Chelsea: Haven’s Kitchen, a “recreational cooking school,” store, eatery, party space, and rooftop nature haven is opening this month at 109 West 17th Street. Chefs like Gabrielle Hamilton of Prune will lead the cooking classes, which are aimed at teaching approachable dishes, not restaurant fare. [Diner's Journal/NYT]
Slow Food and Slow Food NYC sponsor the first English version of the Slow Wine Guide at the Metropolitan Pavilion at 125 West 18th Street on January 30. More than 60 Slow Wine producers showcase 140 wines in a walk-around wine tasting with light food pairings. Tickets here. [Edible Manhattan]
East Village: Two Boots East Village kicks off a 25-event extravaganza tonight at 6 p.m. for its 25th anniversary with a jumble of entertainment celebrating the neighborhood. [EV Grieve]

Financial District/Battery Park: Starting January 16, SHO’s Shaun Hergatt is cooking his version of hot cocoa for the cold snap — house-made cocoa pappardelle soup with broccolini and salt-cured egg yolk — plus other extravagant constructions for the launch of his winter prix fixe menu. [Grub Street]
Jersey: The Cuban, a new restaurant and bar with bold and seasonal Cuban cooking, is set to open January 17 in downtown Hoboken. Executive chef Alexis Lahens calls the restaurant a return to traditional eating — but the menu perks include fresh takes like grilled Spanish octopus with an olive-potato purée. Located at 333 Washington Street, the Cuban has a late-night bar Thursdays through Saturdays until 2 a.m. [Grub Street]
Lower East Side: Health inspectors shuttered Congee Bowery on January 9 after they issued seven Health Department violations — five of them critical. The Chinese eatery at 207 Bowery, which has a sister on 98 Bowery, garnered 55 points for sins like improper holding temperatures for both hot and cold food items, evidence of mice and roaches, and unsanitary food surfaces. [Lo-Down]
Midtown:‘21′ Club will offer beers on tap for the first time since it opened four score and two years ago: Just in time for the 90th anniversary of the birth of Prohibition, Bar ‘21′ will launch Bar 21 on Tap on January 17 with a Brooklyn Brewery night. A $45 ticket buys three Brooklyn pints paired with bar bites like homemade rabbit sausage and mini lobster “tacos.” The ongoing series will feature a different brewery one to two times a month. [Grub Street]
Get a taste of wine’s role in U.S. culinary culture and the life of Robert Mondavi, the Napa Valley vintner, at a panel discussion on January 23 at 6 p.m. Join the panel of authors, a New York Times wine columnist, culinary historian, sommelier, and wine consultant at the Theresa Lang Community and Student Center in Arnhold Hall, 55 West 13th Street, second floor. Admission is $5 and free to all members of the New School community with I.D. at the door or box office. For reservations and inquiries, e-mail boxoffice@newschool.edu or call 212-229-5488. [Grub Street]

Filed Under: neighborhood watch,

• 0 Comments

Want honey?

We all know that Greek yogurt is kinda like everything worth living for. It’s healthy, delicious, a great at-home facial ingredient (try it!), and oh yes, it’s done magic for New York’s economy. Two of the most recognizable brands, Chobani and Fage, have their production plants upstate and are expanding their operations at a rapid pace, and other yogurt producers can’t churn it out fast enough. Foodies, farmers, cows, and the dad from My Big, Fat, Greek Wedding, are over-the-moon. [NYT]

Read more posts by Alyssa Shelasky

Filed Under: greece lightning, greek yogurt

• 0 Comments

A sea of turquoise and white.

Having conquered pizza, on Sunday Motorino’s Matthieu Palombino will don the cap of diner man with Bowery Diner, an homage to both classic American eateries and French brasseries. The 130-seat space looks the diner part, with turquoise panels, abundant stainless steel, and a classic counter-and-stool setup. Palombino’s menu is nostalgic, too, consisting of fare like a Reuben, double-patty burgers, and (as we mentioned) more contemporary eats such as a Long Island duck salad and French-y stuff like steak tartare. Like the diners of yore, this one stays open late, but unlike those, here you can drink cocktails — or perhaps boozy milkshakes. It’s dinner-only for now, till midnight during the week, and till 2 a.m. on weekends, with breakfast and lunch to follow soon. Scope it out for yourself in our slideshow.

Food Menu [PDF]
Wine and Milkshakes Menu [PDF]
Cocktail Menu [PDF]

Bowery Diner, 241 Bowery, at Prince St.; 212-388-0052

Earlier: Bowery Diner Will Start Slinging Reubens (and Lots More) This Sunday

Read more posts by Jenny Miller

Filed Under: openings, bowery, bowery diner, matthieu palombino, nightlife, slideshow

• 0 Comments

Soulful Pink Tea Cup still needs a home.

