red-hued tea that's packed with plenty of vitamin C. As you can probably guess from the image on the packaging it's sometimes served hot...
Continue Reading "At the Ethnic Market: Karkade"January 24, 2008
Okay, we realize that this isn't quite as crucial to the basics of a kitchen as either a sharp knife or a cast iron pan, but in our minds, it still ranks as a kitchen essential. Why? Because not only do we use our Microplane grater quite frequently, but it does what it is designed to do absolutely flawlessly. The Microplane was originally a woodworking tool, but made the crossover into the kitchen. According to...
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About once a year or so Gothamist makes a pilgrimage to Bensonhurst’s 18th Avenue for some Sicilian soul food. A little over 15 years ago, 18th Avenue between Bay Ridge Parkway and McDonald Avenue was dubbed "Cristoforo Colombo Boulevard." While that entire length may have been named in honor of the Italian explorer, the stretch where we usually explore the wonders of Southern Italian food lies between between Bay Ridge Parkway and 65 Street. Depending...
Continue Reading "Get Your Sicilian Soul Food On: 18th Avenue Style"
Prospect Heights mom and Park Slope Food Coop member Yvonne Brechbuhler got a little something extra in a head of organic lettuce she recently brought home: a little green frog “no bigger than the tip of her pinky finger," according to the Daily News. Brechbuhler discovered the frog (pictured) only when she took out the lettuce to make a salad – after it had been in her refrigerator for three days. She insists that her...
Continue Reading "Frog Found in Co-op Lettuce Wins Fame and Fortune"
The Times ran a follow-up today about their investigation that found abnormally high levels of mercury in fish served at area restaurants. Toxicology reports from 44 pieces of sushi, ordered from places including Nobu Next Door and Sushi Seki, may in fact contribute to some New Yorkers’ 3 times higher-than-average blood levels of mercury. It turns out, however, that most New Yorkers just don’t care. The mercury issue, while especially serious for pregnant women and...
Continue Reading "Diners Unfazed by Mercurial Tuna Investigation"January 23, 2008
The “Beer Kir” at Marco Moreira’s 15 East is a Japanese beer-based mixed drink: Sapporo is floated on a shot of honeyed sweet potato vinegar, adding a sweet-sour edge to the dry lager. For the purposes of home experimentation, we found Benímosu ($11.35 for 4 oz.), the same artisanal vinegar used in Beer Kir at Katagiri, a Japanese food store on 59th Street. Made in Kyoto from purple potatoes and koji rice, Benímosu has clean,...
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This soup is of Georgian origin, where pairing red beans and walnuts appears to be some sort of national pastime. It's a rustic soup, lusciously creamy and actually good for you, too. (Unless you overload on the olive oil, that is. Since we don't specify quantities on that, it's entirely your call.) Red Bean and Walnut Soup (adapted from Please to the Table by Anya von Bremzen and John Welchman) 1 lb. dried red beans...
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Photo of tuna at Tsukiji Market in Tokyo courtesy Tien Mao. Hold onto your chopsticks; the Times recently commissioned a toxicology report on sushi from 13 local establishments and got back some rather unappetizing results:More than half of the restaurants and stores surveyed sold sushi with so much mercury that eating just six pieces a week would exceed the amount the EPA says can be safely consumed by an adult of average weight, which the...
Continue Reading "Mercury Rising Higher in Tuna"
This week in the Times, Bruni one-stars Mesa Grill (pictured), knocking the restaurant down from the two stars given it by William Grimes in 2000. Says that while the Bobby Flay restaurant “has considerable charms… on balance [it] presents only flickers of the excitement it did [when it opened] in 1991… It’s an overly familiar, somewhat tired production. More to the point, it’s an inconsistent one.” Peter Meehan goes to Hakata Tonton for $25 and...
Continue Reading "Wednesday Food News: Early Edition"January 22, 2008
Today the Board of Health is expected to pass regulations requiring 10% of the city's 23,000 restaurants to prominently display calorie counts on their menus. A previous push to require calorie disclosure was blocked by a federal judge in September; the new rules will be mostly limited to fast food restaurants that have 15 or more locations nationwide. And the restaurant industry is expected to take the city to court again. In a statement to...
