Walking and Talking

New Year's Feasting, Japanese Style

2011-12-27T20:50:00.000-05:00

It was a full year ago when I reported this November-December 2011 Edible Manhattan article on osechi-ryori, the traditional Japanese New Year's foods that evoke memories of family, home and tradition for those who grew up in Japan or in an osechi-observant household.

Here's the gorgeous three-tiered box that chef Hideki Yasuoka of the Nippon Club in Manhattan prepared for the lucky members who pre-ordered boxes last year. The smaller ayu, or sweetfish, in the box at the fore are simmered for four hours in a soy and saké mixture until they will practically dissolve in your mouth, and each component contains symbolic meaning, usually pertaining to longevity, good fortune, fertility--all the things peoples' wish upon each other for the New Year.

Since I grew up eating these foods, I love them and wish I could eat them every New Year. Yet many Japanese have no real interest in these traditional foods. One year, I searched for the best osechi boxes in New York City to serve to two young relatives who were visiting from Japan. They turned up their noses at the boxes, and were much more interested in steaks and burgers.

My reporting took me to Katagiri, the Manhattan Japanese grocery store, where I talked to shoppers stocking up for their New Year's celebrations.

These New Year's decorations of plastic rice cakes and good luck Daruma dolls would be the equivalent of putting a fake Christmas tree up in your home.

Thanks to the site Discover Nikkei, which re-posted my article here and discussed it on Facebook, I've received some interesting feedback on the story. Nina Kahori Fallenbaum, food editor at Hyphen , introduced me to this amazing-looking place in San Francisco, Peko-Peko, which is offering this luxury osechi bento.

I'm in Vancouver, B.C., now, where a quick search for osechi didn't turn up anything. If any of you know where I can find a good osechi box hereabouts, let me know!

Latke-palooza Returns to Brooklyn

2011-12-19T23:10:00.000-05:00

Tonight, the humble latke became the crispy blank canvas upon which a over a dozen New York City chefs let their imaginations play. It was Great Performances and Edible Brooklyn's third annual latke festival, so massive and crushingly well-attended it took up two floors of the cavernous opera house at BAM.

The winner was chef Jason Weiner's (Almond) super-crispy latke with house-smoked bluefish and yogurt sauce. The traditional Hanukkah food was at home with the smoked fish, and the yogurt accompaniment provided the perfect light touch to offset the oil and saltiness of the pancake and fish.

Weiner's entry didn't play it safe like Veselka's very traditional (satisfyingly so) sour cream and applesauce entry, nor did it go to the opposite extreme like this contender from Mae Mae Cafe: rye latke with cabbage flan, corned beef, Swiss cheese fondue and a dill pickle. Judge Michael Arad, the architect and designer of the 9/11 Memorial, dismissed it as "a Reuben not a latke." Another taster, though commented appreciatively, "It's so Jewish; it even comes with a dill pickle."

I took a shine to this picturesque gem from Julian Medina of Toloache, shredded potatoes fried very crispy and salty with a spicy jalapeno sauce. And also to this demure entry, People's Choice Award winner Bill Telepan's (Telepan) celery root and potato latke.

And finally, for dessert, Ron Ben-Israel (Ron Ben-Israel Cakes) served up a delicious potato and parsnip latke brulee with cranberry sauce. Eat your hearts out, latke lovers!

Feeding the Growing Numbers of NYC Hungry at Thanksgiving

2011-11-21T22:58:00.001-05:00

Some West Villagers may know Earl, the gray-bearded African-American man who wears a baseball cap and can often be spotted sitting in his wheelchair on Eighth Avenue in front of Jane Street garden’s chain-link fence. He’s the guy who shakes his large Styrofoam cup filled with coins (and the occasional one- or five-dollar bill) as he hums softly.

Earl used to be a toll booth worker at the Lincoln Tunnel. He’s also diabetic. Although he lives in New Jersey, he’s adopted this particular spot on Eighth Avenue as his own. He’s been pulling double shifts lately, he told me, for two reasons. One, he wants to get out while it’s still warm enough to do so, and, two, he’s trying to collect enough money to buy a Thanksgiving turkey. His biggest donation of all time, he says, came when another black man, a neighborhood resident he’s friendly with, came by one day and dropped a fifty-dollar bill in his cup.

At The Church of the Village
Photo by Martine Mallary

There are about 1.5 million New Yorkers who, like Earl, struggle to put food on the table, according to the food rescue agency City Harvest. That’s up by half a million since 2009, when I wrote this article about one New York City chef who is a regular donor to City Harvest. According to a post today on DNAinfo, the heavy increase in demand for emergency food assistance (City Harvest puts the growth at 25 percent since 2008) coupled with budget cutbacks has led to the closing of some food pantries and rescue agencies. Others have been unable to feed all the hungry who come to them.

Daisy's Emergency Pantry goods
Photo by Martine Mallary

Here in the West Village, the Church of the Village on Seventh Avenue and West 13^th Street just finished a $2 million renovation and the addition of a commercial-grade kitchen to better serve its clients. During the renovation, says Pastor Sara Giron-Ortiz, the church launched Daisy’s Food Pantry, which hands out bags of groceries to the needy every Tuesday from 1 to 3 p.m. through its Hope for our Neighbors in Need program. Last week, says the pastor, the pantry served over 170 individuals and families.

The need is great, the resources shrinking.
Photo by Martine Mallery

The Church of the Village will sponsor a Thanksgiving community meal Saturday, November 27^th in the Baruch House public housing development at 12 Avenue D. Those wishing to volunteer or donate a turkey or ham may contact Pastor Giron-Ortiz at pastorsara@churchofthevillage.org. The church’s Web site also accepts Paypal donations.

The church, led by Bishop Alfred Johnson, is the result of a 2005 merger of three United Methodist churches in the Village, Washington Square, Metropolitan-Duane, and Church of All Nations, and is housed in the former Metropolitan-Duane United Methodist Church.

If you’d like to volunteer in your neighborhood to help feed the hungry, take a look at The New York City Coalition Again Hunger’s Volunteer Matching Center. Another source of information is Time Out New York, which offers this guide to all kinds of Thanksgiving volunteering. Not enough time? Besides City Harvest, here are a few more organizations that provide dinners for the needy: Food Bank for New York City, Greenwich Village’s St. Joseph’s Soup Kitchen, and Chelsea’s Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen.

Scenes from Occupy Wall Street

2011-11-18T13:09:00.000-05:00

Just a week ago, this was the scene at Occupy Wall Street in Lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park.. A block away, the financial world went about its business as usual. The park itself was a sleepy collection of tents and people milling about or chatting with each other. The encampment had the feel of an alternative adult sleep-away camp, with posters for the day's meeting agenda ("This week's Occupy: Edmonton"), a makeshift kitchen, composting area, and various interest groups. There were ninety-nine percenters, student loan agitators and anti-war advocates, all peacefully co-existing in this United Nations of protest groups. There was an unmanned booth for empathy and meditation training at one end of the square. On the other, a Lego artist had created the scene in miniature in "Occupy Lego Land."

Yesterday, on my way to the 9/11 Memorial entrance on Thames Street, I walked by after police and security forces cleared out the park. Television trucks with giant sattelite antennae lined Liberty Street but, there was nothing to film except for a folk singer and a few die-hard protestors.

Here are a few scenes of Zuccotti Park shortly before the tent city was taken down.

Dolce Vizio Brings Customizable Tiramisu to the West Village

2011-10-21T19:01:00.000-04:00

A few months ago, the former Christopher Street Deli site on the corner of Christopher and Hudson Streets took on a brand new identity when a sleek, red-trimmed storefront opened. Dolce Vizio Tiramisù specializes in one thing: tiramisu, the Italian dessert of mascarpone custard, espresso-soaked ladyfingers and cocoa powder.

The two entrepreneurs behind Dolce Vizio are Alessandro Radici, 27, and Nadia Tade, 25, natives of Bergamo, Italy who met as business students and fellow competitive skiers at Bocconi University in Milan. The concept of an all-tiramisu shop came to the couple after a visit to the Roman café, Pompi, known for its classic tiramisu and variations on the dish.

For their venture, Radici and Tade teamed up with Michelin-starred chef Fabrizio Ferrari, who cooks at a Bergamo restaurant owned by Radici’s family. Ferrari develops different-flavored tiramisu recipes for the shop based on suggestions from Tade and Radici, and between occasional onsite visits and frequent Skype sessions, says Tade, “he is mentoring us” from afar. The shop’s name combines the words for “vice,” and “sweet,” explains Tade, because Dolce Vizio trades in “something you don’t really need in your life but is a nice indulgence that makes your life happier and sweeter.” She notes that the neighborhood has extended a warm welcome to her and Radici, overjoyed that it is neither another Marc Jacobs boutique nor a chain store.

When Radici was accepted at Columbia University’s business school, Tade quit her job as a financial risk consultant for Deloitte Milan so the duo could move to New York together and settle in Columbia graduate student housing. They worked with the city’s New Business Acceleration Team, which helped expedite their way through Gotham's bureaucratic thicket. Radici loves the fact that New York is a “global city” filled with so many foreigners that he doesn’t feel like one himself, and that the U.S. “is a much more business friendly place” than his homeland. At Columbia's business school, which is less theoretical and more practical than comparable schools in Italy, Radici adds that he can study entrepreneurship while he practices it in the West Village.

The store offers $7 ready-to-eat single portions of tiramisu in six flavors, including the most popular varieties of classic, orange-espresso, and nutella. $5 or $8 single-serving-size cups feature lady fingers soaked in either chocolate, citrus or coffee sauces, with a choice of two toppings. Think of it as the more sophisticated, Italian, take on the ubiquitous frozen yogurt shop. There is also a cake-size option that will feed 9 to 12 people for $39. A variety of coffees and teas and a simple dining area round out the take-out or eat-in experience.

“We still don’t have any expansion plans yet,” says Radici.“We are fine turning this store; we want to make it perfect.”

Dolce Vizio Tiramisù,

131 Christopher Street (Hudson Street)

Mon.-Fri. 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.

Saturday, 10 a.m. to 12 a.m.

Sunday 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.

www.dolceviziotiramisu.com

(646) 669-7432

Tasting Table Expands Its Reach

2011-09-09T09:49:00.001-04:00

Last night afforded me a glimpse into one configuration of the new food media landscape. The event was the cocktail party launch of Tasting Table's new test kitchen and dining room, a sleek brick-walled, fabulously outfitted loft space on the second floor of a non-descript Broome Street building

Guaranteed to evoke kitchen envy in all New Yorkers, the Eric Cheong and Loren Daye-designed space signals the eating and drinking e-mail list's entry into the big time. Plans include major content generation, master classes, recipe development, partnerships with large-name business (Williams-Sonoma, MasterCard and Jenn-Air, which supplied the appliances for the new space), and the beefing up of big city bureaus. They're moves that make MTV founder Bob Pittman's investment in the site look as canny as his Daily Candy buy and sell.

The site is no Yelp or (the recently purchased) Zagat, explains Kai Mathey TT's director of communications, because it relies on the judgement of seasoned critics. It's no Urban Daddy, because its not about being first to broadcast the latest arrivals on the scene. In fact, in content and scope, it sounds a lot like the old fashioned magazine. The difference, of course, it that the old three to six months' lead times are gone, and as with online news, the cycle is 24-hour and non-stop.

TT has brought on as its executive chef Brendan McHale, formerly of Jack's Luxury Oyster Bar and Barbara Lynch's The Butcher Shop in Boston, who is excited about a series of "artisan access" dinner he's designing that include cheesemonger Anne Saxelby and the purveyors of heirloom grains Anson Mills.

The pace of TT's growth and the scope of its plans are dizzying, although the source of my vertigo could have been the influence of mixologist Franky Marshall's (The Clover Club) dreamy Royal Sparkler (a pretty concoction of St. Germain vodka, champagne, simple syrup, lime, English cucumber and raspberry), and McHale's addictive pork belly croquettes.

These are big plans backed by big money, but I hope there is still room for the quality independents in the field, such as the meticulously curated Cravings, where yours truly is a contributor.

Chef Kevin Adey's Carrot-Top Pesto

2011-08-28T12:19:00.001-04:00

Chef Kevin Adey's carrot salad dressed with carrot-top pesto

Not too long ago, I wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal on resourceful New York-area chefs who practice “top-to-tail” vegetable cooking. They love their farmer’s market produce, in other words, and don’t want to waste a scrap of it.

My inspiration for the article was chef Kevin Adey of the Bushwick restaurant Northeast Kingdom. Farmer Ben Flanner of Brooklyn Grange, the rooftop organic farm in Long Island City, Queens, tipped me off to Adey’s carrot top pesto, an ingenious way to use every part of Brooklyn Grange’s lovely specimens. So I hopped on the L train and took the trip to Bushwick, where Adey gave me a demo of his dish.

The chef had just received a sack full of carrots from Brooklyn Grange in the wee hours of that morning, so they were super fresh. Because the rooftop placement of Brooklyn Grange means a fairly shallow soil bed, its carrots, while packed with flavor, are petite, each no more than five inches or so in length.

Pesto building blocks

The first thing I noticed was how much salt Adey tossed into the stockpot full of boil water for blanching the carrots. Aggressive salting is one of the traits that separates the home from the restaurant cook, Adey acknowledged as he tossed in carrots that ranged in color from golden to orange to persimmon colored into the pot. “You don’t want to cook them, just to set the flavor,” he explained.

Adey and his raw ingredients

Next, he blanched the carrot tops in the same pot, then shocked them in cold water to set their bright green color and squeezed the water out. (Freshness is key in using carrot tops; other chefs told me they don’t use them because they tend to turn bitter fairly quickly.) Adey loves using cashews instead of pine nuts or walnuts in his pesto, he said, for their great flavor and mouth feel.

Processing....

Adey then piled all the ingredients in his Robot Coupe and whizzed them. He uses basil as a foil to the slightly more bitter carrot tops, and notes that a pesto “has to have chunk.” That means don’t overdo the olive oil, so that instead of coating pasta or vegetables like gluey paste, your pesto will coat them, jewel like.

Note chunkiness of pesto!

Finally, it was just a matter of quickly plating the gorgeous carrots and some greens, also from Brooklyn Grange, and drizzling them with the thinned-out pesto. The result was an explosion of flavor and crispiness, with the fieriness of the garlic and the unctuousness of the olive oil offset by the sweet and bitter accents of the basil and carrot tops and the umami of the grated Parmesan.

Carrot Top Pesto

2 ounces roasted cashews

1-1/2 ounces grated Parmesan cheese

1 ounce garlic cloves

2-1/2 ounces extra-virgin olive oil

3 ounces clean carrot tops (blanched and shocked)

3 ounces basil leaves

salt

fresh black pepper

In bowl of a food processor, place the cashews, garlic, carrot tops, and basil. Start to process, and drizzle in oil, continuing to process until desired texture is reached. Stir in Parmesan, and season generously with pepper and salt to taste.

To use as a dressing for a blanched green market carrot salad, thin pesto with olive oil and drizzle over salad. Or use to dress cooked pasta.

Yield: 1 pint, enough for 8 people

Hudson Street's Sanpanino: Superior Sandwiches, Friend to Local Students

2011-08-17T02:51:00.001-04:00

Part of the charm of walking into Hudson’s Street’s Sanpanino, besides the stand-out grilled panino sandwiches, is its neighborhood vibe. Seating is minimal, and on “meatball Wednesdays,” the line-up for San Marzano tomato sauce-covered meatball sandwiches can stretch out onto the street. It is in early September, though, when the real local action begins. That’s when school opens at P.S. 3 directly next door to the shop,at St. Luke’s School across the street, and at Village Community School around the corner on West 10^th Street.

Sanpanino owner Leonardo Scarpone

Starting around 7:45 a.m. hungry students and their parents begin filing in to buy a bagel, croissant, or a sandwich for lunch. (Invariably, the greatest rush comes during the few minutes before the bell rings to signal the start of class.) When school lets out for the day, another crowd of kids converges on Sanpanino. “Yeah, you get to know them,” says owner Leonardo Scarpone. The kids can be funny. “They’ll come in and ask for forty-five cents back. I’ll say, ‘I know that’s your change, but what did you order?’” They’ll ask to use the shop’s phone to call their mom, or they'll use Sanpanino as a rendezvous point with parents. On occasion, adds Scarpone, “a parent will call me up because they forgot to pack a lunch.” Scarpone doesn’t mind making a sandwich for the lunch-less child and delivering it to the school security guard. “We’re almost like the annex to P.S. 3,” he says.

One of the shop's strengths is its kid-friendly menu. Half-sandwiches at student prices are available, or soup and sandwich combinations and small bottles of juice. Another attraction, though, is Scarpone, 38, himself, who welcomes kids and knows a thing or two about them; he taught middle school social studies in West Brighton, Staten Island for three years before succumbing to the entrepreneurial itch. That part of his genetic make-up came from his Puglia-born parents. Scarpone’s father owned a salumeria on 20^th Avenue in Brooklyn and his mother launched a bridal shop on Staten Island. Mom was also a great home cook. Scarpone grew up on her food, and on the products of two other Brooklyn salumerias where his father worked, A&S Pork Store and Bari Pork Store. “They made the best sandwiches,” he recalls. The concept for Sanpanino is rooted in those childhood memories.

When he founded Sanpanino, in 2000, says Scarpone, “there weren’t so many upscale sandwich shops in the city—there was a big void.” He developed a plan for a type of hybrid sandwich that combined Italian and Italian American traditions, but “leaned more toward the Italian.” That meant not “the packed sandwich of six mixed meats,” but one or two meats, fresh mozzarella, olive oil and balsamic vinegar. He stuck the prefix “san” onto the Italian word for “sandwich,” “panino,” reasoning that it “sort of sounded like the patron saint of sandwiches.” Then he brought his dad, Antonio, in to teach him how to make mozzarella, which is still made on the premises.

The most popular of the 14 specialty focaccia sandwiches on the menu at Sanpanino are the prosciutto di Parma with fresh mozzarella, plum tomatoes, and basil; the grilled eggplant, mozzarella, basil and olive tapenade; and the Sanclassico, which involves sopressata, mortadella, mozzarella, roasted peppers and basil, says Scarpone. He tries to stay high-quality and local when sourcing his ingredients. His prosciutto is imported from Italy, and his beef and poultry come from Ottomanelli & Sons meat market on Bleecker Street. The focaccia and almond cake come from Royal Crown bakery in Bensonhurst.

