There’s Chinese Food and then there’s Chinese Food. If you’re on the hunt for great Chinese, head over to Sammy’s…

Sammy’s Noodle Shop

453 Ave Of The Americas, New York

(212) 924-6688

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When Mojito told us it was quite happy with the makeover it got from Gordon Ramsay, we had to wonder what the place used to be like. Turns out it was over $300,000 in debt. Why exactly? Well, check out this clip from last night’s Kitchen Nightmares, which felt more like a cooking version of Hoarders.

Read more posts by Daniel Maurer

Filed Under: tv land, gordon ramsay, kitchen nightmares, mojito

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NYC Food Guy says Yuca Bar beats the Breslin in skirt steak and eggs by a “landslide,” and Fork in the Road likes Clinton Street Baking Co.’s biscuits over Café Pedlar’s.

Read more posts by Daniel Maurer

Filed Under: what to eat, brunch, cafe pedlar, clinton street baking co., the breslin, yuca bar

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Two things distinguish the Tangled Vine, opening March 1, from other Upper West Side wine bars: the Mediterranean menu of David Seigal, formerly of Mercat, and the wine program overseen by author and importer Evan Spingarn, whose passion for the grape suffuses the 160-bottle list. Spingarn once worked at Nancy’s, where he must have cultivated his Riesling fetish; the varietal is well represented, with eleven choices, and offered as a “trio,” a flight of three themed two-ounce pours.

But the list, which identifies each selection as biodynamic, organic, or sustainable, covers considerable old-world ground, as does Seigal’s menu. Crostini are topped with ingredients like chickpeas and morcilla, and larger plates include scallops à la plancha, fideos negros with squid ink and braised cuttlefish, and braised lamb shoulder with heirloom polenta and preserved lemon.

434 Amsterdam Ave., at 81st St.; 646-863-3896

Tangled Vine Menu [PDF]
Tangled Vine Wine List [PDF]

Read more posts by Rob Patronite and Robin Raisfeld

Filed Under: openings, menus, nightlife, tangled vine, wine

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You won’t find portabello mousse at Caravan of Dreams. This is a real, hippydippy vegetarian restaurant. The kind…

Caravan of Dreams

405 E 6th St, New York

(212) 254-1613

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I was up at the Columbus Day Street Fair today to see one of my favorite cover bands in the city – The Gilfords…

Prohibition

503 Columbus Ave, New York

(212) 579-3100

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Upon entering we quickly realized that we were in a special place….one of the diviest (is that a word?) bar I’ve been…

Malachy’s Donegal Inn

103 W 72nd St, New York

(212) 874-4268

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April Bloomfield: An exception to the rule.

It’s a bit fitting that Amanda Freitag is today’s New York Diet, because female chefs have been on everybody’s mind lately. Gastronomica recently published a piece by Charlotte Druckman, titled “Where Are the Great Female Chefs?” and the oft-discussed issue (New York tackled it a few years ago) was the focus of Anthony Bourdain and Eric Ripert’s “Turn and Burn” show on the Martha Stewart Living station last night. After some bro-ing down with Daniel Boulud (sadly, no real quotables as the chefs mostly just kissed Boulud’s butt), the chefs welcomed restaurateurs Stephanie Izard, Cindy Hutson, and Mary Sue Milliken. Bourdain set the tone by describing his days in the “phallocentric” restaurant business as “a bunch of sweaty guys standing around submarine-sized spaces talking about dick dick dick dick dick.”

Still, things have improved. When Boulud went to the Culinary Institute of America, there were only eight women in the class — now he says enrollment is well over 50 percent. Mary Sue Milliken said she was the only woman out of 90 men at her chef school. She left in tears when the French chef she dreamed of working with offered her a job as a coat-check girl. Still, she was persistent to the point that the chef asked her if she planned to sue him, and when she said she only wanted a job, he finally gave her one at $3.25 per hour.

Eric Ripert made the observation that if women chefs aren’t seen in abundance, it’s partly because they eventually want to start families, which isn’t conducive to working in the kitchen around the clock. (Michelin-starred French chef Hélène Darroze said the same thing when Feast recently asked her why there aren’t more women chefs: “I have a lot of younger women in my kitchen, but unfortunately one day they chose the family.”)

Bourdain’s next question: Why are women overrepresented in pastry? Is a woman who chooses that path “opting out of the sub-moronic level of discourse in the kitchen or is there something else going on?” Izard said the first jobs she was offered out of school were in pastry. “You have to prove that you can do it all yourself. I felt that I needed to prove that I was just as strong, just as good, just as hardworking.”

