Grub Street

A trio of food events, some stinging nettles, and two very serious Japanese restaurants make up this week’s food news. Though the items may be few in number, the magazine’s contents carry a significant freight of good tidings. Adam Platt visits a modern sushi restaurant and an intimate Japanese kaiseki establishment, and finds both pleasingly stark and traditional, a welcome change from the big-box Asian behemoths of recent years. Sara Jenkins, formerly of Bread Tribeca, provides a similarly plain but elegant recipe for one of the spring’s most welcome greens, wild stinging nettles, which adorn a simple Tuscan bucatini dish. Last, this week’s Short List features three events which have nothing in common except all sounding absolutely delicious.

• Adam Platt’s review of 15 East, the sister sushi restaurant to neighboring Tocqueville, and Rosanjin, a formal Tribeca restaurant devoted to the painstaking kaiseki genre of Japanese cooking, show that the big man still prizes understatement and delicacy. Although he prizes it a little more at the former.

• In Season this week is a leaf you don’t want to encounter when hiking but absolutely want on your plate as the sun goes down on a warm day. Tuscan specialist Sara Jenkins provides the perfect way to eat the stinging nettle, once it has been disarmed.

• And in this week’s Short List, Rob and Robin recommend a Piedmontese food festival on the West Side, a Brooklyn wine festival at BAM, and a beer dinner at Stone Park Café concentrating on smoked foods – up to and including smoked chocolate ice cream.

Quiet on the Far Eastern Front
In Season: Stinging Nettles
Location, Location, Location [NYM]