All of this fare is several giant cuts above a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich, and Scarpone admits that his kid customers are living large compared to previous generations, or even present generations not lucky enough to live in New York City. “I don’t think I knew what olive tapenade was when I was eight,” he says.

Sanpanino

494 Hudson St. (between Christopher and Grove Sts.)

New York, NY

(212) 645-7228

A new musical set in Heart Mountain, an indy film featuring Manzanar

2011-08-09T17:41:00.000-04:00

Last week, I attended a workshop production of a musical called Allegiance, which tells the tale of the unconstitutional imprisonment of 120,000 West Coast residents of Japanese descent during World War II. The show is being developed by the Old Globe in San Diego, with music and lyrics by composer/producer Jay Kuo and book by Kuo and Lorenzo Thione.

Having looked at popular depictions of this sad chapter of American history in the decades since World War II, I was interested to see how the musical, directed by Stafford Arima, would tell this story through the medium of musical theater.

The play follows the Omura family as they are abruptly uprooted from their lives as shopkeepers and students in Salinas, Ca. and sent to Heart Mountain, Wyo. Father Tatsuo (Paul Nakauchi) is a defiant Issei (like all Japanese immigrants at the time, barred from becoming a U.S. citizen) who refuses to sign the infamous “loyalty oath” swearing allegiance to and willingness to fight for the U.S. and forswearing allegiance to the Emperor and Japan. As American-born citizens, his sons James (Jose Llana) and Sam (Telly Leung) express the sentiments of the majority of Nisei at the time—the wish to prove their loyalty to America at any cost. James volunteers to fight in the all-Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat team, and Sam throws himself into the camp newspaper, The Heart Mountain Sentinel to write pro-America articles.

The production stars George Takei as old Sam (the story is structured as one long flashback, with a young and an old Sam). Lea Salonga is young Sam’s Japanese teacher and the fiancée of James. In Heart Mountain, father and sons are on opposite sides of the tense political divide that separated loyalist Nisei, led by the accommodationist Japanese American Citizen’s League, and the vocal and defiant “No-No Boys,” who refused to sign the loyalty oath and protested their unjust imprisonment.

Opinion about this play will likely be divided among the Japanese American community that watches it, too. First, there is the squeamish uncertainty: is this going to be a Springtime for Hitler-like attempt at concentration camp musical theater? Turning deeply resonant Issei sayings (shikata-ga-nai/”it can’t be helped,” gaman/“persevere, do your best”) into the lyrics for a Broadway-style song-and-dance musical at first struck me as bizarre, and slightly cringe inducing. The songs, though, turned out to be moving tributes to the stoicism and unquenchable spirit of the prisoners.

Then there is the matter of historical accuracy. One friend, well-versed in Heart Mountain history, objected to the way the “No-No Boys” are treated as a mere plot device to gin up some drama, and their views not fully explained and honored. On the opposite end of the spectrum, viewers at earlier workshops apparently complained that toadying JACL head Mike Masaoka, as played by Paolo Montalban, was too much of a buffoon.

Yet there is a long history of musicals using the raw material of history as fodder for popular entertainment; think Evita, Porgy and Bess (which started as an opera), Les Miserables, and 1776, for example. The first two, especially, were criticized for factual inaccuracies, yet their mass appeal brought small pieces of history—however fudged, cheesed up, glamorized and overwrought the final product—to a mass viewership that most documentary filmmakers and historians can only dream of.

The musical’s outlook on the legality and morality of the mass roundup is in line with today’s views of the evacuation and concentration camps as a gross breach of civil rights and a stain on America’s reputation: JACL leader Mike Masaoka is portrayed as a spineless puppet, the “lapdog of the WRA” (War Relocation Authority, the government body created to oversee the mass incarceration), who suggests that suicide squads of Japanese American soldiers be sent into battle to prove how loyal the Japanese are to America. The camp director installs young Sam as a government mouthpiece at the Sentinel, using him as “bait” to get to the dissident inmates. (In fact, as my friend points out, there was no hiding of the No-No boys; they expressed their views and suffered the consequences of being sent to the even harsher Tule Lake concentration camp.)

This approach is a far cry from Ansel Adams’s 1943 collection of writings and photographs of Manzanar, Born Free and Equal. In it, Adams took pains to both praise the industry and neatness of the prisoners but called the concentration camps “only a rocky wartime detour on the road of American citizenship…a symbol of the whole pattern of relocation—a vast expression of a government working to find suitable haven for its war-dislocated minorities.”

I overheard two people sitting behind me talking about the evacuation and incarceration as a “sad chapter” in American history and “one we don’t hear about.” I hope that Allegiance will get more people talking about it, and send them to the history books to find out the full story of what happened.

***

The indy film Littlerock, directed by CalArts graduate Mike Ott, has been pulling in favorable reviews on the festival circuit. I went to see a local screening because it stars two young Japanese actors, Atsuko Okatsuka and Rintaro Sawamoto as a brother and sister (also named Atsuko and Rintaro in the film) stranded in a dusty dead-end California town. Even more interesting to me, it features a trip to Manzanar.

Ott slaps two very Japanese characters down in the middle of Littlerock, a podunk Antelope Valley town where the young people pass the time drinking, partying, fantasizing about getting out, and trying to scrape by. They are befriended by a hapless dreamer, Cory, who pulls them into his circle. While Rintaro soon tires of the scene, Atsuko, getting in touch with her inner slacker and relishing the sheer otherness of this aimless existence, opts to stay behind and explore a budding romance.

Manzanar as their destination, along with San Francisco, is alluded to, but we don’t really know why these otherwise typical Japanese siblings want to visit the site of the former World War II Japanese concentration camp. Although Rintaro’s Japanese is serviceable, Atsuko, from the beginning to the end of the film, doesn’t utter a word of English. Her face is a blank slate; one of the few clues to her inner life comes from her voiced-over letters to her father. We learn that he and her brother are estranged, and that she lies to her father and tells him she is in San Francisco when she’s actually learning to make burritos at Cory’s father’s Mexicatessen.

Themes of racism, cultural difference and language barriers gain new resonance and the tone of the film abruptly shifts when Rintaro and Atsuko arrive at Manzanar, now a National Parks Service site, and tour the interpretive center. There are clips of FDR’s speech after Pearl Harbor, images of racist signs, and the “soul-consoling tower” ireito, or obelisk that marks the prison camp cemetery. It’s an abrupt and jarring shift to documentary mode, and we at last find out that there is a personal connection between the siblings and the camp. Atsuko muses to her father in a letter what her life might have been like had the war and the concentration camps not happened, and had she been born in America. But the final scene, a frustrating farewell phone call between Atsuko and Corey, who still can’t understand a word each other says, hints that the racial and communication divides that caused such trauma continue today.

Kenny Scharf's Drive-thru Art Installation, Pasadena

2011-08-01T15:30:00.000-04:00

Every time I return to Los Angeles, it seems like traffic has gotten worse. But I like the way this parking garage-as-art-installation at the Pasadena Museum of California Art takes a big Southern California demerit and turns it into something fun. Painted by L.A.-born artist Kenny Scharf, the Kosmic Krylon Garage was part of a big 2004 Scharf exhibition at the museum and remains as a permanent installation. Almost makes owning and parking a car, at least in this garage, fun.

Reno, Nevada: Casinos, Meet Farm-toTable

2011-07-16T11:20:00.000-04:00

Despite dire predictions of bad eating in Reno, a recent trip there turned up some interesting watering holes. Turns out there’s a burgeoning food culture centered on local ranches, farms and some small, family-run dairies that are struggling to gain a foothold. One of those, Laca’s Vacas Dairy, is owned in part by a descendant of a Basque shepherding family. Many Basques still live in the area, and their culture and customs have left a mark on the region’s culinary landscape.

Beautiful fava bean crostini at 4th St. Bistro

The area even has its own member of the edible Community of magazines, edible Reno-Tahoe! When I discovered the magazine online, its “Eat Local Guide” (nine pages covering the region between Carson City and Fallon) became my dining search engine. After a great dinner at a place called The 4^th Street Bistro, I saw a wooden crate in the foyer that I was sure was supposed to hold edible Reno-Tahoe. It was empty. Just then, a woman entered the restaurant carrying a thick stack of magazines. As if I had wished her into existence was Jaci Goodman, publisher and advertising director of edible Reno-Tahoe, carrying the new summer issue of the magazine.

Jaci took us out to the back terrace of the restaurant, where she had been having dinner with the magazine's publisher, Amanda Burden. Since I’m a contributor to edible editions in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Hudson Valley, I was excited to meet the minds behind Reno’s version. Jaci and Amanda introduced us to 4th Street Bistro Chef Natalie Sellers, who’s put in time at some top San Francisco kitchens. All had gravitated to Reno for its smaller size, friendliness, and the chance to make a mark on a community that’s opening up to the idea of local and sustainable agriculture.

The next night we had been planning on eating at Louis’ Basque Corner, one of the few restaurants I could find that was open in Reno on the Sunday of Fourth of July weekend. Jaci set us up with a table, and owner Brian Elcano was on hand to greet us. After he and co-owner Chris Shanks took over in March, they replaced the old vinyl floor with hardwood, and added all new kitchen equipment. The new equipment alone, Jaci had told us, resulted in a leap in quality at the 44-year-old restaurant. Like many Basque restaurants, Louis’ occupies the bottom floor of what used to be a boarding house for shepherds. Meals are still served family style, and are hearty, multi-course affairs.

Loved the braised oxtails at Louis'

Also the crispy sweetbreads

So if anyone tells you Reno is just a faded pioneer town full of casinos, washed up gamblers and anomie, you can raise a skeptical eyebrow. “Scratch the surface here, and there’s a lot going on,” Jaci told me. “People here are friendly; we look out for each other.”

Chef Bill Telepan and Friends Cook for Tohoku

2011-07-07T14:18:00.000-04:00

Telepan, center, and event volunteers.
Photos courtesy of Bill Telepan

I happened to speak with Chef Bill Telepan yesterday, who was full of news about his recent trip to Japan. He was one of eight New York chefs who traveled to Kamaishi, Iwate Prefecture, one of the areas most devastated by the March 11 Greater Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. The team's mission was to cook a heartwarming Fourth of July weekend lunch for an estimated 1,000 people in this city.

“It was an amazing event, and it went perfectly,” said the chef, whose eponymous Upper West Side restaurant is known for its artful presentation of seasonal and local ingredients. “The day before, we were told that only 400 people might show up, and we felt really bad for the people who had organized the event,” he said. In fact, the visiting chef delegation, which cooked their version of Japanese and Western comfort foods, ended up serving between 2,000 and 2,500 guests.

The plan for the dinner was first hatched in May, when two businessmen, one from XCoal Energy & Resources and one from Nippon Steel, were dining at restaurant Daniel. XCoal, explains Telepan, provides coal to Nippon Steel, which has longstanding ties in Kamaishi. When chef Daniel Boulud stopped by to chat, the men discussed the trials residents of the quake- and tsunami-wasted area were still facing and decided that this goodwill gesture would not only lift the spirits of a community that has suffered much, but also show off the safety and quality of Japanese ingredients.

The all-star chef team

Boulud rounded up his all-star team of chefs, which, besides himself and Telepan, included David Bouley, Floyd Cardoz, Craig Koketsu, Tadashi Ono, François Payard, and Michael Romano. Telepan recalled one woman at the event who came up to him and told him that she had not been able to afford a cake for her daughter’s birthday; this lunch was their celebratory meal. Another guest told Telepan that the event provided the first reason for her to put on make-up since the disaster. About 20 percent of community residents are still homeless, the group, which also toured the area to witness the damage first-hand, learned.

The chefs sourced their ingredients with the help of chef Patrice Martineau, a Boulud alumnus who now cooks at the Peter restaurant at Tokyo’s Peninsula Hotel. “I made miso stir-fried vegetables and a miso- and kasu (lees that result from the production of sake)-marinated hamachi and tuna that we seared,” reported Telepan. “It was fun, because I haven’t cooked Japanese food since I was at the CIA (Culinary Institute of America).” Telepan, who graduated from the CIA in 1987, figured out the recipe beforehand, tested it in New York, and also consulted with another chef on the trip, restaurant Matsuri’s Ono.

Patiently waiting in line.

“The truth was, we weren't going to serve a high-end dish, we wanted comfort food with a twist,” Telepan explained. Pastry chef Payard brought 3,000 macarons with him (a favorite of Japanese diners), sourced some “incredible peaches,” for a peach tart, and baked an equally awe-inducing chocolate roulade made with tofu. Another dish that Telepan liked was one made by Chef Craig Koketsu of The Hurricane Club, a fresh summer salad of tomatoes cucumbers and corn. Except for the macarons, the food was all from Japan, Telepan added; “Part of the deal is that we were there to let people know that Japanese ingredients are still good.” For local residents, still reeling from the loss of family, friends and property, the meal must have been a soothing balm to their psychic wounds.

The t-shirt to prove it really happened.

Telepan was amazed by the Japanese guests’ famously rule-abiding natures. The community facility where the event was held was the size of a football field, he says, “where I was about midfield, and the line went around the track. It stayed that way for about half an hour, and at one point people thought there was not going to be enough food. So they told everyone they were only allowed one dish. It was insane,” (here he let out a bemused laugh) “because they listened, and nobody complained. I had a lot [of food] so I kept telling them, it’s okay, you can have whatever you want from me. But they were reluctant.”

Approach Guides: Downloadable travel guides that won't weigh you down

2011-06-21T19:52:00.001-04:00

Recently I came across the nifty downloadable Approach Guide series of cultural travel guides created by husband-and-wife team Jennifer and David Raezer. The concise guides are available for the iPad, iPhone, Kindle, Nook or in PDF format. They are highly specialized, either focused an aspect of a country's art or culture (wooden temples of China and Japan, for example) or on its food and wine. Recently Jennifer sent me the latest issue, AG's Guide to Sushi and Sake in Tokyo.

It's basic stuff that seasoned Japan travelers will not need, but invaluable for the first-time or novice visitor. Tips range from how to order and eat sushi at a restaurant (dip the fish side, not the rice side, of a piece of nigiri sushi into soy sauce) to alcohol pouring etiquette (pour for others, not yourself). Even for seasoned Japan travelers, the glossaries on the different types of sushi and sake are helpful.

This guide is $2.99, and prices for other guides in the series go as high as $7.99. The most popular cultural guide, says Jennifer, is the New York City Cast Iron Architecture of SoHo and Tribeca guide, and for food and wine, the AG Italian Wine Guide.

Intrigued by the idea of the Approach Guides, I asked Jennifer a few questions about the series:

What gave you and your husband the idea for these clever guides?

In 2004, we decided to take a career break (5 years!) to travel. When we started out upon our adventure, we did not plan on creating a guidebook series, however, we found that most guidebooks did not offer the depth of information on cultural sites that we were seeking. So we decided to create what we wanted ourselves: guidebooks that help you go deeper and connect with the world around you through art, architecture, history, food, and wine. One of the most unique aspects of our guidebooks is that we help travelers (who necessarily have limited time in one place) determine what is special about each site and draw connections among other sites.

For our food and wine guides, our goals are threefold: (a) help travelers quickly identify key regional dishes and wines to try in each place; (b) give helpful local tips on eating and drinking that will make fitting in a little easier; and (c) provide a framework that provides a foundational understanding of how things work so that travelers will be prepared for any situation (for example, for Sushi and Sake in Tokyo, we do not profile individual sake producers, but rather the prevailing styles and what makes each style unique).

Who does all the research and how do you go about conducting it?

David and I currently are the sole authors for Approach Guides and the initial series (37 guidebooks) is based on our first-hand travel experiences; we accumulated a large portion of the background information from which we have crafted these guidebooks during the years we spent traveling. The process is this for each destination: we plan our itinerary based around a theme, research each site we plan to visit in advance, and then travel to each site where we take photos and make our own observations. We then synthesize all that we have read and experienced in order to create unique content for each guidebook.

How do you pick your guide topics?

The topics are chosen based on those things in which we have a strong interest. If we don't believe that
something will deliver a compelling travel experience, we won't write about it.

What did you and your husband do before launching this venture, or what do you continue to do in addition to launching this venture?

Our backgrounds make the perfect combination to launch Approach Guides. David worked in finance as an equity researcher for Morgan Stanley and I have always worked in marketing and business development for internet companies. In addition to the ebooks, we also have a series of wine apps for the iPhone and iPad, so we definitely keep ourselves busy!

What is your ultimate goal with the Approach Guides?

Our goal is to give travelers information that will help them explore, experience, discover, and connect with their destination through its art, architecture, history, food, and wine. If we do it right, travelers will use our guides to go deeper and understand more about how each destination fits into a broader context. Once they have the basics down, they are empowered to make their own discoveries...and this, for us, is the reason to travel.

How to make Bar Basque Chef Yuhi Fujinaga's Crispy Farm Egg

2011-06-02T20:33:00.000-04:00

Crispy Egg and proud inventor of dish.

Recently I wrote an item for the Cravings website on the amazing Crispy Farm Egg that Bar Basque chef Yuhi Fujinaga created for his mod restaurant at the Eventi Hotel on Sixth Avenue. Chef Yuhi was nice enough to reduce the recipe to a scale the home cook can manage, and to do a little demo of the dish for me.

Here it is, with my step-by-step photo instructions. It's a very chefy, dish, meaning lots of steps, none of which are too difficult in and of themselves, but which all add up to a bit of a production. But if you're feeling adventurous, give it a go! If you can't find the mildly smoked Spanish raw sheep's milk cheese Chef Fujinaga uses, manchego would be the next best thing, though not quite the same sans smokiness.

Crispy Farm Egg
6 organic brown eggs (Chef Yuhi prefers farmer's market eggs)
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
2 eggs (regular white is fine), whipped, for egg wash
1-1/2 cups panko bread crumbs
2 Yukon gold potatoes (3 oz. each), peeled, quartered, steamed until fork crushable
2 red bell peppers, roasted, peeled, julienned and stewed lightly in their own juices
4 oz. Idiazabal cheese, grated
1 cup half-and-half
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons flat-leaf Italian parsley, washed, picked and rough chopped
2 tablespoons sweet butter, 83% fat
12 sliced serrano ham, sliced paper thin
1 quart canola oil, preheated in a stainless steel pot to 350 degrees (home cooks, you can get away with less)
1 teaspoon Maldon sea salt
1/2 teaspoon Espelette pepper
watercress or arugula for garnish

Procedure:
In a non-reactive stainless steel pot, bring water to a boil with a little bit of salt. Boil enough water to cover all of the eggs.Once the water comes to a boil, drop the organic eggs in the pot for 5 minutes. Immediately remove them from the boiling water, and chill them in an ice water bath. At Bar Basque, cooks boil and chill the eggs in advance.

