September 2012

Casellula, Maison Kayser & Il Buco Alimentari e Vineria

You may not be surprised to learn that when it comes to what I eat, at any given moment, I can be a bit of a control freak. In fact I have a theory that most food people are control freaks: what better way to control what goes into your body than to become an expert on the subject? It’s rare to find a food person grabbing handfuls of snack food willy-nilly off a snack cart. Give a food person the opportunity to select his or own snack from a larger selection and a careful decision will be rendered. That makes us discerning, but also kind-of obnoxious in terms of going with the flow.

So lately, I’ve been going with the flow. The other night I met my friend Lauren for dinner and when she suggested a restaurant I’d never heard of–Casellula off 9th Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen–I said “sure.” Turns out that’s the best decision I’ve made in a long time.

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The Rachael Ray Garbage Bowl

The other night, I cooked (well, chopped) for the first time in the apartment where I’m staying on the Upper East Side. Since I was cooking for just myself, I figured a salad was the right move. There was a cucumber, there was a box of cherry heirloom tomatoes, half of a red onion (sliced thin), a red pepper and a yellow pepper. The dressing had balsamic vinegar, mustard, salt, pepper and olive oil. At the end, I crumbled blue cheese over everything. It was a good salad.

Only, while I was making it, I found it frustrating that the garbage can was a tiny one under the sink. I didn’t want to have to swivel and pull out the can to make the top go up ever time I wanted to throw away an onion peel or red pepper seeds. Which is when I recalled the famous Rachael Ray Garbage Bowl.

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Smorgasburg

It’s impossible to write about Williamsburg without using the word “hipster.” I’ll do my best.

On Saturday, I joined my friends Patty and Lauren and their gorgeous new baby Audra for a trip to the land of the bespeckled and heavily tattooed to consume hand-crafted foods along the water. This event, known as Smorgasburg, was something that just started as I left for L.A. last year. It’s got a lot to recommend it: fall weather, beautiful views, and some of the best food you can eat outside of a restaurant in New York.

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It’s The SECRETS OF THE BEST CHEFS Nationwide Book Tour (Celebrity Chefs! Lavish Dinners! Me!)

[All of the pictures in this post by the brilliant Elizabeth Leitzell]

It’s rare that life offers you a reason to pinch yourself. That reason came on Friday when my cookbook publicists Allison and Molly presented me with the full breakdown of my SECRETS OF THE BEST CHEFS book tour. There’s a dinner at Eataly hosted by Lidia Bastianich (which is almost totally sold out already, that’s why you should follow me on Twitter!), a conversation about recipes (what are they? who owns them?) with Amanda Hesser and Jonathan Waxman at the Greenlight book store in Brooklyn, a dinner at Nancy Silverton’s Mozza in L.A., an afterhours dinner at Tartine in San Francisco prepared by the extraordinary chef Samin Nosrat, a dinner at Hugh Acheson’s Empire State South in Atlanta and a dinner at Renee Erickson’s widely praised Walrus and the Carpenter in Seattle. Do you see why I’m pinching myself? What follows is the full tour breakdown with dates and links and phone numbers so you can make your reservations. To be honest, I’m most excited to meet all of you nice people out there who read what I write every day… so please come out and say hi!

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Pizzeria Mozza’s Coconut Sorbet Pie

Despite the fact that I’ve been in New York for a week now, and that I’ve eaten many wonderful meals so far, the dish I can’t get out of my head is a dish I had in L.A. just before I left. True, I already mentioned it in my newsletter (subscribe here!) and true I’ve written enough about Pizzeria Mozza on this site already it may as well become a Mozza fan page. (It was, after all, my pick for #1 restaurant in L.A.) But this dessert! Let me tell you about this dessert…

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Rosh Hashanah Dinner at Kutsher’s Tribeca

As life was ending in the Catskills, my life was just beginning. I was only a kid when my parents drove my brother and me upstate to experience the splendor (or former splendor) of the great bastions of Jewish entertainment. We stayed in hotels like The Concord and Kutsher’s where the carpeting was well-worn and the smell was a pungent mixture of mothballs and boiled eggs. I remember a lunch in a sunny dining room with faded pink tablecloths and a plate of refrigerated gefilte fish plopped down in front of us, my dad teaching me how to cover it extravagantly with spicy horseradish to mask its nothingness. We saw Frankie Valli perform. We saw The Turtles. An artist named Morris Katz painted landscapes in the lobby. These memories circled around a vague mist in my head as I joined my parents for dinner this past Monday night to celebrate Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) at Manhattan’s resurrection of this time and place: Kutsher’s Tribeca.

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Down With Communal Tables!

[Image via I’m Only Here For The Food]

At long last, after weeks of waiting, we’re going to that great restaurant everyone’s been talking up. We’ve pinched pennies, we’ve cleared calendars, we’ve read the reviews online and the menu and strategized endlessly about how and what we’ll order. Only: this place doesn’t take reservations, so we’re showing up early and hoping for the best. Here comes the hostess now, she says she can seat us right away. We follow her past tiny tables, where pitying eyes peer at us over elongated menus, to an extended piece of wood surrounded by chairs and covered with half-finished plates and half-sipped glasses of wine that all reverberate with the noise of countless voices chattering at high speed. This, we soon learn, is the dreaded communal table and before we can express our willingness to wait for a two-top or a four-top or any top that’s not a communal-top, the hostess drops the menus and flees.

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How I Keep Going To The Gym

There was a tiny period, at the end of 2011 and the start of 2012, when, upon joining a gym for the 300th time, I blogged about this latest attempt at exercise on my Not Food Blog. I wrote about the advantages of a treadmill vs. an elliptical machine (the treadmill forces you to run), what to think about while exercising (the answer: not exercising), and my fear of quitting.

Then, not-so-shockingly, I stopped. People who were reading these dispatches probably thought, “Ah, he quit.” And, based on my history of quitting gyms, these people would have a very legitimate reason to believe that. Only, I didn’t quit the gym, I just quit blogging about it. And, more than 9 months later, I’m still going and–weirdly–kind of enjoying it. And I’m starting to see changes, like the change in my arm you might notice in the photo above. That’s a strong arm! How did I manage that? Here, then, is my advice for those of you who, like me, always quit gyms but want to learn how to stick to it (a pretty essential thing to know if you enjoy eating like I do!).

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