When we heard Camille Becerra was planning a series of pop-up restaurants, we couldn’t help but wonder about the actual restaurant she was planning to open on Orchard Street after Paloma was felled by fire. She tells us that after “many building department issues and partner disputes,” the project “has finally put the drama behind them and are finally moving forward with the build out.” But there’s a chance it won’t be called Paloma after all, and she may not even be involved.

Regarding Teddy Kambouris and his partners, who originally hired Becerra as a consulting chef (that contract has now run out), she says, “It’s important to me that the next place I develop be a perfect fit. It’s unclear still if they will get it together enough for me to be a part of the team. I hope they do.” Becerra adds: “Until they resolve their personal issues, I cannot entertain that concept.”

For the foreseeable future, the Hunger is your safest bet for enjoying Becerra’s food.

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Filed Under: reopenings, camille becerra, lower east side, paloma, teddy kambouris

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Frederick Lesort has slyly opened his southern-France-styled brasserie at the Thompson Hotels’ newest project, the Smyth, and by next Tuesday, the spot should be serving continuously from 6 a.m. to midnight. For now, chef Ed Cotton is offering a menu of Gallic classics that in some ways (specifically, the pâtés and terrines, charcuterie and accompanying vegetables, and specialties like coq au vin and escargots persillade) resembles the one at Bar Boulud, a kitchen Cotton was at one point designated to run.

Instead, the Daniel veteran landed briefly at Veritas and then at BLT Market, and, extracurricularly, on Cat Cora’s Iron Chef team. Cotton, who worked for Todd English and Barbara Lynch earlier in his career, has professed a particular fondness for cooking pasta, which makes us eager to try his pasta printemps with citrus gremolata, not to mention his “Burger Royale au Fromage,” an eight-ounce Pat LaFrieda number stuffed with cheese and slathered with black-truffle aïoli. There’s also an intriguing assortment of house-baked flatbreads, like “L’Olivier” Alsatian, a delicious-sounding if potentially lethal combination of grilled knackwurst, Munster cheese, sauerkraut, red-bliss potato, and mustard aïoli.

As for the décor, AvroKo took inspiration from Arles, and maybe even more from gardening (but none, so far as we know, from Vincent van Gogh). Screens resemble soil sifters, and cabinets contain rustic implements like sap-harvesting cups. Design buffs often peg an AvroKo project by the lighting, but in this case, the hand-blown glass and the brass fixtures were custom-made in Brooklyn, with nary a bare Edison bulb in sight.

Plein Sud’s Dinner Menu [PDF]
Plein Sud’s Dessert Menu [PDF]
Plein Sud’s Brunch Menu [PDF]
Plein Sud’s Breakfast Menu [PDF]

Plein Sud, 85 W. Broadway, at Chambers St.; 212-204-5555

Read more posts by Rob Patronite and Robin Raisfeld

Filed Under: openings, avroko, frederick lesort, plein sud

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Some weeks ago, we received a tip that Ken Friedman would likely reopen the John Dory in the Ace Hotel as a raw bar, and now he tells The Wall Street Journal’s Metropolis that the “oyster bar, with sort of a sense of humor” could open as soon as mid-July. As Friedman told us earlier, there’ll be sidewalk seats — 40 of them, to be exact. [Metropolis/WSJ]

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Filed Under: reopenings, ace hotel, april bloomfield, ken friedman, oyster bars, the john dory

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NYC Food Guy discovers that the owner of Morningside Heights’s forthcoming Mel’s Burger Bar is Nick Tsoulos of Patsy’s Pizzeria, Angelo’s Pizza, and Goodburger. When it opens in mid-June or July, it’ll feature flat-griddled LaFrieda burgers, baby-back ribs, spaghetti and meatballs, and, of course, spiked milkshakes. [NYC Food Guy]

Read more posts by Daniel Maurer

Filed Under: openings, angelo’s pizza, goodburger, lafrieda, mel’s burger bar, morningside heights, patsy’s pizzeria

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This morning we’ll be forgoing our La Colombe for the breakfast cart, in honor of the man who designed the iconic “We Are Happy To Serve You” coffee cup. Leslie Buck, a concentration-camp survivor who designed “the Anthos” when he was marketing director at Sheri Cup in the mid-sixties, has died of Parkinsons complications at the age of 87. “Mr. Buck made no royalties from the cup,” says the Times, “but he did so well in sales commissions that it hardly mattered, his son said.” But here’s perhaps the saddest part: Sales of the cup have gone down from 500 million to about 200 million in 2005, and Solo (which now owns Sheri) no longer catalogues it (it makes the cup only by special request). Oh well, you can always get the “green,” ceramic, “ethically made” version.