Here's your panko-dusted egg, no bald spots!

When the eggs are chilled, carefully peel the shells off, and start your breading procedure: Dust the eggs in all-purpose flour, followed by a dip in the egg wash. Coat the eggs with the panko bread crumbs, making sure that there are no bald spots.

Preheat canola oil to 350 degrees. Deep-fry the breaded eggs until golden brown. Season the eggs after with espelette pepper and sea salt. Chef Fujinaga recommends a good dose of sea salt, so that when the egg is broken open, the salt mixes with the yolk and seasons the entire egg.

Once the potatoes are steam cooked, combine the olive oil, sea salt, parsley and butter in a non-reactive stainless steel bowl, and crush the potatoes with a fork or whisk, incorporating all the ingredients together.

In a separate stainless steel pot, bring the half-and-half to a boil. Meanwhile, place the grated cheese in a blender. Once the half-and-half has come to a boil, pour into blender. Run on high speed to emulsify. This, too, can be made in advance and reheated.

Plating:
In a bowl, spoon one scoop of crushed potato in the center of the bowl.

Top off the potato mixture with the roasted peppers.

Place the fried egg on top of the roasted peppers.
Wrap the tower of potato, peppers, and egg with the thinly sliced serrano ham.

Pour 2 ounces of the cheese broth around the wrapped tower.

Garnish with watercress or arugula. Attack with gusto.

Food Truck Madness

2011-05-27T15:28:00.000-04:00

You can barely toss an arepa in New York City these days without hitting a food truck of some sort or another. Now there’s a whole book about it, Food Trucks: Dispatches and Recipes from the Best Kitchens on Wheels, by Heather Shouse.

One of the nice things about this book is that it covers the two ends of the food truck spectrum: the Jamaicans, Cubans, Indians and other immigrants whose trucks cater to their own communities, and “the gourmand with social media savvy and a flush audience of followers.” The first category entered its golden age after immigration quotas were lifted in 1965, writes Shouse. Up until then, street vendors consisted mostly of Greek and other European immigrants (not that there’s anything wrong with gyros). Today, there are halal carts in Midtown, and pan- everything: pan-Latin, pan-Asian and pan-Arab carts. You could never sit down at a restaurant and eat pretty well for a year, I bet.

For would-be food truck moguls, the big problem in New York is obtaining a permit to legally operate these rolling cash generators. There are 2,800 permits available for the entire city, Shouse reports, plus an additional 50 per borough. The waiting line is longer than the Brooklyn Bridge, she adds; I've heard hopefuls who claim it takes special pull at City Hall to somehow actually snag one. Shouse says that on any given day, you can buy a “turnkey” mobile kitchen for $20,000 to $30,000 through Craig’s List. But the operation with a two-year citywide permit? That will cost you $80,000.

Food Trucks covers the country, and in New York, highlights NY Dosas (which has fan clubs in Japan, Canada and San Francisco!) run by Sri Lankan immigrant Thiru Kumar; The Arepa Lady, 65-year-old Columbian Maria Piedad Cano, who turns out cheese and chorizo cornmeal arepas; Jamaican Dutchy, the Bob Marley-blasting jerk chicken slinging brainchild of O’Neil Reid; Big Gay Ice Cream Truck, the passion of Juilliard-trained classical bassoonist Doug Quint, and Abdul Sami Khan’s Trini Paki Boys halal curry chicken cart at 43^rd St. and 6^th Ave.

At a recent event I attended sponsored by the catering company Great Performances and Edible Manhattan, GP CEO Liz Neumark proudly announced that her company now has its own The Katchkie Truck. Named after GP’s 60-acre organic farm in Kinderhook, NY, it spends six days a week at Wave Hill and Mondays at GP’s 304 Hudson Street headquarters (between Spring and Vandam Sts.). The emphasis is, fittingly, on vegetarian dishes, including a veggie slider with feta cream on a brioche bun and a mozzarella and tomato sandwich with Katchkie Farm pesto on ciabatta.

The Katchkie Truck

Finally, just as I was about to write this little report, I saw Rozanne Gold’s latest post, on a discovery her son made: The Roamin’ Cannoli truck in San Bruno, Ca. Sounds right up my alley. Maybe not as exotic as the braised lamb cheeks sandwich from Spencer on the Go in San Francisco, or the potato poutine from Potato Champion in Portland, Ore., but one that Ferrara or Villabate could do well with here. Get in line for a permit, guys!

Rick Bishop on the challenges of growing the perfect strawberry

2011-05-16T20:49:00.002-04:00

Rick Bishop, left, and one of his many fans, chef Dan Kluger, whose ABC Kitchen just took home the best new restaurant James Beard Foundation award

Although the term “farm to table” has become a cliché, what it stands for has not. Sophisticated, big-city dining has put the small organic farmer at the center of its universe. In the competition for the first, best and most rarified crops of the season, a good relationship with growers is crucial to chefs.

One of my favorite recent interviews was with Rick Bishop, the extremely talented farmer behind Mountain Sweet Berry Farm in Roscoe, NY. As I detail in this Edible Manhattan story, Rick is beloved by Manhattan's best chefs because he's passionate, engaging, and highly knowledgeable about farming. Most importantly, he can deliver the goods.

Among Rick's most prized crops are his Tri-Star strawberries, a small, delicate and extremely flavorful hybrid that was first introduced by Federal agriculture department breeders in 1981. It doesn't require long sunlight hours like most strawberries, so it can grow over three seasons, from May through October. The Tri-Star thrives in cool climates, perfect for the Catskills, where Rick's farm is located.

To hear Rick talk about what it takes to grow a crop like this is to get a tiny glimpse into the challenges of the small farmer that we hear about, but don't understand on a gut level.

One of the biggest challenges of this berry, for example, is its small fruit size, which means pickers have to pick 45 to 52 berries per pint, compared to only 12 to 15 of the California behemoths were used to buying in grocery stores. More berries, more work.

Second, the Tri-Star has no real forage capacity. Instead of sending roots out far and wide to gather nutrients, as a wild berry would, plants have to be placed in raised beds lined with black plastic and watered with overhead irrigation. Because the Tri-Star is a very dense berry, though, with high soluble solids and sugar content, they also mold easily. (These, by the way are exactly the qualities that allow the berry to pickle up so well, which is what the chefs at Momofuku and Corton like to do with them.) To prevent mold, Rick has to be fanatic about cleaning out all dead or rotting berries, pruning off all runners, and laying down straw between rows to make sure no dirt splashes back onto the fruit. His field has to be meticulously maintained, in other words.

"If disease breaks out in week two," he notes, you're done. "To get this berry to come in, when done correctly, it's a treasure." The Tri-Stars are also, he says, "a roller coaster. They can come in and do very well, but they can also take away. Two years ago, the strawberry season was soup, it rained all through."

How did he get through? "I have a day job," he says succinctly (his "more-than full-time" day job is as marketing director of Hudson Valley Foie Gras). "If I just did beans and potatoes, it wouldn't be so bad, but strawberries are like this," he says, his hand describing the up-and-down movement of a roller coaster. "It's ski vacation in Colorado, beans and rice, ski vacation, beans and rice."

When well-heeled customers at fancy chef dinners say to Rick, "Well, if you were smart....." and give him business advice, his answer is, "Being smart isn't always going to help you if this is the weather. If all of a sudden your quarterly reports were 700 percent under last year, what would you do? You'd fold! But not a farmer. It's like Vegas, it's crazy! And you learn to just go with it."

Please bring back your wine cake, Rozanne Gold!

2011-05-08T11:17:00.002-04:00

No visit to Rozanne Gold’s grand, bohemian brownstone in Park Slope would be complete without a slice or two of her Venetian Wine Cake. Once sold locally through a bakery in the ’70s, it is one among the thousands of smart, delicious dishes Rozanne's created throughout her career. It’s also the only recipe that she does not give out. Instead, the cake has a permanent home in her airy kitchen, ensconced in a worn green cake tin on an iron stand next to the window.

So when I showed up one morning to interview Rozanne for a profile in this month's Eat, Drink, Local issue of Edible Manhattan, naturally she cut me several slices of her cake and brewed me a cup of coffee. “I had something vaguely like it in Venice,” she said of her creation, “very simple. I came home and kept on experimenting.” It was her husband Michael Whiteman’s idea to add rosemary, which Rozanne points out is more Tuscan, and typical of the Renaissance style of coupling the sweet and the savory. Her family and their guests go through at least a cake a week, and for the past 15 years, her housekeeper Irene has started her weekly visit off with coffee and a slice of wine cake.

In the picture above, you can see the cake on the right, and behind Rozanne, the beautiful collection of china serving platters that Michael has collected throughout his long career as an international restaurant consultant.

Rozanne’s done so many things well in her life, that it’s difficult to sum her up. In a way, her wine cake does it best. The author of the best-selling “1-2-3” three-ingredient cookbooks used little more than olive oil, sugar flour and rosemary for this toothsome torta, I guessed, yet there is a keen palate, a knowledge of culinary and cultural history, an entrepreneurial streak, and a poetic sense of refinement at play here.

Although she’s written 12 cookbooks and wrote a column on simplified entertaining for Bon Appétit for five years, the author candidly confessed as she prepared our coffee, that, let’s face it, entertaining on any scale takes some attention and effort. Being in awe of Rozanne from the outset, this came as something of a relief to me, a little as if Martha Stewart had just confided that she struggles to conquer a secret, messy, room in her home.

Our hours-long interview was fascinating because Rozanne’s life has been a string of adventures and achievements, and because she blazed her own unique trail through the Manhattan culinary world of the late '70s and '80s, when women often didn't get the get the respect and credit that they deserved. But the taste memory of her wonderful cake will probably be the most lasting for me. Let’s hope she brings it back on the market soon.

The making of a bespoke watch

2011-05-01T18:28:00.002-04:00

It was Dedegumo CEO Bob Guest's idea to take the design from the back of my business card and use it as the taking-off point for a watch design. Dedegumo's first U.S. store opened recently in Manhattan's Lower East Side, and specializes in handmade watches.

My friend, former Japanese classmate and Dedegumo artisan Kai Bailey took on the challenge of translating card design to watch. He took the negative white space shape of the card's design and reversed it to create the two swooping boomerang-shaped images on the watch's face, outfitting it with jagged-edged black hour and minute hands and an elegant curving red second hand. The gold face is scored with ray-like lines and stamped with the Dedegumo cloud logo. The overall effect is Deco meets industrial, and it's very handsome.

The wrapping up of a Dedegumo watch is an art form in and of itself. Kai arranged the watch's double-length band around a plump beige pillow and placed it in a cloud-emblazoned cedar masu, or sake cup.

Then, he channeled memories of his mother tying furoshiki, and began wrapping. Tied properly, these Japanese-style cloth squares make beautiful and practical satchels, with their knots serving as handles. I picked out this flame-orange and cream colored furoshiki; all of Dedegumo's are made in Japan. "We tried making them here but they just weren't the same quality," Kai told me.

Here's the finished package, looking cute as a button.

Toyo Miyatake's presence grows in L.A.'s Little Tokyo

2011-04-22T15:11:00.000-04:00

On my recent trip to Los Angeles, I met with three people who are making a difference in the L.A Nikkei community, Bill Watanabe, executive director of the Little Tokyo Service Center and president of the Little Tokyo Historical Society, and Vicky Murakami-Tsuda and Yoko Nishimura of the Japanese American National Museum.

Little Tokyo is no longer the sleepy enclave of Nisei-run stores and restaurants that I remember, its whiff of modern-day Japan emanating from the New Otani Hotel. There are fewer Japanese residents now, a burgeoning Korean population, and an active night-life scene animated by hipsters of all nationalities. The wildly popular Kogi BBQ-to-go truck, which makes regular stops in Little Tokyo to dispense Korean-Mexican hybrid comfort food (kimchee quesadillas!), is emblematic of the new Little Tokyo.

En route from Curry House in Weller Court to LTSC’s offices on East Third Street, Watanabe showed me another change, one that harks back to the even earlier time of the pre-War Little Tokyo Issei. A newly named street, Toyo Miyatake Way, and a full-scale bronze relief of the pioneering Issei photographer now draw the viewer's eye in front of the Sakura Crossing luxury apartment complex on San Pedro Street between East Second and Third Streets. Watanabe, whose passion is preserving Little Tokyo History, convinced Sakura Crossing’s developer, Related, that the street and relief would be an ideal way to give back to the community, and the new landmarks were inaugurated in February before a crowd that included Watanabe, city dignitaries, proud Miyatake family members and Related representatives.

Miyatake is most famous for smuggling camera parts into Manzanar, the World War II concentration camp where he and his family were imprisoned in April 1942. First surreptitiously (cameras were forbidden in all 10 concentration camps), then, as rules loosened and he gained the trust of the prison director, openly, Miyatake took 1,500 photographs of Manzanar. The relief, which is modeled on a photograph of Miyatake believed to have been taken right after the war, bears this quotation: “Smuggling a lens into Manzanar, this is my duty, to document camp life so this kind of injustice never happens again.”

Miyatake and his family could have relocated to Salt Lake City, Chicago, or New York, as some Japanese did to avoid evacuation and imprisonment amid the rabid anti-Japanese fervor that swept the West Coast after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Instead, the fine art and Japanese society portrait photographer, then 47, chose to stay. He was forced to shutter his Little Tokyo photographic studio, but requested that his family be evacuated and imprisoned with the Little Tokyo residents that he felt most kinship with, rather than his East Los Angeles neighbors. It was in Little Tokyo's effervescent cultural and arts scene of the 1920s where he first made his name, and became the go-to photographer to record births, graduations, weddings—any event of note in the personal and civic lives of L.A. Japantown's residents.

As his reputation grew, Miyatake and his wife Hiroko became tireless hosts to a stream of Japanese dignitaries from film stars to athletes. Before and after the war, a trip to Los Angeles by a celebrated Japanese national almost inevitably involved a visit to the Toyo Miyatake Studio to pose for a portrait. “The portrait file in his studio is in itself a history of cultural exchange between the United States and Japan,” wrote the Japanese photographer and editor Eikoh Hosoe; Miyatake played the role of a “private consular representative, taking care of the Japanese who visited the United States.” Miyatake also landed jobs as personal photographer to Thomas Mann and John Barrymore, and became a disciple of Edward Weston, whose work he tirelessly promoted.

Where Miyatake’s career would have gone had he not been imprisoned during World War II is unknowable, but his contribution to the documentation of the unjust and unconstitutional prison camp experience is clear cut. Happily, there seems to be a growing appreciation of Miyatake. Little Tokyo’s first tribute to him, sculptor Nobuho Nagasawa's bronze replica of his hand-made camera, is on view in front of the Japanese American National Museum on East First Street. An exhibit of Miyatake’s photographs is showing, for a short time longer, at the Tolerance Education Center in Rancho Mirage, CA. I’m glad to see the addition of Toyo Miyatake Way and the bronze relief—further assurance that one of our cultural heroes will not soon be forgotten.

David Bouley's apple foyer

2011-04-01T18:25:00.000-04:00

In pursuit of another story recently, I had the chance to sit down with David Bouley, the brilliantly creative chef who has staked out a corner of Tribeca as his own laboratory for refined French fare, pretty patisserie products, Austrian explorations and authentic Japanese food. His downtown empire is constantly in a state of flux, so the tiny space that used to be called “Upstairs” will become Bouley Studio and the former French-Italian hybrid Secession (in an even older incarnation, it was the Austro-Hungarian Danube) will soon open as Brushstroke, a kaiseki and sushi restaurant done in collaboration with Japan’s Tsuji Culinary Institute in Osaka.

The chef had just returned from Japan and was raving about the fantastic vegetables he encountered in Kyoto: turnips, carrots, daikon, cabbages and round eggplants. “Kyoto eggplants are the best,” he told me, “you can eat them like an apple.” Of course he brought back seeds and will try to grow them here in New York. We shared a moment of worry about the Tohoku earthquake, and the chef reckoned that the record closeness of the moon to the earth at the time could have been a factor in that natural disaster.

Walking through the Brushstroke as it was being readied to open felt like being in a Japanese woodworker’s atelier: the long, narrow room was filled with rough-hewn wood set at asymmetrical angles, glowing light and busy Japanese workers. The artisans and many of the materials for the restaurant are from Japan, and the room (like the food, I hope) promises to be stunning.

But what I really wanted to show you was the famous foyer to the flagship Bouley. In the restaurant’s first incarnation of the late ’80s, a dreamy country-French maison filled with flowers, the chef placed crates of apples in the entrance. According to Bouley, they, like so much of what he does, harked back to his childhood in Connecticut. Bouley explains, “The apples and quinces smelled so good at my grandmother’s farm. My brothers and my sister and I used to hide among the quinces, and my mother and my grandmother both put quinces in with the sheets and towels. We grew up with that, and having a real connection to what was happening outdoors.”

The tradition of always having fresh apples in his restaurant foyer, however, actually began as a mistake. The chef had gone to the theater and in his haste, left some crates of apples there. When he returned, the scent was so magical that they became a fixture. At the current Bouley—more sumptuously attired in rich silks and velvets, and hung with vibrant paintings of the southern French countryside—the foyer presentation, too, has undergone a makeover. Bouley had high-tech stainless steel shelving constructed for his apples, 3,900 in all. But it is the foyer during the fall Concord grape season that really makes people stop in their tracks, says Bouley, as they take in the rich, musky scent with amazement. “They step in, they stop, and they just look around,” he says. That alone is worth a trip come October.

