Posts for December 3, 2012

Cheese for Charity at Murray’s; Bill’s Food & Drink Launches Lunch Service

• Head to Murray's Cheese After Hours for beer, cider, and seasonal cheeses on Wednesday from 9 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. The Bleecker Street location invites guests to taste holiday cheeses while raising money for the Food Bank for NYC's emergency Sandy fund. Tickets are $10 per person, and event attendees will save 20 percent on all purchases. Sign up here. [Grub Street]

• Bill's Food & Drink launched lunch service today. Lunch is now available Monday through Friday starting at 11:30 a.m. and features a few items from the dinner menu along with new, lunch-only dishes including "Manhattan"-style bouillabaisse, a prime-rib sandwich, and conchiglie al forno pasta. [Grub Street]

• Aamanns-Copenhagen opens for breakfast service tomorrow at 7 a.m. Order a special blend of BonJo coffee, Tea Forté tea, and light breakfast items (including danish, of course) to go or to stay in the dining room until 11 a.m. on weekdays. [Grub Street]

Kimchee, brisket, and Repeal Day. »

Watch the Trailer for A Film About Coffee

By Hugh Merwin
Watch Video

"There's so much about coffee that we don't understand," says a subject filmed for A Film About Coffee, a forthcoming documentary from Brandon Loper, a San Francisco–based director. From the looks of things, Loper talked to the experts, obsessives, and some philosopher-baristas on his way to understanding the forces that shape coffee culture around the world. Here's his behind-the-scenes production blog, and check out the teaser trailer, straight ahead.

Espresso served in porcelian, arabica poured through a sock. »

British Restaurant Offers Dim Sum With a Side of Condoms

By Kara Baskin

Seal the deal at their safe-sex lounge.Photo: Daily Mail

Here's one restaurant Kate Middleton probably won't frequent once she recovers from morning sickness hyperemesis gravidarum: Cabbages and Condoms. The Oxford restaurant has the distinction of being the first in the U.K. to offer "leaflets on protective sex when your meal ends," plus other safe-sex-themed goods. The restaurant, a chainlet that's really big in Thailand, reminds customers that "our food is guaranteed not to cause pregnancy" and that purchasing condoms should be as routine as, you know, buying cabbage. After wooing over "fascinating" dim sum and "wonderfully herbaceous" shrimp soup, diners can linger over condom-themed mugs, keyrings, and books, purchases that might seem presumptuous before a third or so date. It still sounds better than Modern Toilet restaurant. [Daily Mail, Earlier]

Dorie Greenspan Delivers

Cult cookie-maker and O.G. baker Dorie Greenspan opened retail locations of Beurre & Sel, her cookie business, to the Essex Street Market and Harlem's La Marqueta in September. By now, you may have heard that the bakery's Jammers and Rosemary-Parmesan cookies make fantastic gifts, but what you may not know is that the bakery is now shipping nationwide. We may have World Peace Cookies in our time, after all. [Beurre & Sel, Earlier, Related]

Lyon May Be Closed for Good

By Hugh Merwin

Never say adieu.

Over in the West Village, the two-year-old Lyon Bouchon Moderne has been closed for at least a month, and its OpenTable account is "offline." Updates to its Twitter feed and Tumblr cut off abruptly in early October, however, and neighbors say they have not seen anyone working inside the space for a while. In June, co-owner Francois Latapie left the business, and word is that the kitchen had been without a chef since the summer. Has the Lyonnaise restaurant served its last rabbit rillettes? We've reached out to representatives and will let you know what we hear back.

Your Tap Water Might Be Giving You Food Allergies

By Kara Baskin

Noooo. First peanuts, then gluten, and now tap water is killing us, too. According to research from New York's Albert Einstein College of Medicine, pesticides lurking in our perfectly tasty, really rather cheap tap water can be linked to food and environmental allergies that might cause tongue-tingling, hives, and even death. Oh, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Read more »

Barcade Is Opening in Manhattan

By Hugh Merwin

Don't tell Ms. Pac-Man.

Hope you have lots of quarters: Williamsburg's classic video-game-centric watering hole Barcade will soon be available on both ends of the L train, according to DNAinfo. The site reports that the eight-year-old bar's owners have filed an application for the 4,500-square-foot space at 148 West 24th Street in Chelsea. Details are scarce right now, but the bar's owners will go before CB4 Manhattan later this month to present their plans. [DNAInfo]

Alamo Drafthouse Now Opening in Downtown Brooklyn

By Hugh Merwin

The owners of the Austin-based Alamo Drafthouse movie theater chain announced this morning on their blog that their third New York location (Alamos in the UWS and Yonkers are in the works) will land at City Point, a 1.8-million-square-foot mixed-use development coming soon to the Downtown Brooklyn parcel that was most recently home to Dekalb Market. Once completed, the movie theater will have seven screens playing new releases and several others devoted to all kinds of retro gems, rereleases, and special programming. Like the chain's other locations, food, beer, and cocktails will be delivered to your seat. Don't start popping your popcorn just yet, however: The City Point Alamo Drafthouse is tentatively scheduled to open in 2015. [Drafthouse via Eater, Earlier]