Leslie Buck, Designer of Iconic Coffee Cup, Dies at 87 [NYT via DI]

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Filed Under: r.i.p., coffee cups, leslie buck, we are happy to serve you

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• Sam Sifton named his “necessary luxuries” for this month’s Departures, including Le Creuset pots, a Moleskine, and some fancy fishing gear. [Eater NY]

• The average scoop at a chain ice-cream shop in New York is 11 to 48 percent larger than the posted serving size. [NYP]

• McDonald’s in the United Kingdom are much healthier than their American counterparts, according to Jamie Oliver. [NYDN]

• Washington, D.C., is the latest city to consider a soda tax. [Obama Foodorama]

• Oregon is leading the way in sustainable wineries. [NYT]

• Traditional luxury foods are increasingly coming from nontraditional places: think Wagyu from Belgium. [WSJ]

• Activist group Breast Cancer Action is not impressed by KFC’s new Pink for the Cure promotion, calling it “pinkwashing.” [Fork in the Road/VV]

Filed Under: mediavore, ice cream, kfc, mcdonald’s, sam sifton, soda tax

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Jenkins tastes the ragu at Porchetta.

Sara Jenkins’s upcoming, unnamed pasta restaurant was almost a food truck. “This guy had been talking to me for a long time about investing in a Porchetta truck,” she says. “And I had a guy ask me to bid on putting a truck at South Street Seaport.” But the truck lifestyle isn’t quite what Jenkins is feeling right now: “It’s more money to open a restaurant, but there are lots of what-ifs to opening a truck: What if nobody comes? What if too many people come? I’d like a truck at some point, but by then it’ll be almost like jumping the shark.” Instead, Jenkins is keeping her restaurants in the East Village — and last night, she cooked for the neighborhood at Taste of the Lower East Side, which “really benefits my community hugely.” See where else in the city she eats in this week’s installment of the New York Diet.

Friday, April 23
For breakfast I had a grapefruit, which my cousin brought me back from his grandmother’s yard in Phoenix. They’re completely amazing — I look forward to getting those every year when he goes out there. I also had iced coffee.

I went to lunch at Ma Peche because my dad was in town. It was fantastic. My dad loves Vietnamese food, and he wanted to go to Momofuku Ssam Bar, but I was dying to get into Ma Peche and we did! We had a lot; there were four of us at lunch: the squid salad, the beef tartare, the fluke seviche, the chicken and morel terrine, the snails, the mussels, which were insane — they’re steamed with beer and shrimp paste, and they’re these little tiny things. I think they’re Bouchot mussels, a very small dark mussel from Canada, and they’re very sweet and yummy and perfect. We had the fried cauliflower which I recognized from Ssam Bar, and they sent us pork ribs with lemongrass caramel. On our way out, we had the salty pistachio soft serve, and that was also really, really yummy. I’m not a huge desert person at all, so whenever there’s salt in it, I really like it.

For dinner, I came home, and my husband had made broiled striped bass filets sprinkled with this Dubai curry powder that my father had brought back from Dubai. We have no idea what’s in it. Every time we use it we’re like, “Hmmm, what can we identify?” And we had spinach. We drank water. We don’t actually drink that much at home.

Saturday, April 24
It was an early morning, because we were at Brooklyn Flea. I started out with iced coffee at Abraço, and they had a lavender-lemon cake that was divine. When we got to the flea market I had hibiscus tea, and we were selling porchetta, and we also brought a side salad that was freekah, a Middle Eastern green wheat that’s toasted, and it’s quite yummy. We made a salad of that with ramps, asparagus, and snap peas, and a ramp vinaigrette, and I had a little of that.

I ate a lobster roll from the lobster-roll place [Red Hook Lobster Pound], but I just ate the lobster meat. There’s two ways to do a lobster roll: plain with drawn butter, or with mayonnaise, and I definitely like the mayonnaise kind. But they put lettuce on it, which I thought was weird. My mother’s from Maine and I grew up being totally obsessed with going to Maine and getting a lobster roll. Everything you eat when you’re a kid, you get very picky about it when you’re older. It’s got to be exactly the way you remember it.

