Alexandra Ilyashov

Few foods instill the kind of fervent enthusiasm that cheese does, perhaps now more than ever. The simple, comforting pleasures of a flawless grilled cheese, a rich orb of burrata, or a pungent Pecorino are all the more satisfying — necessary, even — while we’re hibernating through a pandemic winter. With that in mind, we asked more than a dozen cheese experts, from indie cheesemongers to shop owners to authors, for the best cheese-centric gifts to give this season. From practical (beautiful boards and knives they’ll actually use) to educational (virtual tastings) to playful (a “Big Cheese” hat), there’s something for every curd obsessive on your list.

Cheese subscriptions and tasting boxes

Artifaqt Local Love Tasting Box

This assortment from Artifaqt, a family-run wood shop in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, includes a keep-forever cheese board that’s as appealing as the consumables it comes with. “I love the idea of giving someone a board that they can keep, along with some memorable pairings like chocolate and blue cheese,” says Tenaya Darlington (aka Madame Fromage), author of Di Bruno Bros. House of Cheese and cheese director at Philadelphia wine bar Tria. She likes serving “handmade cheeses on boards that have been made by hand, so my go-to surfaces are from Artifaqt,” whether for holiday, birthday, or wedding gifts.

Crown Finish Caves Victory Cheese Box

“In my opinion, you only need to know about one cheese box,” says Susan Sherrill Axelrod, editor of Culture magazine. Victory Cheese “was launched by a broad collection of cheese-industry folks as a response to the pandemic’s economic impact on American artisan cheesemakers and dairy farmers,” she explains. Matt Gallira, founder and CEO of Big Mozz, recommends the Thursday Night Cheese Club, a three-month subscription, from “the supremely talented” team at Crown Finish Caves.

Cheese boards and platters

Brooklyn Slate Cheese Board

“Slate provides a sharp visual contrast with cheese, and these boards come with chalk that makes it easy to label the cheeses you and your guests will be eating,” says Mateo Kehler, co-owner of Vermont-based cheesemaker Jasper Hill Farm. Jessica Little, co-owner of Georgia-based cheesemaker Sweet Grass Dairy, also recommends Brooklyn Slate’s boards: “I love presenting cheeses on a darker background for a more dramatic look,” she says. Both Kehler and Little like that Brooklyn Slate uses stone from a third-generation family quarry in Vermont. In general, stone boards “are the easiest to clean up, especially if the person you’re gifting it to likes soft cheeses like Bries and Camemberts, which tend to be a messier,” explains Molly Browne, education manager for Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin Cheese and an American Cheese Society–certified cheese professional.

Continue reading on New York Magazine.

Seven owners talk about the ways they overcame challenges following Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and how they’re using that experience to get through the pandemic.

For many NYC restaurants staying open right now, the ongoing coronavirus crisis serves as a grim reminder of the several existential threats the industry has been forced to navigate in just the last 20 years. 9/11 paralyzed businesses, particularly downtown Manhattan, with many predicting that part of NYC would never recover. Many others struggled to stay afloat in the aftermath of the financial crisis in 2008, and Hurricane Sandy further crippled restaurants and bars along the city’s coastal neighborhoods in 2012.

Now, the industry faces yet another unprecedented crisis. Still, some owners are hopeful and are looking at the most recent crisis that rocked the industry — Sandy — to find ways to overcome the current predicament. Here, seven NYC restaurateurs reflect on the lessons learned from the storm, including the creation of months-long emergency funds to stay afloat during a crisis, altering menus to make them more conducive to family-style dining, and finding time to make long-term fixes during a lull in business.

Dan Tubridy, co-owner of Rockaway destination Bungalow Bar. His restaurant group, IGC Hospitality, operates 13 other restaurants and bars across the city.

Damage from Hurricane Sandy: The entire building that houses Bungalow Bar was destroyed, and Tubridy estimates that the damage totaled around $1 million.

Cash generated to help post-Hurricane Sandy: Tubridy and his partners invested $300,000 of their own money, which is equivalent to three years’ profit at Bungalow Bar. They generated an additional $150,000 through an appearance on Spike TV show Bar Rescue, as the prize for participating on the show, and they secured additional funds from friends and family. Tubridy also applied for three federal loans, all of which were denied. The restaurant didn’t receive anything from its insurance coverage either. “We took on a lot of the construction and rebuilding work ourselves, because we had no other work to do, which is where we really saved money,” says Tubridy

Lessons learned from Hurricane Sandy: “We learned from Sandy to have a three-to-six-month slush fund to fall back on,” Tubridy says. “Since then, we always keep a little war chest just in case something like that were to happen again. Though we were thinking of a flood or something like that. This is completely different.”

Estimated money lost from COVID-19 so far: Tubridy estimates “roughly just over half a million in lost revenue so far, as we go into our primetime months.” Bungalow Bar’s sales are down roughly 26 percent year-over-year.

COVID-19 survival strategies: Tubridy has closed 11 of IGC Hospitality’s 13 restaurants, and has furloughed 800 employees total. So far, takeout and deliveries are helping Bungalow Bar break even. The open restaurants are only operating with half of its staff, and the menu has been rejiggered to be more takeout-friendly, and includes family-style meal packages.

COVID-19 funding received so far: Tubridy has applied for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL). He received $10,000 from EIDL in late April, and was approved for PPP. He was initially concerned about actually using the funds under the original guidelines, then opted to use the PPP funds once the forgiveness period extended, to hire back employees.

Predictions post-COVID-19: Turbidy worries that the city may be overzealous with inspections and fines of restaurants, enforcing social distancing measures and otherwise — after the pandemic passes — in an effort to recover lost revenue during the ongoing crisis. “It’s a tactic I’ve dealt with if there’s a shortfall,” he says. He also worries that many permanent closures are inevitable at this point: “We know many of our places won’t be able to survive serving at 50 percent capacity under the current lease agreements,” he says. “No one will be immune to restaurants closing. We contribute to so many different industries, like commercial real estate, trucking, vendors, and farmers, which will be negatively affected by these imminent closures.”

Continue reading on Eater.

DRINK-DON’T SMOKE-UP! SALES OF CANNABIS-INFUSED BEVERAGES ARE ON THE RISE, AND ONE LOCAL COMPANY, AND THE BUSINESS SCHOOL BROS WHO FOUNDED IT, ARE LEADING THE WAY

Originally published in Los Angeles Magazine, December 2020.

He’s one of the biggest names in food, even though you may not be able to pronounce it. Jean-Georges Vongerichten (von-ger-ick-ten) has built an empire in New York and beyond with his artfully assembled dishes, fervor for fresh ingredients, sublimely decorated spaces, and spot-on service. But like everyone else, he still has to deal with the critics!

Read more on The Daily Front Row.

In the price-point echelons of Chopt and Sweetgreen, this new plant-based takeaway restaurant, from the founder of Le Pain Quotidien, stands apart in every way.

A new Belgian import is poised to reinvigorate the SoHo lunch grind and downtown post-work casual wine bar catch-up. After opening in February 2016 on the UES, Le Botaniste’s vegan and gluten-free menu arrived in SoHo (127 Grand St) in October. Le Botaniste’s founder, Alain Coumont, is the mastermind behind the carefully curated aesthetic and menu at a ubiquitous breakfast meeting and easy lunch date mainstay–he’s the founder and creative head of Le Pain Quotidien.

“Being part-time plant-based, I found it very difficult when eating out to find what I was craving, and very few places offer organic plant-based foods that are convenient,” Coumont says of the impetus behind launching Le Botaniste. “Good nutrition has been proven to be preventive medicine, and less animal protein and more veggies is an easy step.” He saw a void for vegan and vegetarian dining in terms of an accessible, unfussy “chef-inspired menu without falling into too much sophistication."

Le Botaniste first launched in Belgium before arriving stateside, as did Le Pain Quotidien, which set up shop in Brussels in 1990. “There are no significant differences between the locations except the rent charges,” Coumont notes of Le Botaniste’s outposts on both sides of the pond. The aim at his newest venture is “pure, practical and surprising” fare, served speedily, in a “relaxed, feel-good environment.” While the pricing is akin to, say, Chipotle or Sweetgreen, Coumont eschews the fast-casual description for something a bit elevated but still approachable, just like the vibe at Le Botaniste – “quality convenient dining”. The set-up seems to be working–half of customers at the eatery’s various locations are repeat visitors, per Coumont.

The menu of “prescriptions” is fully organic and plant-based, gluten-free, and sans any grilling or frying. Dishes, which skew more affordable than Le Pain Quotidien, are cooked at low temperatures, and 40% of dishes are raw. It’s also seasonally-driven fare, so expect updates to the menu throughout the year (and as new ideas arise–Coumont tastes the entire menu at least once a week, in order to fine-tune and evolve the menu).

Appetizers, dubbed small bowls, ring in at $7 to $9, and include red beet “caviar,” potato bacalao, or seaweed tartare (the latter is a bestseller that’s “easy to share with friends over a glass of natural wine,” Coumont says), all of which can also be turned into full-on meals via customized bowls. The selection of large bowls, priced at $14, include the popular coconut peanut butter curry-topped brown rice Tibetan Mama Bowl, served with steamed greens and kimchi, Dirty Noodle Soup, beautifully-constructed vegan sushi with a duo of piquant dipping sauces, and spicy chili, along with virtuous dessert choices like raw key lime pie.

While Le Botaniste makes for a great grab-and-go lunch situation, the ambiance will make you skip a rushed cubicle meal and linger over that tagine or super seed-encrusted avocado. “A 19th century apothecary [atmosphere] is the best way to deliver our food prescriptions,” explains Coumont. The throwback aesthetic takes shape thanks to dark wood-bedecked space, accented with checkerboard floors, creamy marble detailing, and shelves of glass jars filled with grains and spices, alongside actual amber- and olive-hued apothecary bottles. The employees’ getups are equally on-theme. “Our team members are dressed in white lab coats with camouflage bandanas.”

Le Botaniste’s second U.S. location, on Grand Street just east of Broadway, was spurred in part by customer requests at the uptown outpost for a downtown presence, and also because of the neighborhood’s enduring desirability – “SoHo will always be SoHo,” Coumont says. Next up, Le Botaniste will roll out breakfast and brunch in 2018; a new location in NYC as well as another spot in Brussels are also on the docket for next year.

Sure, it’s definitely the kind of spot that attracts yoga mat-toting wellness devotees in droves, along the lines of Hu Kitchen or Dr. Smood. But even carnivorous types are apparently impressed by the flavorful yet healthful fare, especially when it comes to pasta al Mafiosi, comprised of gluten-free fusilli with Bolognese sauce (vegan, of course), basil dressing, and gomasio (a sesame-salt mix), according to Coumont: “Our number-one response from meat-eaters when we have them try our pasta is, ‘Oh wow, I wasn’t expecting this!’”