Lawrence Page of Pink Tea Cup has opened wine bar Auberge Laurent in the Harlem space that was originally meant for PTC’s new location. He tells Diner’s Journal that the lack of a (hard) liquor license was the impetus for the wine bar concept, and since the majority of his clientele are in Harlem, everything just fell into place. Cheers. [Diner's Journal/NYT]

Auberge Laurent, 200 Malcolm X Blvd., at 120th St.; 212-831-3625

Read more posts by Alyssa Shelasky

Filed Under: openings, pink tea cup

• 0 Comments

Sweet little Chiyono had an ultra-Japanese vibe and a $30 omakase of home-style fare, but Grub gets the sad news that the restaurant is no more. Being smack next to Souen Noodle, another healthy Asian option, probably didn’t help. The website is still up and running, but a call finds the phone number disconnected. Sayonara.

Read more posts by Jenny Miller

Filed Under: closings, chiyono, east village, japanese

• 0 Comments

It’s 4 p.m., and that means it’s time to play Two for Eight. We just asked ten restaurants the best time they can squeeze in a couple for dinner; you need only make your chosen reservation. (As always, we make the calls but don’t guarantee the results.)
Today: TV Chefs

Babbo (Menu)
212-777-0303
Two for eight? No
Best available: 10:45 p.m.

Craft (Menu)
212-780-0880
Two for eight? No
Best available: 9:30 p.m.

Daniel (Menu)
212-288-0033
Two for eight? No
Best available: 9:30 p.m.

Felidia (Menu)
212-758-1479
Two for eight? No
Best available: 8:15 p.m.

Jean Georges (Menu)
212-299-3900
Two for eight? No
Best available: 9:45 p.m.

Kin Shop (Menu)
212-675-4295
Two for eight? No
Best available: 9:15 p.m.

Le Bernardin (Menu)
212-554-1515
Two for eight? No
Best available: 8:30 p.m.

Mesa Grill (Menu)
212-807-7400
Two for eight? Yes

Morimoto (Menu)
212-989-8883
Two for eight? Yes

Red Rooster (Menu)
212-792-9001
Two for eight? No
Best available: 10 p.m.

Filed Under: babbo, craft, daniel, felidia, jean georges, kin shop, le bernardin, mesa grill, morimoto, red rooster, two tor eight

• 0 Comments

Will Catch be a hit?

There’s a lot cooking at the EMM Group — and we don’t mean Abe or Arthur. Earlier this week, it was reported that they’re opening an Asian brasserie-bakery monstrosity on the Bowery. And now Eater has the scoop that they’re shipping another version of Catch down to South Beach. Catch will be competing with Carmellini’s the Dutch, a prospective John McDonald project we told you about, and, of course, snow-bird hot spots like Michy’s and Michael’s. [Eater NY]

Read more posts by Alyssa Shelasky

Filed Under: emm group, catch, miami

• 0 Comments

You know what’s weird? Thinking that calling a community board member a “communist” will speed up the liquor license process; vomiting up half a dinner then rallying to get through dessert; and emu eggs, in general. For more weirdness, check out the James Weird awards, straight ahead.

• Boners BBQ is a very real restaurant in Atlanta (tagline: “Put a little South in your mouth”) with a very real need for a PR professional who will advise the staff against posting mean messages about their customers on Facebook. [UnMarketing]

• A group of disgruntled Hong Kong stockbrokers took to the streets to protest plans to shorten their lunch break by 30 minutes. Under the new rules, the employees’ break would be limited to an hour instead of an hour and a half, which was already shorter than the two-hour break they had enjoyed in the previous year. [HuffPo]

• Buzzfeed has compiled a list of the 30 best taco-related crimes, leading us to ask yet again: What is it about tacos that inspires such weird behavior? You don’t hear about people being so destructive in relation to hamburgers. [Buzzfeed]

• Ron Silver, owner and chef of Bubby’s, told employees at the restaurant’s Yokohama, Japan, branch that he expected the food to be “fuckin’ fresh.” When the employees questioned him, he reiterated: “I mean fucking fresh, man. Do not fuck around with this thing.” They took his advice to heart, and now, two years later, “Fuckin’ fresh” is the shop’s wildly successful motto. [Gawker]

Read more posts by Laura Reineke

Filed Under: the james weird awards, bubby’s

• 0 Comments

If nothing else, Blue Hill at Stone Barns’ bone charcoal looks awesome.