Sunny’s in Red Hook Is Closer to Reopening

Red Hook's famous Sunny's — which was inundated with five feet of storm surge a month ago and throughly wrecked — is well on its way to once again serving cold beer and hosting bluegrass musicians. The Brooklyn Paper reports the bar has raised more than $24,000 on Kickstarter. The campaign was set up a week ago in order to help 78-year-old owner Sunny Balzano repair the bar's basement, replace its subpanel, and buy new compressors. All of Red Hook's restaurants and food businesses were affected by the storm and its aftermath. [BP, Earlier, Related]

How Green Were My Riblets: LEED-Bedazzled Applebee’s Opens in Harlem

By Hugh Merwin

The Post has some more details on that East Harlem Applebee's we first told you about back in May: The restaurant space on East 117th Street adjoining the East River Plaza shopping center took $4 million to build — $1 million more than a typical franchise — because, soup to nuts, the place is LEED-certified. The urinals will be "waterless," rainwater collected from the rooftop will be used to flush the toilets, the fryers will run on less gas, and a wall of plants will scrub the Whiskey Sirloin Fajita scents from the dining room. Fans of the familiar should not worry: Riblets will eternally be a mystery of nature. The East Harlem Applebee's of the future opens on December 10. [NYP, Earlier]

What to Eat at Stix, Now Serving Food on, Well, Sticks in Flatiron

By Hugh Merwin

Chicken, on a stick.

Stix, which soft-opened on Thursday in Flatiron, is the newest restaurant looking to replicate the success of a chain like Chipotle by cooking ethically sourced meat and serving it in a fast-casual setting. Owner Stathis Antonakopoulos put a roster of meat and fish kebabs at the center of the menu, which also includes a variety of salads made with whole grains, a Greek yogurt bar, and a juice menu that includes flavors like carrot and sea buckthorn, and cucumber-apple with pine. Elsewhere, an ample-sounding coffee menu features espresso piccolos and correttos. These detours, it turns out, indicate serious pedigrees at work: Executive chef Nikolaos Stavrakakis worked at Noma, and Stefanos Domatiotis, who designed the coffee menu, was this year's Greek Barista Champion. Intriguing. Check out the menu after the jump.

Buckthorn and yogurt. »

Burger King Is Selling 55-Cent Whoppers

It's the Burger King Whopper's 55th birthday, the sandwich is having a midlife crisis, and we only have a few days left to figure out how we're going to party. The fast-food chain, of course, has had its ups and downs recently: It started doing delivery in NYC, but then there were those strikes. From Thursday to Sunday, buy one Whopper and get another for only 55 cents. This, according to promotional materials, includes not only the original variety, but also the Wisconsin White Cheddar Whopper and the so-called Angry Whopper. Why you so mad, Angry Whopper? [Earlier, Earlier]

What Kind of Restaurant Should the Chelsea Hotel Get?

The Post reports that designer Mark Zeff has been selected to help transform the Chelsea Hotel into the "upscale boutique hotel" it never knew it wanted to be, while the iconic property's owner, real-estate investor Joseph Chetrit, is reportedly "in talks with several food and beverage types to run the downstairs lounge space." Many, many people are still upset that the place where a chunk of Naked Lunch was drafted will inevitably offer guests comprehensive juice cleanses. The Chelsea Hotel's forthcoming lounge is perhaps the safest venue to reference its outlaw and bohemian past, but what kind of restaurant do you put in a place where Sid Vicious stabbed Nancy Spungen, Bob Dylan ruminated in the stairwell, Allen Ginsberg ran naked through the halls, and Janis Joplin allegedly spent some time with Leonard Cohen on an unmade bed? Small plates? Charcuterie? [NYP]

Guy Fieri and Drake Are Cooking With Gas

By Hugh Merwin

This'll be good for a verse or two down the line.

Maybe the best part about this Instagram documentation of the meetup between Guy Fieri and Drake is that Drake is wearing rubber gloves. It could also be the studied seriousness, the attention to craft, or the fact that these guys plate whatever sticky ribs with YOLO sauce on a cutting board flanked with cocktails. [Vulture]

Gordon Ramsay’s ‘Spotted Pig’ Is a Project With David Beckham

By Hugh Merwin

Really, we can't wait.Photo: Noel Vasquez/Getty Images

Make it stop: Just before taking the field for his final game with the L.A. Galaxy, David Beckham was quoted as saying his next career moves involve business plans with Gordon Ramsay, including a restaurant. "It will be a business thing but owning a restaurant is going to be fun as well," Beckham told the Sun. When we last heard about Ramsay's business plans, of course, they included a preemptive U.K. trademark filing for the name of the Spotted Pig, the New York restaurant owned by Ken Friedman and April Bloomfield. There's been speculation that Ramsay moved to trademark the name of a restaurant he does not own to snipe at onetime sparring partner Mario Batali, a Spotted Pig investor, but we're pretty sure the Gordo-Becks project is the Spotted Pig U.K., or some such attempt. Here's why.

Would you buy a hamburger from these men? »

Eat Well: Dine Like a Scandinavian; Grab Breakfast at Rosemary’s

By Kate Lowenstein

Eat like a Dane at Aamanns Copenhagen.Photo: Melissa Hom

Is it really "healthier" to eat at home rather than in restaurants? That common thinking is no doubt thanks to the idea that chefs load up their food with cream, butter, bacon, and anything else that will give you the gout. Most restaurant dishes aren't diet food, but some of the city's best new places do offer things that are delicious without sacrificing health. See what we mean, straight ahead.

Read more »

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