Seems like he’d like a bo ssam.

When we caught up with noted football fan David Chang at the Lunchbox Fund Bookfair Auction, held last night at Del Posto, we couldn’t help but ask what he thought about the topic on basically every New Yorker’s mind: Tim Tebow’s arrival in New York. “I can’t hate on the guy,” he told us. “I don’t know if I’d want to hang out, but … ” Chang said, sort of trailing off. “I’m more concerned about the Washington Redskins.”

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Who needs beer?

The Nolita branch of Brooklyn’s Toby’s Public House opens today for dinner — even though there’s still no liquor license. Chef Nicola Bertolotti, just back from a year in Italy, has recreated some signature dishes, and added new inspirations like carpaccio pizza and rosticcera braciolette. Owner Christine Iu, who recently said she’d been harassed by locals, tells Grub Street that the restaurant’s design was inspired by Walker’s and Fanelli’s, and that she expects to start an “after-school happy hour” for neighborhood parents and nannies.Toby’s is open from 4 p.m. to midnight, and from noon on Saturdays and Sundays. Weekday lunch service will begin on April 15. Instead of booze, there will be “Mocktails.”

Toby’s Public House, 86 Kenmare Street (at Mulberry Street), 212-274-8629

Earlier: Future Toby’s Public House Plagued By Vandals

Menu [PDF]

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Kate Upton.

Last year, we thought it’d be fun to ask the Sports Illustrated swimsuit models where they go when they want to pig out. (Because, well, why not?) This year, we’ve got dessert on the brain, so Grub Street once again dutifully braved the issue release party at Crimson to ask the ladies what they go for when they need a sugar fix. Check out the results, straight ahead.

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Filed Under: excuses to run shots of models, cheesecake, fashion week, slideshow, sports illustrated, swimsuit issue

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Simmons, at Jason Wu’s Target event last night.

Last night, designer Jason Wu launched his collaboration with Target at Skylight Soho. Even though the event was focused on shopping, it wasn’t too tough to steer the conversations toward food: Emmy Rossum told us she’s a big Top Chef fan, and that she’s “big into lobster risotto right now.” And Top Chef judge Gail Simmons was, of course, more than happy to chat about her ability to pick great apples at the store, her secret for great Super Bowl wings, and her feelings on that whole Paula Deen debacle you may have heard about.

This is a shopping event. Are you an aggressive shopper? Do you go to sample sales and fight over merchandise?
I would not say I’m an aggressive shopper. I want to be; I aspire to be an aggressive shopper. I am a meek, meek shopper … I’m not good at sifting; I like it laid out, I like to know exactly what I’m looking at. You know, I lose patience really easily; I’d rather shop in the grocery store than in the department store. I can pick an apple like nobody’s business.
 
So you won’t be grabbing that last dress out of somebody’s hands here tonight?
No, but I will be shopping tonight, because I do well with Target collaborations, and I always do well with Jason Wu.
 
Do you have Super Bowl plans? Are you making anything to eat while watching the game?
Yeah, I have plans to watch the Super Bowl. I’m from Canada, so I grew up not knowing a lot about football, but I’ve gotten into the swing of things, especially this year, being a New Yorker. And I also just became a fanatic of Friday Night Lights — a little late in the game — so I feel like I have finally learned the rules of the game of football, so I’m ready to cheer for the New York Giants.
 
Will you be whipping up anything special?
I will be cooking. I will be cooking for friends next Sunday. I have to decide the menu; there will probably be some super-hot sort of, um, Asian chicken wings, because I love chicken wings and I love spice. And probably, I don’t know, some chili. I’ve got to figure it out.
 
What’s your secret for making chili and Asian chicken wings?
Chili, the secret is low and slow; the chicken wings it’s using fresh chiles, and butter — a little bit of butter.
 
Speaking of butter, what do you think about Paula Deen being a spokesperson for a diabetes drug?
You know, I have mixed feelings about it. I can’t really comment on the spokesperson thing; it feels very transparent, it feels like she’s cheating her fans a little bit. But I don’t know the ramifications of that situation. But I do hope that she uses her voice and her power to be honest with the people who look up to her and who appreciate her, because she has a really powerful platform, and I think, as a food professional, you need to take responsibility for your health.
 
Emmy Rossum just told me she watches Top Chef.
Whoo hoo! I’ll seek her out. You know, I just did Andy Cohen’s Watch What Happens Live last night, and she did it, like, two hours before me for a show that’ll air Thursday — tonight — so I’ll have to chat with her about that.

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She said her book did well!