Food writer and West Villager Mimi Sheraton shares some Village faves and other food-related opinions

2011-03-16T17:57:00.005-04:00

Food writer Mimi Sheraton has been a Greenwich Village resident for 67 years and with her husband, retired importer Richard Falcone, lives in a West Village townhouse. Sheraton, who served as restaurant critic for The New York Times for eight years, grew up in a food-loving Brooklyn household. She studied marketing and journalism at NYU, and began her career writing about home furnishings before switching to food writing for The Village Voice, Town and Country and New York magazine. She joined the Times in 1975. Among her 16 books, my favorite is her 2004 memoir Eating My Words: An Appetite for Life¸ which evocatively describes the “pleasantly shabby” Greenwich Village of the ’40s and ’50s stuffed with more than its share of Abstract Expressionist painters, psychoanalysts, potters and weavers. She also wrote this lovely tribute to our shared street, "West 12th Street by the Numbers." Although a few of the places Sheraton describes in her 2006 Times article are no longer in business, they are but very recent changes to a neighborhood that she has seen evolve for over 60 years. (Note the picture of the best vegetable purveyor at Abingdon Square, Nevia No.)

Here, Sheraton shares with Walking and Talking her thoughts on the West Village dining scene, New York City dining trends and other food-related topics.

What are a few of your and your husband’s favorite places for a quick lunch in the West Village? For a nice dinner?
Elephant & Castle for lunch. Tougher to pick for dinner. Between Gotham Bar & Grill, Wallse, Da Silvano, Perry Street...depends upon what you mean by "nice."

What foreign country or region do you most enjoy eating in?
China

In a recent interview in Capital New York, you made some tart comments about Brooklyn restaurants, food trucks, David Chang and Times critic Sam Sifton, which created quite a stir on the internet. What has the fallout been from that article, and do you have any further thoughts on those topics?

Fallout has been a lot of publicity and further blogging by others. Great exposure for me. I still mean what I said but I did go to Brooklyn on March 12th to see Diary of a Madman at BAM…worth the trip but I did not go to a [Brooklyn] restaurant.

What ethnic cuisine do you think New York City does best? Worst?
Italian is best. Mexican is worst.

If you could pick one global chef you would like to see open a restaurant in New York, who would it be?
Fergus Henderson, nose-to-tail chef of St. John restaurant in London.

What do you think of the global restaurant empires that so many chefs seem to aspire to these days? Who does it well and who doesn’t?
It is okay with me if they do them well, but I can't remember going to one such when abroad as I prefer to go to strictly local places when traveling, even within the U.S.

Do you ever order take-out? If so, what is your favorite place?

We rarely order take-out but if so, do it quite locally which means Good or Benny's Burritos on Greenwich Ave., or Tartine on 11th St. at West 4th. Have not found good Chinese or pizza take-outs. I'm never totally pleased with anything take-out…the food always seems to have lost its soul and is soggy and tepid, even from the best places. I’d rather prepare scrambled eggs or spaghetti with olive oil and garlic, or maybe even oatmeal with butter, salt and lots of black pepper.

Who is your all-time favorite food writer?
A.J. Liebling

What is your food guilty pleasure?

Not sure I feel "guilty" but I suppose that might mean hot dogs and salami of all kinds.

What bygone New York restaurant do you miss most and why?
Lutece, because it had wonderful authentic French food prepared by chef-owner Andre Soltner, who was totally dedicated, all in a pleasant but unpretentious setting with service to match.

What current food trend do you find appealing?

Southeast Asian, especially Thai and Vietnamese. I like the crunch and the spiciness but I wish we saw more of the serious, elegant dishes I had in Hanoi and not only the cheaper street-type food, however entertaining and satisfying that can be.

Dedegumo: Bespoke Japanese watches come to New York

2011-03-10T19:42:00.000-05:00

The other day I visited a recently opened Japanese shop on the Lower East Side called Dedegumo. It's the first U.S. and first foreign branch of a Kyoto-based handmade watch shop, founded by designer Izumo Senko. For anyone interested in Japan and/or Japanese design, it's well worth a visit.

Atlanta entrepreneur Bob Guest fell in love with the shop during a business trip to Kyoto and decided to bring Dedegumo watches to New York. He found a tiny space on Orchard Street just south of Houston, hired Brooklyn-based woodworker James Harmon to craft gorgeous shelving for the tiny workshop/showroom, and installed reclaimed wooden floors from a Buster Brown shoe factory in Missouri.

The result is a Japanese-style jewel box of a shop that embodies the simple yet subtle aesthetic of shibui.

Guest hired six artisans, all of them designers or jewelry makers, to work two shifts in the tiny, well-laid out workshop at the front of the store, where visitors can observe them at work. One of them is my former Japanese classmate and friend, Kai.

A Nippy leather skiver and a built-in anvil fit snugly between two work spaces. Kyoto artisans from the main store flew in to train their New York counterparts, while Guest stocked up on watch parts from Japan and four miles worth of Italian leather for watch bands.

Bands, faces, and even the color of the watch hands can be customized, and each watch is made from start to finish by a single artisan, usually taking about three days to complete and quality check. Dedegumo’s 150 designs ($350-$650) range from the delicate to the quirky to the masculine, featuring hand-stamped brass frames and numbers, and intricately buckled leather bands.

The fight for a new Village hospital marches on

2011-02-17T17:25:00.001-05:00

Borough president Scott Stringer promises he'll listen to Coalition members

I’m glad to see some community members keeping the spotlight on the need for a new Level One Trauma Center now that St. Vincent’s Hospital is gone. At first considered a fringe group with little power, the Coalition for a New Village Hospital has picked up political support and a loyal cadre of followers. You know it’s gaining in momentum when it has its own establishment, centrist and fringe groups.

The 200 or so concerned Villagers who attended last night’s meeting included a group called Hands off St. Vincent’s that has pledged to employ the tactics of non-violent direct action in order to get its message across. The group’s latest act of civil disobedience took place on February 8, when four members were arrested after staging a mock trial of elected officials and sit-in in the lobby of the shuttered hospital. The group charged eight politicians, ranging from U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer to state health commissioner Richard Daines with negligence and complicity in allowing the closing of St. Vincent’s.

At last night’s packed community meeting, several of the politicians that Hands off St. Vincent’s called out as being complicit in the shut-down were hand. Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, exhibiting a suitable sense of outrage, said the hospital’s board “ran it into the ground, and that still has to be investigated.” Also present were movement stalwarts Dr. David Kaufman, former director of HIV clinical research at St. Vincent’s; firebrand civil rights lawyer Thomas Shanahan, and former city council candidate Yetta Kurland.

Since the people that care about replacing the hospital are mostly middle-aged or older Village residents, there was a lot of shouting of “We can’t hear you!,” and “Use the mic!” It was a good bet that the few younger faces in the audience were either Hands off St. Vincent’s activists (they are an offshoot of an LGBT advocacy group) or members of the online media.

Shanahan created a witty presentation in the format of the “Jeopardy” game show in order to make the points that the process of developing the former hospital site lacks transparency and that no one really knows who controls land use on the corner of Seventh Avenue and W. 12th Street. He and several other speakers referred to a recent health care survey that ranked our state 46^th in the nation in average emergency room wait time. New York’s average clocked in at close to five hours.

Less activist-minded Village residents shake their heads and say this is a lost cause. Yet when 340 beds, most of them catering to low-income and indigent patients, the only Level One trauma center on the West Side between South Ferry and 114^th Street, and an ER that handled over 60,000 visits a year are suddenly eliminated and not replaced, it should matter to more people.

Gascony tradition, fruits of the sea: Laurent Manrique in the kitchen at Millesime

2011-01-25T09:04:00.002-05:00

Chef Laurent Manrique is back on the scene, and New York is lucky to have him in the kitchen at Millesime in the Carlton Hotel. He’s landed with a salty splash at this airy seafood bistro, where his impeccably prepared dishes have the feel of instant classics. Manrique—ex of the Michelin two-star Aqua and Campton Place in San Francisco, and Peacock Alley in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel—still has one foot firmly planted on the West, and for him, preferred coast. He oversees Café de la Presse and Rouge et Blanc wine bar in San Francisco, and makes the cross-country commute regularly. His executive chef at Millesime is Alan Ashkinaze, formerly executive chef at the Warwick Hotel and chef de cuisine at the Waldorf Astoria.

At Millesime (formerly home to Country), unpretentious red banquettes and lighting reminiscent of a nineteenth-century gaslit brasserie are sandwiched between the building’s original Tiffany domed ceiling and its tile floors. The vibe is casual, though the expert service is anything but. Manrique wanted an unpretentious seafood place where patrons would feel free to enter in flip-flops, and where the menu was honest and straightforward. “Right now,” he told us at our dinner last evening, “this is what I feel like cooking.”

A dozen carefully sourced oysters from both the east and west coasts (Big Rock from Cape Cod, Shibumi and Hama Hama from Washington State among them) started the evening off in a lipsmackingly briny fashion. Manrique disguised silky squid as corkscrew pasta in his trompe l’oeil “calamars carbonara,” and coated it with a smoky bacon, parmesan and cream sauce. The grilled Caesar salad, a joint invention of Manrique and his good friend and fellow Buddhist Eric Ripert, gave a lift to this tired menu staple with the addition of meringe beaten into the dressing, and a topping of smoked cod, caramelized onions and a drop of lime. But the pièce de résistance had to be the lobster pot au feu for two, involving a two-pound lobster, seafood sausage (it tasted like a more refined, French variation on Japanese kamoboko fish cakes), a bouillon of deep character and some dynamite condiments: a tarragon-infused béarnaise, seaweed aioli and salty pickled sea beans. The simple fish dishes, which you can order grilled or griddle (here called plancha) roasted, come with likewise perfectly executed sauces; the lemon mousseline is ethereal, almost dessert-like.

True to his Gascon roots, Manrique offers homemade Armagnac prune ice cream and toasted brioche—my favorite dessert, although I would never turn down an offer of his bracingly astringent orange custard topped with caramelized orange slices, or a caramel and espresso pot de crème twin set.

Millesime
92 Madison Ave. at 29th St.
The Carlton Hotel
(212) 889-7100
millesimerestaurant.com

Of saints and sardine tins: Lynne Block's port-a-shrines

2011-01-24T16:09:00.000-05:00

Last month I blogged about tree decorator extraordinaire, my neighbor Lynne Block. A few days ago, she invited me to her apartment to take a look at the religious shrines she makes out of sardine and other tins. Little did I know that without even leaving my building, I was in for a trip to an apartment-size cabinet of curiosities, and the lair of a true folk artist.

Lynne’s double-unit living space, which she shares with her husband and bestselling crime author Lawrence Block, is bursting at the seams with the booty of their world travels (over 140 countries visited; they lost exact count a while ago), including collections of crystals, masks, paintings and ceramics. As she led me through the apartment, one room gave way to another, revealing a cache of her husband’s Edgar Awards, bedroom walls coated in opulent, gold-flecked paint, and a hallway with a canopy of shimmering, gauzy fabric and shiny stars. It occurred to me that Lynne could have had a successful career as a set designer had she wanted to.

Her expressive eyes and silver-streaked hair bring to mind Anne Rice, only more beautiful; in fact the two share roots in New Orleans. Lynne lit out immediately after graduating from high school with $40 in her pocket, did odd jobs and taught herself bookkeeping. Despite over 40 years spent living in Greenwich Village, her apartment--especially the room dedicated to her shrines and altars--exudes the moss-covered, gothic perfume of New Orleans. Against one wall of the south-facing room, an elaborate, multi-tiered and heavily embellished altar display drips with angels, saints, masks, rosary beads and other religious objects, presided over by paintings of sacred scenes and crosses.

On the opposite wall, Lynne has installed a more austere, eastern-style shrine. The pile of rocks sitting at the foot of the Japanese tansu cabinet is composed of one specimen from each country that she and her husband have visited. A head of Buddha, a statue of Ganesha, and a photo of the Dalai Lama share the tansu with an assortment of other eastern relics and one visiting western saint.

Lynne’s hand-made shrines blend in seamlessly with the antique artifacts on the western shrine: Her Paul the Hermit’s garment of palm leaves is made of tiny, lustrous green beads; the arched edges of the tin cover are beaded in amber to resemble the gothic arches of an altar. In another tin, the messenger angel Gabriel, index finger in air, is half-revealed behind the tightly wound, rolled-down top of a sardine tin, (these old-fashioned tins with key openers are harder to come by these days, notes Lynne). Much better than my snapshots of Lynne’s Port-a-Shrines, as she calls them, are photographer Jim Coyle’s examples on Flickr, “Private Altars.” (All of the shrines pictured in that album, except for numbers 373, 378 and 383 are Lynne’s. The others were made by a friend in homage to hers.)

This tinfoil-embellished shrine is titled "All Hearts Are Sacred"

The Port-a-Shrines came to life first in the late 1980s when Lynne and Larry took to the road for two years to drive across the country. They made a pit stop at a writer’s colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. While Larry wrote, Lynne gathered all the materials she needed, and began making her shrines. The impulse to make them, she says, came in part from the fact that she was raised by nuns in a New Orleans orphanage, in a building that was eventually turned into Anne Rice’s doll museum. One of Lynne’s jobs during her seven years at the orphanage was to take care of the chapel.

“I think everybody should have an altar, a small sacred space for photos of loved ones who are gone, or who are far away at the moment,” Lynne told me. Suddenly, and with great clarity, I recalled the small Buddhist shrine my grandparent’s kept in their bedroom, with a picture of my great-grandmother, and the offerings of food and drink that they prayed to and changed daily. It’s funny how it took years, and a messenger from another culture, place and time, to make me fully understand the significance of that other small, sacred space.

Lynne reached into one shelf of the altar and held out an antique ivory bobbin that she bought a decade ago in England for her granddaughter. Factory girls used to inscribe these with the names of boyfriends or with their own names; this one bears her granddaughter’s name, Sara, who is 23 now and about to embark on her grown-up life. “It has lain on the altar all these years, soaking up good energy,” says Lynne. “I’ll give it to her when we go on her graduation trip in the spring.”

Hunting for traditional Japanese osechi foods at New Year

2011-01-03T14:12:00.002-05:00

Nippon Club Chef Hideki Yasuoka's osechi box

For a fun assignment, I spent part of last week on the hunt for Japanese New Year’s osechi box sets. Osechi refers to the various traditional Japanese New Year dishes that expats pine for when the end of the year rolls around. There’s always konbu-maki (seaweed rolls tied with strips of gourd), kamaboko (fish cakes), and soy-simmered tazukuri (anchovies), among many other dishes. Way back when, Japanese women spent days preparing these dishes, to be eaten by the family and guests who dropped by during the three-day celebration of the New Year. In order not to have to cook during this festive period, and to ensure the food stayed fresh (these were pre-refrigeration days), dishes were highly salted, and usually quite sweet as well.

Today, many young people would rather not eat the traditional foods, preferring freshly made sushi, sashimi or western food instead. Since supermarkets, department stores and restaurants all make and sell osechi boxes, the number of home cooks who prepare the whole feast from A to Z has diminished as well.There are still plenty of people who crave osechi, it seems, even if they don't want to go through the laborious process of making the dishes themselves. I saw this House of Japan item reporting strong sales in high-end osechi boxes in Tokyo this year, ranging in price from 30,000 to 205,000 yen (about $370 to $2,500).

Here in Manhattan, I discovered that several restaurants and Japanese grocery stores, including East, Restaurant Nippon and Katagiri (the oldest Japanese grocery store in the U.S.),sell osechi boxes to go. Hakubai restaurant in the Kitano Hotel serves a New Year osechi meal to customers in its dining room.

Plastic versions of New Year's kagami mochi (rice cakes) for sale at Katagiri

One treat was viewing and sampling the artistic osechi boxes created by chef Hideki Yasuoka of the members-only Nippon Club. I’ll let my picture of Chef Yasuoka's delicious masterpiece (above) do the talking for now. If you want to read the full account, you’ll have to wait a year, when my Edible Manhattan story on osechi appears, with much better photos by Max Flatow.

My evening with knife skills maestro Norman Weinstein

2010-12-28T21:03:00.000-05:00

I’ve been cooking since I was a kid, but until recently had only a vague idea that there was a right way and a wrong way to slice and dice. All of this changed when I took a class from knife skills expert Norman Weinstein at the Institute of Culinary Education (ICE) in Manhattan. His workshops have been so popular that getting into one required keeping an eagle eye on class schedules and swooping down on a spot when a new series was posted.

When I at last made it to the Knife Skills 1 workshop, I was thrilled to meet the knife master in person, but crestfallen to find out that it was his second to last class at ICE; he was retiring, and would only be teaching a few professional classes at the institute after that week. He’s such a legend that he had to shoo Bon Appétit’s Barbara Fairchild, who popped in to pay homage, out of the classroom so he could start the session on time.

Feeling that I was learning from the last of the knife Mohicans, I soaked up every scrap of information, from the basics of kitchen knife construction to selection, maintenance and use. I learned that if you hone your knives on a steel after almost every use, you can minimize the need for sharpening, which will eventually wear away your knife. I also learned that honing steels wear out—when you can no longer feel the grooves along the instrument’s surface, it’s time to buy a new one.

Weinstein, whom I first encountered when I interviewed him for this WSJ story on knife sharpening services, was full of jokes, wisecracks and knife wisdom. “Never take a knife that needs sharpening to a guy driving a truck,” was one such pearl. Shoemakers and sketchy people who grind things other than knives are best avoided as well, he said. When asked what he thought of Japanese santoku knives, he said simply, “I believe in re-gifting.” [I know this is not the opinion of many chefs: my story on Korin Japanese Trading Corp. taught me this.] Weinstein believes that the complete kitchen needs only four knives: A 10” chef’s knife, a 6” utility knife, a paring knife and a scalloped slicing knife. For meat eaters, a carving knife would be a fifth addition.

Norman Weinstein's tomato peel rose.

My tomato peel rose.

It was the hands-on knife skills, though, that I found most eye-opening. I had to re-learn my grip (thumb and forefinger on the knife blade, second finger curled around the finger guard). We learned the “bagel cut,” for slicing laterally through treacherous dough fields, the “low technique” (for short stuff like celery and carrots) and the “high technique” for tall veggies, such as potatoes and melons). It’s all about using the longest knife you can (6” knives mean “you’re working far too hard,” Weinstein told us; let the weight of the knife do the work for you), relaxing the arm, using a light grip, keeping the slicing arm in constant motion and sliding more than chopping. If you’d like to learn the full Weinstein technique, tyou can order his knife skills book and DVD.

I sliced my way through stalks of celery, many carrots and several onions, but my pièce de résistance was a rose I made from a single piece of tomato skin. Perhaps I will take Knife Skills 2, although it’s not on offer at the moment, and won’t be the same without Weinstein at the helm. Happy retirement, Norman!

