Fork Celebrates Ten Years

Old City restaurant Fork has gotten its share of publicity lately. Now chef Ellen Yin gave an interview to the Daily News to promote her new book Folklore: Recipes and Tales from an American Bistro. Here’s a sample:


Q: Some people credit Fork for pushing Old City into the fine-dining arena. Do you take responsibility for this?A: I’m not going to say that we take complete credit, because there were other restaurants in Old City before we opened. I just think that we happened to be the restaurant when everything started, so people have kind of given us credit for it. But we weren’t doing anything specific to make Old City better.Q: In your book, you say that a restaurant that doesn’t reinvent itself doesn’t survive. How do you manage to keep things fresh?A: We’re constantly trying to think of ways to innovate because everything around you is changing. So that might be trends in the way people are eating. Now, people are really into small plates, so we changed our first courses so that there would be more plates that could be shared, or that were more substantial, instead of having everything be formal. It’s all a matter of experiencing and then saying, “What can I do to modify?” It may not be reinventing, but it’s just constantly adapting to the changes around you.Q: In the early days of Fork, you changed the menu pretty regularly to find crowd-pleasing dishes. How frequently do you change the menu nowadays?A: We used to change it a lot more. From a consistency perspective, we found out, changing our menu as often as we did, that people would come back looking for their favorite dish. The entire menu changes every two to three weeks, but generally speaking, two things a week would be changing.

Mark of the Bistro [Daily News]
Fork [MenuPages]
Fork [Official Site]

[Image via Daily News]

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Fork Celebrates Ten Years