She’s the type of famous-enough “name” that’s either nauseatingly everywhere or intriguingly nowhere. And since Katie Lee has been on the side of quiet (congrats!), we sort of missed her and thought we’d check in with her over at the Charity Water Gala, where she told us about her clam-shack dreams and Ryan Gosling fantasy.

Are you involved in any restaurant projects out east?
Sometimes I have a little fantasy of having a clam shack out there, but I don’t know that it would ever happen.

Any food resolutions for next year?
I’m going to continue try to eat less meat and dairy. You know, I look at meat and dairy kind of as a treat, and not to have it every day, so I’m going to continue with that.

You wrote a novel. How is that going?
Great. It’s going to paperback in May, so I’m actually working on the edit of that right now.

So you’re happy with the way it was received?
Very happy, yeah. I got great reviews, I was really pleased.

Any talk about turning it into a movie?
We’ve had a little bit of talk about it, so maybe that’ll happen; that would be amazing.

Who would you cast if you could?
Ideally? Well, I guess I would have to say to play the hot, hunky surfer, Ryan Gosling would be pretty ideal. [Laughs.] But only if I got to supervise on set.

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He likes a feast, moral-consciousness aside.

Over at the Barneys launch party for Gaga’s workshop, Grub Street chatted with Alan Cumming about his curious Thanksgiving plans, given that he’s (1) from Scotland and (2) a vegetarian. Unsurprisingly, he has a very unique, and uncensored, POV.

Are you guys doing Thanksgiving dinner?
We’re going to have Thanksgiving lunch at our favorite veggie café, Kate’s, a vegan Thanksgiving lunch, and then I’m flying to Scotland to get away from these awful celebrations of the genocide of the indigenous population. I’m going back to my homeland where we don’t celebrate killing a whole race of natives.

When you go to Scotland, do you eat haggis?
Sometimes. I eat veggie haggis.

There is such a thing?
Yeah, it’s delicious. Really delicious.

But isn’t the skin, like, skin?
It used to be; traditionally, they used to cook it inside a sheep’s bladder, but they don’t do that anymore … Actually, it was more like whatever sausages are cooked in, I don’t know, like a skin of old cow’s hooves or something. I don’t know. Some horrible cancer-ridden piece of something picked off a floor.

Do you do that every year, avoid Thanksgiving?
No. I quite like Thanksgiving. I mean, I don’t enjoy why it exists, but I like a sort of pagan reason for everyone to get together and basically have Christmas but without the religion. I like that. It’s just a shame, of course, that it has to be tinged with genocide. But I do actually enjoy it. I like feasts.

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Filed Under: characters, alan cumming, haggis, thanksgiving

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North End Grill sounds great for drinking.

Last night at Johnnie Walker’s “House of Walker” opening party, Grub Street spoke with Floyd Cardoz about the almost-hatched North End Grill, a highly anticipated Danny Meyer project that has remained frustratingly impressively under wraps. As such, Cardoz wouldn’t say too much, but he did emphasize the beverage program, which sounds grand and tasty. “We are going to have a whiskey bar,” said Cardoz. “We’re hoping we’re going to do scotch tastings. What I find is if you go to the Brandy Library, they have all these different scotches and you can taste every one of them, which is a great way to give someone something they like.” He also says the restaurant will have 120 seats, will open before the end of the year, and will welcome everyone because “we love guests.”

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Filed Under: downtown, danny meyer, floyd cardoz, north end grill

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Hugs and knishes.

Last night at the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund awards, Jerry O’Connell — a native New Yorker who’s been living in Los Angeles for most of his adult life — told Grub Street that the first thing he does when he’s back in the city is head to Katz’s. “I go right for their Reuben,” says the star of Seminar on Broadway. “It’s my favorite. I love the process — they still have the ticket process there. I love all the beers on tap.” His other fave? Yonah Schimmel Knishes. “I pick up a couple and put them in the freezer, and then put them in the microwave when I come home from doing the play. There’s Yonah Schimmel, and then there’s everything else. I don’t believe you’re allowed to use the term knish unless you’re eating a Yonah Schimmel.” To that, O’Connell’s wife, Rebecca Romijn, sheepishly confessed that she’s never had one. “I’ll introduce her,” assured Jerry.

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Filed Under: good taste, stars who eat

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He’s crafted a delicious dramedy.