She's got the tree decorating touch

2010-12-23T01:38:00.001-05:00

Every year I’ve admired our building’s Christmas tree, and the resident who decorates it so perfectly. This year, I learned, her name is Lynne Block, and she’s been beautifying our lobby for 15 years now. For 14 of those years, she also helped decorate a more famous tree: the 18th-century Neapolitan extravaganza at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Although a bookkeeper by trade, Lynne makes religious shrines out of sardine tins and has shown them at several galleries. She came by her Met tree-trimming gig through a friend, the granddaughter of Loretta Hines Howard, the benefactor who donated her collection of angels and crèche figures to the museum. Installed annually in the museum’s Medieval Sculpture Hall, the tree and its decorations have become a major holiday attraction. Lynne’s friend, knowing Lynne had a “delicate touch,” asked her to help with the decorating. She was so good at it that she returned year after year, eventually taking on the job of keeping inventory of the thousands of components of the tableau and making sure the job was on schedule.

“We had 15 working days to get the tree installed, so I would keep track of where we are on the job. I’m a very organized person, so that was one of the things I did bring to the job,” Lynne says modestly.

“I don’t do it anymore because my knees kind of gave out,” Lynne told me. “The slate floors are very hard on them.” When I commented that perhaps her Met experience is why our building’s tree looks so beautiful every year, Lynne said the experience didn’t hurt, but that the Met tree is of a different order of magnitude. Each angel on the 25-foot-tall tree has to have its own little spotlight. Decorating it involves using cherry pickers, electricians and riggers. Lynne helped decorate the tree and the landscape that spreads across the floor all around the tree. “Our tree,” she added of our lobby version, “is much more of a spontaneous emission.”

Lynne did buy a number of our tree ornaments at the Met as well as at the Metropolitan Opera gift store. The Fabergé egg reproductions, the realistic looking clip-on birds and the snowflake ornaments are from the museum; a set of jewel-toned spheres traced with lacy gold filament are from the Met Opera store. Lynne needs to stockpile them because accidents do happen in an apartment building lobby. “One time a UPS guy came in and leaned this big box against the pillar, and it knocked about five or six things off,” she recounts. “That’s why I watch the sales; we need to have a supply so we can replace stuff.”

The ornaments Lynne loves most, though, are the ones that have a history tied to our building. One resident was in the ornament business, so he donated some for the tree. “When one of the little old ladies in the building died, her family gave us some of her ornaments,” Lynne says. “The history of the building is in the tree.”

Knowing all this makes the tree even more special to me, spontaneous emission or not. Merry Christmas to all!

Kitchen hit parade

2010-11-19T10:30:00.000-05:00

David's picture of Julia Child's kitchen, now on display at the Smithsonian

A nice piece of kitchen synergy: I wrote this Edible Manhattan article about Counterspace: Design and the Modern Kitchen an enticing box of eye candy now on view at MoMA for those who love design, architecture and cooking. Then my friend David Craig, featured these classic kitchens in his blog. If you're longing to be in the kitchen but powerful forces preventing that from happening, here's the solution.

The West Village's real meat market: Florence Prime

2010-11-14T23:02:00.001-05:00

One of my favorite West Village rituals is to drop in on Florence Prime Meat Market (5 Jones Street) on a weekday afternoon. Free of weekend lineups, the crew, fronted by the efficient Maria Alava at the register, is cheerful and relaxed, its mood enhanced by the soothing classical music that always fills the store.

It’s the kind of place with sawdust on the floor, framed charts of beef cuts on the walls, handsaws hanging from hooks. The wooden butcher blocks have been worn concave with use, and the scales and meat case date back to the FDR administration. Many of Florence’s employees have been there as long as owner Benny Pizzuco, since 1995. “Once in a while one or two of the delivery boys change, but they all start out with a broom,” says Benny. “We we don’t start with butchers; they come with bad habits. They have to be taught our way.”

Although Benny worked as a butcher on Long Island before coming to Florence, he still studied the Florence way as an employee for several years before buying the shop in 1995 from previous owner Tony Pellegrino. Tony took over in 1975, but the shop has been around since 1936, when a butcher named Jack Ubaldi first opened its doors.

“We’re one of the last actual prime custom shops in the city,” says Benny. “Walk into other places and everything is cut already.” Pizzuco says he has one or two customers who have been coming to the store since it opened (or their parents did), though most are gone. A number of long-time customers have moved to the suburbs, but still make the drive in on Saturdays to pick up their weekly order.

Pizzuco takes pride in his beef, dry aged for up to three weeks and hand cut to order, handmade sausages, and his seasoned veal roasts, offered two ways: one with prosciutto, pepper, rosemary and garlic, and the other with spinach, sausage and herbs. “The seasoning goes where it belongs, on the inside,” he says.

This Thanksgiving , as every year, Florence is taking pre-orders for natural fresh turkeys, fresh duck, squab and quail, which Benny gets from a farmer in Pennsylvania with whom he’s had a longstanding relationship. On my last visit, one regular wanted to make sure that her turkey would be a wild one. They’re a little tougher, and a little gamier, an acquired taste that is a badge of honor among those who possess it.

Certain info is proprietary at Florence, such as the name of Benny’s turkey supplier, and how exactly he cuts his Newport steaks. The Newport, said to have been invented at Florence, is still one of its top sellers. It is a type of tri-tip, normally a grainy, triangular-shaped muscle from the bottom sirloin of the cow, but somehow rendered much more appetizing by the butchers at Florence.

“When Jack opened the place, it was very bohemian around here,” Benny explains. “People were really starving artists. He came up with this fairly reasonable cut.” (Still reasonable, it sells for $7.99 a pound at Florence.) The name came from the package of Newport cigarettes, which featured a half moon logo. “Back then it was fashionable, though today it might bother people.”

Don’t even get Benny started on the vagaries of outer-borough food stores and cheap meat. “To be honest witcha (one of Benny’s favorite sentence starters) all of those businesses, the meat market, the food store, the fish store, once you leave Manhattan, they’re gone; not enough people are interested in food to support a place like this. The stuff at Costco is horrible, untrimmed, in a bloody plastic bag. Why would you want to spend six-ninety-nine a pound for a steak when you eat only fifty percent of it?” he asks.

Anyway, back to the secret of that tender Newport. Benny will reveal that it is only partly tri-tip, and so more prime and tender. But he prefers not to divulge this “seventy-something-year-old secret.”

That’s okay with me. I’m happy that Benny has such secrets, and that Florence is still here to maintain them.

Florence Prime Meat Market
5 Jones Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues
New York, NY 10014
(212) 242-6531

Joël Robuchon makes magic on 57th Street

2010-11-11T23:24:00.000-05:00

Whenever the boss is in town, L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon at the Four Seasons Hotel crackles with an extra jolt of electricity. Today, the Robuchon force field was so powerful that his team of precision alchemists turned out a feast for the ages, what for me was the best meal of my life.

The occasion was hosted by M. Bernard Margez, the French wine magnate who owns 36 vineyards in eight countries and champions the idea of micro-cuvées, limited-production wines from vineyards that lack the cachet of the great terroirs. Margez has teamed up with the exporter Maison Joanne and is ready to spread his message and his product in the U.S.

So there were ravishing wines, notably a 2007 Château Pape Clément white, and double magnums of 1986 Château Pape Clément red, from the Pessac-Léognan region of Bordeaux, where wine has been made since 1252. Magret apologized for his English, quoted Montaigne on friendship, and thanked the Americans, without whose intervention in World War II, he said, “we would be speaking German today.”

Sommelier Jason Wagner

It was Robuchon’s food, however that stole the day for me: sea urchin in a domed glass cup covered in a white tea and carrot mouseline, king crab in a thin turnip ravioli with rosemary, sea bass surrounded by an ethereal lemongrass foam and stewed baby leeks, sliced wagyu rib-eye scented with wasabi. The wonder of Robuchon’s cooking and his menu is its simplicity and perfect artistry. He keeps his descriptions short, and throws in tiny accents, like the unheralded miniature enoki mushroom caps and the crispy pearl onion rings that helped make the wagyu dish soar.

Le Mikado: light chocolate cream with crackly strudel and intense coffee dome

When he made his appearance, the chef, who commands 26 Michelin stars in 16 cities around the world, was gracious and charming, hardly the exacting taskmaster he is known to be in the kitchen. During my interview with Robuchon in 2006 at the time of his New York Atelier launch, he revealed that he has a weakness for gadgets. On this trip, the man who sings the praises of a simply grilled baby lamb over a wood fire and strives to strip food down to its unadorned essence said he satisfied another craving: he bought an iPad.

Thai food via Harold Dieterle lands in the West Village

2010-11-10T21:47:00.001-05:00

One of the very few disappointments of New York City dining has been the lack of great Thai restaurants. Los Angeles, even Boston, had more to offer in this category when I lived in those cities, the great Sripraphai in Woodside notwithstanding.

Suddenly, however, we Villagers are graced with two pedigreed newcomers. I haven't tried Las Vegas import Lotus of Siam, at 9th Street and Fifth Avenue yet, but happily dug into Harold Dieterle's take on Thai at Kin Shop on Sixth Avenue at 11th Street.. The winner of the first season of Top Chef had no background in Thai cooking, but a trip to Thailand made such a deep impression he immersed himself in the cuisine and made it the animating passion of his second restaurant.

Like Dieterle's first venture, Perilla, on nearby Jones Street, Kin Shop's decor is modest, clean and modern, in this case done up in watery blues and greens and soothing Thai prints.

We loved California's Uncommon Breweries Siamese Twin Ale, a malty, Belgian-style amber infused with lemongrass and kaffir lime. It got along famously with a deeply flavored steamed pork meatball soup with bok choy and a grilled wagyu beef rib cap salad with fiery pickled cauliflower, gooseberries, and mint bathed in a fish sauce dressing. There was vinegary grilled egglplant, showered with sesame seeds and biting black pepper, and bay scallops in a mild curry were marred only slightly by stringy snap peas (something I've encountered lately in other green market snap peas). A comforting braised goat in Massaman curry showed off what Dieterle's Western culinary training brings to the table, slow cooked meats in favor of the more traditional Thai-style quick-firedproteins.

It's fantastic to have Kin Shop in the neighborhood, but stepping out into the cold on Sixth Avenue reminded us why at any price point, New York is a great eating town. Next door, a man stood in front of Ray's Pizza, an open box in his hand, scarfing a slice while his black lab sat by his side, panting eagerly after a taste. "He's had more pepperoni than I have," the man told us, just a tad defensively..

Pots and Pans 101

2010-11-07T10:18:00.000-05:00

Since I love cookware, I jumped at the chance to interview the owner of Broadway Panhandler, Norman Kornbleuth, who’s been in the business of outfitting New York kitchens since 1976. He knows a thing or two about pots and pans, since he’s been surrounded by them since the early 1940s when he was a five-year-old at play in his father’s institutional kitchen supply store on the Bowery.

Some of the more inside-Kitchen-Stadium details I picked up during my tour of BP with Kornbleuth didn’t make it into my Edible Manhattan Story, Worth the Trip. So for those of you who live for discussions about the conductivity of aluminum, copper, or cast iron, this blog post is for you.

The cast iron corner of the store (65 E. 8th Street) is given over to Lodge Logic brand pots, pans and other specialty items, such as molds for baking biscuits and corn-shaped cornbread. The company has been around for over 100 years, and Kornbleuth loves the fact that it’s still family owned, as are many of the businesses with which he maintains decades-old ties. The Pittsburgh, Tenn.-based company’s griddles have been a staple of military kitchens through many a foreign war, can take heat at full blast and leave impressive grill marks. Plus, as they become seasoned, they develop a non-stick quality without the chemicals of treated surfaces. If you think plain old cast iron is too campfire for your kitchen, French maker Le Creuset dresses it up in colored enamels, akin to throwing a sparkly jacket over your jumper to go from office to evening out.

It is copper, however, that is the king of conductivity, if expensive (a 3-piece starter set will run you $900) and high maintenance. It heats up with lightning speed and cools down almost as fast, so delicate foods and sauces don’t overcook. It’s so conductive, in fact, says Kornbleuth, that first-time users often burn foods. The Bourgeat brand that Broadway Panhandler carries is lined with a very thin layer of stainless steel; when copper comes in direct contact with food it emits harmful chemicals. Unlined copper, however, Kornbleuth told me, is extremely good for the non-reactive processes of melting sugar and beating egg whites. In the old days, copper was tin plated on one side, and nickel plated on the other, which meant that you had to re-tin your pots periodically. Two other drawbacks are that copper is a very soft metal and scratches easily, and that with use, it oxidizes and turns a dark, greenish hue.

The next best thing in kitchen conductivity is aluminum. BP sells inexpensive, straight aluminum cookware to restaurants. Yet since it also is reactive (for example it can discolor a white sauce and impart a faint metallic taste), most aluminum these days is coated. In the late 1960s, an American named John Ulam patented a bonding technology that used heat and pressure to create a non-reactive sandwich of stainless steel and aluminum. His invention became All-Clad, which is manufactured in Pittsburgh and now includes a copper core line. It’s great at delivering heat evenly and efficiently, and is one of my kitchen standbys.

Although he looks at every new pot and pan on the market, Kornbleuth remains old school in his preferences. Except for delicate fish filets and egg dishes, he asserts, there is no need for treated surfaces if you bring cooking oil up to the proper temperature before sautéing or frying and avoid cooking foods straight out of the refrigerator.

“We don’t’ believe strongly in coated surfaces,” he told me, “but we have started to sell ceramic coating, which Is an excellent substitute for non-stick.” Although it seems to me most chefs turn a blind eye to the evidence that Teflon emits toxic gases (after all, these are the people who bring all their imagination to bear on pork belly and turn humble ingrecients into cassoulet; they’re devoted to making the life we have enjoyable, not necessarily longer), it is good for us home cooks to know that newer ceramic-coated pans use none of the chemicals found in Teflon. Kornbleuth says the Swiss-made Swiss Diamond line features the best of the non-stick surfaces (its surface is actually infused with diamonds and it comes with a lifetime guarantee). He also carries non-stick lines from Cuisinart and Tramontina, and two new Italian lines from Bialetti and Mepra.

Happy cooking!

St. Vincent's Hospital: what can be done?

2010-10-23T17:57:00.000-04:00

The grassroots movement to replace St. Vincent’s Hospital with a similar facility received a boost on October 17 at a rally in front of the hospital site at 7th Avenue and 12th Street. Speakers ranging from an 11-year-old P.S. 41 student whose brother’s life was saved by St. Vincent doctors to Lt. Dan Choi (who stood up to the Army’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy) were on hand to lend their support to the cause.

Among them was Dr. David Kaufman, who served as an attending physician at St. Vs for over 30 years and as director of HIV clinical research. He reminded the assembled crowd that 340 inpatient beds, 22 operating rooms in full-time use, 23 clinics, 18 mental health sites and dozens homeless shelters and outreach programs can’t be shut down in under a month without any fallout. And that’s not even counting the over 60,000 emergency visits that the hospital’s ER logged annually. Dr. Kaufman’s rhetorical question to the powers that be was, “Where have all the patients gone?”

Dr. Kaufmans’s speech brought some much-needed hard numbers to the debate over St. Vincent’s, so WestView will be reprinting it in its November issue. When I spoke to Dr. Kaufman over the telephone, he told me that although he initially thought the cause of The Coalition for a New Village Hospital was a lost one (as apparently do all of our local and state politicians), or at least far-fetched, he’s been encouraged in recent days by the turnout at the rally (an estimated 500 to 1,000 people, depending on whose counting) and by “murmurings” he’s been hearing.

I didn’t feel encouraged after reading an excellent cover story in this week’s New York magazine, St. Vincent’s is the Lehman Brothers of Hospitals, in which writer Mark Levine placed St. Vincent’s closure amid a larger picture of New York hospitals as an outmoded economic model. The high cost of doing business in New York City, shrinking Medicaid and Medicare dollars, powerful private insurers who bully smaller hospitals into low reimbursement rates, and on and on...suffice it to say the story paints a depressing picture.

The even bigger problem for the West Village at the moment, however, is state health commissioner Richard Daines, who did not support a take-over bid by Mt. Sinai, and seems to be content to watch a Darwinian state healthcare scenario unfold to the detriment of the poor, the weak and the uninsured. As Dr. Kaufman put it, our best hope may lie in the power of the vote. “November second,” he told me. “The only way it’s going to change is if we get rid of Daines. Presumably a new governor will put someone different [in the health commissioner’s position.]”

Dr. Kaufman’s parting words were on the 17th were, “This is not a done deal. Maybe, just maybe, it is a new beginning. But it will take the relentless pressure and voice of our community. We need you to speak up, speak out, write, email, demonstrate and never give up.”

For a list of things you can do and politicians you can contact, go to the Coalition's Web Site, and scroll down to "Can't make it today? Here's what you can do."

The Anti-Michelin Man: Christian Delouvrier shuns stars on Second Avenue

2010-10-12T23:29:00.001-04:00

The recent announcement of the 2011 Michelin Guide rankings for New York City arrived with its usual fanfare, setting up some restaurants for superstardom and no doubt dropping a cloud of disappointment (and worse) on others. When two friends and I visited Bernard Loiseau’s newly anointed three-star restaurant La Côte d’Or in Burguny back in 1991 or so, the chef, who was both charming and fanatical, recounted to us his relentless bid for stardom. Every morning when he woke up, he said, as he put on his socks, he would chant to himself “trois etoiles, trois etoiles,” (three stars, three stars). In 2003, Loiseau committed suicide, an act many believed was related to a decline in critical acclaim for his restaurant and rumors that he was about to lose one of his prized Michelin stars.

Where stealth chef Christian Delouvrier works his magic.

Amid this year’s Michelin triumphs and demotions, and in memory of Loiseau, it’s instructive to look at a chef who once fiercely safeguarded his stars before opting for life in a much slower lane. Christian Delouvrier earned four stars from The New York Times at Lespinasse in 1998 and then pulled down three Michelin stars at Alain Ducasse at the Essex House. The restaurant was a target of critics from the beginning, however. Although awarded its three Michelin stars from inspectors under Delouvrier’s watch, the Times subtracted its fourth star in 2005, leading to Delouvrier’s departure.

He cooked at a La Goulue in Bal Harbor, Brasserie Ruhlmann in Chicago, and briefly at David Bouley’s Secession. Then suddenly the celebrity chef manqué appeared in the kitchen at La Mangeoire, a 30-year-old Provençal bistro on Second Avenue at 53rd Street.

