Murphy: In need of caffeine.

In watching the Sundance screening of Shut Up and Play the Hits, the documentary of LCD Soundsystem’s final show ever at Madison Square Garden, it is clear that James Murphy loves three things: music, his French bulldog, and coffee. He loves coffee with a passion unmatched by pretty much any somewhat famous person besides David Lynch, who has his own coffee line and has been known for putting rants about the virtues of coffee versus tea in movies like Inland Empire. In fact, when Stephen Colbert asked Murphy what he wanted to do now that he was retiring from rock stardom, he said, “I like to make coffee.”

Much of the documentary’s footage of Murphy at home has him crouched by an espresso machine, and the film’s British directors, Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace, insist the portrayal is pretty accurate. “I make a lot of coffee,” Murphy told us in an interview after the movie’s premiere. “For my birthday, my girlfriend got me a training course with the world champion. That’s what I’m going to do when I get back to London.” Not only that, Murphy is working on his own espresso blend. He plans to “just go to a roaster who lives near me and start tweaking beans and temperatures.” Why? “I thought it would be fun. I have beans that I like. I like this sometimes and that sometimes. Sometimes in the middle.”

Murphy will only distribute this special blend at a single shop, but as for what shop and what particular beans, Murphy can’t say. “I can’t talk about that because I’m still in negotiations,” he said, laughing. “I love that we’re here and talking about a film, but I’m like, ‘I can’t really talk about the coffee.’”

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Filed Under: sundance dispatch, coffee buzz, james murphy

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His real thoughts on those waiters.

Some leftovers are just too good to throw away; in fact, they’re even better a day or two later (especially when a contentious lawsuit is involved). Such is the case with the Mario Batali interview from this week’s magazine. Here are a few Molto moments that were too hefty to fit into print, but too juicy to leave on the chopping block.

Any kinks [filming The Chew] so far?
The way I perceive our kinks is that we’re all so excited we tend to talk a little extra, like, we need to let everyone finish their thoughts. And it’s working.

Are you at certain restaurants more than others?
I’m at Otto in the daytime. I’m at Babbo, Lupa, Del Posto. Esca less because Dave doesn’t really need my help. Casa Mono, I go there for dinner. They don’t really need my help. It’s small. They don’t really have room for me in the kitchen. But I go there just to hang out and have a good time. And Eataly, I’m in and out of that two or three times a day.

What do you do when you go in?
I walk in. At this point in my career, I can tell a lot of how the restaurant is going just by the general calm or lack thereof in the kitchens. You can tell by how it smells. There’s a general good smell and rarely is there something I think smells weird. Not spoiled but maybe burnt, maybe overcooked, maybe over-reduced, and you can smell that in the air.

And then you’re doing a CW restaurant drama.
Yes, a scripted show called Chops with a guy named Captain Mauzner, who wrote Factory Girl. We have this scenario in the restaurant world in New York City.

Are you feeding him stories?
I’m allowing him to come in much like Bill Buford did and see the real thing, see what’s going on. And he’ll run some things by me.

What drama would you like it to convey?
The real reason that drew me into the restaurant experience when I was in college and I got my first job at Stuff Your Face in New Brunswick, New Jersey, was the idea that something’s rolling at you and you know it, and it’s the dinner rush, and you’re working together with people that may or may not love each other every minute of the day, but need each other desperately at that very moment, and when you’re working together and you work through the dinner rush and at the end of the day there’s a kind of relaxation.

What’s going on with the lawsuits?
Well, in New York City right now, there’s a group of people right now that are talking to waiters and cooks and the whole staff, and we’re just trying to figure out what they want and we’re trying to make sure we’re in compliance with the law. There’s a couple of ways to look at it.

Joe got slammed on the Internet for what he said in the Post.
Well, when was the last time the Internet gave you an uplifting story about somebody like me? The Internet doesn’t love me. People love me. Most of them do. But the nine people that write on the bathroom wall that we call the Internet have something to say bad about me and Joe no matter what we do. That’s okay. We’re all right with that.

How far is it from resolution?
I would resolve it tomorrow if I could figure it out. I mean, you know, it’s been going on for a year.