Read the full article on L’Officiel USA.

Not to be outdone by sunny LA, the Big Apple eateries also make a mean, animal-free meal.

Maybe you’re living your best life, and that involves a diet completely devoid of meat, dairy, or any animal products whatsoever, whether the reasoning is ethical or health-related. Or, you’re an enthusiastic omnivore who’s always game for something new or different dining-wise, including creative and surprisingly delicious meat-free meals.

While vegan offerings might not be quite as expansive and prevalent as in L.A., where wellness has long trended in every respect, Gotham has some really impressive options for fully plant-based feasts. These standout eateries will impress even devoted carnivores with innovative and, most importantly, completely delectable dishes that are entirely plant-based. Ahead, five truly great spots to find vegan cuisine in NYC.

JAJAJA

Head to this vegan Mexican restaurant housed in a gorgeous, Instagram-friendly space, with pretty tiled floors and lots of natural light, on the crux of East Broadway and Canal St., surrounded by hip neighbors like Dimes, Mission Chinese Food, and Kiki’s. The cocktails are great, too, thanks to a range of fresh juices. Start off with shareable starters like ceviche comprised of hearts of palm and hijiki instead of fish, or beet and pumpkin empanadas. A slew of tacos are offered, too, with inventive vegan dupes for carnitas, chorizo, and fried fish, plus a range of colorful, flavorful bowls.

Avant Garden

Excellent and inventive vegan small plates populate the menu at this East Village restaurant. Avant Garden eschews meat substitutes in favor of creative dishes that really celebrate and showcase vegetables, often transformed and rendered more flavorful in the cooking process, like charred gem lettuce in a Caesar-inspired salad, and scorched cauliflower accompanied by creamy cauliflower puree. Don’t miss the toasts section, featuring combinations like sunchokes with olives, pistachios, and pickled pear. A Williamsburg location of Avant Garden is slated to open sometime this summer; in the meantime, check out plant-based sister restaurants, Cienfuegos and Mother of Pearl.

Modern Love

At this Williamsburg restaurant, chef Isa Chandra Moskowitz whips up creative, occasionally decadent, completely vegan takes on comfort food. Highlights include hen-of-the-woods piccata, which subs breaded maitake mushrooms for chicken in the Italian classic, served here with whipped potatoes, gigante beans, capers, shallots, and escarole in a white wine lemon sauce, and BBQ yuba, a meat-free take on Southern fare that’s served with rhubarb salsa, corn pudding, and sauteed collard greens. Other options include “mac and shews” with a creamy red pepper cashew cheese sauce, chorizo nachos with a smoked walnut “chorizo,” and truffled poutine. The stylish space includes wood-paneled walls and mismatched chandeliers that hang above the tables.

Blossom

A long-running vegan favorite in NYC, Blossom has been dishing up sophisticated fare since 2005, thanks to co-founders Ronen Seri and Pamela Elizabeth. Choose from appetizers like quinoa flour-battered crispy artichokes and Buffalo-sauced risotto croquettes, and mains such as a tofu BLT or a Moroccan tagine. The original location is housed in a charming townhouse in Chelsea. There’s also an UWS outpost on Columbus Avenue, and a former location in the West Village has since morphed into Urban Vegan Kitchen, also serving upscale and fully plant-based takes on familiar fare, like “Chick-un & Waffles” and a po' boy with popcorn-fried seitan in lieu of shrimp.

Toad Style

For a more casual option when the objective is entirely meat (and dairy and egg) free takes on classic meat-centric dishes, check out Toad Style in Bed-Stuy. It’s primarily a takeout setup here, and in addition to being completely vegan, Toad Style’s menu is also fully soy-free, palm oil-free, and non-GMO. Selections include BBQ pulled jackfruit sandwich, which replicates pulled pork or chicken with hickory-smoked jackfruit, the Philly, with sauteed portobello mushrooms, onions, and peppers smothered in cashew and almond cheese on garlic bread.

There are also vegan takes on gyros and Banh Mi to consider. Add on sides like fried cauliflower, which is brined in rosemary and lemon before being battered, served with sweet chili mustard to dunk in.

All of the sandwiches can also be made as gluten-free tacos, or served in salad form, too, and the entire menu is quite affordable, with nothing over $11. Toad Style also runs a food truck from Wednesday to Sunday at Bushwick bar Marco’s.

Read the full article on L’Officiel USA.

Introducing the new class of female scientists and entrepreneurs who are carving out the future of clean meat.

Compared to other science fields, biology attracts the greatest numbers of women in grad school and academia: There’s a 50/50 split between male and female biology grad students and 40 percent of biology post-docs are female, per a 2014 MIT study. (However, that same study shows that representation in teaching is a very different story: Academic biology faculty members are far more likely to be men. Just 36 percent of assistant professors and 18 percent of full professors are women.) One biology-adjacent field that seems to be attracting a strong presence of women pioneers is cellular agriculture (cell ag to those in the know). For those unfamiliar, this rapidly developing area of science is dedicated to creating so-called clean or cultured meat—a process that involves taking cells from an animal and culturing them outside the animal’s body so that they divide in a controlled environment, for example large bioreactors, akin to fermentation tanks that brew beer. Then, the cultured cells are turned into processed or ground meat products, like burgers and nuggets, or synthesized into muscle tissue for bacon or steak (the latter is more challenging and requires more R&D before becoming a reality). Yes, in the not so distant future, omnivores will be able to enjoy familiar proteins—beef burgers, pork sausages, chicken nuggets, bacon—and, eventually, less familiar and exotic meats—like woolly mammoth, panda, and zebra—that did not derive from a slaughtered animal.

Women cellular agriculture researchers and engineers are plentiful—and the field is a great place for women to thrive as compared to other sciences, says Marianne Ellis, associate dean of Biochemical Engineering at the University of Bath in the U.K. and chief technology officer of biotech company Cellesce. “I’ve probably met more female engineers [in cell ag] than I know all together in every other discipline—it’s one of the most open, friendly, non-judgmental fields, almost because of that lack of tradition,” Ellis explains. “The field represents the world as it should be, social equality.”

Yet, akin to how gender ratios in biology shift from student to professor roles, women’s presence in cellular agriculture tapers as you move up the hierarchy to startup founders. “The gender ratios in my world of research are fairly even,” explains Jess Krieger, a PhD student and current research fellow with New Harvest, cell ag’s oldest nonprofit, founded in 2004. “I work with many women on a day-to-day basis; however, most, if not all, of cellular agriculture companies are founded by men.” Memphis Meats, Mosa Meat, Impossible Foods, and Beyond Meat all have male founders and, in most cases, male top execs. (Major investors of these startups tend to be men as well, like Richard Branson and Bill Gates.)

Despite this, many women are already doing trailblazing cellular agriculture work, and they should be recognized as pioneers in the science, technology, and history of these novel (yes, still futuristic) foods. Cutting-edge researchers in academia and at startups are evolving the science behind ethical, environmental impact-free animal proteins. Fundraising dynamos are deftly navigating uncharted legal and policy matters and properly communicating with the public about these edible innovations. Women founders, CEOs, and investors of startups in the field are also incredibly instrumental: There ought to be more, but the talents already making waves deserve to be known. Ahead, meet a variety of exceptionally talented women leading the charge for food that’s infinitely kinder to animals and the planet.

Read the full article on Atmos.

As one of the first chefs to get his hands on the Impossible Burger, Brad Farmerie was up for the challenge. It turns out that it didn’t take much to get people hooked.

Chef Brad Farmerie has built a reputation for delicious, carnivore-friendly fare, formerly at the (now closed) Michelin-decorated Nolita restaurant Public and currently as executive chef at another Avroko-owned hotspot, Saxon + Parole, an equestrian-themed, meat-centric eatery. In early 2017, Farmerie became one of just five chefs nationally to get a hold of the Impossible Burger, a lab-created, plant-based meat alternative. He’s since been blazing up juicy patties of the remarkable beef facsimile, crowning them with a decadent truffle-tinged mushroom sauce and sherry onions at Saxon + Parole—and he foresees a bright, wide-reaching future for the miracle product.

ALEXANDRA ILYASHOV

Why did the Impossible Burger initially appeal to you?

BRAD FARMERIE

With cooking, I like to give people something different, even in a package that seems familiar. At Public, we never had beef or chicken on the menu—always venison or sweetbreads, but also a lot of vegan dishes. The Impossible Burger seemed to be exactly that: positioning something vegan in a format that people can easily understand. I made some calls, looked into it, but at that point, it was so early in their production, nobody could get it. They spent four or five years perfecting it. I forgot about it for a bit, then Impossible Burger approached me as one of five chefs nationally they wanted to give it to. I felt pretty honored—Public was the first Michelin-starred restaurant the burger was served in. I also carry it at Saxon + Parole, which is such a meat-focused restaurant—we serve vegetarian options, but that’s not part of our reputation.

ALEXANDRA

How have customers responded?

BRAD

It was a sensation right from the start. So many people wanted to see this “bleeding burger.” [Impossible Burger] didn’t like it described that way, but that’s the tagline that built the reputation. At the beginning, we only had 50 to serve per night, and would hit that all the time. It’s a lot. People drove in from Boston and Philadelphia just for dinner. It’s crazy! Only myself and David Chang served it on the East Coast. Groups from CIA [the Culinary Institute of America] and food tours came in. It was a lot of pressure! The product is good, so it’s my job to just enhance it and not fuck it up. We got a lot of new guests, which can happen any time you serve something new. But what was different about the Impossible Burger is that people would try it and next time bring friends to taste something they discovered.

ALEXANDRA

Is the Impossible Burger pricy for you to procure?

BRAD

It costs significantly more for us to purchase than regular ground beef. There’s definitely no real financial incentive behind it for us—it’s not a loss, it’s better than a break-even, but it’s not much of a profit. We’ve done that purposefully: If it’s a comparable or cheaper price than a beef burger, you’ll get it onto more tables. But Impossible is definitely struggling to keep up with production, so if we’re not buying it, a lot of other people would be very happy to do so.

ALEXANDRA

How did you decide to dress the Impossible Burger?

BRAD

We wanted to enhance the natural flavors and textures without covering up that it smells and tastes like beef. This is a vegetarian preparation with a lot of umami to boost what the Impossible Burger has going for it: A mushroom purée hints at the burger’s richness, some pickled onions cut that richness, plus a tiny bit of truffle oil and cheese sauce. It’s not a “cheeseburger,” but it’s oozy and gooey. We also do a vegan version on a housemade vegan brioche bun, served with smoked paprika and avocado, so it kind of feels like you’re doing something good for your body, but we didn’t want to be too treehugger-y about it. Also, we do our patties a lot thicker than other people: We wanted it medium rare, with the textural difference between the inside and outside.