I happened to talk to Delouvrier recently while reporting a story, and asked how he ended up here, amid cheerful sunflower- and orange-colored bric-a-brac, in a corner of Manhattan far from the power corridors of his previous kitchens. His cooking happens to retain all of its fantastic-ness, by the way, but coming across it here is little like stumbling upon a Caravaggio at the Greenwich Avenue Street Fair.

“That’s a good question,” the gentlemanly chef responded, “and I’m going to tell you what really attracted me here. “In 2008 I was in Bal Harbor, and I decided to come back to New York. One day somebody called me up, he said he needed a consultant. I went there, we talked, and I really got very excited about this. It was the challenge of “taking a restaurant that had been run differently,” and making it his own that drew him. “The challenge is still there,” he said, “We are not yet where we want to be.”

Also alluring was the fact that La Mangeoire was off the radar of blood-sniffing critics. “After being in a four-star restaurant,” the chef explained, “it is very, very soothing to be able to work and do whatever I want, and to bring a restaurant up to the level I would like to see. It’s a work in progress, and I really enjoy that.”

La Mangeoire owner Gérard Donato deserves Salesman of the Decade award for landing this talented chef; we’re looking forward to seeing what the duo creates in the coming months and years.

Remembering St. Vincent's Emergency Room

2010-09-30T10:33:00.000-04:00

I’ve spent time in many hospital emergency rooms, but my late-night visit to St. Vincent’s in January 2007 stands out. There were more crazy people, more cops and more drunk and deranged people than average, for one thing. Since I was in Greenwich Village very late on a Friday night, this shouldn’t have been surprising. Getting something as simple as a blanket took an eternity, and the nurses had a gruff, seen-it-all attitude. The place felt more like a scene from M*A*S*H than the sleepy scenarios I’ve witnessed at emergency rooms in Jasper, Alberta, or Toronto. The only one that comes close for sheer colorfulness was Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center’s ER, which featured a higher number of gunshot victims and patients chained to gurneys and guarded by police officers.

This St. Vincent’s memory came to mind because I’ve been speaking to people to get their “St. Vincent’s ER Saved My Life” stories for WestView. Many of them are elderly, and are understandably frightened that since St. Vincent’s April closure, the closest Level 1 trauma center on Manhattan’s West Side is St. Luke’s Roosevelt at 114th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Their worry: What will happen if another life-threatening asthma attack occurs, or heart attack, stroke or terrorist bombing? The extra 15 minutes or longer, depending on traffic, it takes to get to Bellevue or St. Luke’s could mean the difference between life and death.

The level of complacency among residents here in the West Village is puzzling. As one senior activist in my building put it, “No one cares, because none of them go to St. Vincent’s.” That’s probably true. Affluent, newer residents have specialists and family doctors elsewhere, who did not have admitting privileges at the atrociously mismanaged St. Vincent’s. Perhaps they imagine themselves being expedited to New York Presbyterian’s ER via helicopter when disaster strikes.

Older residents—especially those who saw the pivotal and compassionate role St. Vincent’s played in the community during the 1980s AIDS crisis—recall nuns and nurses who were like angels, compassionate doctors and a sense of community at the medical center. By the time I got there, however, it was clearly a hospital and staff that had seen better days, and was just trying to hang on. The important thing, though, was that it was there, it was open, and it offered the community trauma, emergency and crisis centers, as well as the full range of medical specialists on the premises 24/7.

Walk-in urgent care centers are simply no substitute.

Hare with a pudding in its belly, and the future of cookbooks

2010-09-23T19:16:00.000-04:00

I blogged recently about food historian Sandra Sherman's fascinating book, Invention of the Modern Cookbook, in which she explains how many cook and cookbook attributes that we think of as particularly modern (the incessant hype and marketing, the cult of the celebrity chef, the cunning methods of creating a market, etc.) were actually invented in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Last night I attended a lecture Sherman gave at the 58th Street public library on her book and was especially delighted with this example she gave of a 17th-century recipe:

Hare With a Pudding in its Belly

Gallon of flour, one-half ounce of nutmeg, one-half ounce pepper, salt, capers, raisins, pears in quarters, prunes with grapes, lemon, or gooseberries, and for the liquor, a pound of sugar, pint of claret or verjuyce, and some large mace.

Quantities peter out, and there is no mention of cooking methods, times or the order of adding ingredients. I would be hard pressed to make the pudding, let alone figure out how to cook it in the hare's belly. Sherman's point was that it took a while for early cookbook authors to figure out how to write a recipe down. At least some things about cookbooks have progressed quite a bit since those early days.

Questioned on whether cookbooks will survive the abundance of free cooking advice, recipes, videos and other information on the internet, Sherman replied with the confidence of someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about them, "I'm sure that cookbooks will be the last books standing."

Tea and champagne on West 12th Street

2010-09-16T14:37:00.000-04:00

A stretch of West 12th Street that was looking a little sad after the closing of Bluni-Rea hair salon and Day-O just perked up, with this week's opening of The Tea Set Organic Tea and Champagne Room, 235 W. 12th Street, just West of Greenwich Avenue.

Owner Jacques Doassans, who left the real estate business in France to follow his penchant for tea, was on hand today to welcome curious new customers.Specializing in teas from around the world that Doassans imports and in some cases blends, the tea room will feature all-organic fare, including a champagne tea, and breakfast, lunch, and dinner created by chef Jean Louis Dumonet. The champagne is from Pommery and all chocolate products are by Jacques Torres.

In addition to offering an online mail-order service, Doassans has opened retail tea outlets throughout the U.S.; a hair salon, Red Market, in the Meatpacking district, and a spa in New Hope, PA, according to his website. Noting his location right across the street from Equinox gym, Doassans told me he is planning to add smoothies to his menu -- good call!

A visit with nose-to-tail eating evangelist Fergus Henderson

2010-09-15T16:43:00.001-04:00

During my family’s recent visit to London, we visited the birthplace of modern nose-to-tail dining, St. John Restaurant, and its father, Fergus Henderson. The architect and self-taught chef opened his restaurant in 1994 and set down his philosophy in the now-classic Nose to Tail Eating: A Kind of British Cooking (Bloomsbury) in 1999, opening the book by explaining, “’Nose to Tail Eating’ means it would be disingenuous to the animal not to make the most of the whole beast; there is a set of delights, textural and flavoursome, which lie beyond the filet.”

Henderson advocated a return to offal, the humble organ meats and gristly parts of the animal that make many people these days say “ewww,” though they were once common dishes in parts of the world. Henderson included in his book recipes for warm pig’s head, as well as pig’s spleen, tails, trotter, cheek and tongue; grilled, marinated calf’s heart; boiled ox tongue, and four ways to prepare lamb’s brains. The chef’s voice is a large part of the charm of his cookbook; it’s whimsical, encouraging and kind. Of tripe, he writes, “Do not let the tripe word deter you, let its soothing charms win you over and enjoy it as do those who always have!”

Henderson became a culinary cult figure, and incongruously, given his gentle personality, spawned dozens of macho, tattooed aspirants who never had pig’s trotters lovingly braised by grandma, as many a European chef has. Nose-to-tail cooking and eating was new to the younger generation, but it was an idea that was in sync with today's ethos of low-waste, sustainable farming. Plus, there was the bonus outlaw aspect of extreme eating. A sequel to Henderson's cookbook, The Whole Beast: Nose-to-Tail Eating was published in 2004.

We were one of the first lunch guests of the day in the plain, all-white dining room, an abattoir-like environment appropriate for its location near the Smithfield meat market. St. John’s deep selection of offal dishes is rounded out with simply prepared but delicious English dishes such as cold roast lamb, green beans and anchovy, brown crabmeat on toast, and Welsh rarebit.

Henderson appeared at our table, looking like an overgrown, rumpled school boy in a pink Oxford shirt and corduroy suit (it was late summer, but London at this time of year felt more like fall in New York, only humid and changeable). In round horn-rimmed glasses and with a soft voice and diffident hand gestures, the chef told us that he had actually been in our own West Village neighborhood on several occasions in the recent past, to cook at April Bloomfield’s gastro-pub The Spotted Pig at West 11th and Washington Streets, and at a neighborhood favorite of ours, Jonathan Waxman’s Barbuto on West 12th Street. Both The Spotted Pig—which serves a more toned-down down version of Henderson’s offal-centric British fare—and Barbuto—the casual open-air restaurant that turns out a simply and perfectly roasted chicken—make congenial homes away from home for Henderson’s earthy cooking.

Although an assistant sent me a press release and pictures of the minimalist and modern St. John Hotel that Henderson plans to open in London’s Chinatown in October, Henderson is hardly the type to engage in the hard sell. There are no rave reviews plastered at the front of his restaurant, no mention of his Michelin star shoved in your face as you enter the restaurant. When asked if his new hotel would be party to any of the hotel designations that tourists look for (the Leading Hotels of the world, for example), he replied, “We’re not very good at joining things,” and pointed out that many of these lists involve payment in exchange for inclusion.

Although Henderson admitted that he did, as a trained architect, enjoy having a hand in designing the 15-room hotel, on site of a former London theater landmark, it was “more fate” than anything else that had led to this venture. He and business partner Trevor Gulliver had planned to build a hotel in Beirut, but that fell through. When the Chinatown space became available, they jumped on it. The hotel will include a bar and a restaurant that will stay open until 2 a.m.

Henderson talked briefly about his battle with Parkinson’s disease, referring to “my ropey left side.” The tremors have sidelined him from daily kitchen cooking, though he says that what is being served is still very much his food. “I’m here every day so if the chefs go crazy, I’ll pull them in line again,” he told us. In 2005, he underwent a procedure called deep brain stimulation, in which a wire fitted with electrodes was surgically implanted in his brain tissue and connected to a pacemaker-like control device in his chest. His symptoms have vastly improved, but are probably at play in those diffident hand gestures, controlled but still visible. Although the chef may at one time have hoped to return to the kitchen, he’s kept his status as the guiding creative force and public face of the restaurant.

For lunch, Henderson recommended that we try the grouse, at the time in season and visible on select menus throughout London. Henderson’s version is a small, whole roasted baby grouse from the moors of Yorkshire. “It’s so tender it almost melts in your mouth, and has this wonderful musky undertone,” he said, adding, “People always tell you’re the grouse is terrible this year and then they charge you a fortune for it. This year, they’re saying it’s actually a good year, and then they charge you a fortune for it.” We opted for an order of Henderson’s celebrated roasted marrow bones, parsley salad and sea salt; the grouse, which came with a side of liver (or was it duck heart, which Henderson is also partial to?) paste on toast crisped in duck fat; an order of witch sole and tartar sauce, some lightly braised spring cabbage and boiled new potatoes. All were astonishingly simple and flavorful. Desserts of a sublime, currant-stuffed Eccles cake with Lancashire cheese, honey roasted figs on toasted brioche and chocolate pot rounded out our meal, leaving us feeling that we had, at last, tasted British cooking at its elemental best.

St. John Bar & Restaurant Smithfield
26 St. John Street
London, England
EC1M 4AY
Reservations 020 7251 0848
(email: reservations@stjohnrestaurant.com)
For details on St. John Bread and Wine, Spitalfields:
http://www.stjohnrestaurant.com/home/

Remembering 9/11

2010-09-11T15:01:00.001-04:00

It's a beautiful day in the Village today, just as it was exactly nine years ago. The good weather brought strollers out in force Here are a few 9/11-related remembrances I spotted. This giant flag on the wall of the now-closed St. Vincent's on 7th Avenue is accompanied by a sign that reads:

Although we are gone
The Family of St. Vincent's
Will Never Forget
9/11/01

It's a reminder of the role the hospital played in administering to the wounded that day, and of the hole in trauma, cardiac, crisis and emergency services left by its closing.

Like most pedestrians, I tend to walk right by the Tiles for America on 7th Avenue and Greenwich Avenue, but stopped today to take a closer look. The tiles are fading, and the Greenwich Village Society for Historical Preservation is trying to save them.

In front of Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square, this sign responded to the recent Koran-burning story and critics of the proposed community center and mosque near Ground Zero, quoting George W. Bush:

Pagliacci on Coney Island: the high-low art of Mercury Opera

2010-09-02T23:24:00.005-04:00

Last night I attended a terrific opera that has to take the show-must-go-on prize for overcoming mountainous obstacles. Mercury Opera Artistic Director Daria Parada somehow managed to stage an offbeat yet artistically accomplished version of I Pagliacci in the building that usually houses the Coney Island Sideshow.

It was the perfect venue for the production, since Parada’s interpretation of Pagliacci transposes the Ruggero Leoncavallo favorite to the amusement park boardwalk on the day of the Mermaid Parade. The Banff School of Fine Arts and Mannes College of Music-trained singer launched her company in New York City in 1999. In 2005 she relocated to her hometown of Edmonton, Canada for love, to marry musician Boris Derow. Parada first staged Pagliacci to rave reviews at the Edmonton Fringe Festival, but from the moment she first clapped eyes on Coney Island in 1992, bringing the production to the actual boardwalk that inspired it was her ultimate goal.

Parada held a competition for singers, and planned to stage the production in a tent on the Thor Equities lot on Coney Island. But a reduction in the number of seats she was allowed made the production financially untenable. After first considering cancelling the show, Parada thought of the Coney Island Side Show building on Surf Avenue and 12th Street, the original inspiration for her Pagliacci. Miraculously, despite the Side Show's busy summer schedule, its owner granted Parada use of the facility for one night only. Meanwhile, the tenor who had won the competition dropped out, the conductor walked out, and another singer was dragging the cast down by his lack of preparation.

Somehow, the persuasive and plucky Parada managed to lure two top-notch performers to fly out from Phoenix and Niagara Falls to fill in, and Boris, her husband, did a superb job in the role of Beppe.
The event was a giant hit with the packed audience. Parada envisions Pagliacci becoming like a Cirque du Soleil production or a traveling Broadway show, constantly in production somewhere in the world. At the moment, she's in conversation with the Coney Island Side Show about doing an actual run there.

The last item in the evening’s program fittingly captured the miracuous quality of the evening. It was a quote from Tom Stoppard’s Shakespeare in Love: “….Allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. So what do we do? Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well. How? I don’t know. It’s a mystery.”

For more information, contact: mercuryopera@gmail.com,917 757 1849
9320-106 A Avenue Edmonton, AB Canada T5H 0S7.

.

Living Spaces for a Small Planet

2010-08-27T11:04:00.000-04:00

I saw a terrific show at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London last week called 1:1 Architects Build Small Spaces. Out of 19 architects invited to submit proposals for small structures, seven were selected and constructed, and are scattered throughout the museum. The V&A’s challenge to architects was to design a space that explores the idea of refuge and retreat. Here are two of my favorites, Terunobu Fujimori’s “Beetle’s House,” and the Norwegian Helen & Hard Architects’ “Ratatosk.”

The first, conceived as a venue for an English version of the Japanese tea ceremony, is made of charred pine and is set atop stilts. The charring is an ancient and labor-intensive Japanese method of preserving wood, and gives the teahouse a weathered, alligator-like skin. Visitors climb a ladder and enter by a hatch in the floor of the teahouse. Traditional Japanese building methods were used to evoke a simpler, more primitive way of life. Housed in the V&A’s sunlight-filled Medieval and Renaissance room, the juxtaposition of this new, yet old-looking structure next to a medieval wooden spiral staircase was fantastic. Fujimori is a longtime professor of architectural history at Tokyo University who came to designing structures later in life.

The title for the second piece, “Ratatosk,” comes from the name of a squirrel in Norse mythology that lived in a giant ash tree at the center of the cosmos. The architects of Helen & Hard constructed their piece—which sits in the outdoor courtyard of the V&A—from five ash trees split lengthwise, planted face to face and covered with a canopy of curving willow slats. Although they used a high-tech 3-D scanning and modeling process to map sections of wood to be cut, the result is completely organic, conjuring the forested magic of myth and fairytale.

When samurai walked the streets of New York

2010-08-14T19:14:00.000-04:00

There is a curious gem of an exhibition on now at the Museum of the City of New York, Samurai in New York. The show tells the story of the first official delegation of Japanese to visit the country in 1860, not long after Commodore Matthew Perry forced the ports of Japan to open after 220 years of isolation from “barbarian” foreign influences.

The purpose of the nine-month voyage was to ratify an amity and commerce treaty Japan’s Tokugawa Shogunate signed with the U.S. in 1858. A total of 170 Japanese left from Edo (now Tokyo), including the official delegation of 76 samurai, interpreters, doctors and other functionaries. After setting anchor in San Francisco Bay, the “Japanese Embassy” as the delegation was known, split off from the rest of the group and continued on to the East Coast via a Panama land crossing. The Embassy completed its mission in Washington, traveled through Baltimore and Philadelphia and ended its visit with a two-week stay in New York.

In the Big Apple, the furor the delegation’s visit created was like something you might expect if aliens were to descended from a space ship to take a meeting with Mayor Bloomberg. With their shaved heads, topknots, hakama (skirt-like culottes), swords and martial demeanors, they were the extra-terrestrials of their day, and a transfixed city made them the toast of the town. New York, entrepreneurial and sassy on the eve of the Civil War, tried to portray itself as the “Edo of the West” to the visitors, staging two parades, a City Hall reception, and a grand ball, among other lavish celebrations. Walt Whitman wrote a typically hyperbolic poem commemorating the teeming parade up Broadway that he witnessed:

Over sea, hither from Niphon,
Courteous, the Princes of Asia, swart cheek’d princes…
First-comers, guests, two-sworded princes,
Lesson-giving princes, leaning back in their open barouches,
Bare-headed, impassive……
This day they ride through Manhattan……
When million-footed Manhattan, unpent, descends to its pavements….
When pennants trail, and festoons hang from the windows,
When Broadway is entirely given up to foot-passers and foot-
standers……

The exhibit is filled with curious mementoes: stereoscopic photographs, some of them hand-colored, of the visitors and their hosts; gifts exchanged; sketches and poems composed by the several poets and artists members of the Embassy. The visitors were especially impressed with a hot air balloon draped with flags that they witnessed rise in Philadelphia and head to New York, another commemoration of their historic visit.

An excited press even manufactured a young heartthrob among the members of the Japanese Embassy, Tateishi “Tommy” Onojiro (photo, left), a teenaged interpreter-in-training who reporters dubbed a “darling fellow,” and a “Japanese prince.” By the time the Embassy reached Washington, young ladies were in a frenzy to meet him, begging for his autograph or to have their photo taken with him (photo, below left).

