Results tagged “deathco”

       

Undeterred by their Kafkaesque struggles with the local community board over the stellar cocktail lounge Death & Co., two of that bar's owners have boldly branched out with a second establishment on the very same street. Named Mayahuel after the Aztec goddess of fertility, this cozy, bi-level temple to tequila and mezcal is unofficially open now. The menu by cocktail craftsman Phil Ward consists of almost two dozen mezcal and tequila cocktails ($13 each), plus a few beer cocktails, some punch, and sangria.

The Daily News talked to some bartenders and alkies about today's significance. 35-year-old Daria Dennhardt from the Bronx said she can't wait to squeeze into The Back Room for the "classic cocktails," adding, "Thank God it's still legal." Can't you just smell it on her breath when you read that? As a side note, have fun tomorrow with this website that calculates the calories in how much you imbibed, then shows you the (shocking) the equivalent in food. [Via Grub Street]

Last night the committee that represents Tribeca for Community Board 1 voted against recommending full board approval for a liquor license for Brushstrokes, David Bouley’s planned Japanese restaurant and cooking school, which would be his fourth eatery in the neighborhood. In withholding approval for the license, the committee cited prior health code violations, a carbon monoxide leak, the glut of limos crowding the street outside his restaurants, and controversy surrounding Bouley’s attempt to claim $2.2 million for lost business income after 9/11 despite winning a $5.8 million contract with the Red Cross to feed Ground Zero recovery workers.

Today the Times’s Frank Bruni marvels at Manhattan’s new wave of high tone restaurant openings during a recession, and pins the trend not on entrepreneurial bravado but on the fact that it takes years to get a fancy eatery open, and most of these new places were envisioned in flusher economic times. It is true that in 2005, the top fifth of earners in Manhattan made 52 times what the lowest fifth make – $365,826 compared with $7,047 – comparable to the income disparity in Namibia. Yet thanks to tax cuts and stagflation, the income gap has only widened in the past three years. Dinner at Per Se is as unattainable as ever for New York’s lower orders, but even with Wall Street turbulence it’s unlikely the ranks of the well-heeled will thin to the point where a fashionable restaurant can’t manage. Of course, chefs like Ken Friedman (The Spotted Pig) are artists and don’t chain their muse to the vagaries of the economy: “I’m certainly not the kind who would look at the Dow. Does a writer write or not write a book based on the economic climate? Does a songwriter write songs that way?”