Then I had a salted-caramel chocolate from Nunu Chocolate, another flea-market seller. McClure’s Pickles had a tomato bloody-mary mix they were selling — pickle juice, spicy, tomato stuff, no vodka — and I had some of that. I had some apple-ginger soda from the Brooklyn Soda Works people. I’m not a soda drinker and their soda is like something else all over again. I was like, “Oooh, can we get this at Porchetta?” But they only do it for the one restaurant where they make the soda, Palo Santo. Something about the freshness.

My booth is right next to the guy from Scratchbread, so he sent me over a plantain bread pudding with a mole streusel; it was really good. And then there’s all the Red Hook vendors at Brooklyn Flea — that’s who I got the hibiscus tea from earlier. They have all this fruit and they put lime chili and salt on it, and I got watermelon. It’s so good. My first weekend out there, I went through eating everything, grilled cheese, this and that. I was like, “Okay, now you got that out of your system, have some fruit.” It’s all really fatty food out there, including our porchetta, and then this fruit stand is like this beaming banner.

We sold out by three, and I went home. My kid was eating these pixie tangerines that someone gave me, from some ranch in California. He’d been telling me about them and said he’d drop some off. My kid is a tangerine nut, so I got very little out of him, but they’re amazing. They’re small, very fruity and very juicy, not super sweet. They’re just perfect. They’re everything a tangerine should be.

I did drink Saturday night. I had a bottle of Lambrusco in my fridge so I had a couple of glasses of that. Our default meal at home is broiled fish and vegetables, and we had swordfish and roasted cauliflower and rice.

Sunday, April 25
For breakfast I had sheeps’ milk yogurt, toast, and then I put on top this olive oil from my family’s house in Italy, and za’atar, which is this Mediterranean spice mix. That’s like the Lebanese breakfast: flatbread, yogurt, olive oil, zaatar. That’s my ideal breakfast. Well, it’s a tossup between that and Vietnamese soup, but this is easier.

I went and got a cemitas sandwich from Tulcingo del Valle. I went with my cousin and got a beef milanese. I ate half, and then later I had the other half for dinner.

Monday, April 26
I had toast with peanut butter for breakfast, and then my kid asked for another bowl of yogurt and muesli and he didn’t eat it, so I ate it.

I went to a late lunch with a friend of mine. We’d taken my kid to the aquarium in Coney Island, and on the way back my friend, who lives in Park Slope, was like, “My new favorite place is Mile End Deli,” so I was like, “Let’s go in and check it out!” We had the Mile End Poutine, the whole deal, and I’d never had poutine before, only read about it, and I’d say that this is the poutine to have. It’s a bomb. We had a brisket sandwich and a turkey sandwich, and they had a really great cole-slaw salad that was much more vinegary; it had no mayonnaise. It was almost pickled in a way, and it was red — maybe from grated beets? It’s very clean, definitely a very good foil to the poutine, which is not clean.

That was a really late lunch, so that night for dinner I had pistachios and leftover guacamole.

Tuesday, April 27
I had sheeps’ milk yogurt for breakfast. I’m big on the whole Chatham sheeps’ milk yogurt.

I was in to work around 12:30, so for lunch I had a sandwich from Abraço. It was sautéed kale and Cheddar. I had ramp-and-potato soup at work, and iced coffee. I tasted the ragu — we have the slow-cooked porchetta ragu which I hadn’t had in a long time, so I checked that out.

Then I went to dinner at Veloce Pizzeria. We’ve been working on pastas over there, and I wanted to see how they were doing. I’ve really encouraged [partner Frederick Twomey] to put pasta on the menu over there, and we’ve been doing some really basic, foolproof pastas. I had the Bolero Salad, which is romaine, cucumber, grape tomato, red onion, in a really lemony oregano dressing. I had the fritto misto, and I was with my friend [Sebastian Jaramillo] who will probably be the chef de cuisine at my new place, and he helped me open Veloce Pizzeria, so we were both being really critical — not in a bad way. We had the clam pizza; we love it. And then there’s a tortellini I’ve been working on over there and we started arguing about it. We were arguing about whether the butter should be emulsified or not — I’m of the camp that it should just be brown butter on the plate, and he was arguing that it should be emulsified with a little water. We haven’t resolved the issue yet.

Wednesday, April 28
I had another one of those grapefruits for breakfast.