The first American Consul General in Japan, Townsend Harris, arranged the trip and was largely responsible for this hero’s welcome; he had elevated the status of the Embassy in order to burnish his own reputation and persuade his government to foot the bill for the entire trip.

Despite the image-making of Harris, aided by Whitman and the press, the truth, writes Masao Miyoshi in his absorbing book about the Japanese Embassy, As We Saw Them: The First Japanese Embassy to the United States, was that the Tokugawa Shogunate sent “rather humble officials” to America.

Even the MCNY exhibit (co-presented with the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University) falls into the trap of romanticizing the exotic visitors, describing them as “all sword-wielding samurai” and “members of the military nobility.” Miyoshi dismisses them as “a group of bureaucrats too humble to even guess where Tokugawa policy might turn next.” (A few members did, however, go on to have distinguished careers in Japan, although one, a Tokugawa loyalist to the end, was beheaded by the imperial army.)

The compact MCNY exhibit touches briefly on the ugly racism that appeared in press accounts and among the American populace during this giddy cross-cultural exchange. For greater detail and complexity, though, look to Miyoshi’s 2005 book. He describes the impressions of both the Japanese Embassy members—whom he criticizes for being incurious and condescending—and the Westerners, who, although genuinely welcoming and generous, harbored equally appalled responses to certain Japanese customs and behaviors.

In answer to food historian Sandra Sherman’s question to me after she saw the exhibit, “What did they eat?” Miyoshi offers an amusing description of the difficulty the delegation had with the rich feasts that were endlessly proffered to them. Even today, the author points out, Japanese are “extremely attached to their native diet of rice, soy sauce, bean paste, fish and poultry, and cannot tolerate Western cuisine for any prolonged time.” (So true!) Many also adhered to Buddhist vegetarian diets and never touched milk, cheese or butter. Although the envoys brought huge quantities of their own foods and learned to love some delicacies (ice cream and champagne, for example), keeping well-fed on the trip was a challenge. They were “at times famished in the midst of feasts more luxurious than they had ever dreamed,” writes Miyoshi.

Miyoshi’s scholarly book (he was a professor of Japanese, English and comparative literature at UCSD) is both comic and poignant, and ends with the suggestion that despite the cosmopolitan outlook of many Japanese today and 150 years of diplomacy between Japan and the U.S., the relationship between the two countries is still, at bottom, one of mutual bafflement and incomprehension.

Samurai in New York
The Museum of the City of New York
1220 Fifth Ave. at 103rd St.
New York, NY 10029
(212) 534.1672
www.mcny.org
Through October 11th, 2010

The NEDA coach and trainer toolkit has arrived!

2010-08-06T15:47:00.001-04:00

Exciting news: The National Eating Disorders Association toolkit for coaches and trainers that I coordinated and wrote has just been launched online. You can download and view it here.

At the outset of this project, I knew a fair amount about eating disorders through co-authoring The Parent's Guide to Eating Disorders with Dr. Marcia Herrin. But I learned a lot more about athletics and eating disorders, including useful general information about sport, fueling and hydration that I have taken every opportunity to pester Son about, and even the children of other people.

Organized sport, often as early as at the middle school level, emphasizes the achievement of lean muscle mass, peak fitness levels and winning at all costs. The most successful athletes are driven, highly competitive and intensely perfectionistic, traits that just happen to be risk factors for disordered eating and eating disorders. For a genetically susceptible child or adult, the combination of these traits and sport can be dangerous; it’s no surprise that there is a high incidence of eating problems among competitive athletes.

The very nature of some sports can be damaging to the body image of both women and men, girls and boys, for example, gymnastics, figure skating, diving (aesthetic sports) and wrestling, rowing and distance running (weight-sensitive sports). Yet despite this pile-up of risk factors, there has been scant education about eating disorders within the world of sport. In part this is because of the feeling among coaches and trainers that eating disorders education contains an implicit criticism of what they do.

One of the goals of the toolkit is to balance an understanding of the goals and methods of coaches and trainers with the perspective of the eating disorder professionals who treat affected athletes. Attempting to do that, I included interviews with coaches and athletes, as well as physicians, psychologists and nutritionists who specialize in both eating disorders and sport, and worked with an advisory committee of experts in the field.

The toolkit, which has won the endorsement of the Academy for Eating Disorders and the International Health, Racquet and Sportsclub Association, will be officially launched at NEDA’s national conference this October in New York City.

Dogs, humans vie for licks at the Café Cluny ice cream cart

2010-08-04T11:06:00.000-04:00

It’s been a hot summer so far. Really hot. Horrible, humid hot. So the mobile ice cream cart sitting in front of Café Cluny at the corner of West Fourth and West 12th Streets has looked even more enticing than in past summers.

We wait for it every spring, wondering when the cart will appear and officially kick off ice cream season. Addicts have their favorite flavors – a new one this year, banana vanilla wafer, made a big splash, especially after the persuasive Idyl Bray (pictured, at right), who studies dance at Alvin Ailey when she’s not scooping or hostessing inside the café, began touting its deliciousness. Cookies ‘n’ cream is the standard by which many measure newer Cluny flavors, but spearmint chocolate chip, peanut butter and strawberry seem to have large followings as well.

This cart is a charming, bright spot in the neighborhood, but I have to agree with Julia Moskin, who wrote in today’s New York Times (You Scream, I Scream….at the Price) that this whole artisanal ice cream boomlet can feel like silk-gloved hold-up. Some patrons, it must be said, drew the line and stopped coming when Cluny hiked its prices this year, from $2 to $4 per single scoop.

Those who can afford it, or who can’t but have no will power, have Jacqueline Zion, pastry chef of The Oden in Tribeca to thank/blame. She is the mixologist behind these flavors, which are also served from a cart in front of The Odeon. The pedigree of Zion’s cold comfort food is so long that it would surely win best in show in the Westminster of ice cream battles (perhaps that has happened already on the Food Network). The milk comes from Ronnybrook Farm Dairy in the Hudson Valley, the eggs from Fishkill Farms, and the fruits and herbs hail from Satur Farm on Long Island. Naturally, the cookies and wafer mix-ins are all made at the restaurant.

Delia Acosta (above left), a deceptively docile martial artist, has been scooping in front of Café Cluny for three summers now, as long as the cart has been in existence. She’s watched kids grow up during that time, and gotten to know every neighborhood dog. Delia and Idyl, in fact, rave about their dog customers more than their human counterparts.

There’s Larry, who after a fateful sampling of one spoonful of peanut butter ice cream, now lies down in front of the cart every time he and his owner pass by, refusing to budge until he’s been given his taste. “You would think I gave him doggie crack the way he acts,” says Idyl. There’s Petey, the French bulldog who will eat anything and thanks his servers with a bark, and Ella, the goldendoodle with the beautiful greenish-gold eyes that plead for dessert.

Idyl has become friends with half the neighborhood, many of whom know that she is going to Poland to meet her boyfriend’s family. “Some people will sit here for hours and talk to you,” she says, motioning to the inviting bench that sits next to the cart. Delia says Gay Pride Day is always particularly memorable for the bare-chested, Speedo clad men who parade by, and there is even the occasional celebrity. Food writer Mimi Sheraton, a longtime 12th Street resident, has sampled a flavor or two, and Delia was once stiffed by Kirsten Dunst, who promised to come back with money but never did. She obviously doesn’t live in the neighborhood, for who would dare wear out their welcome when the ice cream is so cold, and so good?

Cafe Cluny ice cream cart
284 W. 12th Street, at W. Fourth Street
One scoop, $5, two scoops, $6
Root beer and Abita float, $8
Open daily, 3 to 10 p.m.

Blockbuster cookbooks and celebrity chefs date back to the 18th century

2010-07-28T17:08:00.000-04:00

I love it when my articles connect me to interesting people from different walks of life. Food historian and lawyer Sandra Sherman contacted me through my blog recently after reading my Joe Baum article, explaining that she was fascinated by Baum’s entrepreneurial spirit and connected it with her latest book, Invention of the Modern Cookbook. In her book, Sherman examines how 17th- and 18th-century chefs became some of the earliest entrepreneurs, using promotional (and self-promotional) strategies that presaged Baum’s imaginative brand of restaurant showmanship. Sandra wrote, “It’s amazing how quickly capitalism and foodie culture grew together.”

We might think that today’s celebrity chef and cookbook mania is unique. In 2006 alone, Americans spent over half a billion dollars on cookbooks, Sherman writes in her fascinating history, and almost 2,000 cookbooks were published that year. This when more than 38,000 were already in print! It’s hard from our perspective to imagine a time more cook and cookbook crazy.

In fact, however, the modern blockbuster cookbook (The Joy of Cooking or Mastering the Art of French Cooking, for example) has roots in women-authored cookbooks of the 18th century. Lydia Fisher’s The Prudent Housewife (1750) was printed 25 times, Sherman tells us, and hers was only one of several cookbooks that went through multiple printings.

Robert May was the first great English celebrity chef, a “master of self-promotion,” according to Sherman, with an ego to match his cooking skills. In his 1665 Accomplisht Cook, as was the custom of the day, he included poems by hacks for hire. They were the celebrity blurbs of the 17th century, often penned by uncredentialed unknowns who were sometimes comically clueless about their subjects. Their job was to write “puffery.” In other words, not too different from today’s celebrity puff piece.

Accomplisht Cook featured a frontispiece portrait of the chef, a glowing bio detailing all the famous people May cooked for, and his extensive experience in continental kitchens. These story-telling techniques were the same ones I employed in the many chef profiles I reported as a correspondent for People, in which a crucial element was which celebrities ate at said chef’s “posh” or “tony” restaurant. Sherman amusingly compares Grant Achatz’s 2008 book Alinea (also the name of his Chicago restaurant), in its self-promotional zest, to May’s Accomplisht Cook, what with its numerous introductions, serious essays by noted food journalists, musings on the nature of the cooking genius, and homage not to his biological father, as May paid, but to his spiritual father, Thomas Keller.

The arrival of women celebrity chefs in the second quarter of the18th century injected a note of modesty, practicality and relatability into the celebrity cookbook, softening its image much as Julia Child brought a breath of fresh air and undercut the Olympian poses of male French predecessors such as Antonin Carême or Auguste Escoffier.

Best-selling British cookbook author Hannah Glasse addressed the reader directly and refreshingly in her book The Art of Cookery, a bit like a chef-blogger today might chat directly with her legions of followers. Sherman describes this approach as “an in-your-face refutation of pompous French chefs.”

In her book, The Experienced English House-keeper, best-selling British author Elizabeth Raffald affected a warm competence that won over readers, drawing them in further by confiding how the labors of putting the book together had compromised her health. A precursor, perhaps, to the over-sharing that is a hallmark of not just today’s cookbooks, but all print and social media.

There’s so much more good stuff in this book that sheds light on today’s culinary landscape that you’ll just have to buy it yourself and read it!

Restaurateur Joe Baum lived to work

2010-07-14T09:46:00.001-04:00

It was fascinating to research this story in the current edition of Edible Manhattan on restaurateur Joe Baum. I had so much good material a lot of it ended up on the cutting room floor.

Baum (pictured at left with his daughter, Hilary) is credited with coming up with many of the innovations that define the modern American restaurant. During his career he was responsible for some of the showiest, most profitable eateries of the day, including Windows on the World, Tavern on the Green, and The Four Seasons.

Although I was not able to fully tell this part of his tale, the end of Baum’s career was a bittersweet one. In 1970, he endured a painful ouster from the firm he had led to success with his wildly imaginative innovations, Restaurant Associates. He bounced back, however, landing a gigantic contract to develop all 22 restaurants in the new World Trade Center complex. From there, he rose to even greater heights of glory. In 1985, at the age of 65, he took on the $30 million project of overseeing a meticulous and widely praised renovation of The Rainbow Room complex atop 30 Rockefeller Plaza. With the Rockefeller family itself footing the bill, Baum had at his disposal the kind of deep pockets he needed to realize his lavish vision.

The good times came to an end in 1996, though, when the real estate development and management company Tishman Speyer took over the center. Lease renewal negotiations fell through in 1998 between Baum, co-operator David Emil and Tishman Speyer over a $4 million per year lease agreement, which would have been the highest in the business. Baum and Emil walked away from the contract, and the Cipriani family took over the restaurant for an 11-year-run that ended badly. In 1998 Cipriani, by then deeply in debt, was ousted by Tishman over millions of dollars in unpaid rent.

Negotiations between the Baum team (which by then included restaurateur Drew Nierporent) and Tishman Speyer fell through in May 1998. By October, Joe Baum was dead. To those who knew him best, there was no question that the loss of his beloved Rainbow Room, which he had coveted since first setting eyes on it on a school field trip to New York City in 1941, was what finally led to Joe Baum’s death. “Losing the lease at the Rainbow Room put Joe over the edge,” Baum’s longtime confidant and personal advisor Tony Zazula told me. Tishman Speyer, he says, “Didn’t realize they had the best.” Yes, Baum had been suffering from some time from the prostate cancer that killed him, but this was a man who wanted to live forever because he loved his work so much.

Baum’s longtime scribe and speechwriter Irena Chalmers said of Baum, “he died of a broken heart.”

Myers of Keswick celebrates its 25th anniversary

2010-07-09T12:59:00.000-04:00

This has been a week of celebration for Myers of Keswick founder Peter Myers. Not only has he returned from England this week to celebrate the 25th anniversary of his Hudson Street bastion of all foods British, his daughter Jennifer Myers Pulidore, who now runs the shop, is expecting her first child on August 5th. Any customer who spends more than $30 will get a free Myers of Keswick mug all day tomorrow. Now is the time to stock up on English victuals in preparation for Sunday's World Cup finals! The only thing that could be better is if England were still in the contest....

Myers of Keswick
634 Hudson Street (between Jane and Horatio Streets)
New York, NY 10014-5167
(212) 691-4194

Where can't you watch the World Cup in our neighborhood?

2010-06-26T16:39:00.001-04:00

I usually see interesting things on my Saturday morning rounds of the neighborhood, and today was no exception. This mobile ESPN tv truck was parked on Ninth Avenue just north of West 14th Street. There were quite a few people who either wanted to watch South Korea face off against Uruguay (they were eliminated, 2-1) or just take a break from the already brutal heat. I'm glad they didn't go as far as providing the vuvuzelas.

Bonsignour, for a latte and the World Cup

2010-06-22T13:59:00.000-04:00

It wasn't your usual crowd this morning at Bonsignour on Jane Street at 8th Avenue. This largely Latino crowd looked like they were at Mass, worshipping at the altar of World Cup Soccer. It was Uruguay over Mexico, 1-0.

2010-06-21T18:37:00.000-04:00

It’s not often that I meet someone whose love for Japanese confections rivals my own. So I was tickled when I arrived at chef Anita Lo’s West Village restaurant Annisa last month to take a picture of her for this profile I wrote for WestView.

The restaurant was not yet open, and two adorable little shih tzu dogs were in varying stages of relaxation close by the chef. I leaned over to pet one of them and asked Chef Lo what their names were. “Adzuki and Mochi,” she replied, adding, “If I had a third dog it would be named Kinako.”

Here was someone truly after my own heart! Adzuki (sometimes spelled “azuki”) are the little round, reddish-brown beans that are so beloved in Japan. They can be steamed whole with sweet rice to make the celebratory dish sekihan, or boiled, sweetened and either mashed and sieved into a smooth paste (koshi an), or left lumpy (tsubu an). The an is used to fill pounded sweet rice cakes (daifuku mochi, see photo below, left) or used as the base for the dessert soup shiruko. Kinako is a light brown powder made from toasted soybeans, often slightly sweetened and used to coat mochi (see photo below, right). If I had only these three ingredients to live on I would be as contented as Chef Lo's chrysanthemum-faced shih tzu looked.

As my article describes, Lo is a talented chef who has, with quiet determination, made a name for herself in the competitive world of New York fine dining. Although she did a brief turn on last season’s Bravo reality show "Top Chef Masters" (a highly rewarding yet grueling experience, she says, which makes "Iron Chef" seem like “a walk in the park”) she has not garnered the kind of attention that would be accorded a male chef of her stature.

For more on the relative lack of high-profile women chefs in New York and across America, take a look at this gourmet.com article from Laura Shapiro, Where Are the Women? Then go out and sample some of the fantastic cooking that is being done in the city by the likes of Lo, Alexandra Guarnaschelli (Butter), Gabrielle Hamilton (Prune) and Missy Robbins (A Voce).

World Cup fever at Myers of Keswick

2010-06-21T16:37:00.000-04:00

Internal discord may be roiling the ranks of team England at the World Cup tournament in South Africa, but here in the West Village, Myers of Keswick on Hudson Street is helping the British community keep the focus on winning--preferably while snacking on the store's delicious bangers, crisps and biscuits.

Periodical Heaven: Casa Magazines

2010-05-26T12:41:00.000-04:00

Mohammed Ahmed has been running the West Village newspaper and magazine shop Casa Magazines for 15 years at the corner of Eighth Avenue and 12th Street. Casa is a magazine-lover's dream. If what you're looking for is not available, Mohammed will special order it for you. He and his longtime assistant, Syed Khalid-Wasi spoke recently to Walking and Talking and offered a glimpse into the periodical reading habits of West Villagers.

WT: What are your best-selling periodicals?

MA: The New York Times, for newspapers, and for magazines, Vogue, British Vogue, Paris Vogue and Fantastic Man.

WT: What are the most unusual or obscure periodical requests you have fielded?

MA: Zeek (a Jewish journal on thought and culture). I had to special order this. Also Memoir (a bi-annual journal of “memoir and prose, poetry, essay, graphics, lies and more”) and October (an intellectual journal of art, theory, criticism and politics from MIT Press).In order of popular subject matter, it’s fashion first, then design and decorating,, computer and cars, skateboarding, then health and fitness.

WT: What is your bestselling non-periodical item?

SKW: Natural American Spirit tobacco (organically grown in Santa Fe, NM by independent small farmers.)
WT: What do you yourself read in the store?
SKW: Only Time Out New York. I love my work. I have beautiful customers. They treat me like family. I have a good time here.
WT: What music do you play in the store?
MA: Always WQXR (105.9, all-classical music)!

