Posts for November 15, 2012 -- Grub Street: New York Magazine's Food and Restaurant Blog

Posts for November 15, 2012

11/15/12 at 6:20 PM
Leftovers
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White Truffle Specials at the Little Owl; Maiden Lane Replaces Life Cafe

• The Little Owl has taken delivery of a shipment of astronomically priced Italian white truffles, and will be offering specials of veal ravioli with truffles and jus, risotto with egg yolk, and veal tartare until Joey Campanaro runs out of tubers to slice for you tableside. [Grub Street]

• Fortune has begun a series on the heavily damaged South Street Seaport, checking in on the Fish Market Restaurant, which has reopened with beer and well drinks, but won't be heating up any drunken clam chowder for sometime. [Fortune]

• Maiden Lane, a new restaurant and wine bar owned by former general managers of Parm and Torrisi, is set to open on 10th Street and Avenue B early next year. [Eater]

11/15/12 at 5:00 PM
Mad About Mads
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Acme’s Mads Refslund Wants a Second New York Restaurant

The Danish chef, who opened Noma in Copenhagen with René Redzepi and is now the chef at Acme, doesn't quite feel at home yet in New York, but definitely wants to open a second restaurant here down the road. The menu will probably be less conceptual and more casual. "I will tell you that I want a place that is foodie, in a way," he tells Eater, "but also for everyone." [Eater NY]

11/15/12 at 4:10 PM
Openings
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First Look at Arlington Club, Now Seving Côte De Boeuf for Two in The Old Payard Space

By Hugh Merwin

In preparation for opening Arlington Club, his partnership with the TAO Group on the Upper East Side, Laurent Tourondel told Grub Street he wanted to reinvent the steakhouse once again. The menu at the restaurant, which opens tomorrow and will offer diners 20 percent while it is in previews until November 21, is divided into house specialties, sushi and steaks. Potential for French-Japanese crossover is high: A Kobe beef roll dabbed with black truffle aioli hides out among the yellowtail and kumquat, while you can order Armagnac-peppercorn sauce or house ketchup spiked with ginger to accompany your steak. Specialties include mushroom-stuffed roast chicken and "modern" sole meunière with preserved lemon, but the menu's anchor point is a selection of dry-aged prime steaks, including a 22-ounce bone-in rib eye ($62) and a 34-ounce côte de boeuf for two, which goes for $110. Check out the space and the food, ahead.

Sushi, steak, and mashed potatoes.

11/15/12 at 4:10 PM
Gin
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New York Distilling Company Will Celebrate Anniversary With Gin, Rye, and Sandy-Relief

By Hugh Merwin

You'll probably want to be there.

On December 5 from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m., the NY Distilling Company is throwing a party to celebrate its one-year birthday, but also to commemorate the 79th anniversary of Repeal Day. Good times indeed. At the Shanty, that magical Williamsburg spot where NY Distilling Company (to paraphrase Nelly) regularly feels like bustin' loose and feels like making hooch, there will be punch, hot toddies, and a chance to win your own personalized five-gallon barrel of rye. Each partygoer will receive a 375 ml bottle of unaged rye as it flows from the still, and there will be Brooklyn Brewery beer and snacks from Stinky BKLYN and Jacob's Pickles. Best of all, all net proceeds from ticket sales will benefit the Brooklyn Recovery Fund. More details, and information on tickets, can be found here. [NYDistilling]

11/15/12 at 2:40 PM
Lawsuits
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Sparks Steak House Settles ‘Male-on-Male’ Sexual Harassment Suit

By Hugh Merwin

Sparks Steak HousePhoto: Jennifer McFarlane

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has settled a sexual harassment suit against Sparks Steak House for $600,000. Twenty-two male waiters say they were groped and harassed by one manager in particular over an eight-year period, LGBT Weekly reports. Though waiters continued to report the offensive manager to other managers and even informed the restaurant's owners, the incidents did not stop. In addition to the monetary settlement, the restaurant's owners and management have agreed to implement comprehensive new set of anti-discrimination policies. [LGBT Weekly]

11/15/12 at 2:00 PM on Grub Street Chicago
Oeno-file
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Legendary Sommelier Larry Stone on Charlie Trotter’s Wine Collection (Which He Built)

By Michael Gebert

Stone.

Tomorrow, Christie's in New York will auction off the top bottles from the collection amassed over 25 years by Chicago's legendary Charlie Trotter's restaurant. (The remainder will be on sale online through the end of the month; you can see the collection catalogue here.) Master sommelier Larry Stone was Trotter's most celebrated wine director, working at the restaurant from 1989 (when it was two years old) to 1993, and then returning for its last few months. But more than that, he was Trotter's collaborator in developing an American way that wine and food could go together in contemporary fine dining, largely responsible for building the restaurant's celebrated cellar and setting the direction that it followed after he left. Stone recently took a new post as dean of Wine Studies at the International Culinary Center in Campbell, California; we caught up with him via e-mail in Burgundy and asked him about the collection, which Christie's buyers will be bidding on tomorrow.

