Foodies Flock to Networking Site; No Word If Any Have Dates
Food Candy is as simple as a baked potato: It’s the Foodie Friendster (or, as you cutting-edge types would probably prefer, MySpace). The strange thing about the site is how happy, normal, and attractive the people look. Can these really be the same hard-core geeks that we’ve eaten with? Or is this the food version of JDate, which for the longest time showed you pictures of one Sarah Silverman after another, only to deliver Golda Meirs? We appreciate how the site brings together established bloggers like Daisy Martinez with obscure but worthy writers we didn’t know about, like the farm-loving Pease Porridge and the admirably focused Burrito Blog. (Restaurant Girl and Famous Fat Dave had already made fans of us.) We just hope this social phenomenon reflects the foodie community’s increasing obsessiveness, not some attempt at reintegrating with normal human society.
Openings
Five Points Owners to Transform Provence (But Still Serve Bouillabaisse)It’s always a sad day for Francophiles and nostalgists when yet another beloved old-school French restaurant shutters its doors, but in the case of Provence — which served its last bowl of bouillabaisse on Saturday — it could be a lot worse.
Vicki Freeman and Marc Meyer, the owners of Cookshop and Five Points, have taken over the space with plans to completely gut the kitchen, redo the dining room, put in a raw bar, and reopen by January as — guess what? — a nice French restaurant called Provence.
Back of the House
Iron Sous-Chef Busts a Move; A Man Tells of His Meatballs, Liquor License• Bruni dropped in on a restaurant wearing a fanny pack and riding a scooter? No wonder he needed some R&R. [Eater]
• davidburke & donatella gets a new chef de cuisine (Eric Hara, doing bacon-wrapped duck) and pastry chef (Monica Bellissimo, standing by her egg cream in an eggshell). [NYO]
• Some October-November openings via ZagatWire: The former Tocqueville space is turning Japanese; Anne Burrell, sous-chef to Batali on Iron Chef, takes over the kitchen at Centro Vinoteca. [Zagat]
• John LaFemina of Ápizz and the Orchard recounts the joy of applying for a liquor license in an excerpt from the forthcoming A Man and His Meatballs. [Eater]