Pastry ScoopNicole Kaplan is out at the Plaza and Johnny Iuzzini is behind the bar at PDT.
ByDaniel Maurer
Mediavore
The $175 Kobe Burger; Black Truffles in TroubleJunk-food-eating monkeys, why raw vegetables are not always best for you, inflation in food prices, and more, in our morning roundup of news and gossip.
A Voce’s New Pastry Chef Is HomegrownThere’s a new, high-powered young dessert chef in town. And get this — he’s homegrown! His name is Joshua Gripper, and his new boss, A Voce’s Andrew Carmellini, vouches for him thusly: “He’s the shit.” Gripper, a 27-year-old Queens native, has worked with Carmellini at Café Boulud and is also a member of A.C.’s hip-hop combo, the Crown. Primarily, though, he’s said to be a talented technician with a simpatico sensibility and eight years of classical training. So what is he doing at A Voce?
Neighborhood Watch
Porta-Café Touching Down in Columbus Circle; La Marmite Back in HarlemAstoria: Sorriso’s Italian Salumeriaa at 44-16 30th Avenue makes a serious Rosino Panino. “It may look like chicken, but those thick white slabs in the middle of the sandwich are actually house-made slices of fresh mozzarella (made three times a day) piled atop a generous helping of prosciutto cotto.” [Serious Eats]
Chelsea: P.S. 11’s fall festival this Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. features a ten-piece salsa band, free food, and a bake sale, plus it’s open to the public. [Blog Chelsea]
East Village: Back Forty from Savoy chef Peter Hoffman is opening October 17. [Grub Street]
Harlem: La Marmite restaurant has finally opened in its new location. [Uptown Flavor]
Lower East Side: Now’s your chance to be the next Sam Mason: Thor is looking for its own rock-star pastry chef. [Eat for Victory/VV]
Tribeca: The new home for Steak Frites will be the same space that was temporarily the doomed Charolais. [Eater]
Upper West Side: From November 28 to December 29, Illy coffee will maintain a “Push Button House” in the Time Warner Center; the installation is basically a large shipping crate that opens to reveal a full-service café that premiered at the 52nd Venice Biennale. [NotCot]
Openings
Park Slope Gets Its Own Pastry-Chef Spinoff
Now that star pastry chefs are spinning off their own restaurants (Sam Mason at Tailor, Pichet Ong at P*Ong), it’s high time that some of the less famous names have the chance to do the same on a smaller scale. Hence Emily Isaac’s journey from being the pastry chef at Union Square Cafe to her new place behind the counter of her own bake shop in Park Slope. Trois Pommes Patisserie, which Rob and Robin include in this week’s Openings, has twelve seats and an open kitchen where Isaacs cooks up “greenmarket-inspired fruit pies and ice cream,” not to mention a wide selection of other pastries. The iced coffee is pretty good too.
Restaurant Openings: Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory, Lola, Le Barricou, and Trois Pommes Patisserie [NYM]
NewsFeed
Feisty, Ambitious Will Goldfarb: “Fire Your Pastry Chef!”Will Goldfarb, whose high-concept creations have made Room 4 Dessert a big hit with city gourmands, is now taking over the dessert program at Zak Pelaccio’s meatpacking mecca 5 Ninth. Although Goldfarb is the first of the rock-star pastry chefs to provide outsourcing, it could be the wave of the future. “I just can’t do it,” Pelaccio says of having in-house desserts. “We don’t have the space, and it’s not economically sound, anyway. We can’t afford to pay a full-time pastry chef sixty or seventy thousand dollars a year.” (The new treats include a hot-chocolate martini with Calvados gelato, topped with saffron crumbs and Ligurian olive oil; a coconut parfait with lime sorbet and smoked-tea meringue; and Nutella over kabocha-squash cake, served with whole-milk ice cream.) Outside the world of composed sweets, the trend is already in full swing: Il Labatorio del Gelato owner Jon Snyder estimates that around one in five New York restaurants that serve gelato is getting it directly from his company. “We just did a sake kasu gelato for EN Japanese Brasserie,” he tells us. As far as Goldfarb is concerned, 5 Ninth is just the start; he has deals under way with two other restaurants and preliminary plans to service several more. “Fire your pastry chef,” the cake whiz says. “We’re your Bangladesh.”
