05/28/08

Joe Bastianich Speaks!

We recently caught up with Joe Bastianich for an upcoming feature in Westchester Magazine’s August Dining Issue. In between launching a 400-seat steak house in Vegas, managing his Italian vineyards in Friuli and Maremma, buying for his fine Italian wine market in Manhattan and operating his 15-unit nationwide restaurant empire, Bastianich has been percolating on his first ever suburban restaurant venture. We caught up with this busy, busy man just before he jetted off to tend his vines in northern Italy, where he summers with his family. His newest...

05/26/08

Big Girl Bakes Hard

We've been noticing a grim trend in bakeries over the last few years: things just don’t taste like they should. We’re finding a sensory void where butter should be, natural vanilla is being replaced by synthetic vanillin, and cheap, industrial mixes and canned fillings are being fobbed off as the work of skilled bakers. Take a good, close taste of what’s passing for a corner bakery nowadays. Except for the tippity-top echelon (and price point), it’s a pretty scary world out there in cookie-land.

Of course, it was bound to happen. The cost of the baker’s bag of tricks—flour, eggs, butter, milk and sugar --has skyrocketed, along with rents for Westchester’s commercial spaces....

05/26/08

Market Watch

Memorial Day means that Farmer's Market Time is coming in Westchester County. We’ve gathered all the pertinent info, and so it’s up to you now to get out of the supermarkets and into eating living food.

Stone Barns Center's 2008 Market:
Located in the Dooryard Garden
Wednesdays 3:00PM - 6:00PM (Member Hour – for Seedling level & above, 2:00PM - 3:00PM) featuring Red Jacket Orchards (fruit & cider), Bread Alone (artisinal breads & pastries), & Consider Bardwell (cheese) - in addition to Stone Barns veggies & meats.
Fridays 1:00PM - 4:00PM featuring seasonal tastes from the chefs of Blue Hill at Stone Barns from...

05/26/08

GM-O-Rama

It seems like some things never change. While the weather is improving, and the flowers of May are in bloom, the restaurant business is still a nasty, seething den of vipers. Hirings, firings, job-swapping and tantrums—why do you think we sit at a computer all day instead of manning the pans? We simply got tired of surfing the changing tides of employment, wondering, as we whisked, whether our current restaurant was tanking or my boss would finally be carted off to jail or rehab. It gets wearing, folks.

Plus—besides working in a soul-eating industry alongside all of those "creative types" + high stress + booze, cooking turned out to be hell on our manicure.

Therefore it is with...

05/19/08

Déjà Vu Story: Gray Lady Disses Suburban Dining

Anyone who reads EATER knows that we’re loyal Times readers. We link to the august broad(ish) sheet regularly, and relish our Wednesday lunchtime Dining section just as we would a meaty sandwich. What would our lives be without Asimov, Bittman, Flo Fab, etc.? And while we’re at it, we look forward to our Sunday Times Regional section and all of its suburban foodies, too—Emily DeNitto, Alice Gabriel, M.H. Reed, et al. We especially love the Quick Bite section: so trim, so useful, so informative.

Yet the Times really cheesed us off in their May 4 story,

Posted at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments: 0

05/19/08

Fairway Underway in Pelham Manor

As we hinted way back in last August, Fairway Market has been scouring Westchester for a building large enough to suit its massive needs. While Dan Glickberg was not committing to anything definite last August, it turns out that EATER was right all along. As reported in The Journal News last week, Fairway Market is planning to open its first Westchester branch in Pelham Manor in 2009.

Frankly, we can’t wait. We’re part of that sad group of Westchesterites who make a weekly schlep into the Harlem store for its excellent

Posted at 07:59 PM | Permalink | Comments: 0

05/19/08

The Host with La Mozza

We’d like to admit a journalistic failure here. This Monday, we joined Andy Nusser, Mario Batali, Lidia Bastianich and all sorts of other restaurant, food and wine people for an incredibly fun, food-soaked and boozy party at Joe Bastianich’s Greenwich house. Oh, Joe was mingling, looking slimmer and more athletic than in recent appearances on his mother’s TV show, pouring jeroboams of his Maremman and Friulian wines. Meanwhile, Mario Batali and Cesare Cassela manned the big grill (until its plastic canopy got singed), and Lidia Bastianich...

05/12/08

Eat Your Blues Away: The New Deal for Recession Dining

Oh, there are times when we miss the restaurant business—the excitement, the camaraderie, the five or more drinks per night. But lately, given the current economic situation, we’re thanking our lucky stars that we’re writers. This way, we can empathize from the sidelines as restaurants white-knuckle it through another economic downturn.

The dining public is a nervous bunch, and prone to sulks and panics. When they realize that their houses are worth $300,000 less than last year, diners are likely to stay home and boil their own pasta. It’s a psychic belt-tightening measure, kind of like what happened after 9/11. In this shaky economic environment, with world food riots and soaring wheat...

05/05/08

Let Them Eat Cake

You remember that karmic come-and-get-me of Marie Antoinette’s, don’t you? When alerted that her subjects could no longer afford to buy bread, she replied (while tucking a faithfully-reproduced miniature boat into her two-foot-tall hairdo), “Well—then let them eat cake!” to the general amusement of her patched-and-powdered sycophants. Well, it was kinda funny at the time, but, as always, karma got her in the end. She was relieved of the hairdo, and her head went along with it.

What seemed like a bit of baked-goods overkill (a human head vs. a loaf of bread) is not looking so crazy now. With wheat prices as unchecked as gas prices, the cost of a slice of pizza is heading towards $3 and...