11/15/12 at 1:15 PM
Roe for the Holidays
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Eric Ripert Has His Own Line of Caviar

By Hugh Merwin

Roe, roe, roe!

The Le Bernardin chef is following up his $18 chocolate bar side project with a slightly more luxe product. Ripert's twenty-year friendship with Paramount Caviar's Hossein Aimani has produced a co-branded line of sturgeon roe. These eggs are downright multicultural, having been farmed in China, Israel, and Italy. They come in four-ounce ($525) and eight-ounce tins ($1,050), and include a satin pouch, a mother of pearl serving spoon, made-in-France blinis, bells, whistles, and crème fraîche. [Paramount Caviar, Earlier]

11/15/12 at 12:15 PM
Interviews
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Padma Does Playboy

By Alan Sytsma

But don't get too excited, fellas: It's for a Q&A, and the accompanying photo is very tasteful. (The same cannot be said for the ads on the site.) Anyway, topics discussed: Lakshmi's lack of sentimentality ("I’m like a truck driver trapped in this body"), ex-husband Salman Rushdie ("Now there is somebody who has great wit and is a great flirt"), her role in the 2001 box-office bomb Glitter (money job), and attractive people who don't have a lot to say ("A lot of people I see in magazines or on TV bore me"). So it goes. [Playboy]

11/15/12 at 12:00 PM
Hot Coffee
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Starbucks Is Doing a Buy-One-Get-One-Free Deal With Its Gingerbread Lattes

Between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. today, then continuing through Sunday, order any hot, blended, or iced peppermint mocha, gingerbread latte, eggnog latte, caramel brulée latte, or "Skinny" peppermint mocha at Starbucks and they'll throw in another of equal or lesser value for free. The holiday spirit is indeed in effect, but has anyone ever ordered an iced gingerbread latte? [Gothamist]

11/15/12 at 11:15 AM
Overnights
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Top Chef Seattle Recap: David Rees on Personal Branding and Geopolitical Humblebrags

By David Rees

Photo: Bravo

I’d like to apologize for last week’s disparaging comments about soup. After doing a little research, I realize that soup can be, in fact, quite complicated and delicious. I must remember to eat it someday.

11/15/12 at 11:00 AM
Bookshelf
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More Details on the Treme Cookbook

The Treme cookbook, first reported in August by the New Orleans Times-Picayune, will be at least partially written from the perspective of Janette Desautel, the fictional chef played by Kim Dickens on the show. Anthony Bourdain is writing the forward, and the book will also feature new recipes from Eric Ripert and Dave Chang when it comes out next July, just in time for all those mudbugs. The final, five-episode season of Treme will premiere next year. [Amazon, Nola.com]

11/15/12 at 10:10 AM
Department of Deportment
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Department of Deportment: The End-All, Be-All Guide to Using Your Phone at the Table

By Jordana Rothman

Resist the urge to play some mid-meal Angry Birds Star Wars.Photo-illustration: Konstantin Sergeyev

Look around any hot-ticket dining room and you'll see it: the vulgar, telltale glow of smartphones laid on tables, bars, and laps. iPhone 5s and Samsung Galaxies full of Twitter updates and text messages; equipped with cameras ideal for mediocre food photography; even able to, in the most loathesome of at-table scenarios, make actual phone calls. They're a great technological advancement, and an even greater nuisance to both diners and the cooks whose food has to compete for your attention with push notifications. The ubiquity of smartphones in restaurants now has even led to calls for a hard ban — or the invention of odd games involving stacking phones on the table during the meal. But such extreme measures are unlikely to succeed, and the use of phones at the table should be a matter of etiquette, not law, so here is the definitive road map to using your phone at the table.

"A phone left on the dinner table is a shifty kind of power play."

11/15/12 at 09:50 AM
Now Hiring
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Hill Country Chicken Is Hiring Sandy-Displaced Workers

By Lauren Elkies

Hill Country wants you.Photo: Melissa Hom

Hill Country Chicken, the Flatiron offshoot of nearby Hill Country Barbecue, was shut down for a week due to Sandy. But now they're back: “Any restaurants downtown that are still without power or closed — if you are looking to temporarily place your employees somewhere, Hill Country Chicken would like to hire them!” writes Dina Millan, the restaurant group's executive VP of human resources, on Facebook.

A good deed.

11/15/12 at 09:15 AM
Amped
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5-Hour Energy Drinks Cited in Reports of Thirteen Deaths

By Hugh Merwin

Performance-boosting caffeinated beverages like Four Loko, Red Bull, and Monster Energy Drinks are not the only brands cited in reports of consumer deaths, apparently: The Times reports that 5-Hour Energy, a brand founded and owned by Manoj Bhargava, a former monk who is now a low-key billionaire, has been cited in 30 reports filed with the FDA since 2009, including thirteen deaths. Other FDA reports "involved serious or life-threatening injuries like heart attacks, convulsions and, in one case, a spontaneous abortion," according to the newspaper. [NYT, Earlier, Related]