Il Cantuccio: a new standard for biscotti

2010-05-12T11:03:00.000-04:00

So far, from what I can tell Il Cantuccio, the new Italian bakery at 91 Christopher Street near Bleecker, puts a very high premium on chewiness. You have to like mastication in order to take pleasure in its products. Its signature cantucci are super chewy biscotti, which come in chocolate, almond, fig, prune and apricot flavors, and are a welcome change from those over-sized, crown-busting rocks that sit in a glass jar next to your local barista.

The schiacciata flatbread at Il Cantuccio are similar to focaccia, but flatter, with a muscular, elastic texture that puts the wimpy, fluffy texture of Genovese focaccia to shame. These flatbreads are as challenging to the jaws as the cantucci, and come plain or topped with tomato or large cubes of bacon. It is the combination of their austere flavor and their amazing texture that make the schiacciata so weirdly addictive. The brutti-boni (the name means “ugly but good”), are pale lumps of almond paste, egg whites, sugar, flour and salt that are baked at a low temperature to make them crisp on the outside, and –you guessed it—chewy on the inside.

Il Cantuccio also offers pizza on a Tuscan-style flat bread similar to its schiacciata, sandwiches, and various other round, sweet and softer breads baked with raisins, rosemary and chocolate. They are brought to us courtesy of Tuscan bakers and co-owners, Camilla Bottari, Simone Bertini, and Lorenzo Palombo, who came with their recipes from Prato, north of Florence. The bakery traces its roots back to its founder and patron saint of chewiness, Leonardo Santi, who began making his cookies in 1920 in the Besenzio valley’s Migliana.

Bottari notes that all Il Cantuccio’s ingredients are imported from Italy, which perhaps accounts for the intense flavorfulness of the dried fruit. The schiacciata is made from nothing more than flour, yeast, olive oil and salt. The most popular items, she says, are the chocolate and the apricot cantucci. New Yorkers may also be mesmerized by the fact that, in addition to packing a lot of flavor and texture, these cookies are made without butter or oil, consisting of only sugar, flour, eggs and their various fruit or chocolate components.

How do they manage this? Bottari gives away nothing, saying, “It’s been a secret recipe for 50 years.”

Interview with Daniel Shaviro

2010-05-07T10:03:00.001-04:00

Interview with Daniel Shaviro
I highly recommend this hilarious satire, Getting It, by NYU tax law professor Daniel Shaviro. It's about venal law firm associates trying to claw their way to partnership in an '80s era Washington, D.C. firm and it made me laugh at lot. Read my interview with the professor here!

The life of the restaurant delivery worker

2010-05-05T18:31:00.000-04:00

Some time after I wrote about protesting restaurant delivery workers in the West Village for the March issue of WestView, I spoke with David Colodny, senior staff attorney for the Urban Justice Center (UJC), a local non-profit legal and advocacy organization for low-income New York City residents. The center works with street vendors, domestic violence victims, sex workers and other groups that don’t get a lot of legal representation.

UJC also works with immigrant Chinese restaurant workers. Colodny filed a February 2008 U.S. District Court lawsuit on behalf of several deliverymen against their employer, Kawa Sushi, alleging minimum wage and overtime labor law violation and retaliation for organizing.

The UJC lawyer says 10- to 12-hour shifts are typical for restaurant delivery workers. Their work day begins in the morning, before the restaurant opens. They might deliver menus throughout the neighborhood, clean the sidewalk, or cut cardboard for delivery bags. In the afternoon, their “side work” continues with chores such as filling plastic sauce containers, chopping vegetables, and more cleaning.

“They’re treated as someone who’s going to make a lot of money earning tips, but at the end of the day, when you figure it out, these are not lucrative jobs by any stretch of the imagination,” says Colodny. “They can also be very physically demanding; working in really cold or hot weather lack of breaks, no sick leaves and difficult working conditions.” The minimum wage for tip-earning workers is $4.60 per hour, compared to the non-tip earning minimum in New York State of $7.25 per hour. The workers I spoke to were not even getting that; they were earning between $1.90 and $3 an hour and working over 70 hours per week.

Unspoken in this debate is the immigration status of the workers who have tried to unionize, and the possibility that their status makes them more vulnerable to exploitation by restaurant owners. “From a legal standpoint, everyone who works is entitled to be paid,” says Colodny, who adds, “The common factor in these cases is employers preying upon immigrants who don’t speak English, often are not aware of their rights, and are not in a position to assert them. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of this kind of abuse that goes on.”

How many of us think about these things when we open our door to a member of the city's vast network of deliverymen, the runners and cyclists who travel our streets carrying white plastic bags and insulated plastic pizza box holders? If America runs on Dunkin', New York runs on food delivery. So next time you go to your door in happy anticipation of your pizza/Thai/Chinese/Japanese food, try to imagine the kind of day the man holding the bag has had.

NYC Takashimaya gone; the real thing beckons

2010-05-01T17:04:00.000-04:00

Just as I was mourning the closing of the gorgeous Fifth Avenue branch of the Japanese department store Takashimaya, a beautiful and mouth-watering book arrived on my desk. Titled Food Saké Tokyo, it is written by a former Takashimaya depachika (food hall) employee, Japanese-American chef, sommelier and journalist Yukari Sakamoto.

As I flipped through the book, nostalgic memories of our satellite Takashimaya, with its once-delicious Tea Box restaurant, tea counter, Yokumoku cookies and raffiné Japanese ceramics began to seem paltry compared to Sakamoto’s dissection of the real thing: the Tokyo depachika. A combination of the words depā-to (department store) and chika (basement), these underground food extravaganzas are a something like a cross between Chelsea Market and Bergdorf’s, but with many more specialty food shops—pickles, saké, Japanese and western confections, meat, chocolate, to name just a few—representing the best edible and potables the country and world have to offer.

There are many other pleasures to be found in this handy guidebook, which is part of The Little Bookroom’s Terroir series (other volumes in the series include food and drink guides to Burgundy, Rome and Budapest). Filled with hunger-inducing photos, Food Saké Tokyo is aimed at the gastro-tourist who wants to know where to find the best, whether it is miso, senbei crackers, kaiseki (a style of dining composed of an artful parade of small plates) or an inexpensive bowl of ramen. It also includes useful tips on dining etiquette (never let your companion’s beer or saké glass go empty), primers on the Japanese vocabulary of food and drink and listings by neighborhood.

I loved the page that defines food and drink-related giongo and gitaigo, onomatopoeic double words that meld taste, feel, sound and language into a sensory-descriptive whole that English utterly lacks. For example, a bowl of hot, steaming rice is hoka hoka; koto koto is the sound a bubbling pot makes and the stickiness of natto (fermented soybeans) is neba neba.

It’s been years since I lived and worked in Japan and regularly trawled the depachika for unusual foods. When I return for a visit next year, Food Saké Tokyo will be in my suitcase, and I’ll have a pretty good idea of where and what I’ll be eating.

Friends With Differences: Lange and Adams at the Oakland Museum of California

2010-04-29T10:51:00.002-04:00

When you are researching a topic, somehow relevant stories seem to appear all around you. So it was with this Wall Street Journal story today, on two photography sections in the newly renovated Oakland Museum of California. One is on the work of photographer Dorothea Lange, and one on Group f/64, a group of Bay Area photographers that included Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham.

The two exhibitions highlight two opposing currents in the fertile Northern California photographic scene in the first half of the twentieth century. Lange, who learned her craft as a studio photographer, was radicalized by the poverty she witnessed during the Depression and the migrant farm workers she photographed for the Farm Security Administration. She viewed herself as a documentarian; technique was secondary to her attempt to honestly portray the dispossessed.

Adams and his group argued for a move beyond the romantic, gauzy Pictorialism of the nineteenth century, and for photography as a pure art form. It could be abstract, reflecting the modernist themes emerging in the fine art world at the time, or realistic depictions of nature that, like Adams’ work, reflected the timeless and the sublime through subtle and exact calibrations of framing, aperture, light and developing techniques.

William Meyers’ Journal article discusses the sometimes prickly friendship between Adams and Lange, described by Sandra S. Phillips, the senior curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as “a friendship with differences.” These differences were most obvious in Lange’s and Adams’ treatment of the World War II California concentration camp for Japanese Americans, Manzanar. Lange portrayed the sorrow, loss and injustice of the mass imprisonment (an example of her work above, left), while Adams (portrait from Manzanar, below)fashioned a positive image of the Japanese as “loyal Americans” displaying their mettle through obedience and elevated by the majesty of their high desert surroundings.

Meyers notes that the differences between the two photographers live on in their treatment of their photographic legacy. Lange wanted to make the personal archive she donated to the Oakland Museum—including 6,000 prints and 25,000 negatives—available to the public. Adams’ archive is held at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, but is tightly controlled by the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.

Although Adams donated his Manzanar photographs to the Library of Congress, he omitted several iconic images he took on his Manzanar trip: Winter Sunrise, The Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine California 1944 and Mount Williamson, Sierra Nevada, from Manzanar, California. These images had become a valuable source of income that Adams sought to protect.

In 1944 Adams published a cheaply printed, two-dollar paperback book of his Manzanar photos, Born Free and Equal. Featuring 64 photos and text he wrote himself, it was among the top-ten books sold in San Francisco that year, although it was poorly distributed beyond the Bay Area. In his later years, Adams claimed that the military had confiscated a large number of copies and destroyed them because of its perceived anti-Americanism. At the time of publication, some critics praised Adams for his moral courage while others vilified him for sympathizing with the enemy.

Perhaps as a result of the criticism received by Born Free and Equal or to keep the highly lucrative Adams’s legacy free of political taint, the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust refused to approve the re-publication of Born Free and Equal in 2002 by the small California press Spotted Dog. This caused much anguish for publisher Wynne Benti, who recalled that the months she fought to complete the project as among the most difficult of her life. “I remember being at the UCLA book festival,” Benti told me. “People walked away and refused to buy the book because it was not approved by the trust.” In the end, Benti was forced to leave out Born Free and Equal’s powerful nature photographs.

Stay tuned. I am putting the finishing touches on my piece on Adams, Lange and Manzanar prisoner/photographer Toyo Miyatake and hope to make it available soon!

Cowtastic!

2010-04-25T01:05:00.001-04:00

We loved our dinner at Takashi tonight, a tiny new new yakiniku (grilled meat) restaurant in the West Village that hails from the whole animal school of cooking. All the beef comes with a pedigree: Dickson Farmstand, Kansas’ Creekstone Farm via Pat LaFreida, and Japanese Premium Beef’s Oregon washugyu. In addition to some of the best short rib and ribeye we’ve had in recent memory, Chef Takashi devotes a whole section of this cow-only restaurant to horumon, or innards, including three different stomachs and the large intestine.

A charmingly illustrated blackboard that wraps around half the restaurant explains how to cook your meats on the high-tech tabletop grills and extolls the virtues of horumon: “The horumon team, working to help ladies get and keep clear, beautiful skin.” The musky/spicy pickled sesame leaf wrapped around rice balls in the bakudan "rice bomb" is touted as a “super veggie, great scent, chock full of alpha linoleic acid, which can prevent hardening of arteries.”

The smokeless, super-hot grills make browning the meats a fast operation. After a trio of complimentary Korean-style small dishes (left), our favorite sides were a very crunchy spicy cucumber dish, edamame bathed in sesame oil, salt and lot of black pepper and simmered ramps. For horumon, the kitchen had run out of hearts but still had cheeks, which were tasty but sinewy, what with all that skin-enhancing cartilage.

After the hot grilling, the house-made Madagascar soft-serve vanilla offered some refreshing coolness. Topping choices include shiratama (rice flour dumplings), kuragoma kinako (black sesame and soybean flour), and azuki beans. As I am a big fan of any Japanese dessert, I was happy to find another source in my neighborhood.

Takashi is a young third-generation Korean-Japanese from Osaka who’s cooking from his grandmother’s recipes. Judging from tonight's hour-long wait and the quality of our dinner, he is doing his obaachan proud.

Takashi, 456 Hudson St, (at Barrow St), New York, NY 10014, 212-414-2929

Why you should sign up to be an organ donor today

2010-04-21T22:18:00.001-04:00

Today New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center’s kidney transplant program staged a big shindig to celebrate its three-thousandth successful transplantation. Over 600 donors and recipients and their friends and family members attended the event at the 168th Street Armory, three of whom had been transplanted over 30 years ago.

It was a joyful event, with press and PR photographers snapping a huge group picture of donors and recipients, speeches by New York Presbyterian-Columbia’s dream team of crack surgeons, and an appearance by Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer to proclaim today Circle of Life Renal 3000 Day.

The first kidney transplant at New York Presbyterian-Columbia took place in 1969. In those early days of transplantation, only identical twins were considered viable transplant donor-recipient pairs, and the success rate was only 50 percent. Today, the success rate is 95%, and leading centers like Columbia’s are experimenting with what is known as ABO-incompatible transplantation, which neutralizes the problem of incompatible blood types; desensitization (removing antibodies to foreign tissue from a potential transplant patient’s blood), and paired kidney exchanges, multiple transplantations that occur simultaneously in one center so matching kidneys can be distributed among strangers. In one particularly impressive kidney swap, Columbia performed 12 simultaneous surgeries, giving six renal patients a new lease on life.

I was in the audience because in 2006, I became the two-thousand-and-something person to be transplanted at Columbia. Sitting at my table were the father-daughter team of Dennis Cronin and Kelly Jarer (pictured at left; Kelly donated a kidney to her dad), one man who had received a kidney off the donor registry after a year-and-a-half long wait, and two women in matching pink suits, white blouses and necklaces. They were Joann Lemons and Patti Moreno from Connecticut. Joann and Patti (below) met on a bus trip to New York City sponsored by the Red Hat Society, a social group for spunky over-50 women.

Joann and Patti had known each other only three years when Joann told Patti she had polycystic kidney disease and needed a transplant. Because potential donors in her family were also affected by the genetic disease, Joann needed look beyond her family circle for a donor. Patti passed the battery of tests required and donated a kidney to Joann. Just like that. Patti can’t understand why more people don’t donate, and says were she given a do-over, she’d make the same decision in a heartbeat.

The only thing missing on this special day was my sister and selfless donor, Julie, who lives in California and is doing just fine.

Although the event was largely celebratory, the one urgent message was this: we need more donors! In New York State, only 13 percent of those eligible are registered to be organ donors in the event of their death, very low compared to other states. There are barriers to registering in our state, such as the inability of potential donors to give electronic consent, and having to opt into the registry instead of consent being presumed. Legislation is pending to remove those barriers. Until that happens, however, 500 New Yorkers will die each year waiting for a compatible kidney donor.

So look for your state’s Donate Life program, and register to become an organ donor! In New York State, you can download the registration form for the New York State Donate Life Organ and Tissue Registry here.

Son's Day at Colicchio & Sons

2010-03-24T15:52:00.002-04:00

Tucked away at the bar of the wood-hued Tap Room of Colicchio and Sons today, my own Son and I were the only spring break refugees in the business lunch crowd. The room is contemporary, light-filled and warm, and the selection of beer on tap is impressive. The two women next to us weren’t interested; they were sipping soft drinks and burning holes in the keypads of their BlackBerries between courses of kale and white bean soup and salads.

What we ate: Fresh ricotta with roasted fennel, carrots, and cipollini onions drizzled with truffle honey; a leg of lam sandwich with roasted eggplant and black olive tapenade, and baked rigatoni with duck and cavalo nero (dark-green Tuscan kale). This is a kale kind of place, earthy, robust and masculine.

The ricotta dish, which we overheard referred to as burrata (it looked at tasted like burrata), was a perfect balance of creamy, woodsy and sweet, and the lamb was rare and herbaceous. Our server, Brent, whose other job is creating tv series, told us we’d ordered two of the most popular dishes in the room, the ricotta and the rigatoni (less of a knock-out but still rich and warming). Oddly, he said, though the pizzas are popular, not many customers order the burger with balsamic onions, pecorino and chips (which he assured us was as stand-out).

The adjacent dining room is open for dinner only, and features much more elaborate tasting and a la carte menus.

Coliccio and Sons, 85 Tenth Avenue, Chelsea, New York, 10011. (212) 352-1690

Chef Maryann Terillo returns to the West Village with Bistro de la Gare

2010-03-15T22:17:00.000-04:00

On the winters’ rainiest and windiest night, we ventured around the corner to the recently opened Bistro de la Gare, where chef-owner Maryann Terillo is turning out rustic Mediterranean food for a neighborhood that has welcomed her back with open arms. Terillo last cooked at Jarnac on West 12^th and Greenwich Streets, which closed last June after owner Tony Powe was unable to come to terms with his landlord.

The night we visited, Terillo wasn’t sure how many guests would keep their reservations, what with the aggressively foul weather outside. She need not have worried. The room filled to capacity during the hour after we arrived, and at the end of our meal, we were gently ushered out to make room for the night’s second seating.

The 43-seat restaurant is located 626 Hudson Street (at Jane Street), in part of the space that formerly housed Mi Cocina; next door, Móle Mexican Bar and Grill, an import from the Lower East Side, has opened. The Bistro’s interior is simple, but warm and welcoming, painted in brown and beige tones with red and steel blue accents. The double-exposure pinhole camera photographs that adorn the walls are by Yoshi Hija. On the menu, Terillo has kept Jarnac regulars happy by including her signature roast baby chicken with walnut butter and her winter-vanquishing cassoulet. We also enjoyed the roasted cream of tomato soup and a tender plate of braised short ribs, as well as a terrific cinnamon panna cotta garnished with nuts and winter fruit.

Terillo is assisted in the kitchen by chef Elisa Sarno, whom she first hired to work for her when she ran another West Village restaurant, Café de la Gare, between 1984 and 1991. I was happy to see Terillo back in her element, supervising her new but eager staff and shuttling back and forth from the front of the house to kitchen as she kept an eye on things. After suffering the frustrations of months of delays due to permit-related bureaucratic snafus she seemed thrilled to be working again.

Even after the restaurant’s soft opening, there were difficulties, including a period of time where the kitchen struggled with no gas, working with makeshift electric burners and the chefs even doing some cooking at home. The restaurant is still BYOB, which it seems they can’t announce to customers, but I can. Call before you go in to see if that’s still the case. For fans of brunch, the Bistro had a soft opening of its brunch menu this past weekend, which looks terrific and includes a fair number of southwestern dishes.

Bistro de la Gare, 626 Hudson Street at Jane Street, New York, NY 10014, (212) 242-4420, bistrodelagarenyc.com