It's been a rough week for Jimmy's; customers crowded the East Village gastropub on Monday for a bacon, beer, and cheese festival when a fire marshal chased everybody out. (We were present, pontificating about bacon, but weren't given any explanation for what the problem was.) Jimmy's has been dark since then. As an Eater post today points out, a sign on the door indicates that the restaurant will open on Tuesday, May 20. But Jimmy says it might be as late as Wednesday, depending on the whims of the city's Buildings Department. "We were vacated because the landlord had not maintained a basement-side alley exit; there wasn't a clear way out for either us or the other tenants," he explains. The alley's been cleared out in anticipation of a hearing on Tuesday. We hope Jimmy reopens soon; we'd hate to see his secret chef cooking in a real kitchen at this point.

Jimmy's No. 43 Update: Reopening Tuesday [Eater]
Related: Jimmy's Secret Chef Performs Culinary Miracles in the East Village

The name Robert Mondavi may mean inexpensive California wine to a lot of people, but the vintner, who died today at the age of 94, was responsible for making Napa Valley known internationally as a great wine-making region. He was inducted into the CIA's Vintner's Hall of Fame in 2007, an honor Mondavi's wife called “a pearl in the crown of our family's winemaking history in the Napa Valley.”

Winemaker Robert Mondavi Dead at 94 [NYT]

Some of us who live in Brooklyn tend to think of our supermarkets more as burdens to be endured that boons to be appreciated. (If you ever looked in the meat aisle of the Ditmas Park Key Food, you’d know what we mean.) But let even a bad supermarket disappear, and you have a major blow to a community, as two stories in this week’s Brooklyn Paper show. Out in Bay Ridge, neighbors are petitioning against the closing of a Key Food on Third Avenue and 95th Street, which is slated to become a Walgreens. “We don’t need a pharmacy — we need a grocery store,” says one resident. “That property has been a grocery store for over 50 years, and it should stay a grocery store.” Meanwhile, over in Brooklyn Heights, a Gristedes closed by a fire is of such vital importance to the neighborhood that construction crews are working around the clock to get the place back online. “I hate dragging heavy stuff like a gallon of milk from Montague Street,” says a local. You can do without a dry cleaner, and you can do without a cool bar, but live somewhere where there’s no supermarket, and you’re in a tough spot, FreshDirect or no.

Key Food Fight
Gristedes Will Reopen [Brooklyn Paper]

We used to pen a column called Restroom Report, and sometimes on Fridays our mind still turns to crap. (Wait, that didn’t sound right — you know, we get pee on the brain. Wait.) Today is just such a day, and so we turn your attention to a restaurant in China that keeps twenty fish in its urinal trough. Wha-wha-WHAAT? And here we thought the fish tank in the men’s room at Tropical Billiards was trippy!

TSK! Chinese restaurant keep live fish.....in a URINAL! [Wabby]

It may not be as bad as Cindy McCain ripping off dessert recipes from the Food Network's Website, but Sfoglia owner Ron Suhanosky is getting some heat for doing the same with Mario Batali’s goat-cheese torta. According to The Boston Globe, Suhanosky did the dessert, which appears in The Babbo Cookbook, on The Martha Stewart Show. Suhanosky, for his part, is uncowed, saying, “How do they know Batali didn't take it from me? People can think what they want to think,” before then quickly reversing himself, and adding, “Everyone in this business uses other people's recipes.” Now there’s a ringing denial!

A Recipe for Bad Manners? [Boston Globe]

The famously stringent Park Slope Food Co-op is giving those who hate it one more reason to hate it and those who love it one more reason to love it by joining restaurants like the Waverly Inn and Gemma in ceasing the sale of bottled water (as The Brooklyn Paper points out, 30 million bottles end up in landfills every day, which wastes enough petroleum over the course of a year to fuel 100,000 cars). The paper asks whether the co-op is guilty of “hydro-hypocrisy,” since it didn’t bother looking for an environmentally sound water; the co-op responds that it’s less about environmentalism and more about an investment in New York City tap. Don’t look for Evian’s “palace bottle” there anytime soon.

Banned! Food Co-op no longer bottled up [Brooklyn Paper]

Ladies and gents, let us present to you Salon de Ning. Tonight, she replaces Pen-Top on the roof of the Hotel Peninsula. Ain’t she a beauty? Forecast calls for rain, but, as you can see from the following first photos, indoor seating abounds.

It’s a good thing that Allen & Delancey has all those candles there, because, according to the Observer’s Doree Shafrir, who wrote about it on her own blog, the lights went out last night and didn’t come back on for some time. This was probably all right with the various canoodling couples, but we feel for the sad sack who saved up the money to experience Neil Ferguson’s justly famous food, and then had to sit and gnaw on it in the dark. Of course, the outage might have allowed him to taste the food free from the sight of amorous trustifarians, which can take the edge off even the finest food.

Update: As Shafrir's post makes clear, Allen & Delancey did in fact eventually clear everybody out. The image of a man sitting in the dark eating Neil Ferguson's food was one we projected wishfully onto ourselves. Apparently, no one did it for more than a little while.

Electric Company [Doree Chronicles]

Had you been taking bets, circa 2000, which foodie Website would eventually be owned by CBS, only a Nostradamus (or rather, a Gastrodamus) would have picked Chowhound, a bare-bones, unmediated bulletin board where people compared notes about shawarma. But yesterday CBS bought Chowhound's parent CNET for $1.88 billion. On the Chowhound board, owner Jim Leff spoke out on the subject, playing both the corporate strategist (“we need more international penetration”) and also the insular Internet food geek (“What we don't need, however, is a broader slice of diners participating. A real flood of unsavvy diners could dilute the knowledge level”). The truth is that Chowhound has never been the same since it was absorbed by CNET's Chow property in 2006, and not just because of its notoriously difficult navigation and search issues. There are still great Chowhound posters and Chowhound threads — if we wanted to find the best new Taiwanese oyster pancakes in Flushing, it would still be our first stop. But the site is already so diffuse and depersonalized that big media ownership may actually help — or at least, not make it any worse.

CBS in $1.8B deal for online news, info site CNet [SF Gate via Eater SF]