ALEXANDRA

Have you dabbled with Impossible Burger meat in other recipes?

BRAD

It doesn’t make a great Bolognese sauce, but if you make a drier chili, it works. One of its pros is also one of its cons: It tends to absorb moisture, rather that expel it, like regular beef. As a burger, it stays nice and juicy and doesn’t leak out all the liquid—it retains almost the same weight, pre-cooked and cooked. Beef loses roughly 75 percent of its weight, and Impossible Burger loses five to eight percent. So, you can start with the same amount of [ground meat] and the Impossible Burger looks incredibly large.

ALEXANDRA

Why are you equally drawn to lesser-used meats and high-tech alternatives?

BRAD

They’re two misunderstood ends of the food spectrum. Someone can have a bad experience with their grandma’s overcooked, grey, metallic-tasting liver and decide they don’t like it; or their uncle cooked deer in a chili, it was rubbery and terrible, and now they don’t think they like venison. Similarly, I like to do something really creative, break the preconceived notion that a vegan dish will be insipid, flavorless, or you’ll be hungry in an hour.

ALEXANDRA

Any interest in other meat alternatives?

BRAD

Right now, the “buckets” I look at are upcycling content, like turning spent grains or expired bread into beer, which Toast is doing in the U.K.; then, urban and vertical farming, on rooftops and using solar power; the third bucket to me is alternative proteins, like Ahimi “tuna,” made from compressed tomatoes. I think we’re the only NYC restaurant using it—and it’s sold at Whole Foods in the sushi case. Most Ahimi goes to Japan, that’s how good it is. Because tuna is generally a texture more than a flavor, I think it can easily be substituted. We use it for raw fish preparations, like tartares. Also, FabaButter, a vegan butter made from chickpea water, is genius. It can be substituted one-for-one for butter in most baking applications and it tastes good just on bread. I think Impossible helped elevate the whole industry and set a new standard: It got so much money behind it, and [other food-tech companies] were like, “Oh, wow, I have to make my product taste better.” I’m also interested in cricket flour from Seek. It’s hard with insect protein, though. People don’t want to see a bug, but if you get it into something like flour…

ALEXANDRA

How do you track down these sustainable, futuristic ingredients?

BRAD

It’s a domino effect: The guys from Impossible introduced me to a few people, who introduced them to a few people. It’s become this ever-expanding web. A lot of these foods are at a starting point where, as a chef, you can help propel or give advice about what could be better. There are strange things happening, like a world-changing product that’s packaged in a non-recyclable container. It can’t just be end product—the whole cycle of the product must be great.

ALEXANDRA

What burgeoning meat tech are you eager to explore next?

BRAD

I’ve been to seminars about using techniques similar to the Impossible Burger to create a whole muscle: Can you create a steak? Theoretically, yes. The research has already been done—how it’s supposed to look, taste, smell. In Europe, there’s research being done on striated plant proteins that mimic the muscle. It’s still a distance away, but when somebody figures out how to make steak, they’re going to be rich!

ALEXANDRA

Do you find that fellow chefs embrace or are skeptical of these innovative proteins?

BRAD

I’ve heard chefs joke about how five years ago it was a pig movement, all about butchering and charcuterie. Now, the pendulum has swung way back. The pig is still cool, it’ll always be delicious, but I think chefs understand they have to keep up not just with products but with what guests are demanding. Impossible raised that awareness and make people ask for more options.

ALEXANDRA

How can chefs and restaurants help plant proteins truly go mainstream?

BRAD

Impossible is an interesting case study for this: Most brands go right out to mass market first and pray that it’s used properly and that people don’t ruin the product while cooking it. A lot of times, peoples’ first chance to taste something is when they’ve ruined it. That’s a bad way to start! Instead, Impossible gave the product to five chefs to create our idea of the “best” version—of this—and when people come dine, they try what could be the best way to use the product, and they start to talk. You don’t have to be vegan or vegetarian to enjoy this. Some people ask for a fried egg or bacon on it. Actually, it seems like the only people who haven’t fully appreciated the Impossible burger are vegans, because it’s just too close to beef. The smell and look, it’s already something they haven’t eaten in years, maybe avoided. Impossible wants to be available across America, for the same price as ground beef. When and if Impossible reaches the same price and it sits side by side with beef in supermarkets and customers have already tried a good version of it, then I think Impossible Burger is going to win over America. If they can replace even a percentage of what the beef industry is producing, that’s going to help the world.

Read the full article on Atmos.

Chicken wings, a down-market American staple for sports lovers, are the humble best-seller at Portland hot spot Departure. The pan-Asian restaurant with a killer view goes through tens of thousands of wings each year, amounting to six digits’ worth since the dish first debuted.

“It’s pretty high up there,” Gregory Gourdet says incredulously.

For over a decade, Gourdet has helmed the kitchen at Departure Restaurant + Lounge in Oregon’s largest city, first as executive chef and then culinary director. His bestselling dish — an inspired twist on a crowd-pleasing appetizer that’s complex in both flavor and technique — is so popular that it even bears the restaurant’s name.

The Departure chicken wings with sweet chili glaze have been on the menu for over a decade, even though they’re “pretty labor intensive and complicated to make,” Gourdet says. He uses the wing paddle, removing the larger bone and forming the meat into a ball around the smaller bone. An overnight marinade in a Japanese-style mixture of soy sauce and ginger makes the wings ultra-tender; then, he dredges them in potato starch before finishing them in a reduction of fish sauce, palm sugar, chiles, even more garlic, and a bit of cilantro.

“The result is a lollipop-shaped, perfectly tender wing with one tiny little bone,” he says. “First there’s savory meat that’s really crunchy from the breading, and then this tangy, sweet, spicy, funky sauce all over the outside. You can literally just nibble all that meat off the bone with little force, so they’re really tidy to eat.”

The Top Chef alum and two-time James Beard Awards semifinalist honed his skills at various Jean-Georges Vongerichten restaurants before moving to the Pacific Northwest and eventually settling at Departure, where he cooks an eclectic mix of dishes that range from a popular Chinese Peking duck dinner to sushi and dim sum. Gourdet’s experience as runner-up in 2014 on Top Chef season 12 propelled him to explore a wider range of cuisines through extensive travel.

“I walked away feeling like I knew nothing, and I was determined to be on a lifelong mission to learn as much about culture and food around the world,” he says. “I started traveling immediately after my first season, all around the world, to eat, work in different kitchens, see different cultures, and experience different ingredients at the source.”

Continue reading on OpenTable.

At Latin destination restaurant Chica in Miami and Las Vegas, the arepa basket is so much more than just an appetizer.

The colorful arepas basket, in black bean, beet, and cilantro flavors, is a distinctive riff on the Latin cuisine staple that has become her signature dish, meant to set the tone for a meal at Chica.

“It’s an immediate connection for my customer with my culture, how I grew up, and my flavors, which is very important to me,” acclaimed chef Lorena Garcia says. “But it was also very important to me to have technique and a point of view that elevates Latin cuisine to be gourmet, high-end, and at the same time, accessible. That little basket, let me tell you, it does magic!”

Garcia rose to fame after competing on Top Chef Masters in 2012 and appearing as a guest chef on a season of Top Chef All Stars. The former law student turned pro chef has an affable, warm personality, so it’s no surprise she’s penned two cookbooks and has numerous television cameos under her belt aside from the Bravo favorite. Garcia frequently appears in both English and Spanish on Univision and Telemundo and was a judge on America’s Next Top Restaurants. Over the years, she opened many restaurants, but Chica, open in 2017 in Las Vegas and 2019 in Miami, is her most well-known.

Chica’s arepas come in a trifecta of vibrant flavors and colors, thanks to pressed juices made from black beans, beets, or cilantro. They’re then incorporated into a tortilla-like dough that Garcia says becomes “nice and crispy outside, fluffy inside, and super delicious” once fried. The cooked arepas are tossed with Kosher salt and served alongside nata butter with spicy pequin pepper. The spreadable raw cow milk condiment is a nod to Garcia’s Venezuelan roots.

Continue reading on OpenTable.

Kristen Kish still can’t believe that she’s associated with mushrooms. Her knack for working magic with mushrooms became known to the public during her winning 2013 stint on Top Chef season 10.

“The first main challenge I won, I literally cooked a side of white button mushrooms. I won money for it!” the renowned chef says in disbelief. “I was just as surprised as anyone else. It became ‘Kristen and her mushrooms.’”

But the label stuck, and at Kish’s hip Austin restaurant Arlo Grey, the signature offering once again features the ingredient. The creamy pasta dish — mafaldine with champignon sauce, pearl onion, and parmesan — is one of just two dishes that’s been on Arlo Grey’s dinner menu since it opened in June 2018. The umami-packed pasta is also sweetly sentimental.

“It’s a nod to my love affair with Hamburger Helper since I was a kid,” Kish says. “If you put a box of Hamburger Helper in front of me, I wouldn’t say no. I’d be really excited to cook it. I don’t seek it out, but it does hold a special memory.”

By using the lowly grocery market staple as inspiration and dressing the dish up with fancier words — “Champignon is just the French term for a white button mushroom, the most humble, basic type of mushroom you can find,” Kish says — she’s able to “bridge the gap between homemade, restaurant-quality things with things we grew up on that maybe came out of a box and still bring some sort of comfort.”

The dish begins with mafaldine made fresh about every three days, using an Italian pasta maker and local Barton Springs Mill flour, to “bring Texas, and a story, to a very humble dish.” She says she chose the frilly, sculptural mafaldine shape for the way its “ridges act like little spoons that help get the sauce to your mouth, by clinging to the dish’s creamy, reduced sauce and mushrooms.” (A version of the comforting pasta in Kish’s October 2017 cookbook uses more common ribbon-like pasta such as pappardelle or tagliatelle, to make the dish more accessible to home cooks.)

For the sauce, Kish takes the mushroom caps and dehydrates them until they’re very dark and about a third of the size. “We’re basically taking all that moisture out and condensing the flavor,” she says.

Continue reading on OpenTable.

Each healthy concoction is 70% comprised of food scraps from “fresh-cut” fruits and veggies.

While Phil Wong and Ann Yang were undergrads at Georgetown University, the unlikely pair of best friends both focused on international studies and interested in food system issues. A fateful couple of crates of bruised but still delicious peaches was the accidental start of Misfit Juicery, the innovative juice company meant to address food waste which the duo co-founded in late 2015. Inside of cheerful, strikingly-designed bottles, Misfit’s mixtures are 70% comprised of food scraps from “fresh-cut” fruits and veggies, like watermelon cubes or baby carrots, as well as dinged-up but still tasty produce that grocery stores don’t deem pretty enough to buy from farmers. Here, Wong discusses the brand’s unlikely roots, how it’s expanded thus far and what’s next, plus the deeper meaning behind the company’s moniker, which is about more than just blemished pears and carrots.