Still, the Gastronomica article makes clear that even when female chefs find success, their cooking is defined in different terms.

So, if a male chef serves a plate of Spaghetti Bolognese, it is lauded for its “in-your-face,” “rich,” “intense,” “bold” flavors, while a woman’s plateful of the same indicates “homey,” “comforting” fare, “prepared with love.” The former becomes an aggressive statement, a declaration of ego, while the latter is a testament to home cooking.

Druckman points out that few people know that “Über mother” Lidia Bastianich is actually a part-owner in Del Posto and has restaurants in Pittsburgh and Kansas City.

While Joe gets all the credit for the business success of the Bastianich family, Lidia is identified as the Italian equivalent of Julia Child. She cooks, with love, out of a home kitchen for her pbs audience and is noted for making remarks like “food for me was a connecting link to my grandmother, to my childhood, to my past. And what I found out is that for everybody, food is a connector to their roots, to their past in different ways. It gives you security.”

Even in California, where women have found greater success, they haven’t achieved Great Chefdom and are described in different terms. Vogue noted Suzanne Goin’s “Audrey Hepburn-like figure.”

On the Food Network, men are consistently portrayed as “serious chefs, experts, adventurers, competitors.” Women like Paula, Giada, Rachael, and Sandra, meanwhile, are portrayed as “cooks, not chefs; as pretty faces
who do easy meals for families or casual parties” — usually in V-necks, in a home kitchen. Even Anne Burrell, the only “professional” in the bunch, has to “dumb down.” (Except, doesn’t she cut a pretty commanding presence on Worst Cooks, just as Amanda Freitag does on Chopped?)

Male chefs are inherently sexy; female chefs, sexless. This assumption runs counter to the media-friendly women of the tv cooking shows that, by putting beautiful homemaker types on screen, reinforce the male-is-to-chef what female-is-to-cook identification. The defeminization factor is another byproduct of the frat-like culture of the professional kitchen

Then there’s the problem of the kitchen’s organization — it’s traditionally hierarchical, and women often get hazed harder than men. In addition, nobody cuts them a break when they’re dealing with “heat, heavy pots, equipment stacked to the ceiling, standing on your feet all day. With less muscle mass to start with, women aren’t generally as tall or as physically strong as their male counterparts. So, although the setup isn’t particularly friendly to anyone, it’s harder on females.” Druckman wonders whether an increase in the amount of female chefs would change all that: Would women reorganize the structure of the kitchen if more of them had the opportunity?

In her pointer to Druckman’s piece, Daphne Duquesne notes that women chefs are already working their way up, and the proof is in the Bocuse d’Or competition:

At last year’s US competition to select the American delegation, while none of the eight chef leaders of the two-person teams were women; three of the eight commis (assistant) competitors were women. The commis must be 23 years or younger at the time of competition, so it is wildly encouraging that nearly half of the competitors eligible at that level were women.

Why Are There No Great Women Chefs? [Gastronomica]
Where the Great Women Chefs Are [Gastronomista]
Video: Why There Aren’t More Women Chefs [Feast]
Related: A Woman’s Place? [NYM]

Read more posts by Daniel Maurer

Filed Under: food for thought, amanda freitag, anne burrell, anthony bourdain, april bloomfield, celebrity chefs, daniel boulud, eric ripert, female chefs, food network, lidia bastianich, nigella lawson, paula deen, rachael ray, sandra lee, stephanie izard, women

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Seared cod with chorizo cream.

At previous positions at Employees Only and Dogmatic Dogs, Jeremy Spector trafficked in cocktail cuisine and haute fast food. Now in new East Village digs he hopes to unveil next weekend, the chef-owner is focusing on sharable portions of eclectic comfort food — served, in some cases, in teacups inherited from the previous occupant, the neo-Korean Persimmon.

A spread selection includes potted shrimp, steak tartare, and taramosalata; small plates range from salt-roasted beets to braised oxtail; and transplanted Canadians and Texans alike can find flavors of home in dishes like duck-confit poutine and chicken-fried steak (which, says Spector, is also big in Oklahoma, where he grew up). Where there once was a single communal table, there’s now room for 35 at a banquette, a counter, and a newly built bar.

277 E. 10th St., nr. Ave. A; 212-529-9702
Brindle Room Menu [PDF]

Read more posts by Rob Patronite and Robin Raisfeld

Filed Under: openings, brindle room, jeremy spector, menus

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Chef Amanda Freitag in the dining room at the Harrison.

