Daniel Boulud’s oysters Vanderbilt at Le Pavillon, Audrey Saunders’s sour glass collab, the Wolfgang Puck biopic on Disney+, and more.
The Trendlet
Consider Cooked Oysters
Like the rest of the restaurant-supply industry, oyster farmers lost most of their wholesale accounts during the pandemic. (A dozen Blue Points on the half-shell don’t deliver as well as a pepperoni pizza, it turns out.) With restrictions lifted, though, chefs are making up for lost time. And rather than resort to the raw bar, they’re cooking their shellfish in a variety of ways: grilled with oreganata butter and a dash of nostalgia at Andrew Carmellini’s Seaport chophouse Carne Mare; roasted in a wood-fired oven and garnished with scallion oil and peanuts at Outerspace in East Williamsburg; spooned with green Chartreuse hollandaise and theatrically set aflame at Dame. And that eternal New Orleans classic oysters Rockefeller has found two worthy New York homes — Le Pavillon in a modern midtown skyscraper, where Daniel Boulud calls them oysters Vanderbilt, and Brooklyn’s reincarnated Gage & Tollner, a restaurant as old as the recipe itself.
The Endorsement
Get Fries in Your Burrito
Electric Burrito, 81 St. Marks Pl.; electricburritonyc.com
Nothing wrong with fries on the side. But there’s something mildly thrilling, if not brilliantly handy, about finding them stuffed into a sandwich. Think salty spuds wedged with spicy merguez into a crusty baguette or rolled up with toum-dressed chicken shawarma in a pliant pita. Now comes Electric Burrito, a nifty little takeout shop from the owners of the East Village bar Mister Paradise, dedicated to the San Diego art of stashing French fries in flour tortillas along with all manner of juicy fillings. Its Hot Rod breakfast burrito (eggs, beans, cheese, carne asada, bacon, crema, and fries) tipped our kitchen scale at 1.4 pounds, and yet it was as neat, leakproof, and easy to eat as a cucumber sandwich with the crusts removed.
The Glass
Make a Pisco Sour in a Glass Designed by a Cocktail Legend
Audrey Saunders Sour Glass, six glasses for $47 at cocktailkingdom.com
Audrey Saunders, the great bartender and founder of the recently closed Pegu Club, has designed a sour glass in collaboration with the barware company Cocktail Kingdom, and it is a doozy: a seven-ounce dishwasher-safe dynamo with balance and style and the shapely curves of a vintage Italian roadster. The goal, says Saunders, was to create something different from the ubiquitous coupe that would allow more room for the little enhanced-sour extras like egg whites or vermouth. Inspired by an early fondness for serving drinks in tulip-shaped Champagne flutes, and also a trend among bartenders of serving sours in Irish-coffee glasses, Saunders’s lightbulb moment came when she realized she could roll those two glasses into one. In addition to sours, she offers this fun suggestion: Try the glass with a classic Champagne-cocktail recipe, Angostura-dabbed sugar cube included. “It’s the cocktail version of a lava lamp,” she says.
The Chef Biopic
Discover How an Austrian Expat Invented California Cuisine
Without Wolfgang Puck’s evil stepfather, would we have open kitchens, celebrity chefs, or Chinese chicken salad? That is the existential question posed by the new Disney+ documentary Wolfgang, which credits the cook’s bleak Austrian childhood for his indefatigable drive and hunger for success. Puck leaves home at 14 and never looks back; his arrival in L.A. at 24 coincides with a moment of upheaval in American food and fine dining. His part in this transformation is adoringly chronicled by former employees (Nancy Silverton, Mark Peel), critics (Ruth Reichl), and, foreshadowing what’s to come, talent agent Mike Ovitz. Along the way, the film reveals the origin stories of some of Puck’s greatest hits, like the smoked-salmon pizza he improvised for a ravenous Joan Collins one night when he’d run out of brioche and the frozen-pizza sideline born of Johnny Carson’s habit of buying pies in bulk to freeze at home.
The Move
Buy Pasta With a Pedigree
Talbott & Arding, 202 Allen St., Hudson; talbottandarding.com
Discerning gastronomes like to refer to gourmet-goods-and-cheese mecca Talbott & Arding as the Dean & DeLuca of the Hudson Valley (not the sad, empty-shelved, on-its-last-legs 2018 D&D, mind you, but the ’80s-heyday D&D). Now, after seven years in a pipsqueak space, Talbott & Arding is moving on July 16 to comparatively palatial quarters a couple blocks away. There’s room here for more cheese, charcuterie, and prepared foods but also 25 indoor seats and a new line of fresh pasta —fettuccine, pappardelle, agnolotti, and ravioli. Why that last news is exciting? Because partner and Chez Panisse grad Mona Talbott spent five years teaching pasta-making at the Rome Sustainable Food Project at the American Academy in Rome. Also: Sous-chef Alexis Delaney cooked at Franny’s and led Haven’s Kitchen’s pasta program.