What’s the hold up?
Everyone’s playing liar’s poker. They’re trying to figure out the highest number they can get for us and we’re trying to figure out the lowest number we can pay them while not hurting anybody and not breaking the law. It’s about compliance, at the end of the day. It’s the tip standard. The real answer is that in the industry, all the waiters know that they’re not working for the standard minimum wage. They know they get what’s called the “waiter wage” and that they augment that by getting tips. Apparently there’s a part of the legal handbook — which, if we’re wrong, then we’re wrong and we’re going to deal with it — there’s a part of the code of the law that says that you actually have to tell them, “By the way, do you personally know that you’re not working for minimum wage, that we’re making it up with tips?” And if we didn’t do that because we just assumed that everyone knew that, and we’re wrong, then we’re going to have to deal with it.

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Filed Under: unfiltered, law suits, mario batali

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Hogwarts, in cake form.

Last night marked the New York premiere of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, and Food Network’s Duff Goldman was on hand for the event. The reason? His bakery has been making cakes for the various Harry movie premieres over the years — the latest is a re-creation of a half-destroyed Hogwarts that involves LED lights and smoke machines. Grub Street caught up with him to talk about it, Goldman’s self-professed Potter fandom, and why people are scared to actually eat his cakes.

Describe the cake for us.
Well, the first cake we ever made for a party for a Harry Potter premiere was Hogwarts. This cake is also Hogwarts, but we’ve also grown with Harry Potter; we’ve been making cakes for these guys almost the whole series. We made one of the train that had steam coming out of it. Well, this one is Hogwarts done so much better, but it’s totally destroyed, because it’s like that scene where Voldemort blows it up. So it’s like that really almost painful moment where Hogwarts gets destroyed. We love Harry Potter. We’re all huge, huge fans, and for us, we’re definitely going to cry. It’s going to be very sad. But this is a great way for us to get closure, because Harry Potter kind of made us get better at what we do. You know, because they sort of pushed us and pushed us to do better and better work, it made us get really good. And so looking at the cake we made tonight versus the one that we made for them the first time, it’s amazing to see how much better we got.

Does it taste better, too?
No, they’ve always tasted good.

What’s the flavor?
The actual cake that’s in there is a pound cake, but then we made a bunch of cakes to serve, because there’s a lot of people at this party. So we made pumpkin-chocolate-chip, a cardamom-pistachio; we made a peanut-butter-chocolate, a carrot cake, and a strawberry shortcake because it’s summertime.

Was it easier to make a cake of destroyed Hogwarts since it’s, you know, destroyed?
No, it was actually harder. It’s one thing to destroy it. Then it’s just destroyed cake.

Did you just make a cake and smash it up?
No! This one is all burnt. It’s little scorch marks. So you basically have to make the cake and then you have to add all this stuff to it, like it’s been burning. It’s got over 120 LED lights on it that are all on different circuits so they’re blinking at different moments, so it looks like it’s on fire, and then it’s got smoke machines that go through it, so smoke is billowing out of the towers. It’s really cool.

Is anybody going to eat that cake?
Yeah, they better! It is cake! It’s eating-cake! It’s good! I hope they eat it. I mean, I’m going to cut it. The thing is, usually at these things once you cut into them, people will eat it. Like, people are so afraid to cut it. But if I’m there and I just take a knife and I cut it, we’re good.

Did you get into Harry Potter because you got the gig, or were you always a fan?
I’ve been a Harry Potter fan since college. My dad gave me the first book when I was a freshman. He was like, “Hey, check this out.” And I was like, “This book is awesome.”

How are you going to mourn the ending of the series?
I’m going to really, really hope that J.K. Rowling writes more books, like, about Dumbledore as a kid or something like that. Or I might just write fan-fic myself. Or I might just keep reading these ones over and over again. It’s kind of like Lord of the Rings — I just keep reading them over and over and over again.

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Filed Under: interviews, duff goldman, harry potter, sugar high

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We bet he orders the Lionheart.

Last night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s gala dinner honoring Geoffrey Rush’s performance in Diary of a Madman, we inadvertently discovered that Rush’s fellow Australian Baz Luhrmann is a regular at Roberta’s. Normally, when we go to BAM galas and ask the famous folk about the last time they’ve been in Brooklyn, we get some amusingly shame-faced response about their busy schedules and how nice BAM was to have sent a car to Manhattan to pick them up. Luhrmann, on the other hand, could work for Marty Markowitz.

“I was in Bushwick recently at a fantastic pizza restaurant I love out there. It’s called … ” he began, then drew a blank and turned to his wife, production designer Catherine Martin. “C.M., what’s that crazy great, awesome, brilliant pizza restaurant in Bushwick where we go to?” Roberta’s, she said. “Roberta’s! Where they grow their own organics,” Luhrmann went on. “It’s just awesome and we have a great time and they grow all their stuff out of the back. And my kids go to school here and I really like the fact that they see where their food comes from. And most of my team are in Brooklyn. So I’m there a lot.” We continued to pepper him with questions about his upcoming adaptation of The Great Gatsby, which he answered in circles, with hints and caginess.

