Meet the Original Food SnobsSlate’s Sara Dickerman has a great piece this week about the Founding Fathers of food snobbery — the short library of books that real food snobs draw on, as opposed to the quick studies who are buying David Kamp’s The Food Snob’s Dictionary like hotcakes this holiday season. We applaud Dickerman for including not only the big, unwieldy references like Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking and Grub Street guru Hervé This’s Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor, but also the classic crackpot treatises like Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s 1825The Physiology of Taste and Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de la Reynière’s Gourmand’s Almanac (1803–12). Those great gastronomes of yore were the first and best food snobs, and today’s aspirants would do well to go back to the source.
Hey, Fromage Obsessive [Slate]
Related: David Kamp Brings Aid to Would-Be Food Snobs
Neighborhood Watch
Eight-Cent Falafels Worth Every Penny in the East Village; Chris Lee Has aCobble Hill: Sahadi’s might have a fancy new sign to flaunt at Trader Joe’s, but are they cutting corners to compete? The Brooklyn Paper reports that customers are “fuming that the grocer has replaced the classic glass jars with generic plastic containers in the nuts, dried fruits and candies section.” [Brooklyn Heights Blog]
East Village: Next Friday, Tasty Falafel on St. Marks Place will sell sandwiches for 8 cents each from 4 to 9 p.m. and host a falafel-eating contest at 6. [Gridskipper]
Lower East Side: A new wine bar is on the way, and Gino and Guido are now accepting applications in the TRE space at 173 Ludlow. [Eat for Victory/VV]
Midtown East: Gilt has announced that chef Chris Lee has spent $8,000 on a 1.51-pound white truffle, which is “significantly larger than the truffle that Sirio Maccioni of Le Cirque won in a highly publicized October bidding.” We wonder what GM Elli Jafari thinks about that tougher tuber. [Bottomless Dish/Citysearch]
Upper East Side: Serendipity 3 has pushed back its reopening from tonight to December 5, after being closed by the DOH. [Eater]
Openings
Breaking: Radegast Conquers the DOH, EPA, and CB, Opens Right This Very Second
After stalking Radegast all day we’ve finally gotten someone on the phone to say, “Yes, we are open!” To rehash details from our first look at the place earlier this month: Bohemian Hall vet Ivan Aohut has his wife in the kitchen, mucho beer on tap, and eventually infrared heating in the outdoor garden.
NewsFeed
Chris Cheung Looking to Bring ‘Evolutionary Asian Cuisine’ to MonkeyWe’ve always liked Chris Cheung, going back to the days when the young Long Island–born chef was trying to reinvent Asian fusion from the Chinese side at Almond Flower in Chinatown. (His exit from the place, and its epic aftermath, made some good Grub Street fodder.) Now that Cheung has taken over from Patricia Yeo at Monkey Bar, he’s trying to implement his style of “evolutionary Asian cuisine.” So what does that amount to?
NewsFeed
Mr. Black Is Back, But Will It Be the Death of the Pussycat Lounge?After gay dance den Mr. Black was closed in September (“because of the evidence of rampant drug activity there,” an NYPD spokesman told the Voice), the owner issued a statement somewhat euphemistically saying, “The decision has been made to move Mr. Black to a larger space due to the tremendous demand and success of the nightclub.” It’s now been announced that the new space is, for this Friday at least, the Pussycat Lounge of all places — that bastion of hetero sleaze that is under city scrutiny and is in jeopardy of being razed by developer Sam Chang.
