Adam Platt Talks Shop With Frank BruniThe city’s two top critics compare notes on the star system, their least favorite restaurants, the matter of anonymity, and more.
How New York Kitchens Cut CostsFrom Queens to the Upper West Side, restaurants cut costs and hope that you’ll still eat out.
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Miracle Fruit Dealers Will Take You ‘Flavor Tripping’If you read the ‘Times’ feature about Miracle Fruit — the rare berry that, thanks to a protein called miraculin, makes sour, acidic stuff taste sweet — you probably wondered where you could score the stuff, so you could throw a “flavor-tripping party,” à la Supreme Commander.
Amanda Hesser Out at the ‘Times’Food editor Amanda Hesser took a buyout from the Times, but does her departure involve more than money?
Back of the House
New York ‘Times’ to Wonder How Bloggers Stay AliveWhen we received a voice mail last week from Kim Severson of the New York Times, saying that she wanted to interview us, our natural response was one of delight. Was the topic to be hamburgers or our upcoming book on same? Or perhaps the larger topic of meat? Or perhaps the ongoing efforts of Grub Street? It was with giddy fingers that we dialed Severson’s number only to find out that the lady was writing an article on how fat and unhealthy food bloggers are, and to ask us, in so many words, why we were still alive. Apparently, bloggers aren’t the trenchermen they once were: Off the Broiler’s Jason Perlow recently had some serious health problems, and even Steven “the Fat Guy” Shaw of eGullet has gotten on the austerity program. But, as we told Severson, the day we start eating salad she’s welcome to our place at the table. Grub Street may cost us the vitality of our once-springy carcass, but by God the work will go on!
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Fiamma Prices Drop After Bruni PostWhen Frank Bruni decided to confront Fiamma about its price increases, we knew it wouldn’t take long for Team Hanson to get on the problem. Fiamma is the group’s flagship restaurant, and the critical pile-on about high prices and missing ingredients must have stung B.R. Guest. Today, the group announced the inevitable price cuts to tasting menus. Prices are dropping from $92 to $85 for the standard prix fixe menu, and the five-course dinner has been cut to $105 from $120. Fiamma has also reintroduced its full-bore seven-course menu, which will come in at $125.
Back of the House
The Cost of Charity, ExplainedA month doesn’t seem to go by without some kind of charity benefit, at which every chef you’ve ever heard gives away his time and food. Besides the warm feeling of do-goodery, what do the chefs get out of it? Michael Ruhlman had a feature on the subject in this week’s Times magazine, and the answers are interesting: Danny Meyer explains charity efficiency (“It may cost me $30,000 or $40,000 to close down a restaurant for a night, but if an organization can pull in a quarter of a million dollars, what a great investment, relative to giving a $200 gift certificate that somebody buys for $225”), and Aaron Sanchez gives a frank reason for doing all these events (“I get to catch up with my friends who are chefs”). Ruhlman cites Wolfgang Puck as the “originator of the chef-driven benefit” back in 1982. As a chef’s profile rises, so does his ability to milk beneficial bucks from not only donors but also potential future customers.
Friends With Benefits [NYT]
Mediavore
Economy Shrinks Portions, Swaps Ingredients; a Ko Reservation Fake-outWith food coasts soaring, high- and low-end kitchens are taking measure to reduce portions, swap out costly ingredients, and serve more dishes with higher profit margins. [WSJ]
In related news, it doesn’t look like wheat prices will drop anytime soon: “Consumption has exceeded production in seven of the last eight years.” [NYT]
The online reservation page for Ko was live for ten minutes on Friday, but now you need a password to enter it. Still, at least you can add the URL to your bookmarks and check it every hour. [Eater]
Did you know that nine large feasts from Boston Market can add up to $1,800? A Queens woman found that out, but since she was using fake checks, she didn’t care too much. [NYP]
The Times has a review/promotional article of their own city-beat reporter Jennifer 8. Lee’s exploration of Chinese cuisine, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food. [NYT]
Related: Jennifer 8. Lee Tackles Fortune Cookies
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‘Times’ Building Gets Restaurant, Staffers Get BarThe next restaurant at the base of the New York Times building promises to bring a brace of Milanese swagger to the tower’s inner lobby. Montenapo by BiCE, run by the 80-year-old upscale chain and named for a Milan street full of fashion-design firms, faces architect Renzo Piano’s inner birch-tree courtyard and expects to cater parties in the ballroom space under the building’s auditorium. And while the name may evoke the rag trade, interior designer Studio A is charged with crossbreeding garden-gazing and table-hopping. But a mod look will not necessarily translate to faddish food. “I can’t do anything better than Italian food,” says BiCE CEO Roberto Ruggeri. “Call it northern Gallian classica with influences from American bistro.”