How did you and Ann come up with the concept for Misfit?

We’re on a mission to fight food waste, and we’re creating delicious products from supply chain inefficiencies. This was born out of our shared passion around food waste, and also my and Ann’s friendship. We met in college at Georgetown and became best friends, and were both really interested in various food issues. But food waste really captured both of our imaginations. Sure, it’s very environmental, but it’s also really value based and in the eye of the beholder. Looking at produce, we might think one is better or more valuable than the other. But a bruised apple is just as delicious and nutritious as a “perfect apple” we might find in a grocery store. It’s also an issue that isn’t really consumer-facing. Produce takes a really long journey to get to grocery store aisles. Getting from farm to table is not easy!

When did you two start making juices?

We started off with four crates of ugly peaches and a borrowed blender from our college farmer’s market. We essentially juiced for nine or 10 hours and started selling the juice in a coffee shop and salad shop on campus. That was the beginning of Misfit; we then fully launched in December 2015. Thankfully, we’re no longer making the juice in my college kitchen, to the delight and of the health inspectors, I’m sure. We’re now selling in over 25 places in D.C. and New York, and we have some awesome distribution partners, like Whole Foods, Eataly, Sweetgreen, and WeWork.

Where do you source your bruised-but-usable fruits and veggies from?

We’re sourcing from the entire value chain before retail, so we’re not working with restaurants or grocery stores. Instead, we’re working with farmers that have a product they can’t harvest or that won’t sell, and distributors who, likewise, don’t have products that might the aesthetic specifications of retailers. We also work with fresh-cut producers, who are making baby carrots, for example. Those don’t grow out of the ground looking like that! To make baby carrots, you chop down a fully-formed carrot, and in doing so, create all of this really delicious and nutritious product, like trimmings and tops, that simply isn’t being used right now.

What’s it like doing business with your best friend?

No challenges to speak of! It’s really easy, and a learning and growing experience, every single day. I think Ann and I make each other better people. But we have to work at that, too, to make sure that that’s the case. We are very different personalities, and I think people are confused as to why we’re friends and business partners. And, a lot of people say not to start a business with a friend. But we have such trust and transparency with each other, and it’s hard to imagine starting a company without that. We really are in this together, and in some cases, it feels like we’re married. To [co-found a company] with somebody you aren’t all-in on is tough for me to fathom.

During college, what did you and Ann think you’d each be doing career-wise?

Yeah, it’s pretty out of left field! We were both in the School of Foreign Services, which is the international relations school, and a lot of people go in thinking they’re definitely going to work for the government or state department. Clearly, we are not there right now! My senior year, I lived in a house with six other guys, five of whom went into consulting after graduation; that was a pretty common thread amongst our friends. Despite the fact that it’s not where we thought we’d be, we’ve just been incredibly happy and grateful to be on this journey and doing something we’re passionate about. It gives fulfillment in a larger, big-picture sense, and well as joy in the day-to-day. I think that’s a combination to cherish.

How have you funded Misfit?

At the very beginning, we were working with pitch winnings from competitions while we were at Georgetown; they’ve been hugely supportive, from a financial perspective but also in terms of mentorship and community. We did raise some money last year, and we have an awesome group of investors who are totally mission-aligned; we’re really lucky about that.

How have customers been responding to Misfit?

When we do samplings [at stores], some of our biggest advocates are actually young kids, which is always a delight, to see them running around the store with our juice in their hands. I think that also speaks to the idea that Misfit is not just about food waste; it’s about the Misfit ethos and embracing difference in food and in life. That idea tends to especially resonate with kids, which is a huge validation and makes the whole thing worthwhile.

What’s the most popular Misfit blend?

It really varies by location, but I’m going to make a shameless plug for my personal favorite, which is Off Beet, with beet, carrot, apple, lemon, and ginger. In some locations, Pear To The People. There are pretty common juice preferences between D.C. and New York, but we do see some differences between, say, a Whole Foods and a Dig Inn, which I think is just reflective of why people are shopping at each location: one might be for lunch, while the other could be to pick up groceries for the week.

The packaging is gorgeous. How did you come up with Misfit’s aesthetic?

We worked with a Brooklyn-based firm called Gander; they do really awesome work, and they’ve been really great partner for us. It was difficult to define, first and foremost, what Misfit meant before we could figure out what it should look like. In that way, the branding process was a little bit like therapy. Ultimately, it comes down to the idea of greatness in differences, both in food and life, so our bottles are distinctive in terms of the palette and the illustrations. They stand out on the shelf, which pays homage to the food waste story, but also to the broader idea of misfits.

Are there other items aside from juice that Misfit might roll out at some point?

Juices are a really great product for us in many ways, because you don’t have the same visual biases towards fruits and veggie in a juice as you would on a grocery store shelf. We’re in the early stages of R&D on our first non-juice product, and we’re hoping that will hit shelves in late 2018. But I think the way we define food waste, a lot of people now think we’re just talking about fruits and veggies. But the fact of the matter is, food waste can mean a lot things, and we’re hoping to broadly new supply-chain stories with these new products.

So, perhaps a meal replacement or snack bar made from less-attractive produce?

A bar could definitely be down the line in the future, but for now, we’re looking for products that can sit on shelves next to our juices.

How do you predict and hope the zero-waste space, from forward-thinking startups to bigger companies changing their outdated, wasteful practices, will continue expanding?

I think there are so many opportunities for products using food waste. I hope there are more people that want to push the boundaries on that because you can really define food waste in so many ways: meat is oftentimes a form of food waste, because the resources used to produce it are way less efficient than fruits and veggies. So, I think we can collectively push our definition of food waste. There’s also a lot of education we have to do with consumers who are not accustomed to using the whole fruit or veggie when cooking. We should do a better job of building kitchen confidence and making people comfortable with wasting less food by virtue of cooking.

Continue reading on L’Officiel USA.

Exceptional babka, flaky rugelach, doughy challah, and more

On the market for an excellent loaf of dense, chocolate-streaked babka, a buttery, flaky bag of rugelach, or perfectly crumbly, jam-stuffed three-sided hamentashen cookies? There are plenty of places to source superlative Jewish pastries around the city, from venerable, endearingly no-frills mom-and-pop outfits that’ve been keeping it old school for many decades, like Moishe’s East Village bakery or Yonah Schimmel’s knishery, to much newer sensations like Breads Bakery. Same goes for classic NYC confections that aren’t technically Jewish but are often lumped in the same general category, like the black and white cookie.

Most are Eastern European recipes in origin, with many tracing back to Hungary in particular, with a couple outliers, like Mansoura’s Syrian offerings. Ahead, 12 great places for all sorts of Jewish pastries worth tracking down.

1. Lee Lee's Baked Goods

This homey Harlem space, replete with floral wallpaper and red-and-white checkerboard floors and awning, specializes in great rugelach. Owner Alvin “Lee Lee” Smalls never encountered the Jewish pastry during his formative years in South Carolina; he learned about the baked good while reading the newspaper and landed on his recipe for the buttery, flaky pastry in the late ‘70s, which includes sour cream instead of cream cheese in the dough and topnotch filling ingredients, like apricot jam and walnuts. The African American baker and entrepreneur’s first shop, Marion Smalls Bakery, was named after his father, situated on Amsterdam Avenue, and counted Mike Tyson among its customers; he opened the current joint on a side street in 2001. These days, Smalls’ store, which also goes by Lee Lee’s Rugelach By a Brother, sells over 1,000 pieces of rugelach per weekend, and offers local delivery of 24- to 26-piece sets to every borough except Staten Island.

2. William Greenberg Desserts

Black and white cookies in both palm-scaled regular and mini sizes are perhaps the biggest hit at this kosher Madison Avenue spot that’s been around since 1946. It’s a thinner layer of frosting on these, a fondant-like coat with the cookie peeking through. There are also riffs on the black and white here, like pastel-hued frosting in lieu of chocolate, and red velvet or pumpkin cookie versions. Rugelach is available year-round, and for Purim, there are regular and miniature hamentashen; Hanukkah brings cookies with white and light blue themed frosting, with menorah or Star of David-patterns designs. WIlliam Greenberg also does plenty of wedding cakes. There’s a location in The Plaza’s food court, too.

Continue reading on Eater.

Chef Jordan Kahn, the visionary behind the high-concept tasting menu at Vespertine, crafts edible spring-inspired masterpieces exclusively for VMAN.

Over the course of chef Jordan Kahn’s career, he’s toiled in some of the finest, most directional kitchens of all time, like The French Laundry, PerSe, and Alinea. In July 2017, he unveiled his magnum opus: Vespertine, an otherworldly labor of love that’s fascinated critics, baffled diners, and intrigued Instagram scrollers. “It was, and is, the project of my career; I won’t achieve anything greater,” Kahn says over the phone, as he drives 45 minutes outside Los Angeles to harvest Douglas fir pine from a 14,000-foot-elevation forest for a new dish.

Savannah-bred Kahn’s culinary roots date back to assisting his Cuban grandmother in the kitchen. Graham Kerr and Jacques Pépin’s PBS shows also fueled his passion, as did a fateful Christmas gift at age 13 from his mom: The French Laundry Cookbook. “It was a really defining moment for me, a snapshot into the most elite version of something I was interested in,” Kahn says. “To say it was inspiring is an understatement.”

Kahn began cooking professionally in Savannah at age 15. Two years later, he achieved his teenage dream: working under Thomas Keller’s tutelage at The French Laundry. Kahn then went back east to New York City to work on the opening pastry team at Keller’s Per Se, and next hopped over to Chicago to help launch Alinea, another hugely influential tasting menu temple. “When I learned what Grant [Achatz] wanted to do at Alinea, it was a place I had to go to,” Kahn explains. The chefs had missed each other by a month at The French Laundry, and Kahn was told he reminded people of Achatz. “Later, he became a really important mentor.” Then, Kahn worked at now-shuttered Varietal in NYC, then Michael Mina in San Francisco, and helped open XIV, another Mina spot in L.A. “I fell in love with Los Angeles and decided to stay,” he says. In 2010, Kahn co-launched Red Medicine, “a punk rock Vietnamese place that evolved into something more formal and creative.” After it shuttered, Kahn grew enamored with the Culver City area and began the secretive, four-year process of conceiving Vespertine, where wildly creative, frequently revolving dishes cost $250 per head. In 2016, Kahn opened Destroyer, a cafe (and unplanned side project) across the street from Vespertine’s striking, waffle-esque, Eric Owen Moss-designed structure.