But he seemed so enthused about food and restaurants in general that it was obvious he should try his hand at a food movie. “Funny you should say that … ” he said, his eyebrows raised and a smirk starting to form. We began to ask another question, but he laughed and stopped us right there. “Uh-uh. I didn’t say anything!”

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Filed Under: fyi, bam!, baz luhrmann, brooklyn, brooklyn academy of music, bushwick, roberta’s

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The master chefs.

Shocking but true: French master chefs Joël Robuchon, Guy Savoy, Alain Ducasse, Jean-Georges Vongrichten, and François Payard have never spent a night in a kitchen cooking a meal ensemble … until last week. On Wednesday, the longtime friends gladly joined forces to raise money for the James Beard Foundation’s annual benefit gala and auction at The Four Seasons, which was being labeled as a “historic” meal. Keep reading for a report from the dinner, interviews with the chefs, and a look at everything they served.

The chefs — Eric Ripert and Daniel Boulud both were invited and had scheduling conflicts, by the way — have all eaten each other’s food; whenever they’re in town, they usually stop by each other’s restaurants. (Savoy and Robuchon are particular fans of Le Bernardin, and Ducasse always likes it when his French brothers gather at DBGB.) But cooking with each other and collaborating on a menu with that many egos was something new. “Everybody has his own specialty and wants to showcase his best dish ever,” said Vongerichten. “I wanted to do fish and they said, ‘You can’t do fish. You have to do meat.’ And I had to say, ‘Okay.’ ” Vongerichten’s acquiescence likely has a lot to do with him being one of two “spring chickens” of the group. (Payard is the youngest.) As a sous-chef in Paris, he’d stayed up late nights studying the books of the elder three. “That was my goal, always, to be one of them. I’ve always admired them, since I was learning the craft,” he said. “So today to be with them is, ‘All right!’”

Savoy, Ducasse, and Robuchon seemed less intimidated. “It’s a team,” said Savoy. “It’s a team for good food. It’s very joyful. It’s not a competition tonight. It’s like a sport, a team that play a match for a good time.”

Robuchon was up first with an elaborate starter made of potatoes with shaved white truffles and a foie gras carpaccio. Speaking through a translator, he told Grub Street that as soon as he found out the event would be in November, he knew he wanted to use white truffles since this is the best month for that delicacy, and he liked the idea of pairing one of the most expensive ingredients in the world with humble potatoes. The dish was so complex, he moved his team of French Culinary Institute students to the basement, where they could plate with plenty of space and plenty of quiet.

Following him would be Savoy with his signature artichoke soup with black truffle and a layered brioche with mushrooms and truffles. Payard had tasted it and was gushing already: “It’s so incredible, even if it’s a soup. This one, it give you an excitement that you never have. And it’s not about crazy things. You think, ‘Wow! That was artichoke? I can’t believe it.’” Next was Ducasse with a dish of braised eggplant with smoked ricotta and a gratin boulangère of porcini mushrooms and fall vegetable that he’d crafted through visits to the Greenmarket just before menus were printed. Then came Vongerichten’s grilled rack of lamb with a glaze of smoke ancho and Thai chiles, king oyster mushrooms, and broccoli rabe, or as Vongerichten called it, “a very sexy dish.” And finally, Payard, with Greenmarket pears roasted in brown butter and glazed in maple syrup atop a thick layer of pastry and topped with vanilla ice cream, almond cream, and salted pecans. Payard, too, had aimed to please his fellow chefs. “They are always making fun of pastry chefs, that we are making chocolate mousse,” he said. He wanted to make the kind of simple dessert that non-pastry-chefs like to make for themselves, something that was less of a show-stopper than a natural end to the meal and fit in with the others’ sensibilities. So he made several trips to the Greenmarket and just happened to find ripe pears — a rarity in New York. “I was trying to make a dessert more on their line than just making something extravagant and then they don’t relate to it. We wanted to show them that it was all about the ingredients, and that even a simple pear can make an incredible dessert like tonight,” he explained. “And now they can’t make fun of me for chocolate decoration.”