America met Amanda Freitag last summer when she was a contestant on The Next Iron Chef. Now she’s even better known as a judge on the Food Network show Chopped. “I’m sure 90 percent of the people who watch the show are like, ‘I’d like to see the judges try that,’” she said of the contestants’ often baffling takes on the ingredients in the show’s signature “mystery basket.” Viewers will get their chance on Monday, when Freitag joins her fellow chef-judges in a Chopped-inspired live cook-off at Savor, a fund-raiser for Gay Men’s Health Crisis. When she’s not passing stern judgment on television, Freitag is the executive chef at Jimmy Bradley’s Tribeca restaurant, the Harrison. Try to catch up with Freitag on this week’s N.Y. Diet, which takes her from the kitchen to the set to her mom’s house in New Jersey.

Friday, February 19
I started off with a latte. Most of my workdays start off with a very strong coffee — sometimes I make it at home, some days I buy it. This day I’d gone for a chiropractic adjustment and I met a friend, so it was a Starbucks coffee and a Starbucks breakfast. Lo had an apple bran muffin; I’d stuck a banana in my purse before I left the house, so I had that as well. That was breakfast.

I headed down to work and started cooking and working, and lunch didn’t really happen. During my prep time I was portioning some cold braised pork belly and I ate about three ounces of it — I tasted a little end piece, and another end piece, and at the end I was like, “I should probably weigh this.” And then for our family meal at 4:30, we had pulled pork. It was kind of a pork day for me. I also had a bowl of romaine salad dressed with olive oil and lemon juice.

Around 10:30 p.m. there was a half of an apple crostata that was broken, and I ate it, because I was in the mood for something sweet. I usually have a shift drink at the end of the night, but I had the crostata instead.

And then my boyfriend, who lives in Bay Ridge, came to pick me up. He had just had dinner at Tanoreen, and he brought me this vegetable wrap. From Tribeca to Park Slope, I finished the whole thing. So that was a great, great late-night snack. It had cracked wheat, all these spices, peppers, tomatoes — it was pretty dark so I couldn’t see exactly, but I could taste it.

Saturday, February 20
I had a homemade coffee with a fat-free yogurt at home. On Saturdays I usually double the caffeine, I really pump it up, because it’s the last day of my work week and the busiest. So I had a latte when I got to work, too. I had a banana.

My lunch was a small piece of fresh-basked hot brownie out of the oven. My pastry chef put her hand out with this golden light shining down on this hot brownie, and I was like, I can’t say no. These are the perks of my job.

At family meal I had the standard romaine salad &#8212 that doesn’t really change ever. We had lamb ragout with penne pasta. My co-workers like to make me try things, so a server split a bottle of mango kombucha with me. It was very generous of her — those things are expensive! And then all through service I drank a full four cups of an iced tea–cranberry juice mix, to keep me going and hydrated.

I was headed out that night after work to New Jersey to visit my mom, who’s quite the night owl, and of course she had ordered a pizza from the local pizzeria, Esposito’s in Cedar Grove. It’s called the “everything” pizza and it literally had everything on it: pepperoni, pieces of meatballs, peppers, onions, broccoli, mushrooms. It was the bomb pizza. I got there at 1 a.m. and I had the first slice cold, because it just went down that way, and then I had another slice because I was like, “Okay, if I’m going to be a glutton, I’m taking it all the way.” And then to be a little healthy I had a side salad, an iceberg salad. For me it’s really satisfying, just having iceberg lettuce.

Sunday, February 21
Sunday was party day. My mom was having a jewelry party — it’s like a Tupperware party, but this lady comes and sets up jewelry and sells it. It’s kind of modern, kind of cheesy. We had a very light breakfast, cranberry juice and chobani yogurt, and I had a half of a blueberry muffin. For some reason everything in New Jersey is ten times bigger than it should be, including the muffins that my mom buys. And of course I had coffee.

Basically the rest of the day had no meal structure whatsoever. The jewelry lady came over, and my mom had ordered some platters from a local catering company — cheese, mini sandwiches, crudités, and a mixed cookie platter. I ate four cubes of Monterey jack, about a half a cup of Doritos, a mini turkey-and-swiss sandwich, about three broccoli spears, a handful of baby carrots dipped in ranch dressing, and then — I’m not even sure how to equate this into actual food — I had four large pieces of pumpernickel bread dipped into spinach dip, which was inside of a hollowed out large round of pumpernickel. And then, of course, to top it off, I had two chocolate cookies — butter cookies that were enrobed in very low-end chocolate — but they were very good.

