• Dear Christopher Borrelli: We love you. We really really do. We feel kind of embarrassed to be so overwhelmingly gushy about basically everything you write, but them’s the breaks. We like your beat. Like today, when you’re all screw those stupid ice cream mix-ins, and then reminisce about your childhood ice cream mentor, Steve Herrell (we went to college in Massachusetts! We love Herrell’s!), and then point out how iCream got hoist by its own petard, and then compare “Marble Slab” and “Cold Stone” to graveyard imagery! Good gracious, mister, you make our Thursdays fun.
• Speaking of Mr. Borrelli, apparently reader response to his “Mr. Breakfast” article has been so great that the paper will be running a pile of breakfast suggestions in next week’s edition.
• Phil Vettel has the dirt on former Spiaggia chef Missy Robbins, who’s picking up for New York City, where she’ll be helming the kitchen at Manhattan’s A Voce. And by “dirt” we mean “everyone is really friendly and amicable and there is just no good gossip to be taken out here.”
• This week’s big review: Vettel is in the suburbs, at Haussmann Brasserie (305 N Happ Rd, Northfield, 847 446 1133). For those of you keeping score, the S-T’s Bruno was there a month ago, and found the place too simultaneously elitist and predictable for his taste. Here, though, Vettel enjoys pretty much everything: the menu is a solid mix of French classics (onion soup, steak frites, a killer roast chicken) and nouvelle twists like roasted salmon with curried artichokes. For those of you who, like us, were totally confused by the review’s headline, “Hoochie Koo” is apparently a song by Rick Derringer which, we assume, was playing while Vettel dined.
[Photo: charcuterie at Haussmann Brasserie, via David Hammond of LTHForum]