Soon, they headed off to the kitchen to help each other out and watch and taste. (Ducasse, declaring that there were too many cooks in the kitchen, opted only to taste.) Robuchon needed extra hands, as did Savoy, while Payard insisted that only those with a delicate touch do his plating. “Pastry is delicate and cooking is more rough,” he said, laughing. “I need somebody with two right hands and no left hands.”

The next day, they would go off on their own. Savoy wanted to get a “big, big steak” and baked potatoes from Mesa Grill. “I love Bobby Flay!” he said. And Robuchon wanted to hit up electronics stores; he admitted that he loves an In-n-Out burger, but that shopping is his real guilty pleasure. He has a dozen cell phones, five computers, and a handful of iPads. “Today, I went to look at the new Samsung Tablet. It was fascinating! The new Windows cell phone as well.”

As for the post-meal festivities, that was one area in which Vongerichten didn’t feel intimidated. “We’re going to ABC [Kitchen] first, and then, who knows?” he said, explaining that he was automatically in charge of all after-parties when it comes to this group. “I wouldn’t take those guys to any other restaurant or any other chef. They would yell at me. They would never talk to me for the rest of my life. But maybe we take them to the Boom Boom Room. After all, it is my town.”

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Filed Under: foodievents, alain ducasse, francois payard, james beard foundation, jean-georges vongerricheten, joel robuchon

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“I want to welcome you to the first time I’ve ever done a demo in a four-star restaurant,” said Mario Batali the other night at Del Posto, as he prepared to show a roomful of guests how to make lobster salad alla Catalana with tomato and celery. “Although the Michelin guide didn’t agree, I think we’ve got a great place.” It was just a coincidence that “Magic Martinis & Mario” — an annual benefit dinner for the Mario Batali Foundation at which the chef demos each dish before serving it — conflicted with a party to launch the 2011 Michelin guide, which had that day declined to give Del Posto two stars after having demoted it to one star the year before. Not that the conflict really mattered to Batali. “They didn’t invite me,” he said, laughing. Del Posto is the first Italian restaurant to get four stars in the Times in 35 years, but it’s still a one-star restaurant in the Michelin guide. It didn’t even make the Zagat top 50.

Batali and business partner Joseph Bastianich were just trying to focus on raising money for underprivileged kids, along with friends Jimmy Fallon, Stanley Tucci, Isabella Rossellini, and Anthony Bourdain, but they didn’t hide their feelings. “I’m slightly disappointed,” said Bastianich of being denied a second Michelin star. “It’s important to us and we’d love to have it, and we didn’t get it. So we’ll try harder for next year. I don’t know what happened; I thought it all went swimmingly, but apparently not. I think the restaurant’s evolved. It takes a little time. Maybe they’ll take another year to appreciate what we do. We’re hoping for the best.”

Batali was taking solace in Eleven Madison Park also being denied a second star. “The Michelin guide guys … I don’t know what they’re looking for,” he said. “The Breslin and the Spotted Pig and Eleven Madison and Del Posto all have one star. If I came from out of town and just booked tables at those, I’d think the book was a little kooky. Because it’s entirely different experiences. That said, I respect it. All I want to do is get a second Michelin star back for Del Posto and a Michelin star for Babbo.”

Losing one star last year stung, but it did prompt the Del Posto team to make some serious changes. They got rid of a number of tables and the less-expensive café. They had a plan to get that star back. But Michelin’s Jean-Luc Naret has said the food is not yet worthy. So now what’s the plan? “I thought I had been executing it! I thought we were doing it!” said Batali, laughing but clearly frustrated. “This is a fully evolved restaurant. This is what we want it to be. You know, maybe the Michelin guys got here early in the year when we were still doing the transition. So, you know, the Michelin guide needs to come back. In Europe, you don’t open to what you want in stars. You’ve just got to keep doing it and doing it and doing it again. So I’m sure if we merit it, they’ll give it to us next year.”

As for his second goal of getting a single star for Babbo, Batali knows what he has to do. “I think that maybe they really want me to turn down my music, which is not going to happen for a Michelin star,” he said. “If that’s why we’re not going to get it, we’re not going to get it. It’s a loud place.” Sometimes, he explained, he had to come to terms with his vision for Babbo being more important than getting in the Michelin guide. “I mean, when you walk into Babbo, there is a palpable, intense energy, and if that is counter to what it’s supposed to be, then there’s nothing I can do.”