Vespertine dishes start with a sketch by Kahn or a single ingredient, and are intended to flummox. To wit: when the restaurant opened, the first course resembled volcanic ash. It’s actually bastard halibut aged for three days, sliced very thin, lighty pounded, and pressed into a roughly-textured fireclay bowl painted with salt-cured plums, chopped herb stems, and a dollop of yogurt—all topped with puffed tef and dusted with onion meringue-glucose mix that’s stained jet black with squid ink. “It really looks crazy; you couldn’t tell where the dish began and where the bowl ended,” Kahn says. “People thought we were fucking with them, serving an empty bowl. It sets a really good tone; things are not what they seem.” Kahn doesn’t read reviews, but recalls a quote from Los Angeles Times food critic Jonathan Gold, who ranked Vespertine the city’s top restaurant of 2017. In a radio interview, “Jonathan said, ‘This is the very first restaurant I’ve ever been to where I could not separate the food from the experience; it fucked with my process.’ To me, that’s the ultimate compliment,” Kahn says.

Kahn looks to art for inspiration. Even the staff uniforms are high-concept, by Brooklyn-based designer Jona Sees: long tunics, cropped pants, goatskin slippers, and natural charcoal-dyed aprons woven on a 800-year-old Japanese loom used for samurai undergarments. “The apron actually comes with instructions on how to put it on,” Kahn laughs. The dishware is a mix of custom pieces by a sculptor-ceramicist, plus items Kahn sketches and has 3D printed. Pondering whether each breathtakingly plated dish is, in fact, actually edible is precisely the point. “Vespertine is essentially a place where art and food intersect,” he says. “We’ve intentionally tried to be really nebulous, but everything we do is very premeditated.”

Continue reading on VMAN.

Making a great cup of coffee at home has plenty to do with buying excellent beans, but after that, it’s crucial to consider how you store them. “The right storage vessel can definitely extend your coffee’s shelf life and keep all of those delicate flavors and aromas ripe and fresh for another week,” said Andrew Ho, the food and beverage manager at Ferris and Paper Coffee, both at the Made Hotel in New York. “Maybe two weeks, if you’re lucky.”

To find the best storage options, we turned to java savants like baristas and coffee-shop owners, who gave us their picks along with some added advice: Buy whole beans instead of grinds and re-up weekly. “We recommend buying coffee like bread, keeping it fresh weekly and using it frequently to avoid it going stale,” says Peter Longo, owner of Porto Rico Importing Company. Other coffee pros even espouse the benefits of the packaging that high-quality beans are already sold in. Some of those — plus the best glass, stainless-steel, plastic, and ceramic canisters — are all below.

Airscape Stainless-Steel Storage Container (32 oz.)

No less than six of the experts consulted said the Airscape canister is the one they use to keep coffee reliably fresh. Paul Schlader, co-founder and head roaster at Birch Coffee, has used the stainless-steel model at home for years. “Because it’s stainless steel, it’s less porous and therefore coffee oils won’t stain in the way that they do plastic,” he says. The lid on the Airscape depresses into the can, eliminating any excess oxygen, which is what erodes the flavor of fresh beans. Todd Carmichael, CEO and co-founder of La Colombe Coffee Roasters, swears by the stainless-steel Airspace, too. “When I’m looking for a coffee canister, it’s important to look for ones that protect from light and force humidity and oxygen out, keeping it airtight,” he says.

OXO Coffee and Tea Pop Container

Schlader says he also likes the OXO container, for a more aesthetically pleasing option. “This holds coffee very well, and because of its UV protective coating, it doesn’t allow light in, which can break down coffee,” he says. Jonathan Rubinstein, founder of Joe Coffee Company, also likes the Pop: “When it comes to coffee-bean storage, there is no need for many bells and whistles, and simplicity wins,” he says. He also emphasizes buying less coffee, more often.

Le Creuset Coffee Storage Jar

“In Italy, and at all of our restaurants, we always grind coffee beans à la minute for the freshest espressos and cappuccinos,” says Iacopo Falai, culinary director of Sant Ambroeus Hospitality Group. “We know at home, especially here in New York, that is not always an option for people, so I recommend Le Creuset’s containers: They always make such beautiful ceramics. Also, most people always want to put coffee in the refrigerator, but please don’t.”

Continue reading on New York Magazine.

Excellent soba and udon, from hearty bowls to austere chilled trays.

Ramen may dominate the stateside discourse about Japanese noodle dishes, as proven by New York’s extensive array of great places to procure the dish. But there are indeed some exemplary versions of soba and udon to be found around town. The former are more delicate in girth and made from buckwheat, touted for being gluten-free, low in cholesterol, and generally a pretty damn healthy option on the cross-cultural noodle circuit. In stark contrast, there’s udon, a hefty, chewy, pale wheat noodle.

There are acclaimed, venerable temples devoted to udon throughout Japan, yet New York still hasn’t hit peak soba appreciation, and has a ways to go in terms of udon choices, too. A small but mighty crop of high-quality soba establishments have enjoyed loyal followings for years, though stalwarts like Midtown’s Soba Nippon have shuttered, and a handful of promising udon-centric spots have debuted in recent years. Ahead, 11 places to satiate that soba or udon craving, ASAP.

Continue reading on Eater.

Stemless wine glasses can be divisive: “I think elitists still believe it is somewhat gauche to carry stemless glasses versus ‘proper’ wine glasses in a restaurant,” says Zach Jones, wine director at Chicago restaurant Pacific Standard Time. “That’s kind of a silly way to think, but it is true that, at least in a restaurant, stemmed wine glasses are easier to store and transport because they can be hung upside down.” But then, the opposite is true for klutzy people at home with small kitchens: “When shelf space is limited, they’re a real lifesaver, without having to deal with giant racks or having to make space for tall glassware,” says Roman Tartakovsky, beverage manager at Hudson’s in New York. Plus, as many experts pointed out: a stemless wine glass works equally well for Aperol spritzs, Sangria, a nightcap of something brown, or even just water. So as a way to praise the stemless wine glass, here are over a dozen wine experts, restaurant owners, beverage directors, and frequent party hosts who’ve chosen their favorites.

The very best stemless wine glasses

Riedel O Cabernet and Merlot Stemless Wine Glasses

Austrian glassware company Riedel, which has been around since 1756, is the perennial favorite wine glass, but its “O” series of stemless glasses — around half of the pros interviewed for this story raved about them — didn’t come about until 2004. Introduced initially as tumbler glasses, this particular style is technically intended for Cabernet and Merlot red wines. Cedric Nicaise, wine director at Eleven Madison Park, likes these because there are relatively few compromises compared to a traditional stemmed style. “It still provides great aromatics and the glass is very thin, so smelling and drinking wine are great experiences,” Nicaise says. (Although he warns about using them for cocktails: “the glass is delicate, so be careful when putting in ice.”)

The best dishwasher-safe stemless wine glasses

Duralex Picardie Clear Tumbler

Victoria James, beverage director at New York Korean steakhouse Cote, suggests this sturdy style for at-home drinking, saying they feel French. “This tumbler brings me back to brasseries and vineyards in France, where these are used for a simple casse-croûte,” she says. “The thickness of the glass allows you to grip it and not heat up the wine too much, which is an issue with thin, stemless tumblers; they are dishwasher safe, stackable, and last forever,” James says. She says to use these for a casual Tuesday-night bottle: “They’re meant to be used for everyday, glou-glou wine, something that you would gulp alongside a sandwich.”

The stemless wine glasses to splurge on

Saint Louis Crystal Folia Medium Tumbler

Philanthropist Jean Shafiroff frequently hosts dinner parties (in addition to many charity galas), and when entertaining at home, she opts for glassware that looks as fancy as possible. “I love Saint Louis wine glasses; they make whatever you are drinking look expensive,” she says. This handcrafted crystal tumbler is from the French brand that dates back to the 16th century.

Continue reading on New York Magazine.

A trio of recipes that feature edible insects including locusts, silkworm pupae and ant larvae.

“We’re quick to down slippery oysters, stinking cheese and hot dogs made of entrails unknown, but we shy from anything that might once have crawled, hopped or hovered over a picnic blanket,” writes T contributing editor Ligaya Mishan in her latest piece on the joy, history — and, perhaps, necessity — of eating bugs. “Only in the West have we resisted such gustatory pleasures.” To make good on that suggestion, we asked three chefs around the world to submit their own recipes for insect dishes that can be made at home — assuming you have the stomach for it, along with the correct (somewhat chef-y) tools and, of course, the right bugs. A note on that last part: Thailand Unique stocks an extensive selection of insects for cooking purposes, including dehydrated silkworm pupae, highlighted in one of the dishes below. And a Maine-based company called Entosense sells online, too. Joseph Yoon, the executive director of Brooklyn Bugs, who also contributed a recipe, suggests the website Merci Mercado for procuring grasshoppers and gusano worms and another site, Entomo Farms, for cricket and mealworm products. Bon appétit!

Inago no Tsukudani (Locusts Simmered in Soy Sauce and Mirin)

By Chef Kuniaki “Kuni” Yoshizawa from Wokuni, Tokyo

Chef Yoshizawa doesn’t serve any insects at Wokuni, the Japanese seafood chain from the powerhouse restaurant operator Tokyo Ichiban Foods, which also has a location in New York. But one of his formative cooking experiences is bug-centric: learning how to make inago no tsukudani, or locusts in tsukudani, a mixture of soy sauce and mirin. “It’s my childhood memory dish,” he says. When Yoshizawa was growing up in Tokyo, one of his neighbors invited him to visit his hometown, in a rural area of northeastern Japan’s Yamagata Prefecture. It was there that Yoshizawa learned to make this traditional dish. “We had to catch [the locusts] alive; while we were cooking, they would run away from the kitchen,” he recalls. “As a kid, it was a very sensational, memorable and shocking experience.” The sweet and salty locusts are typically served as a snack, with a “crunchy and crispy” texture and flavor that recall a chewier version of shrimp heads.

Continue reading on The New York Times.

In a male-driven industry where origin stories come second to production, these ladies are breaking new ground.

Jill Kuehler never anticipated she'd swap a career in food education and access advocacy to gin. But when an unexpected trio of Portland women aligned, that's exactly what happened. Kuehler worked on the idea behind Freeland Spirits, a small-batch Portland purveyor of herbaceous gin, for over three years before launching. And once she had the concept, she went about establishing a dream team of women to help shape her new product. "I was really excited about having an all-woman team, from who grows the grains and botanicals, to the distillers," Kuehler says. And in a male-driven industry where origin stories come second to production, they're breaking new ground.

