05/29/12

The Cookery Debuts Its DoughNation Pizza Truck, Birdsall House Branches Out, More Restaurant Openings, and Best in the Bash: X20’s Cowboy Burger

To every great movement, there is a backlash—because, once you have enabled the excesses of Rush, you gotta have The Clash. It’s a correction, a revision, a move toward a more perfect balance. And, for exactly this reason, I love the recent trend of food trucks. In a restaurant world of neuro-gastronomy and $20 cocktails, food trucks offer a reformist snap to reality. In a truck, there’s no room for lighting designers. No linens. No diva waiters. Just food, often excellent, sold directly from cook to diner.

Posted at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments: 0

05/21/12

Memorial Day Is Coming (So Grab a Party Pack at Bartaco; Get Your Schnitzel On at X2O; and the Single Instance Where Belly Is Sexy

Right now, I’m looking at my vast collection of food magazines, which burden my kitchen bookshelves and occasionally fall on my head when I try to extract one. You know what they’ll all be writing about between May 25 and September 3? They’ll all be filled with ideas for easy summertime entertaining.

Posted at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments: 0

05/14/12

Chef Shea Gallante to Open Italian Kitchen in Ardsley, HotDates (Free Empanadas and Beer), and Stop the Interwebs! Westchester Finally has First-Class Soup Dumplings!

HotFlash: Chef Shea Gallante to Debut Italian Kitchen in Ardsley

We heard that Chef Shea Gallante was opening a restaurant in Ardsley, so we rang him up—on Monday, at home, which was a pretty dishraggy move. Everyone knows that chefs take Mondays off so that they can live like humans for 24 hours. Still, Gallante could not have been sweeter as he took my call while on marathon hold with the phone company. Turns out that Gallante’s experience of first-time sole ownership means that this rocket-hot...

Posted at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments: 0

05/07/12

First Taste of Purdys’ Farmer and the Fish, Crabtree’s to Branch Out with a Second Kittle House and Check Out These Sexy Bivalves from Farmer and the Fish

Sacrilege! The owners of Farmer and the Fish, the new restaurant that went into the creaky old North Salem farmhouse house formerly known at John-Michael’s (and before that, as Purdy’s Homestead—and before that, yadda, yadda, all the way back to 1775), and stripped off the glass enclosure of the historic house’s 19th-century porch. The owning duo (Edward Taylor and Michael Kaphan) removed Revolution-era walls. They united the structure’s once-small rooms and opened up the base of its staircase. These folks dared to alter history. And guess what? It’s good!

Posted at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments: 7

04/30/12

First Taste: Hudson at Haymount House, Mother’s Day Approaches (So You’d Better Get Clicking), and Killer Hudson Valley Duck with Fennel and a View

We, the green kids of America, have had this trio of words hammered into our heads: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Yet this edict has not always been employed when it comes to Westchester’s historic private estates. Many of Westchester’s high-style relics of boundless 19th-century capitalism (often sited on vast, aristocratic landscapes) were unceremoniously destroyed after World War II, when they became expensive white elephants.

Posted at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments: 0