Park Avenue Café Waiter Says He Was Discriminated Against for NotA little over a week ago, we broke the news that Park Avenue Café (currently Park Avenue Winter) is being sued by employees who claim they were forced to participate in illegal tip-pooling and discriminated against because they were South Asian. The Sun now reports that a court has allowed former employee Mohammed Rahman to bring a suit on behalf of nonwhite employees at Park Avenue Café, but stopped short of allowing a class-action suit against parent chain Smith & Wollensky. One of the reasons Rahman claims he was given a hard time, and eventually fired, is that he didn’t drink alcohol and so couldn’t taste wine — which has to be the first time someone has been canned for not drinking on the job.
Related: Park Avenue Winter Experiences Legal Discontent
Mediavore
Chefs Relax in Bruni’s Absence; Chinese Seafood: Now With Fewer Drugs!Frank Bruni is out of the city until January 23, or maybe January 31. Either way, chefs at new restaurants will be breathing a little bit easier until he returns. [Eater]
The European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies has released a report saying that cloning causes suffering to animals, making it unjustifiable to clone them for the food supply. [NYT]
Top Chef winner Hung Huynh was spotted in Las Vegas at Company, the same restaurant where Season Two contestant Marcel Vigneron works as a cook. It’s no coincidence, though; they’re buds from cooking school. [Eater L.A.]
NewsFeed
Coming Soon: ‘Edible Manhattan’We’ve been longtime fans of Edible Brooklyn, a very cool magazine we wrote about a while ago. Edible Brooklyn doesn’t publish restaurant news as much as articles and essays about the life of the borough’s food culture, written by the people who love it. And now Manhattan will get the same treatment in Edible Manhattan, which will come out bi-monthly starting in the fall and is already accepting subscribers.
The New York Diet
Chef Eric Ripert Starts the Day With Chocolate, Ends It With Chorizo and Tequila
There’s a reason Le Bernardin was ranked No. 1 (one of just two five-star restaurants) in the Platt 101. During lunch and dinner every day, chef-owner Eric Ripert samples a half-spoon of each of the twenty-odd sauces his chefs prepare, tests most of the mise en place (everything from string beans to mashed potatoes to polenta to guacamole), and then takes bites from dishes before they go out to the dining room. “Every day I have ten different fishes — a piece of tuna, snapper, monk, cod, himachi … It’s about 60 or 80 things I try.” To make up for this, he tries to eat light and takes 45-minute walks to (and sometimes back) from work through Central Park. But that doesn’t mean he won’t indulge in his daily breakfast chocolate.