Back of the House
Steven Rinella Dons Locavore CamouflageSteven Rinella’s op-ed piece in today’s Times, in which the Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine author makes the case that hunters are not really hobbyists who enjoy killing animals, but rather proto-locavores, struck us as disingenuous on so many levels that we had to respond to it. First, Rinella wraps himself in green language as if it were a Thinsulate camo parka. “Hunters are the original locavores,” Rinella writes, bragging that his family used to eat three or four deer a year, along with various other unlucky birds and squirrels, and that he “carried that subsistence aesthetic into adulthood.” Subsistence aesthetic! Rinella’s from Twin Lake, Michigan! We would bet the closest he got to subsistence culture was running out of Pop-Tarts.
In Other Magazines
Dave Arnold’s Alcoholic Pickle of the FutureThe Times Magazine’s annual examination of “big ideas” brings news of some culinary innovations such as a food-processing technique that helps farmed fish taste more like wild fish (encouraging fast-food companies to make the switch to the former) and packaging that will allow us to tell whether supermarket meat is rotten, which is of no consequence to those in another article who practice “vegansexuality” by forgoing liaisons with carnivores. The most curious item, though, explores French Culinary Institute head Dave Arnold’s ingenious method of combining two of our favorite things — booze and pickles — by pickling cucumbers with a martini’s worth of gin and vermouth. Watch the video and you’ll see the dapper Arnold use a vacuum machine to turn the cucumber opaque while gin rushes into its air holes — easily the hottest thing in mixology since the “hard shake.”
The Edible Cocktail
Tell-Tale Food Wrapping
Vegansexuality
Fish-Flavored Fish [NYT]
In Other Magazines
Chocolate and Corned Beef Get Their Journalistic DueAh, had we the luxury to lie around and read densely packed food features! As it happens, there are two out now both worth your time. In the current New Yorker, everybody’s favorite roving food writer, Bill Buford, does a number on the chocolate wars and the quest, now dominating the minds of choconauts, to find the perfect cacao bean. And here we were just coming up to speed on coffee! (The article is not online, but there’s a cool slideshow from Buford’s trip.) The other piece, on a subject matter we’re much more familiar with, is a very fine feature from the Times magazine on the Lebewohl family and their efforts to relaunch, in the face of an increasingly alien world, the new and improved 2nd Avenue Deli.
A Counter History [NYT]
Slideshow: Food of the Gods [NYer]
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Amanda Hesser Takes Some Time Away If you get into your Sunday groove by reading Amanda Hesser’s bouncy food coverage in the Times Magazine, you may have a cold winter ahead of you: Mrs. Latte has gone on a long leave to work on a book and is being replaced in the interim by Jill Santopietro, a lesser being in the Times firmament but one with much experience doing short recipe and travel pieces and the occasional feature. Will those obsolescent recipes continue? Will there be more pieces à la T Style’s “Mantry” series? We can only hope. Hesser is scheduled to return to the Times in March.
Amanda Hesser in Trouble Again; Room 4 Dessert to ReopenTimes Magazine food editor Amanda Hesser runs afoul (again) of the paper’s strict conflict-of-interest policy, this time by reviewing a book by someone who had blurbed one of hers. [Gawker]
Room 4 Dessert, currently closed, will be reopening in a week. [Eater]
The DeMarco family has a special message to the public about Di Fara’s imminent reopening. [Gothamist]