Kuehler first worked as the director of Zenger Farms, an educational nonprofit farm in East Portland, but she always planned to launch her own spirits business. “I didn’t really see many craft brands telling the story of where the ingredients in their spirits were coming from,” Kuehler explains. “Using my agricultural background, I thought it could be really fun to launch a brand that tells that story, of the farmers involved.”

She started with her friend Cory Carman, the force behind Carman Ranch in Eastern Oregon. She was the first person with whome Kuehler shared the idea for Freeland Spirits. “Cory said, ‘Oh my God, I’ll grow the grain!’ She always wanted to incorporate small-batch grains into her ranch, but there wasn’t an obvious market for a small-scale production, so this was a great fit,” Kuehler recounts.

Kuehler was then introduced to Molly Troupe, who joined Freeland in summer 2017. Troupe, who spearheads the distilling process, decided to tinker with a Rotovap, a rotary vaporator used to infuse flavors, utilized in tandem with traditional distilling techniques to "really elevate" the gin. The Rotovap distills at a lower temperature, which makes for fresher spirits. Some Rotovap experiments were a bust: "The weirdest thing I tried was balsamic vinegar—that did not go well—and we also tried Szechuan peppercorns, which was interesting," Troupe recalls. What did make it in: cucumber, rosemary, mint, and thyme, "all used in their fresh states, which is pretty unusual." Distilling involves 12-hour days, complete with playlists featuring plenty of Beyoncé. "Molly is insistent that music plays during distillation—she sincerely believes it improves the quality," Kuehler explains. Once a batch is distilled, the bottling process becomes a friends and family affair: "I don't think Molly's parents have missed a single bottling," Kuehler says.

Freeland debuted the first fruits of its labors—meant to invoke a garden’s flavors, housed in elegant, distinctive blue bottles—in December 2017. Then, the trio opened the distillery to the public for tastings and tours in July 2018. “Gin is a whole different ball game than whiskey: you get to play with as many different botanicals as you choose and create a really special flavor wheel,” Kuehler says.

The team expanded further in May 2018: Jesse Brantley, Kuehler’s childhood best friend, a sommelier with restaurant management experience, joined Freeland to run sales and the tasting room. That tasting room is meant to be “really experiential,” saysTroupe, as she thinks spirits education (specifically about gin) is pretty limited. Botanicals used in Freeland Spirits’ gin grow right outside the tasting room, and are featured in drawers inside the space; tastings happen close to the “beautiful 500-gallon copper pot” their herbaceous gin is distilled in.

The name Freeland Spirits is a nod to Kuehler's grandmother (a.k.a. Meemaw), whose surname was Freeland—"she was a huge inspiration to me, she was the breadwinner in the family; such a hard worker—and my interest in agriculture really came from her," Kuehler says. "She really showed me that all the good things in life come from scratch." The homage has nothing to do with grandma Freeland's libation preferences, though: "Meemaw never touched a drop of booze in her life, and now has a spirit brand named after her," Kuehler recounts with a laugh. "I grew up helping Meemaw in her garden in Texas, so we were thinking a lot about what gin from Meemaw's garden would taste like; that was the impetus for using fresh ingredients."

Continue reading on Saveur.

A quarter-century on the GQ masthead and 15 James Beard awards later, the preeminent food critic Alan Richman is as saucy and unbridled as ever.

Read more on The Daily Front Row.

The award-winning Japanese chain import brings iekei-style noodles stateside in a very laborious manner.

When E.A.K. Ramen opened in the West Village in May 2017, it stood out in this ramen-crazed city by serving iekei-style ramen. That style of soup — which submerges thick noodles in a creamy tonkotsu-shoyu broth blend, topped with spinach, seaweed, and chashu (roast pork belly) — was difficult, if not impossible, to previously find, and E.A.K.’s excellent version scored the Japanese chain the distinction of NYC’s best imported restaurant chain of 2017 in the annual Eater Awards.

Iekei ramen originated in Yokohama, a bayside city outside Tokyo, and the signature style can now be found in shops throughout Japan. Most purveyors are indie, one-off spots, (many of which were opened by former employees of renowned shop Yoshimura, which is credited for creating the style), but Iekei Ramen is the biggest chain serving the distinctive soup style, with 40 outposts in Japan, locations in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and Singapore, and hundreds more shops that franchise their recipe. The name was changed to E.A.K. here so an American audience would phonetically know how to pronounce the dish.

E.A.K. also employs a cheeky, social media-ready slogan (“But First, Ramen”) and equally Instagrammable bits of branding, like glossy logo-laden bowls and colorful ramen-themed stickers to grab on the way out. Playing right into that social media savvy is the Zebra bowl, created a year and a half ago as a last-minute invention the day before the company opened its first location outside Japan, in Singapore, explains Kiyoyuki Miyashita, manager of E.A.K. Ramen in New York.

In Singapore, the Zebra bowl simply goes by garlic shio ramen. It got its more whimsical moniker in the U.S. because of the black-and-white contrast between the white bowl and the nearly black garlic oil, drizzled on as a final flourish. Plus, it “just sounded more playful,” Miyashita says.

“Shio ramen is often a category in Japan, but it can be boring. It’s too plain, so it needed a stronger flavor,” Miyashita says. “We wanted to really differentiate our shio ramen option from the shoyu signature, since the differences are so subtle.”

The team landed on the addition of butter and garlic oil, with an added aesthetic bonus of the stark broth-to-oil contrast for a “cute” visual, he says.

In NYC, the ramen shop sells around 40 Zebra bowls each weekday and roughly 80 per weekend day. (For every 10 bowls of its signature offering, called The E.A.K., ordered daily, three Zebra bowls are ordered.) It only takes four minutes to assemble a bowl at E.A.K., but days of work go into creating the ingredients.

Continue reading on Eater.

Will the spirit of this Flatiron luncheonette stay alive under new ownership?

Tucked among the parade of mid- to luxury-priced stores, salons, swishy restaurants, and fancy fitness studios on Fifth Avenue is Eisenberg’s, an anomaly of a sandwich shop where most plates don’t top $10. The Flatiron lunch counter serves Jewish-tinged sandwiches and other comfort fare in a no-frills space that’s barely been changed since opening in 1929. It’s frankly a miracle it’s still around.

But as of May 1, Eisenberg’s has been under new ownership, and regulars are nervous for potential changes to the time capsule of a space, the kind that is endangered in high-rent New York City. How will a historic NYC restaurant with a quieter legacy — lots of loyal regulars, not massive busloads of tourists — fare in an ownership transition, and can it stay the same as it’s always been?

New owner Warren Chiu seems to understand what he needs to say and is quick to allay fears. Of the space: “I won’t be renovating the place to make it entirely different, but I’d certainly restore it properly, so I can bring out the best,” he says. Of the food: “Why change when people are already loving the food?” And of the low prices: “There’s no immediate plans to modify the pricing.”

It’s not a guarantee that nothing will change, but the previous owner, Josh Konecky, chose Chiu for a reason. “It was important to me to try to find someone who would continue the Eisenberg’s tradition,” Konecky says.

It’s a long tradition. The place was opened in 1929 by the Eisenberg brothers and stayed in the Eisenberg family for a few generations, until the 1970s, when it was sold to a Polish couple who owned it for less than a decade. Steve Oh bought the restaurant in 1988, running it for 17 years before selling it in 2005 to Konecky, who was a regular at the restaurant.

Konecky bought the restaurant with no previous hospitality industry experience whatsoever. But what Konecky lacked in restaurant prowess he compensated for with intimate knowledge of Eisenberg’s. He’d been going to the restaurant for a decade and a half, coming in a couple of times a week for breakfast or lunch, lured in initially by the scent of bacon wafting out of the exhaust system onto Fifth Avenue on his first day working in the area.

Thanks to his frequent visits, Konecky became friendly with the previous owner Oh, which led to him buying the place. He scored a 17-year lease and scrounged up the money for it from relatives, banks, and friends.

“My mother was one of the investors, and when I took her for lunch to see the space, she said, ‘You want to buy this shithole? Do you know how much money you’ll have to put into this?’” he recalls. “But she just didn’t get it.” His mother’s skepticism inspired Konecky to create a new tagline for Eisenberg’s: “You either get it or you don’t.”

Changes have been very minor under Konecky’s ownership, save for some recipe tweaks and the addition of burgers to the menu, which meant installing a grill and exhaust system. He updated certain dishes with his mom’s recipes, like the chopped liver, but that’s about it. “We’re not trendy. There’s no kale or quinoa, we still don’t do wraps, and we just added avocado to the menu in 2017. I held out as long as I could,” he says.

The neighborhood has transformed considerably in the past 15 years, ushering in a younger crowd living and working in the area. “I wasn’t sure if they would get it, but they did,” Konecky says. “There’s a sense of camaraderie here, and it’s a great place to eat alone, especially at the counter; you don’t stick out.”

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LA’s Prop Heaven houses all the diner decor, bar stools, and fake food a set decorator could want.

In most movies or TV episodes, characters are bound to eat, at least once. Whether that happens in a pivotal scene or just provides a delicious-looking background, these scenes need highly specific ingredients in order to be brought to life: 36 identical bar stools or a cotton candy machine, maybe; possibly a fro-yo dispenser, or hundreds of fake fruits and vegetables. That’s where a place like Prop Heaven comes in.

Keith Marvin currently runs the show at Prop Heaven, the large independently owned prop house in Burbank, California. His father, Lennie, founded the business over three decades ago, turning a passion for antiques into a prop rental business. And among nearly 100,000 square feet of set-decorating gems currently housed at the company’s HQ, a significant portion — nearly 25 percent — of the furniture and smaller items are devoted to restaurant and food scene-setting.

“In the early days of our company, a loyal customer told my father, ‘In the history of Hollywood, food and drink are always part of the conversation piece,’” Marvin says. “You can’t work in film and not have experience creating [projects, scripts, stories] around food or drink. In the early days, my parents were doing a lot of ’50s-type shows, so we had a diner counter, jukeboxes, a drive-in set dressing. Those were our first real restaurant props we had: We could do a ’50s diner set, but not much else.”

Since then, the business has grown exponentially. On a pretty ordinary Tuesday afternoon, by 2 p.m., Prop Heaven had already shipped pieces to over 30 shows, including How to Get Away with Murder, The Young and the Restless, The Middle, Champions, Lethal Weapon, and Life in Pieces — and there are still a few more hours in the day to get more orders out.

“For shows that are filmed in LA, you can’t name one that doesn’t work with us,” says Dan Schultz, Prop Heaven’s vice president. Over the years, that roster has included the likes of Will & Grace (both the original and new versions), Ballers, The Big Bang Theory, NCIS, American Housewife, and Black-ish as well as its spinoff, Grown-ish. Every restaurant featured on How I Met Your Mother had pieces from Prop Heaven, although the gang’s go-to bar, MacLaren’s Pub, was a permanent set. Similarly, while Central Perk was a permanent set on Friends, basically any restaurant scene outside that beloved, fictitious coffee shop included rentals from Prop Heaven. Television shows and commercials comprise 80% of its business.