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Filed Under: mario batali, charity events, del posto, michelin

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“I think it’s brilliant. I think my kids would love spaghetti tacos. In fact, if I didn’t have to come to this event tonight, I was going to go home and make my kids spaghetti meatball tacos. I would put a bolognese with lots of tomatoes and mini meatballs. I think soft taco, not hard. If I wanted to do a Mexicali riff, I’d do soft tacos. You could riff and do branzino tacos with arugula salad and Tuscan olive oil and avocados and soft corn tortillas.” —Joe Bastianich at last night’s Magic Martinis & Mario event, coming out in favor of spaghetti tacos.

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Filed Under: quote of the day, joe bastianich, spaghetti tacos

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On Sunday, a looser and, frankly, rounder Emeril Lagasse will debut the Emeril Lagasse Show (8 p.m./7 central), a variety show for ION (formerly PAX) that looks suspiciously very much like his old Food Network gig, Emeril Live. The new show has guest stars like Martha Stewart, whom Emeril quizzes about Renaissance paintings, and Sherri Shepherd, an old friend, who helps Emeril apply edible spa treatments to volunteers from the audience. Sammy Hagar will stop by later in the season to drink tequila and judge a tortilla-tossing contest. There’s also something called a BAM box that provides prizes for things like being the first audience member to figure out how to strip an ear of corn. But the show might need its host to kick it up a notch.

How did you end up working with ION?
They loved the idea of sort of “not an Emeril Live format,” but that’s what a lot of viewers and a lot of fans loved. And the live Emeril had a ten-year run, which was fabulous. I think I shot 1,500 shows of that show.

What happened with you and the Food Network?
Production from where we started to where we ended got very expensive. They had certainly enough shows in the can to do what they needed to do, and they sort of stopped production. Certainly in television, nothing lasts forever.

What did you discover in your time off?
I really enjoy doing television.

That’s what you discovered?
It kind of puts a smile on your face knowing that you’ve touched a lot of people and maybe made them a better cook. I think I’ve made people better cooks along the way.

You’ve seen this?
Absolutely. I think that as opposed to ten years ago, people are just in a whole different food perspective. I think it’s kind of neat to think that maybe I had just a little to do with that.

A variety show didn’t work too well for Jay Leno. Are you taking any lessons from that?
No, I’m just kind of in my own little world.

Any new catchphrases on the new show?
No, just kind of what I’ve been doing.

So, saying “BAM!” a lot?
I don’t constantly do that just to do that.

You ought to come up with a fun new phrase.
Give it to me; I’ll give you credit for it.

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Filed Under: food tv, emeril lagasse, ermeril lagasse show

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Jean-Georges Vongerichten premiered his new restaurant at the Mark Hotel last night for a Chanel dinner in honor of Vanessa Paradis for Rouge Coco. The chef served 140 people a meal including pumpkin ravioli, grilled black sea bass, and Parmesan-crusted organic chicken. He spoke to Jada Yuan about the lure of hotel restaurants, the timeline for his upcoming ABC Kitchen restaurant, and why locavores are akin to time travelers.

When is the Mark restaurant opening?
Probably a couple weeks from now. The restaurant was finished yesterday. They gave me the key yesterday. We threw a party tonight. So it’s been pretty intense, serving 140 people the first night. Now we have to test the food, work out all the kinks, make sure the flavors are right, etcetera, etcetera. We have friends and family the 18th, 19th, 20th, then hopefully a party for the industry.

How is this different from your other restaurants?
Every restaurant is different. Already the ambiance is totally different. We are on the Upper East Side, so we try to do something for everybody. We have some pizzas on the menu, some pastas; we have a raw bar with Champagne and oysters. My flavors, the combinations are mine, but it’ll be different. We’re open breakfast, lunch, and dinner because of the hotel. We’ll pamper the guests upstairs, pamper the neighborhood, pamper anyone who comes in. We’ll pamper everybody!

What’s the appeal of opening in a hotel?
Hotels are the ultimate pampering. When you’re in a restaurant, you’re there for two or three hours. When you’re in a hotel, you stay overnight, a couple days. You get to take care of people up in their room, for breakfast. For me, the hotel is the ultimate pampering.

What are you most excited about on the menu?
I’m excited about all the pasta, because it’s different. We did a pasta with buckwheat. Not like a soba, but a buckwheat fettuccine. We added some clams, some shrimps, some sea urchins. It’s almost like a healthy pasta, but not. It’s almost like a vongole, with lots of seafood, but we added buckwheat.

How hands-on are you?
Every single dish. For me, you know, opening up a restaurant, I have to be here for three months and watch over every single dish, and then I give it to other people to repeat it, and then I watch the consistency.

