Grub Street Grub Street New York

Each week on the Food Chain, we ask a chef to describe a dish he or she recently enjoyed. The chef who prepared the dish responds and then picks his or her own memorable meal. On and on it goes. Last week, Terry Chan of South Sea Seafood Village in S.F. told us he keeps going back for Luke Sung's potato-wrapped sea bass at Isa. What's been a favorite of yours recently, Luke?

Who: Luke Sung, chef-owner at Domo and Prime Rib Shabu, consulting chef at Isa
What: Monkfish liver nigiri
Where: Ino Sushi, Japantown, San Francisco
When: June, 2010

It’s no surprise when Knot Just Pretzels in Penn Station gets a health inspection score that puts it in the C range — what is surprising is when the city’s No. 1 restaurant, Le Bernardin, is thwacked with an even higher number of demerit points. The five-star eatery’s hold message touts its Zagat, Times, and Michelin ratings, but what it doesn’t mention is that it received 32 demerits (4 points above the C mark) on an inspection last Friday. Mais est-ce possible? Is Eric Ripert spending too much time broing down with Anthony Bourdain?

The James New York hotel opened on the corner of Grand and Thompson today, but we’re told the restaurant where David Burke will likely be chef (still no official announcement) won’t open until November 1. This much is set in stone: Thomas Schlesser is signed on to design the semi-subterranean dining room, and we’re told he’s aiming for a cross between the industrial feel of DBGB and the more organic vibe of the Publican.

Greenmarket veteran Eran Wajswol, owner of New Jersey’s Valley Shepherd Creamery, sells his raw-milk, cave-aged cheeses at farmers’ markets and at the “Sheep Shoppe” on his own 120-acre Morris County farm. Next week, he opens a dairy-dedicated Manhattan storefront in Soho, where he’ll stock twenty or so of his cheeses, plus cultured butter, sheep’s-milk yogurt, fresh pastas like gnocchi and ricotta-stuffed ravioli, lamb meat, and cheese condiments. Wajswol calls his mixed-sheep’s-and-cow’s-milk version of Brie “Brielle” and will serve it on sandwiches made with bread from neighboring Grandaisy Bakery. And for those curd nerds among his clientele, Wajswol plans to schedule bus trips to Valley Shepherd for cheesemaking classes and tours of the facility, including an aging cave carved into a hillside.

Valley Shepherd Creamery, 79 Sullivan St., nr. Spring St.; 646-476-2893

New York City's drinking water is a point of pride for natives. Never mind that in practice, depending on your building, it can come out of the tap with a tinny aftertaste or, at least at our last apartment, with a light sprinkling of unidentified white particles that settled and dissolved in about a minute. (Just blame the pipes.) Gizmodo has taken a microscopic look at our superlative drinking water's real special sauce: copepods, a tiny crustacean invisible to the naked eye. It isn't pretty, but it's still clean. In fact, copepods are known to eat mosquito larvae, so think of it as the shrimpier of the two evils. Although kosher? Not so much.

You Swallow These Invisible Shrimp With Every Gulp of NYC Tap Water [Gizmodo]