Continue reading on Eater.

Less a restaurant than a religion,
Le Bernardin looms atop the New York
City food chain like some midtown Notre Dame—an ecstatically four-starred salute to the wonders of the sea. But while it may be tough to book a pew, it’s easy to feel at home, thanks to Maguy Le Coze—its bobbed and beatific high priestess, conscience, and co-owner—who’s been spreading her saintly brother’s gospel of raw with chef Eric Ripert for three decades running. She is classically fabulous and utterly French: Behold her awesome power!
 

There’s nothing quite like a bagel with lox and schmear

Appetizing shops are an NYC-bred tradition, opened in the late 1800s and early 1900s by Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants, most hailing from Eastern European countries. Historically, appetizing shops observed kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws outlining what’s considered Kosher, and only carry certain seafood (fish with scales; no crawfish or bottom-feeding species, including bivalves and mollusks) and dairy items, but no meat, as mixing meat and dairy is verboten. Pastrami, corned beef, chopped liver and other carnivorous Jewish comfort foods historically had to be sourced at delicatessens, like Katz’s and 2nd Avenue Deli.

While some of the places on this list have upheld the Kosher, strictly fish-and-dairy approach to the appetizing genre, most don’t adhere to this. Hence why one can find lobster or shrimp salad in some modern-day appetizing places, or chopped liver and pastrami in others. But in most cases, the time-honored basics that appear in any proper Jewish event’s catering spread (from bat mitzvahs to funerals) or Sunday morning brunch is defined by: buttery, salty smoked fish, a bagel, and schmear (cream cheese), ideally accessorized with onion, tomato, and capers.

The culinary genre can be overwhelming to the uninitiated. The selection might include multiple varieties and provenances of cold-smoked salmon; lox, which is cured in salt and not smoked; gravlax; which is also cured instead of smoked, but with sugar and herbs as well as salt; kippered salmon, which is hot-smoked; sable, a fish in the black cod family and often one of the priciest picks in the case; pickled and/or smoked herring, with or without sour cream-based sauce; whitefish, available both sliced and in salad form; and sturgeon.

Appetizing shops are on the decline, so restaurants offering the traditional meal are also on this list. Ahead, 16 excellent shops and restaurants to hit up when a smoked fish craving sets in.

Continue reading on Eater.

Life after Condé? Tough...but not impossible. Since losing her beloved glossy, Gourmet, in the McKinsey-backed bloodbath of 2009, Ruth Reichl has taken a dip in the Gilt pool, inked a three-book deal with Random House, and Tweeted up a storm. But The Daily isn’t the only fangirl on the block: a four-top waited patiently through cappuccinos for a photo op with the onetime Top Chef judge, and Scott Feldman (the foodie set’s answer to Ari Gold) popped by for a mid-meal schmooze. Thankfully, there’s more than enough Reichl to go around.

It’s been half a decade since Frank Bruni held the revered—and occasionally revst of restaurant critic for The New York Times. In his current op-ed columnist role at the paper of record, where he’s now spent nearly 20 years in an eclectic collage of gigs, he’s more likely to sound off about tenure than tagliatelle or tartare. The din of feedback is equally fervent—not that Bruni has ever read the comments. We tucked into a bowl of farro salad with him at Charlie Bird to discuss.
BY ALEXANDRA ILYASHOV

What’s new since your review days?
That phase of my career was sort of an odd digression. When I was named food critic in 2004, I’d already been at the Times for nine years, doing broad-based political stuff. My little brother has always joked that I don’t have a career—I have an attention deficit disorder.

Were you surprised to nab that gig?
I was certainly aware of this mythology of The New York Times‘ restaurant critic, but I never fantasized about having the role.

How did being a generalist of sorts make you a great food critic?
I don’t know if I did a great job! I’m the worst judge of that. It’s really hard to analyze your own work. I brought less reverence for chefs and restaurant traditions. My reviews were a bit more varied and unconventional in approach, because I didn’t marinate in that world beforehand. I loved food, had dined around a lot, and lived in a foreign country, but I wasn’t the most erudite about food. As compensation, I had eclectic real-world knowledge. Restaurants are about a lot more than food—they’re about culture, theater, anthropology, and sociology.

Has the role shifted more in the past five years?
Two decades ago, there weren’t nearly as many people making a point of trying restaurants and considering themselves “foodies.” Last spring, I taught a food-writing seminar at Princeton. The 16 students in the class went into New York to try certain restaurants, knew what was going on in the New York dining scene, and were familiar with the big chefs around the country. You couldn’t have found 16 kids like that 20 years prior. Ten years prior, even.

There must’ve been quite the waiting list.
There were 48 students who applied. I deliberately didn’t choose the 16 students who seemed like the most geeky foodies. Still, 12 of the 16 students had pretty good restaurant-scene vocabularies.

Do you remember your first-ever review?
I was a nervous wreck! I’d just moved back from Rome, and I didn’t have occupancy of the apartment I’d bought yet, so I wrote it in this horrible temporary apartment the Times put me in. It had terrible feng shui. I stopped every three paragraphs and questioned myself. But I remember that that review wasn’t edited much.

Are there any takedowns you regret?
The only one that keeps coming back to me is my review of Barbuto. It was a few years old when I wrote about it, and I gave one star. I wrote, “As you ranged around the menu, the food could be sort of uneven.” I adore Barbuto—it’s one of the five restaurants I eat at in this city. I don’t know if it was a completely inaccurate review, but I only eat a quarter of the menu, and that quarter is, for me, a three-star restaurant. As a critic you’re obliged to reflect all of a restaurant’s ambitions and its menu in a review, but that’s not the way people use restaurants.

Did you deal with lots of scathing criticism?
The first year or two that I was the critic, there was a website called The Bruni Digest that was an ongoing parody of my reviews. I only read it once because I know how tape-loop obsessive I can be. I’m not one of those writers with a Google Alert on my name. I don’t read comments on my columns. I don’t want to see them. I get onanistically addicted to the positive stuff, and get masochistically obsessive about the negative stuff. I don’t have enough energy as a human being to spend the mental bandwidth on what people are saying and then do my job. It’s self-defeating.

Did you ever feel like a celeb of sorts?
I certainly didn’t! I’m guessing most critics don’t feel like celebrities. You’re trying to avoid having people know what you look like, and you don’t want to be too much a part of the story. During those five years, I never posed for a photo or appeared on TV. The only thing that kind of broke my anonymity was when Nora Ephron, my very good friend, was making Julie & Julia and cleverly decided to stud the movie with bit parts for food-world people. I got it cleared with my bosses. I asked not to have my name in the credits. After all the editing, you basically see me dopily chatting at a table and applauding Amy Adams’ duck.

Have you considered returning to the food beat at any point?
After I left the critic role, I didn’t entirely stop writing about food. I wrote a number of travel pieces; I did a very long piece a year or so ago for Condé Nast Traveler about the rising restaurant scene in Bogota, for example. I don’t write about food full time and I don’t want to again, but I still have the freedom to dip in. I think I always will dip in; it’s something I love.

What do you miss most about being a critic?
Having all of my meals expensed! I still eat out a lot for work, so I expense some meals. Maybe I’ll pick up the tab when I eat with a political strategist, but I certainly can’t take these people to Le Bernardin. I ate three or four times at Masa and six times at Per Se as the critic; it did not cost me a dime.

Which restos are in frequent rotation?
I’m here at Charlie Bird at least once a month; I’m probably in Barbuto every three weeks; same goes for Szechuan Gourmet. I go to Hill Country and Perla a lot, too. I like Gabe Stulman—he knows how to put together a fun restaurant, and he and his staff know how to make customers have a great time.

Do you have more chef friends these days?
Absolutely! When I was a critic, I had none—I couldn’t. But I got a sense with some people, like The Spotted Pig’s Ken Friedman, that we might get along. They were like friends in waiting.

Any guilty food pleasures?
Pop Secret’s sea salt flavor of microwave popcorn. Extremely salty, but surprisingly good.

What’s your signature dish?
I buy fantastic salmon and cook it for really short time at a very high temperature. It’s astonishing how foolproof it is. Everyone thinks they need to poach it. Just coat it with something—I use Dijon mustard and blast it with dill. And don’t overcook it! I also make very good meat loaves—veal meat loaf, turkey meat loaf. I even thought about making a meat loaf book with my friend.

Speaking of books, you’ve got two new tomes on the docket, right?
One is called Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be, and it’s coming out in March. It originated from a column I wrote during college admissions season, when kids freak out about where they’ll get in. The book is an argument against investing too much anxiety and importance, in certain demographics, in getting into one of the two dozen most competitive schools. The other book I’m working on is about the fraught relationship historically between fathers and sons. It looks at the last five presidents and how much they’ve been stamped by their relationships with their fathers, or lack thereof. Among prominent men in America, you can notice kind of fraught father-son relationships, and that isn’t an accident.

Do you have any pals in fashion?
When I worked for Detroit Free Press, Robin Givhan was one of my best friends. We’ve totally fallen out of touch, but not for any reason. We were very close—we both lived in this former paint factory turned into luxury loft apartments you could have for a song because it was Detroit. We lived on the same floor, and we were both L.A. Law addicts. We’d watch it together every Thursday, switching apartments each week, padding down the hall shoeless.

Skip the wait at packed spots, try tasting menus at a lower price, and indulge with a drink

There’s something luxurious about going out for a decadent weekday lunch: It can stretch on for hours, feels far more indulgent than a fast-casual salad eaten desk-side, and maybe involves a drink or two. Or dessert, at least. A leisurely lunch in the middle of the week might occur on a well-deserved day off (or “sick day”), for a lavish birthday meal, or, simply, to try a much-touted, no-reservations place that gets so damn packed at dinnertime. Another advantage is that some revered tasting menu-centric restaurants offer lunch at a relative discount. Whatever the occasion, the 20 places ahead span the gamut in terms of cuisine, price, and appeal for worthy destinations for a memorable Wednesday afternoon feast.

Continue reading on Eater.

When it comes to the kitchen and the closet, Bon Appétit’s executive editor Christine Muhlke has all her bases covered. From trickled-out tea accoutrements to Lanvin flats, the stylish food savant has a cadre of wearable and edible musts worth cribbing.

Read more on The Daily Front Row.