And then you take a vacation?
No, no, no. There’s no vacation. Because there’s always a better restaurant opening next door. Usually it takes about six months to put a restaurant together. In the beginning, everyone has to see and everyone has an opinion, but after three months you can settle in and know what the food is going to be. Here it is very light. Very light.

How do you train the staff?
Tomorrow, half the staff sits down and the other half is cooking and serving for them, and then they switch. So we are trying amongst us until we have the right flavor down, you know, the right movement. Because, you know, when the restaurant actually opens, we will have 150 people, so we need to coordinate. Everybody is very receptive. They want to learn, they want to see, they want to taste — because they are the ambassadors of the food. They are the ones talking to the customers about it, doing the sale.

In the kitchen we are working on the flavors, the combinations. On our menu, altogether, we have about 60 new dishes. We’re only going use about 30, half of it. So we’re going to take the best ones and the others, use them for next time, for next season. But it’s tough to open in the wintertime. You have to use root vegetables. The palettes of flavor are kind of limited. In the spring you have asparagus, rhubarb, those things. Opening in February is kind of challenging, but I like it. I love a challenge.

What’s going on with ABC Kitchen?
We pushed it back another month. This one was late, the other one was early. I was like, “Guys, there’s only one me!” We’re definitely going to open up there soon.

How will you know when you’re ready to open ABC Kitchen?
We’re training a whole team of waiters, the chef, the whole team in the kitchen. But I want to focus on this one for the next two weeks and get it off the ground, and then we’ll look to that. Secretly, I want to push ABC until I can get asparagus on the menu, and ramps. I want it to be in springtime so we can get ramps and morels, rhubarb. You have to follow the seasons. But it’s so great, even the dishwasher is green, and the soap we are using there, the silverware — we bought everything on eBay. Everything is recycled. The plates were made in Connecticut by a lady there. Everything is done by local artists. We bought nothing new.

Now you have to make all your other restaurants that way.
We are. A little bit more local every day. It’s amazing, we found somebody making soy sauce in New York State, homemade soy sauce. A lot of people are approaching us, contacting us: “Oh, I do this. I do that.” It’s amazing. Even the liquor is local. We have whiskey and vodka from the Hudson Valley. Local veal. There’s so much going on right now. All these artisans. It’s amazing. It’s like we’re going back in time a little.

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Filed Under: openings, abc kitchen, back of the house, jean georges vongerichten, the mark

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Why was Thomas Keller himself catering the announcement of a new art project by Jeff Koons at the artist’s studio last night? “BMW,” Keller said. “That’s my only connection here. It’s the ultimate driving machine.” The announcement was that Koons would follow in the steps of Alexander Calder, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol in painting the seventeenth BMW Art Car. Keller is in town to work with Per Se and head up the team of judges narrowing down sixteen chef teams to the single American representative to the Bocuse d’Or in Paris next year. But really, he said, he’d come to serve mini-BLTs with truffle, frozen foie gras, and cones filled with crème fraîche and topped with raw salmon that night simply because he loves his car (and, well, we’re sure he got some sort of compensation).

The second car the chef ever bought, in 1977, was a 1978 BMW 320i. He restored it three years ago and says “it stays in the garage.” His “everyday car” is a BMW five-series station wagon. Sadly, he has never gone drag racing on the West Side Highway, and as a Californian, doesn’t want to weigh in on Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed salt regulation. But he did say that Per Se chef de cuisine, Jonathan Benno, left the building on Friday to start work on his new Lincoln Center restaurant with the Patina Restaurant Group. His replacement is Eli Kaimeh, formerly an executive sous-chef, and Keller seemed completely calm about the change: “Eli has been there since day one. Jonathan has been grooming Eli for the last eighteen months.” Any changes expected? “No, it’s going to be the same exquisite food we’ve always done.”

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Filed Under: personalities, bmw, eli kaimeh, jeff koons, jonathan benno, per se, thomas keller

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“My husband will love that kind of dirty-whore cheese.” —Maggie Gyllenhaal, buying Pecorino Gregoriano for Peter Sarsgaard at Bklyn Larder. [NYM]

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Filed Under: quote of the day, bklyn larder, in the magazine, maggie gyllenhaal, peter sarsgaard

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“Counter, Tagine — it isn’t really vegetarian, but it has great vegetarian dishes — Josie’s uptown, and Angelica Kitchen.” —Natalie Portman names her favorite vegetarian restaurants Monday night at the Gotham Independent Film Awards

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Filed Under: celebrity settings, natalie portman, vegeterian

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