Welcome back to our semi-weekly column, Market Fresh, in which we take a look at one ingredient that's showing up in the city's Greenmarkets right now and tell you what to do with it. Last week, we experimented with sunchokes, and this week, we have a very special double-ingredient feature, using both Swiss chard and rhubarb.
Market Fresh: Cooking With Swiss Chard & Rhubarb
Six Fun NYC Oscar Parties
We know it might be hard to wrench you away from the chip and dip you had planned for Oscar night on Sunday, but heckling celebrities' fashion choices is best as a group activity, and often comes with cheap drinks. So click through for our guide to the city's best Oscar parties, ranging from glamorous dinners to silly contests and trivia. And we're pretty sure swooning over James Franco (or Anne Hathaway, however you roll) will be happening no matter where you go.
Eat Cetera
This week in food news: A sunset dinner at Brooklyn Grange, east coast and west coast chefs battle at Le Fooding, Betel's new dim sum brunch, and an end-of-summer pig roast at Fatty 'Cue tomorrow night!
Restaurant's Charge for Filtered Tap Water Explained
The Post set their fine-print gumshoes loose on the city’s restaurant menus and uncovered numerous crimes against the dining public, like restaurants charging for normally free items like bread, butter, and tap water. Times dining critic Frank Bruni thinks that charging extra for nice bread and butter is perfectly acceptable, but for the most part, everyone’s like holy crap, this is totally outrageous. Apparently there’s “A 20 percent mandatory tip on all checks at the Little Italy tourist spot Grotta Azzurra,” and bobo in Greenwich Village charges $1 per-person for filtered tap water.
Chef Patrick Connolly, Bobo
After shuffling through three chefs since opening about a year ago, ridiculously good looking restaurant Bobo seems to have hit its stride with James Beard award-winning chef Patrick Connolly at the helm. Writing for the Times last month, restaurant critic Frank Bruni praised his "fine sense of balance when it comes to flavors and textures...The cooking during my visits was often impressive."
Midweek Special: NYC Restaurant Review Roundup
Of course, the big thing on everyone's minds this morning is Frank Bruni's review of Bobo, a Greenwich Village restaurant as maligned for its food as it is adored for its ambiance. Well, after a long night of suspense and speculation, Bruni has made his announcement: one star, and considerable praise for Patrick Connolly, the restaurant's third chef in a year. "In fact a few of his dishes — his appetizers, at least — manage to steal attention from the votive candles lining the dark, narrow staircase up to the main dining room and that room’s droopy lighting fixtures, which bring to mind gargantuan glass jellyfish." But when a waiter upsells Bruni into a $115 Burgundy, he finds himself "wishing that Bobo was a little less bourgeois and a little more bohemian."
Midweek Special: NYC Restaurant Review Roundup
This week Frank Bruni double-fists it with a review of two sushi places: Kanoyama, in the East Village, and Sushi Azabu (pictured), in TriBeCa, that both "stand out in part because they’re navigable in ways that aren’t too financially wounding." Kanoyama’s "brimming, glistening combination platter...is first-rate, and doesn’t give you the sense you sometimes get at other restaurants that what you’re saving in money you’re sacrificing in freshness." The clandestine Sushi Azabu, accessed via a secret staircase in the meh Greenwich Grill, is "erratic. Get the scallop sushi or the spicy tuna roll, lavished with sesame and a chili-spiked mayonnaise, and you’re in heaven. Get the crispy fried squid and you’re in a strip-mall sports bar."
Cheap Food for a Good Cause Tomorrow
More about tomorrow's Futurehood benefit to help PS 41 convert its plain old rooftop into a environmentally-beneficent green roof: A measly $10 gets you assorted snacks and a sampling of chef Michael Anthony's food from Gramercy Tavern, Bobo, Murray’s Bagels, and Royal Café + Pastry. GELL project founder Vicki Sando and Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer will speak. Proponents believe that wider adoption of green roof systems in urban areas lead to decreased storm drain run-off and help scrub the air clean. Organizer Carlos Suarez envisions future outdoor events like the “Mozart series they have in Provence, maybe a biweekly opera series featuring the participation of neighborhood restaurants.” For tomorrow’s benefit, however, Southpaw co-owner Mikey Palms has enlisted slightly louder performances from bands including the Hungry March Band, Care Bears on Fire, and Tiny Masters of Today to round out the bill.
Michael Anthony, Chef
Chef Michael Anthony can be incredibly emphatic about the farmers who supply Gramercy Tavern’s kitchen. He may tell you how he thinks the soil conditions at a particular farm influenced the flavors of certain vegetables. He might talk about baby turnips as if they’re long lost friends, but Anthony is also realistic about the purpose of food in our lives.
Wednesday Food News: Early Edition
This week in the Times, Bruni goes to Alex Ureña’s Pamploma, gives the restaurant two stars. “Pamplona is Ureña [the chef’s former restaurant] with an attitude adjustment,” he says. “His best dishes are more than memorable enough to redeem Pamplona’s shortcomings.” In the Post, Cuozzo goes to BLT Market, where he finds “Tourondel’s first fully-composed dishes since Cello.” Says the restaurant revives the corner of Sixth Ave and Central Park South, and “What BLT Market...