The creamiest, richest, cheesiest versions to devour

Mac and cheese is a cherished comfort food, and beyond being a frequent kid’s menu favorite, there are a slew of spots around New York City dishing up decidedly adult takes on the creamy creation. Whether swimming in a mix of aged cheeses, topped with a crispy, bubbly crust, or peppered with bacon or mushrooms, there are some seriously excellent styles of mac and cheese at the places ahead.

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Steak tartare, traditionally comprised of minced, chopped, or ground raw beef tossed with raw egg yolk, capers, onions, and chopped parsley, first cropped up on menus at chic hotels in France at the beginning of the twentieth century. By the 1920s, the protein-packed dish was dubbed “beefsteack à l’Américaine,” as mentioned in notable French chef Auguste Escoffier’s 1921 culinary guide, though its connection to the United States is unknown. Besides high-quality beef, the dish required sauce tartare, then made of pureed hard-cooked egg yolks, vinegar, chives and oil, which is widely believed by historians to be steak tartare’s true namesake. “Beefsteack à l’Américaine” debuted in 1926 at Joseph Niels’s Brussels restaurant Le Canterbury. However, by 1938, sauce tartare was nowhere to be found in the steak tartare recipe in Larousse Gastronomique, which consisted of raw ground beef topped with a raw egg.

“The vogue for steak tartare really started after the Second World War, in the 1950’s,” French food historian Patrick Rambourg told the New York Times in 2005 after steak tartare had become popular throughout France and Belgium in the second quarter of the twentieth century (Smith, 2005). But Americans did not have a taste for the dish until travel to Europe became popular postwar. It arrived in New York in the mid-twentieth century. Later on, a scene in the 1987 film Wall Street featured the ruthless financier Gordon Gecko (played by Michael Douglas) initiating a young stockbroker (Charlie Sheen) into rich living by ordering steak tartare at the 21 Club. Contemporary chefs have tinkered with the classic slew of ingredients, with common modern-day additions that include Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco sauce, shallots, chives, scallions, pickled gherkins, and mustard—or, in the version at Les Halles, when Anthony Bourdain was the chef: a bit of ketchup.

Late twentieth-century favorites versions of the dish, some faithful to traditional preparations and others flaunting innovative revisions to the classic recipe, can be found at Balthazar, Odeon, Employees Only, Estela, Takashi, M. Wells Dinette, Prune, and Employees Only. Also pleasing the palettes of raw meat enthusiasts in New York in recent years are versions made with lamb, including dishes at The Cannibal, Empellon Cocina, and Dover.

Some very standout burgers, many Michelin stars, and more

Conveniently perched between uptown and downtown, Flatiron and Gramercy often function as that agreeable meeting point for a group dinner that won’t piss off the friends coming from the Upper West Side or Crown Heights (not too much, at least). And the area is filled with some noteworthy meals.

There’s a lot more to discover in these adjacent neighborhoods besides seemingly every fancy salad lunch chain: upscale, beloved places like Eleven Madison Park to classic burger joint Joe Jr. to an excellent Persian hole-in-the-wall counter, housed inside a slice joint. Ahead, 21 standout options for dining around the Flatiron and Gramercy areas.

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Iconic Italian pastries, a Vietnamese sundae, and excessive amounts of ice cream

Those who gravitate toward sweet over savory should get quite the thrill devouring desserts throughout the East Village and Alphabet City. Quality, indie, locally born ice cream shops abound, while Asian dessert fans can choose from a Kyoto-style teahouse, a popular Taiwanese chain with over 100 dishes to deliberate over, or a homemade mochi haven, to name just a few worthy area picks. A self-guided crawl of just a couple of the 18 highlights ahead will definitely induce a spectacular sugar high (and possibly a cavity or two in the process).

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A Serbian feast, affordable omakase, myriad Mexican spots, and more

There’s excellent variety of food to be found in Alphabet City, the area of the East Village between Houston and 14th streets amid the alphabetically named avenues. All ranges of cuisine types, price points, and ambiance abound, from truly special sandwiches or sophisticated cocktails to a memorable omakase experience or a boisterous German beer hall. Ahead, 18 solid picks for eating and drinking in this far-east neighborhood.

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Find San Diego-style burritos, popular Los Angeles imports, and odes to the Bay Area’s stellar produce

California cuisine is a bit nebulous to define, but it’s about an obsession with really fresh produce and letting those excellent ingredients shine. It’s where the whole obsession with farm-to-table emerged, at Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse in Berkeley, over four decades ago. In the 1980s, Los Angeles had its own sense of homegrown pride in cooking that flourished at places like Michael McCarty’s Michael’s Santa Monica and Wolfgang Puck’s Spago.

But distinctly California fare also includes sublime Mexican food with regional specialties throughout the state. For example, juicy, carne asada-filled burritos in San Diego, which swap in fries for rice; puffy fried fish tacos found throughout Southern California and Baja California; and Mission-style burritos from San Francisco. Also an important tenet of eating out West? Vegetable-focused, vaguely hippie-ish bowls, now a ubiquitous fast-casual staple that has long been around in LA.

If hopping on a flight out West isn’t on the agenda anytime soon, there are places in New York City that taste and feel a bit like being in California, whether the sunny state inspired the menu, or it’s a straight-up import. Check out these 16 places around NYC for dishes and vibes that effectively channel the West Coast, one fish taco, grain bowl, and In-N-Out burger homage at a time.

Read the full article on Eater.

Where to try the fresh and thrilling raw meat dish

The steak tartare doesn’t often get its due when compared to its cooked cousin, the burger, but it’s cooler in temperature, often daintier in presentation, and usually filled with bright, punchy flavors. The dish’s name is a French word that traces back to the 13th century, referring to the Tartars, a Central Asian tribe; but it also refers to a sauce made of pureed egg yolks, vinegar, chives, and oil, which was used in some steak tartare preparations in the early 1920s.

Ahead, check out 13 standout tartares in NYC, from French brasserie takes on the dish, to the Lebanese version, kibbeh nayah, to ultra-creative interpretations that resemble abstract art.

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Gather a group to dip meats and veg in bubbling vats of broth

Cold weather calls for hot pot, a dish with Chinese and Mongolian origins thought to date back at least 800 years — and by some estimates, closer to 2,000 years. The warming, communal meal focuses on big vats of boiling broth, with raw meats (often including offal cuts), vegetables, and noodles of choice dipped in.

Shabu shabu is a similar dish in Japanese cuisine, typically served with a kombu (kelp-based) broth, with the ingredients swished around the broth (shabu shabu translates to “swish swish”) instead of being briefly dunked in.

It’s a big business in China, with one report finding it’s the most popular restaurant type in the country with 22 percent market share, but still underrepresented in NYC compared to Sichuan or Cantonese restaurants. Still, here are solid spots worth trying, concentrated primarily in the East Village, Lower East Side, Flushing, and Sunset Park. The hearty, soothing dish is the ideal antidote to declining temperatures and the subsequent sniffles and congestion. Ahead, 17 places to hit up for a flavor-packed, broth-based feast.

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Bon Appétit restaurant and drinks editor Andrew Knowlton and L.A.-based designer Greg Chait of The Elder Statesman dropped by Achilles Heel in Greenpoint for a drink and some charcuterie. On tap? Some bicoastal food analysis, with a bit of style chatter thrown in.

Originally published in The Daily Front Row magazine, September 2014.

Fragrance star Tom Ford celebrates our favorite fruit

Originally published in Cherry Bombe magazine, Issue No 12.

Rachel Krupa delivers conscious convenience and community with her mini mart venture

Originally published in Cherry Bombe magazine, Issue No 12.

A shared love of Star Wars, Legos, and Legends brought together celebrated Chef Iliana Regan and wine pro Anna Hamlin

Originally published in Cherry Bombe magazine, Issue No 12.

A Saturday morning Southampton jaunt isn’t complete sans a cappuccino at Sant Ambroeus. Just ask the elegant Milan-founded spot’s fashionable regulars. The Italian original is 77 years old…and much as transpired since its birth! Dine on the tasty tale of a haute spot that feeds the fanciest crowd.

Craving the scrumptious story of Sant Ambroeus, aka the Euro-chicest spot out east? Bon appétit!

Originally published in The Daily Front Row magazine.

Chef Geoffrey Zakarian and his wife, Margaret Zakarian, have known Marc Murphy and Pam Murphy for six years. The guys met on the set of Chopped, and there’s been many a boisterous Hamptons dinner party at the Murphys’ Bridgehampton abode since. Over afternoon cocktails, bone marrow, and salmon tartare at one of Murphy’s spots, Landmarc, and then iced tea and burgers at Zakarian’s Lambs Club, the rather frank quartet dished on their friendships, relationships, the resto biz, and more.

Originally published in The Daily Front Row magazine.

Sirio Maccioni is a fine-dining icon with proud Italian roots and a celebrated restaurant empire. At his crown jewel, Le Cirque, the crème de la crème of the chic set has piled in for years-and crème brûlée made its stateside debut. Last month, he won a James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award. Maccioni and his son, Mario, sat down for lunch recently with The Daily at Sirio Ristorante, which opened its doors a year and a half ago at the Pierre. Some spirited reminiscing ensued.

Originally published in The Daily Front Row magazine.

Pour yourself a cup of ambition with the help of an eye-catching demitasse.

Originally published in V Man, Issue 39.

Chef Jordan Kahn, the visionary behind the high-concept tasting menu at Vespertine, crafts edible spring-inspired masterpieces exclusively for VMAN.

Originally published in V Man, Issue 38.

Unwrapping the bizarre world of fake food

Originally published in Gossamer magazine, Volume One.

What’s in your ice box?

Originally published in The Daily Front Row magazine, September 2013.

Despite regularly wolfing down up to 200,000 calories in a single month (yes, you read that right), Bon Appétit’s restaurant and drinks editor, Andrew Knowlton, can still fit through his front door. How is that even possible? Over omelets, Salade Niçoise and several glasses of rosé, the stubbornly svelte gourmand explains. We’ll have what he’s having!

Originally published in The Daily Front Row magazine, September 2013.

Ten top foodies who never skimp on presentation!

Originally published in The Daily Front Row magazine, September 2013.

Surely you know by now that EICs are rarely found in the official corporate caf. If you’re looking for top types, you go directly to Michael’s. For 32 years, proprietor Michael McCarty has been wrangling heavy hitters in media and beyond-and the Cobb salad’s never tasted better.

Originally published in the Daily Front Row Magazine, February 2012.

An impromptu eatery will feed vous, chéris, during Fashion Week for four days. After which, pouf!, the magic shall end as surely as a delicious soufflé. Aspiring mogulette Elettra Wiedemann’s pop-up rest, Goodness, is back at the Robert at the Museum of Art and Design. With four A-list chefs on the calendar, you can be assured from February 11-14, the eating’s good.

Originally published in the Daily Front Row Magazine, February 2012.