It’s been nearly a century since Henry Ford and E.G. Kingsford first popularized charcoal briquettes, the mashed and compressed mix of factory leftovers and sawdust that’s since been fired up in billions of backyards. Now, as chefs look to make their food ever more personalized and heritage-focused, it should come as no surprise that a handful of chefs — hewing closely to locavore edicts — are now doing some flame-based soul-searching beyond the basic briquettes and hardwood. And while boutique methane will probably never be a tangible concept, it looks like custom charcoal, of all things, is on the verge of having its very own carbonized moment.

At Iron Chef Jose Garces’s just-opened Distrito in Scottsdale, Arizona, Graces Group culinary director Michael Fiorello says the charcoal the restaurant uses in its grills and pit is a custom blend: 60 percent is briquettes, 40 percent is Ono, an additive-free traditional Hawaiian charcoal made from Kiawe wood that’s long been used for luaus. The advantage: “It burns much hotter,” Fiorello explains. Ono registers around 800° once it gets going, or, in Fiorello’s words, “It really puts the pedal to the metal.”

In Minnesota, Gary Feblowitz — a filmmaker and cameraman who has worked with Andrew Zimmern and Tyler Florence — became so enamored with some Jamaican jerk he sampled while on location that he negotiated multiple trade laws to eventually become the lone U.S. importer of sustainable pimento wood. His company is the result of a cooperative system with Jamaican farmers — charcoal is derived from dying or storm-damaged wood culled from Jamaican Allspice groves. Now he supplies the Stillwater, Minnesota, restaurant Smalley’s Caribbean Barbecue, owned by chefs Shawn Smalley and James Beard Award winner Tim McKee.

Aamanns, the upcoming smørrebrød restaurant in New York, will put its haute charcoal right on the tables: The restaurant will filter its tap water in glass bottles designed by the Copenhagen-based group Sort of Coal. The bottles will consist of one piece of kishu binchotan charcoal — a rapidly cooled charcoal variety that known to absorb chlorine — placed in the water. (Sort of Coal also sells cubes of something called Kuro powder, which is a form of activated pine charcoal that can be pulverized into batters and pasta doughs.)

But as is often the case with ecofocused food initiatives, the charcoal craze probably got its start with Dan Barber, who makes his own charcoal from animal products. Blue Hill at Stone Barns happened upon its “charcoal program” a few years ago. The farm was already producing soil-enriching biochar from trees, a decidedly low-tech process: A steel barrel of organic material is inserted into a larger steel barrel. The space between the two is packed with kindling, and sticks, then lit. Flame does not touch the contents of the inner barrel, so water vapor and gas are removed from the superheated material over the next few until it turns into a black substance that can be pulverized and mixed with soil. One day, Gregg Twehues, director of nutrient management for Stone Barns, proposed the idea of creating a new product for the kitchen by turning animal bones into a fuel source.

Interestingly, unlike other initiatives that return chefs to the land, there’s no real historical precedent for the burning of animal bones for the sake of cooking. In North America, the Aleut and Tlingit tribes both used bones and tallow for heating when wood was scarce; New York City’s earliest days saw oyster shells being burnt to produce lime; and in the 1830s, the U.S. adopted a French technique of using crushed, pyrolyzed animal skeletons to refine sugar, which became the industry standard. But apparently, nobody had the notion to, say, grill pork over its own carbonized bones.

But now Blue Hill at Stone Barns is making charcoal with all kinds things, including mussel shells, lamb bones, lobster shells, corn cobs, pig femurs, and venison skulls. In some way, the idea of grilling a square of fatty belly over a blackened-shank-bone fire even fulfills some ineffable kind of food logic. More important, it allegedly adds flavor: “You get a sort of pig times two,” Barber told a group at Dartmouth earlier this year.

Not all chefs agree with that. North End Grill’s Floyd Cardoz was quoted by the Times last August telling Danny Meyer — who had eaten shrimp grilled over pork bones at Barber’s restaurant the night before — that it was a “gimmick kind of thing — it’s not going to flavor the food.”

But Barber says he’s conducted blind taste tests, grilling mushrooms, potatoes, and pork over three types of charcoal — one regular wood, one over fully carbonized pig bones, and ones over pig bones that were only partially carbonized (and still had some meat). His panel preferred the bone charcoal: “The food grilled over the pig bone charcoal was meatier, smokier, fattier,” he says. “It was amazing how pronounced it was.”

