Grub Street

There are many special events and lots of online drives set up to benefit those affected by Sandy, of course, and now here's newly minted CNN personality (and all-around culinary statesman) Anthony Bourdain with a few more ideas on how diners can reinvigorate the post-storm restaurant scene. Because most all of the workers who make any given restaurant meal reach your placemat are sustained with tips and/or shift pay — two things that poured out of the city's dining last week with the storm surge — catch 'em up with cash tips, and send a Hamilton back to the potwasher. "That’s not charity," writes Bourdain. "It’s just neighborly." [Eatocracy/CNN, Related]

Three years ago, when a health department hiccup closed the newly opened Red Hook restaurant Fort Defiance for having gas equipment but no gas service, owner St John Frizell just took it in stride and hung a sign on the restaurant's front door announcing the restaurant was "bloody, but unbowed," urging patrons to visit the neighborhood's other small businesses. Fort Defiance was again roughed up during last week's storm surge, Frizell writes today on Epicurious, but the restaurant remains unbowed.

A 39-year-old who spent his childhood barefoot in and around a wooden shack nestled deep within the Himalayas has been working at the Lower East Side lox institution Russ & Daughters for a little more than ten years. After lower Manhattan lost power last week, Chhapte Sherpa, who is now an assistant manager at the famed appetizing shop and can cut lox so thin you can read "a newspaper through it," commuted from Jackson Heights to the LES each day to keep the caviar ice cold and save the shop's smoked fish. It's no big deal, apparently: “I never even know what electricity was, never saw it, until I was in my 20s," he tells the Times. [NYT]

At this weekend's Chicago Humanities Festival, Grant Achatz finally revealed the next Next theme, which should begin sometime in January. It's going to be called the Hunt, and all we know about is that it will have a focus on game meats. While this is a natural enough theme for both Achatz and Next chef Dave Beran, who both grew up in the kinds of small towns in Michigan where hunting is a common pursuit, we wonder if it will run into some flak here in Chicago, where any time Mike Sula writes about eating another species, it prompts dozens of angry comments. At the same time, if this is the same upcoming menu (which we assume it must be) that we heard was worked out before it had a theme settled upon, then maybe the Hunt is only one side of it and it's going to be something more intricate and varied about life in semi-rural America than merely a dozen courses of different woodland creatures. As usual, the more Next reveals, the more Next intrigues and fascinates.