I went to Marea for lunch. I’ve been dying to go for a really long time, and a friend of mine was free for lunch and he was dying to go to. We had the uni crostini, the famous uni crostini, and it lived up to the hype. We had a braised calamari — it was really a stuffed calamari with greens— and then we just went nuts on the pastas. We ordered a bunch of half-orders: spaghetti with uni and crab; something they call spinozzini wtih clams; we had the famous fusilli with bone marrow, which completely lived up to the hype; a rigatoni arabbiata with salt cod which was delicious; a pansotti that was amazing. And then we finished with two glasses of white Burgundy, because how could you not.

I had dinner at home: We had pan-roasted chicken breast, rice, and greens.

Read more posts by Helen Rosner

Filed Under: the new york diet, abraco, brooklyn flea, brooklyn soda works, ma peche, marea, mcclure’s pickles, mile end, nunu chocolate, palo santo, porchetta, red hook lobster pound, red hook vendors, sara jenkins, scratchbread, ssam bar, tulcingo del valle, veloce pizzeria

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It’s that time of year again, so brave your seasonal allergies or be sure to take your Claritin because weather…

Red Hook Ball Fields

Clinton St And Bay St, Brooklyn

(718) 667-4663

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Named in playful homage to the late famous rock hall up the street, if CBGB stood for Country, Blue Grass, and Blues…

DBGB Kitchen and Bar

299 Bowery, New York

(212) 933-5300

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Brooklyn Heights: The Stamp Out Hunger campaign will accept donations of canned goods and nonperishable items at all branches of the U.S. Post Office from May 3 through May 8. The Food Bank will distribute items to community organizations and emergency food programs to help families in need. [Bococa Land]

Clinton Hill: Mega Bites has replaced Andy’s Clinton Hill Restaurant at 945 DeKalb Avenue. [Clinton Hill Blog]

East Village: After closing for renovations, Northern Spy has reopened with more seating space. [EV Grieve]

Flatiron: Hill Country will host a Kentucky Derby viewing party this Saturday. A special menu will offer guajillo-rubbed wild-boar ribs and Derby pie, and all-day drink specials include $6 mint juleps, $4 two-for-one PBRs, and $20 Lone Star buckets. [Grub Street]

Gowanus: Tony’s Bagelz will open its doors soon at 284 Third Avenue. According to its signage, the spot will serve breakfast and lunch, and visitors may enjoy backyard seating. [Brownstoner]

Meatpacking District: On June 5, local eateries like Fatty Crab and Matsuri will gather in Gansevoort Plaza for “Tastes from the Meatpacking District through Chelsea.” All proceeds will benefit Friends of NYC Lab School, an organization that raises money for the school’s extracurricular programming. Tickets may be purchased at tastesnyc.org. [Grub Street]

Midtown: Nanoosh, an uptown hummus bar, is moving to Madison Avenue between 33rd and 34th Streets. [Midtown Lunch]

Filed Under: neighborhood watch, brooklyn heights, chelsea, clinton hill, east village, fatty crab, flatiron, gowanus, hell’s kitchen, hell’s kitchen flea market, hill country, matsuri, mega bites, midtown, nanoosh, northern spy, nyc lab school, stamp out hunger, tony’s bagelz

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Two unconfirmed items are floating around the blogosphere today: Eater hears from “multiple inside sources” that Michael White and Chris Canon will be running the restaurant and room service at midtown’s forthcoming Setai 5th Avenue, and more bizarre, PX This hears that Zengo’s Akhtar Nawab is planning to take over the kitchen at “a very popular downtown Mexican eatery” that sounds a lot like La Esquina. [PX This, Eater NY]

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Filed Under: rumor mill, akhtar nawab, chris canon, la esquina, michael white, setai 5th avenue, zengo

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We’re told it’ll be a month or so till Pain D’Avignon (the bakery that delivers bread to Momofuku Ssam and Eleven Madison Park) starts serving sandwiches at its Essex Street Market store, but in the meantime it has added Stumptown to the mix. The menu below should loosen Café Pedlar’s hold on Lower East Side Stumptown nuts, and it’s a much safer option than getting your caffeine fix from a certain other Essex Street Market purveyor (wrote Kenny Shopsin in Eat Me: ““When people come in and ask for coffee to go, we tell them ‘You can get the “to go” part.’”)

Coffee Service
Espresso – $2.50
Cappuccino – $3.30
Latte – $3.70
Americano – $2.50

Coffee Beans for Sale (12 oz. bags)
Guatemala Bella – $12.50
Hair Bender – $11
Burundi – $12.75
Decaf House – $10.75

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Filed Under: cool beans, essex street market, kenny shopsin, stumped

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