Calories to Show Up on Menus Starting March 31; Mercury Levels Horrifically HighThe Board of Health decided yesterday in a unanimous vote to make all chain restaurants with fifteen or more outlets – approximately 10 percent of the city’s restaurants – post calorie info on their menus starting March 31. RIP, 1,230-calorie triple Whopper with cheese. [CNN]
Laboratory tests run on sushi samples from twenty Manhattan stores and restaurants revealed shockingly high levels of mercury in bluefin tuna, so high that the FDA could technically take the fish off the market. And if you’ve got to have your tuna sushi, you’d best head to Fairway and avoid Blue Ribbon Sushi at all costs. [NYT]
Gourmet editor-in-chief Ruth Reichl is “obsessed with” Momofuku Ssäm Bar, “like everyone else in New York,” according to her. [TONY]
Neighborhood Watch
Brooklyn’s Top Bed-and-Breakfasts; Free Cupcakes in the Financial DistrictBedford-Stuyvesant: Akwaaba Mansion at 34 Macdonough Street made it to the top of this list of Brooklyn bed-and-breakfasts. [Gridskipper]
Financial District: Crumbs has opened a bakery at 87 Beaver Street between Hanover Street and Wall Street, and to celebrate the shop will give away 1,000 cupcakes this Friday starting at 7 a.m. [Snack]
Harlem: Among its other delicacies, Fairway sells flagels, which are “to the bagel what nuggets are to fried chicken. When toasted, they are delightfully crunchy, but the inside still has the chewiness a bagel should — “just less of it” — because they’re flattened, of course. [Eat for Victory/VV]
Jackson Heights: The city’s first Tibetan street-food cart is up and running near the 74th Street stop. [Gothamist]
Lower East Side: Six Point Ales debuted a new flavor called 8 Days of Wheat at the Whole Foods Beer Room last night, and the first impression is that “it’s pretty darn good.” [Down by the Hipster]
Upper West Side: Senor Swanky’s has put its space on Columbus Avenue between 84th and 85th up for rent. So line up, if you just happen to have a business plan that incorporates giant chile peppers and underage drinking. [Eater]
Neighborhood Watch
Reasons to Stay in Williamsburg; Green-Tea Cupcake in West VillageBattery Park: The Treats Truck will be on hand at CultureFest NYC on Saturday from noon to 4 p.m. [Treats Truck]
Clinton Hill: Two armed men robbed the White Castle at 531 Myrtle Avenue yesterday. [Clinton Hill Blog]
Meatpacking District: Next Tuesday is Dirty Bingo night at Paradou. [Paradou NYC]
Midtown West: The Royalton hotel has reopened after a brief renovation and has already started serving breakfast at Bar Forty Four. [NewYorkology]
Upper West Side: Thankfully, the old-school Murray’s Sturgeon Shop holds a long-term lease because the neighborhood’s “soul currently hangs on the continued existence of a few shops, among them Zabar’s, Fairway, Citarella, H&H Bagels, Barney Greengrass, Gryphon Book Store and Murray’s.” [Lost City]
West Village: The green-tea cupcake Josh DeChellis serves at BarFry is not only intensely and deliciously flavored, it’s also ” a study in green: the kind of snack a stay at home Incredible Hulk would send off to the school bus in dozens if his kid were having an in-class birthday party.” [Gothamist]
Williamsburg: In an effort to dissuade those thinking of leaving Brooklyn for greener (cleaner) pastures out west and elsewhere, one blogger has compiled this list of some of the hood’s best dishes. [Cakehead]
The New York Diet
Leven Rambin Consoles Herself With Chocolate After the Daytime Emmys
In addition to playing the autistic teenager Lily Montgomery on All My Children, Leven Rambin, the face of Caressa jewelry, has been a party fixture ever since she moved from her mom’s house in Connecticut to a place on the Upper West Side. When making the scene, she skips the hors d’oeurve. “After working from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m.,” says the 17-year-old, “the last thing I want to do is go to the gym. So I try to eat light.” That is, except for those addictions to peanut butter and protein bars — and the occasional serotonin-boosting chocolate splurge.
The New York Diet
Writer-Rocker Darcey Steinke Downs Jell-O With NunsIn her new memoir Easter Everywhere novelist Darcey Steinke recounts her life as a minister’s daughter, traveling the country and picking up tastes for regional dishes like fried okra. “When you get it right,” she says, “It’s like crack.” Though her Prospect Park neighborhood has yet to yield the perfect fix, she’s fond of the jerk chicken, and as a survey of her most recent week of eating reveals, she also knows where to find exceptional sauerbraten, redemptive sticky-toffee pudding, and a classic Waldorf salad with marshmallows — which she enjoyed with an order of nuns.
Neighborhood Watch
A New Menu for the Next Time You’re in the Financial DistrictBoerum Hill: Brooklyn Inn on its way out. [Eater]
Clinton Hill: Credit the blogosphere if the brewery on Waverly Avenue opens this summer as a beer garden. [Gothamist]
Financial District: We’ve got the menu for the new Dublin-European bistro Stella Maris. [Grub Street]
Flatiron: Markt has relocated to Sixth Avenue and now serves breakfast. [Grub Street]
Greenpoint: Starbucks cabaret may be opening soon. [Curbed]
Harlem: Wine store to replace Back in the Day antique shop. But will it have as cutesy a name? [Harlem Fur]
Midtown East: Jeffrey Chodorow’s Wild Salmon replaces English Is Italian on Friday; we look forward to his review [NYT]
Morningside Heights: Order pinot at Vino Fino wine shop, opening soon. [Harlem Fur]
Times Square: Only two more days until you can sing Journey like everyone else at karaoke joint Spotlight Live. [NYS]
West Village: Alexandra swallowing nearby storefronts for wine bar to be filled by nonexistent waiting customers. [Eater] Newly opened Central Kitchen offering 10 percent off its menu through Sunday. That’s as much as a “European-style” tip. [NYS]
Chicken Soup for the House-Bound SoulRight now there are two kinds of New Yorkers: those with a cold, flu, cough, sniffle, ache, or fever, and those trying to ward off everyone else’s germs. Our advice: Stay close to home, and let the chicken soup and orange juice come to you.
In the Magazine
Kobe Club Gets the Bagel, and Foie Gras Foes’ Last StandThis week’s issue of New York is crammed with food news, including an Adam Platt slam, a Gael Greene discovery, and a very odd story about people who hate foie gras.
• Foie Gras foes, rebuffed in their efforts to get the delicacy banned in New York, converge on Fairway, much to the store’s delight. [Intelligencer]
• Adam Platt hands Jeffrey Chodorow’s new Kobe Club a bagel, faulting the restaurant as “less like a steakhouse than a bizarre agglomeration of restaurant fashions and trends, most of them bad.” And that was one of the nicer things he had to say. [Food]