Grub Street caught up with Dallas Roberts over at the opening night of Relatively Speaking, where Roberts was daydreaming about his own one-act play: an homage to pesto. Naturally, Roberts would play the lead, with Bobby Cannavale as “the cop,” and “you’d need a movie star to be the girl, so … Elaine Stritch.” It would go something like this …

All right. It’s two people, it’s a couple, and they want to go get pesto; they’re going to make dinner, and they need pesto, but they’re in Brooklyn. So they’re going for pesto — they’ve got everything else, you know, the pasta — and so they’re walking for the pesto, but it’s hard to find pesto necessarily, so they go into the Met Foods and there’s no pesto, and then they go to the other place and there’s no pesto. But every time they ask, “Do you have pesto?” They go, “What’s pesto?” And they go, “It’s pine nuts and olive oil and basil,” and no one has it. No one has it. Finally, they walk into this just bodega, just a proper shit bodega, but nothing’s on the shelves, there’s, like, a can of Dinty Moore, and that’s it. And they say, “Do you have pesto?” and the guy’s, like, “What’s pesto?” And he goes, “You know, it’s olive oil, basil and pine nuts.” And then — [makes siren sound, motions flashing lights with hands] — cops roll up, because this place is not a bodega, it sells drugs, which is why there’s nothing on the shelves, and they think this is what’s going on. So they put them up against the wall, he and his girlfriend, throw them up against the wall, and they say, “What’s going on?” And he goes, “You’ve got the wrong guy, etc., etc., blah, blah, blah. We were just here buying pesto.” You know New York cops, they were like, “You were trying to buy pesto in a bodega? Impossible.” So, as it ends, they release them from the security, and they’re allowed to go, and as they’re walking away, the cop goes, “No, no, everything’s cool, they just wanted to buy pesto.” And over the air you hear the other cop go, “What’s pesto?” And he goes, “You know, basil, pine nuts, olive oil.

End.

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Filed Under: genius, dallas roberts, pesto, theater

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Gettin’ wild with them walnuts.

When he wasn’t stressing over the Occupy Wall Street unmentionables over at the Huffington Post 2011 Game Changers event, Grub Street asked Dr. Oz and his daughter (and co-host of The Chew), Daphne Oz, to think back to Frank Bruni’s blunt breakdown of Dr. Oz’s eating style: “It was the most efficient, joyless eating I have ever seen.” Their reaction? Yup, Bruni was basically right.

Frank Bruni once called Dr. Oz’s diet “the most efficient, joyless eating I have ever seen.”
Dr. Oz: You have a good memory. That’s right.
Daphne Oz: My own eating habits are definitely informed by having grown up at the same dinner table as the man to my left. However, I tend to be a little less rigid, I definitely enjoy my food, and I’m not quite so strict in my restrictions.
Dr. Oz: Frank found it joyless, but, you know, I like to automate my life.
Daphne Oz: It’s efficient. [Laughs.]
Dr. Oz: It’s very efficient. So what I was doing was, when he wrote that, I used to put walnuts — I still do — in water and soak them. And he saw me eating walnuts out of water, and he found them very bland. I like the essence of them, I like the Omega-3s in them, he was looking for pepper sauce or something.
Daphne Oz: I’ve seen you eat fresh fish, and I’ve seen the joy that it brings to your face. There are foods that definitely strike joy into his heart.

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Filed Under: automate, bruni, daphne oz, dr. oz

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Chicken and waffles are très chic.

“Oh, I roll it with Corn Flakes I smashed up with flour, egg whites — I take the yolk out — and then I just deep-fry it, and then I, you know, let it all happen. And then I stick edible glitter on top, from the cake store, and add to my waffle. But I cheat, I use Eggo waffles.” —Richie Rich at the “HTC Serves Up NYC” event, on his cooking deficiencies, other than this one magical concoction.

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Filed Under: quote of the day, richie rich

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Should a movie star give out restaurant stars?

Grub caught up with Aldea’s George Mendes at last night’s “HTC Serves Up NYC” event, where he served Portuguese shrimp, bonito tuna rillette, and a bacalo a bras … but mostly, some sharp insight on the future of the Times‘ restaurant critic position. His recommendation? George Clooney. “He’s got a great presence; he knows food really well. Actually, it’s a tie between George Clooney and Wes Anderson.” Why so? “Wes Anderson loves food, he knows food, and he’s just a fantastic eater. A great person.” With respect to HTC mobiles, we also asked Mendes if he’s had any major tech disasters lately. “Oh, laptops have fallen into stockpots accidentally while they’re being strained … in the past, there have actually been people not knowing where they’re walking and falling, you know, hands- or feet-first into a stockpot.” Hopefully that wasn’t George Clooney, ’cause he’s got a column to write.

Related: Sam Sifton Officially Named The New York Times’ National Editor

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Filed Under: handsomeness, aldea, george clooney, george mendes, sifton

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