Barber’s not alone in making his own charcoal: At New York’s Mas (la grillade), which opened in October, chef and owner Galen Zamarra powers his fire with locally sourced hardwood, but discovered he was inadvertently producing his own charcoal in small batches. “We have a large, heavy-gauge steel drum where we empty our ashes after service,” Zamarra says. “We sift through that before disposal and remove the large pieces of what is, by then, charcoal. It takes about a day or two to do. Basically, the charcoal forms because the ash covering the pieces limits the oxygen and the heat carries over for a whole day.” Zamarra says he uses the “house” charcoal to prolong the burn life of his hardwood-based fires.

Earlier this year, another esteemed chef, South Carolina’s Sean Brock, was making carbonized pig bone to supply both McCrady’s and Husk, his crazy popular Charleston restaurants (some of the stuff made it to this year’s Meatopia, too), but when he decided the carbon footprint of the animal process was too high, he began using sustainable hardwoods for his in-house charcoal production.

Brock may have also hit upon one major problem facing restaurants that want to play up their charcoal credentials: They can’t really sell customers on the idea that housemade charcoal is ecofriendly, because <a href="http://articles.sfgate.com/2007-08-11/home-and-garden/
17255673_1_charcoal-carbon-dioxide-grilling”>recent studies conclude charcoal grilling does more damage to the environment than gas grilling. (Needless to say, the math gets screwy and it immediately becomes more difficult to take into consideration the environmental effects of charcoal that’s been made in a matter of hours from the bones from animals raised on site, which had already been simmered in stocks and sauces and would otherwise be thrown out.)

Meanwhile, the next step for Barber, who remains committed to the cause, is to do more tasting experiments and publish the results in the International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science, which was founded by Spanish chef Andoni Luis Aduriz (of Mugaritz in Spain). “I know this sounds highfalutin,” Barber says. “But it gets me thinking about how we use energy in the kitchen. Are there are other ways to cook that are flavorful and ecological?”

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: going above and beyond, aamanns, andoni aduriz, biochar, blue hill at stone barns, charcoal, dan barber, distrito, floyd cardoz, husk, jose garces, mccrady’s, north end grill, pimento wood, sean brock, smalley’s, sort of coal, tim mckee, trends

• 0 Comments

Have your cake and eat it too.

If you’re gay, engaged, and living in Brooklyn, you might want to check out Brooklyn’s first annual LGBT Wedding Expo at Brooklyn Borough Hall this Sunday. Free admission, and Marty Markowitz will be there. Caterers and cake-makers, but maybe not Girl Scouts, are ready and waiting. [About Brooklyn]

Read more posts by Alyssa Shelasky

Filed Under: i do, gay marriage

• 0 Comments

The other day we brought you Talde’s Asian-American menu, and now here’s a look at the spot, which is slated to open Sunday. Former Buddakan toque Dale Talde partnered with Thistle Hill Tavern’s John Bush and David Massoni, and plans to create a simple tavern look were scrapped when the three found some vintage Japanese carved wood, which sets the restaurant’s aesthetic. There’s a twenty-seat proper bar (as in, drinks and snacks, no dining at the counter) with five Asian beers and five Brooklyn brews on tap, plus “tiki-esque” cocktails by Bush, Talde tells us, and Japanese whiskey.

The chef reiterates that he’s “trying to take the dirty word out of fusion,” and his menu reflects that: Phot roast combines “everything you’d find in pho and everything you’d find in a pot roast,” while market ramen is an all-vegan soup based on seasonal veggies. That might sound like a contrast to other dishes, such as a reportedly intense barbecue platter, but Talde tells us, “The yin and yang — it’s very applicable to this restaurant.” See the space and some food in our slideshow.

Opening Menu [PDF]

Talde, 369 Seventh Ave., at 11th St., Park Slope; 347-916-0031

Read more posts by Jenny Miller

Filed Under: openings, asian, dale talde, park slope, slideshow, talde

• 0 Comments

Should wrap some pork into that lettuce.

What with Mark Bittman’s recent online breakdown of why we, as a country, are eating less meat, and A.G. Sulzberger’s 1,300-word story on the torturous existence he now suffers as a vegetarian living in the Midwest, we were starting to think the entire New York Times editorial staff had made a New Year’s resolution to become a bunch of beet-lovin’ grass-grazers. But never fear, devourers of animal flesh: Sam Sifton comes to the rescue today with a big, meaty piece about cooking Dave Chang’s bo ssam at home. Is there anything the bo ssam can’t do? [NYT]

Read more posts by Alan Sytsma

Filed Under: oink!, bo ssam, david chang, new york times, pork butt, the other critics

• 0 Comments