Prime Beef: Scenes From the Burger BashA look at the burgers from Friday night’s competition in Brooklyn, featuring Michael Psilakis, Rachael Ray, and Katie Lee.
Medjool Owner Out at City HallGus Murad resigns from the Small Business Commission as his restaurant continues to get heat from the city over an illegal roof deck.
Market Table Already Bumpin’ Market Table has opened for both lunch and dinner with little fanfare, and what we hear today predicts future success. Chef-owner Joey Campanero tells us that he did two and a half turns at lunch today (roughly 100 customers). Plus, the retail counter is cha-chinging away. The biggest seller, Campanero says, is the burger. No surprise, given that it’s made from the same magic meat found in burgers at the Spotted Pig, Stand, Borough Food and Drink, City Hall, and even (though not exactly) the Shake Shack. Expect a tough table: the place is even smaller than the Little Owl, Campanero ’s perpetually packed West Village favorite.
Related: Shop Like a Chef (Preferably in His Own Store)
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Waiters Serve Papers to City Hall and B.B. King Blues Club
Two more waiters have crumbled up their aprons and decided they’re not going to take it anymore. Maimon Kirschenbaum, the lawyer last seen suing Heartland Brewery for shaving time off punch-card records and failing to cough up overtime (he says ten servers are now onboard with the complaint including a former manager) is now going after both Radiante, which owns City Hall (according to the suit, six-year server Mohammed Uddin was paid straight time instead of overtime), and B.B. King Blues Club & Grill. Kirschenbaum filed the latter suit yesterday; as he has it, server Brandon Salus was singing the blues at B.B. King’s after walkouts were deducted from his paycheck, a violation of Section 193 of the New York Labor Law. In one instance a $240 dine-and-ditch allegedly reduced the server’s weekly pay to $20.
The New York Diet
Novelist Marisha Pessl Motivates Herself With Coffee, Rewards Herself With
As Marisha Pessl has it, she got so carried away describing food in her best-selling novel Special Topics in Calamity Physics that certain passages had to be edited down. It’s no surprise then that beyond the eight or nine cappuccinos she used to drink while writing (she’s now down to two or three) and the ’wichcraft cupcakes she rewards herself with afterward, the author and Tribeca resident is a self-confessed “absolute foodie.” Now that she’s between book tours and working on a second novel (the paperback of Special Topics comes out next week), she says she has “a license to feed all the time.” So how does she put it to use?