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January 22, 2008
Gothamist has dined in all kinds of joints in Flushing’s Chinatown – killer Cantonese, top-flight dim sum and lamb-laden Northern Chinese. The area we haven’t explored much is the food courts, mazes of stalls so diverse that Tony Bourdain could easily cull material for an episode or two. It’s not that we are squeamish, it’s just that the signs are all in Chinese and many of the proprietors speak little English. A non-Chinese speaker...
Continue Reading "Eat Like a Chengdu Gourmet at a Flushing Food Stall"
Photo of the still open Gray's Papaya by Wallyg Crain’s takes notes of a sharp spike in restaurant closings, with real estate brokers reporting many more closures than usual and a surge in restaurant auctions; the city's leading restaurant auctioneer tells Crain’s he’s been handling “20 liquidations a month for the past year, twice as many as the year before.” Especially telling is that many of the auctions involve seasoned operators rather than neophytes who...
Continue Reading "Obscene Rents 86 Growing Number of Restaurants"January 21, 2008
Some people may prefer other bakeries, but from the looks of the crowd at the Magnolia Bakery's new Upper West Side location, people are hungering for some heavily frosted cupcakes. If the treats are available, that is. We stopped by the bakery yesterday, a day after its Saturday opening, and the shop was packed. And many of the customers were victim to the opening frenzy, because Magnolia ran out of cupcakes for a spell...
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What do you get when you mix hot chefs like Seamus Mullen, Joey Campanero, and Josh DeChellis with top mixologists like David Wondrich, Dale DeGroff, Audrey Saunders, Julie Reiner, Jim Meehan and Eben Freeman (and many more, pictured above), a brand new space in the East Village and swirl in a dash of festive atmosphere? The opening party for the Astor Culinary Center. The new Astor Center is offering classes for food and wine...
Continue Reading "Get Your Taste On"January 19, 2008
Dean’s: A third Dean’s Restaurant is now open in Tribeca. The Italian eatery has won fans with their signature thin crust brick oven pizza made with homemade mozzarella and a dozen potential toppings. But if amazing brick oven pizza isn’t your thing, Dean’s also has a full Italian menu with pasta dishes like Parpardella Toscana, a wide ribbon pasta with wild mushroom and sundried tomatoes in a light cream white wine sauce. There are also...
Continue Reading "Openings Roundup: Dean's, Seymour Burton, Chop Suey"
Easy, sugar fiends - the new Magnolia Bakery outpost on the Upper West Side (Columbus at 69th Street) isn't quite opening at 11AM as Eater reported yesterday. We walked by around 9:30AM and the sign said that they anticipated a noon opening. Magnolia had always been a popular West Village stop for more super-sugary and homey desserts when a seemingly sudden cupcake craze hit the city. Next thing we knew, there were analyses of...
Continue Reading "Upper West Side Braces for Magnolia-zation"January 18, 2008
Even after only being open since October, Dell'Anima, the brainchild of some Babbo and Del Posto alums, is already tough to get into. Sure, it's partially because it's a small space, with seating for just over forty, but it's also due to the cozy, warm and inviting atmosphere, friendly and knowledgeable staff, and for the delicious rustic Italian fare. Grab yourself one of the six seats in the open kitchen and watch Chef Gabriel Thompson...
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It’s rare when a book causes the sudden desire to collect large quantities of AP flour, unsalted butter and sugar, but that’s what Greg Patent’s A Baker’s Odyssey might do to you. Other traditional bake-books operate within the wholly confined orbit of strudel and streusels; A Baker’s Odyssey has strudels galore but is also about forgotten or esoteric American immigrant recipes, so it also covers kulich and chin chin cookies, shoofly pie and puran poori....
Continue Reading "Feed Your Mind: A Baker's Odyssey"
Photo of Crosby Connection space by Billy Chasen Photo of the meatball hero and a smoked gouda and ham sandwich (with apples) by Tien Mao On Crosby Street between Bleecker and Houston, there's a literally hole-in-the-wall sandwich shop called The Crosby Connection. Joey Cramarossa, an ex-cop from New Jersey, works out a tiny space to serve up unbelievably fresh, delicious, filling and reasonably priced sandwiches and salads at $5-6 each. The meatball hero (with...
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It's always disappointing to go to a restaurant you immediately fall in love with for the atmosphere and the wide-ranging beer list, and walk away a bit let down by the food. At Jimmy's No. 43 in the East Village, the subterranean cavernous restaurant with a generous draught list of international beers, the menu changes from day to day to include local ingredients and showcase what is in season. There is a long narrow...
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