I had to head back to Brooklyn, and of course Mom, not wanting me to go anywhere hungry, sent me home with the sandwiches. I was filming Chopped the next day, and they usually pick me up around 5:45 a.m., which is not really my usual schedule, so I had a hard time falling asleep. I had another mini turkey sandwich.

Monday, February 22
When we get to the set of Chopped, we get the information of what’s going to be in the baskets ahead of time. I was so horrified by the thought of what I was going to be eating that I decided to make a base in my stomach to protect myself. So I had coffee, orange juice, scrambled eggs, and roasted potatoes while they were making my hair look like I hadn’t slept on it for two hours.

I can’t tell you what I ate during the shoot until the show airs, but I can tell you I ate nine plates of the strangest combinations of food, starting at 8:30 in the morning and finishing at 7p.m. More than nine plates. It’s a lot.

On filming days, I drink so many different beverages to stay awake and stay hydrated. It’s very dry in there, and when the contestants are cooking the kitchen gets very hot. I drank Coca-Cola, lime seltzer, and coffee. I also ate a fair amount of Jolly Ranchers — I have to say, I really appreciate the little snacks on my craft-service table because they’re just so fun and random.

Later on, since I was awake and dressed and had my hair and makeup done, I went to the D’artagnan 25th anniversary party, which was at Gustavino’s. Before I entered the building I was waiting for some friends and I had a Gatorade — I was fearful that I was going to have too much win,e so I wanted to hydrate. Inside, I had three very, very small pours of Malbec, probably the equivalent of one glass, and I had a foie gras skewer and a very small plate of cassoulet.

Tuesday, February 23
Tuesday was a Chopped day again, and again I feared the basket ingredients so I had a big breakfast: coffee, orange juice, oatmeal, and a Nutri-Grain bar.

I kept the beverages going all day. More Coca-Cola, which really helps keep me stay awake, more coffee, and then I stuck with water pretty much the rest of the day. I knew I didn’t have to go anywhere afterwards — not a party, not work, not anywhere — so I had a beer from the green room. It was a Sierra Nevada. It was delicious — so cold, so perfect. After eating all those different foods and tasting all those different plates, having a beer was like the perfect thing.

I convinced myself not to eat anything else when I got home, which worked until around 10 p.m., when I got hungry. I still had some of those weird catering sandwiches from my mom in my fridge, so I deconstructed them and I made my own sandwich using fresh bread: turkey, melted muenster cheese, some mustard. That was my gourmet, homemade dinner out of leftovers.

Wednesday, February 24
I was feeling incredibly dehydrated and totally off my game because I’d had two days of that Chopped schedule, so when I got back into work mode, hydration was the plan. I had a green Naked Juice, I had a Vita Coco water — and a coffee, of course. And I had a lemon Larabar.

For lunch, I had a quarter cup of spaetzle. We were recipe-testing and I was tasting tasting — what happens usually when I taste something is that it’ll taste really good, and it becomes not just tasting but eating. For family meal all I had was romaine salad, the ever-popular salad at the Harrison family meal. I had a glass of Shiraz as well, as a shift drink before I left. That was it until I got home, and that’s always the worst. I heated up a can of Amy’s organic chili, garnished it with fat-free sour cream, and had some chili-lime chips on the side.

Read more posts by Helen Rosner

Filed Under: the new york diet, amanda freitag, chopped, tanoreen, the harrison

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• Nine banquet waiters are suing the Waldorf-Astoria, alleging that they were only given part of their tips. [Reuters]

• Owner David Arrick hopes to open a brick and mortar outpost of online “manly cupcakes” emporium Butch Bakery in downtown Manhattan this spring. [Fork in the Road/VV]
Previously: Have Cupcakes Entered the Testoster-zone?

• Tip pools are perfectly legal as long as a restaurant pays more than the minimum wage, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday. [KTVZ via Eater National]

• Munich’s starkbier season (or strong-beer fest) is a less touristy alternative to Oktoberfest. [WSJ]

• North Carolina’s Kampai Japanese Steak & Seafood House banned a regular for being a bad tipper. [Eater National]

Read more posts by Leila Cohan

Filed Under: mediavore, bakesales, butch bakery, lawsuits, waldorf astoria

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The space is -small-. Three or four tables and a counter with as many stools cram the space – outside which crowds…

Mile End

97A Hoyt Street, Brooklyn

(718) 852-7510

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