In a random but oddly enjoyable interview with Harold Dieterle, the Perilla chef and Top Chef laureate tells Gridskipper he loves Bangkok for its duck and deep-tissue massages — but not that kind.

Debriefer: Top Chef Harold Dieterle [Gridskipper]

Don’t get us wrong: We like mirror balls, cramped apartments, and warm bottles of cheap tequila as much as the next person. But if we were in the money? And New Year’s Eve were to be truly a blowout? We would turn our back on everyone we know to get to even the least extravagant of the New Year’s Eve celebrations offered at the ten restaurants in our New Year’s Eve guide. And while our New Year’s Day repast will probably be dehydrated hash browns and a sense of profound remorse, we would hit the places in our New Year’s Day brunch guide too. That is, if we had any sense.

Flawless First Night
Begin With Brunch

The hardworking listings department at nymag.com has just added a stellar new feature: recipes! Our extensive database includes dishes drawn from New York’s finest restaurants. Get Laurent Tourondel’s instructions for chestnut-stuffed guinea hens; serve Tom Colicchio’s bruschetta of clam ragout; and assemble your own tartlets, just like they do at Gramercy Tavern. Search by ingredient, cuisine, type of dish, and more. Now there’s no excuse to eat out.

nymag.com's Recipe Finder

If there’s one thing you can count on Gael Greene to deliver, it’s tales of seduction by food — and her latest post has it in spades. This time, it’s from the male point of view, as Gael offers a “service feature on seduction,” courtesy of her friend Francesco, “the teflon Romeo, in and out of love constantly, an outright chauvinist pig, in fact, but as a pal, really fun, full of zest and unfailingly loyal.” Francesco’s advice includes the following helpful tips:

Tangy Tart Hot & Sweet. That’s the name of model turned Top Chef dictatress Padma Lakshmi’s new cookbook, and that’s just how she behaved before swooning fans last night at her Strand book signing. After donning “serious” glasses to read food-related mini-memoirs from the book, she told the crowd that saying “Please pack your knives and go” to Top Chef’s weekly loser was “the hardest part of my job” … and divulged that men often ask her to say it to them in a dominatrix-y sort of way. (“It creeps me out!” she insisted.) She said the show had knocked down any remaining foodie limits she might have had: “I’ll put anything in my mouth once.” Oh, Padma!

Thankfully, Lakshmi kept her innuendo PG-13 as she told us her top cheap eats in New York City:

Chefs tend to be notoriously bad husbands and boyfriends, and the reason is obvious: They’re at work all night, they love to pop corks and hit the dummy pipe, and there are always foxy waitresses, servers, and even diners eager for the “fourth course.” But don’t despair if you’re stuck with one of these scoundrels. There’s a blog for you. It’s called Desperate ChefsWives of NYC. Essentially a one-woman support group written anonymously, it’s filled with details of her personal life, from her man's addiction to plastic wrap to her discovery of other women in the same predicament via Google. "So many other women have e-mailed me who are in the same situation," the blogger tells us. "They say, 'I can't believe you said that, because I say it all the time.' Some lady in Ohio wrote asking me if she should leave her boyfriend. There are a lot of us out there."

Desperation aside, the author's own domestic situation seems rather stable, which kind of detracts from the site's entertainment value, you know? What it really needs is more sob stories! We want a blog that reads like a chef-y telenova! But given what goes on in those naughty chef circles, it's only a matter of time. We'll wait, breath baited.

Also, the real question: Who's her husband? What chef has inspired his wife to blog? Check out the site for yourself; your guesses (and yes, we expect you to have some) in the comments below, please.

Desperate ChefsWives of NYC

Today’s eGullet kerfuffle on the riches of New Jersey cuisine is exactly the kind of thing that makes us love New York all the more. eGullet co-founder Steven Shaw started a thread in which he berates New Yorkers for their neglect of the Jerz's fine food: The argument goes that with the Japanese market in Edgewater (hm), Newark's inherent awesomeness (um), and the fact that 60 percent of New Yorkers have a car (wha?), we've got no excuse not to visit our neighbors. His conclusion, therefore, is that New York foodies are “lazy” and “lack a fundamental element of cultural literacy about food in the New York metro area.” We're not going to say anyone's got a chip on his shoulder, but … wow.

The responses poured in — but true to our reputation for self-obsession, the only part of Shaw’s post that made any impression on New Yorkers was his rather dubious assertion that a majority of us own cars. As one commenter put it:

On the eve of Momofuku Noodle Bar moving its base of operations up the street, NPR’s feature today on the “fifth sense” of umami has a certain timeliness. (In the ramen business, every day is umami day.) The Japanese word for “yummy” is used to describe the taste of meat, animal fats, cheese, dashi, and other foods in which glutamates have broken down — it reflects the “savory” sensation that everybody likes in chicken soup, ramen broth, and other foods not notably salty, sweet, bitter, or sour. The feature is a kind of combination of Science on the March, with Escoffier standing in for Madame Curie, and a Paul Harvey piece: “and that flavor, that scientists said was just a figment, was… umami. Now you know the rest of the story.”

Sweet, Sour, Salty, Bitter… and Umami [NPR]

Since the birth of Grub Street, we've been aware of the need for some kind of interactive feedback. And it's not that we weren't listening; we just didn't do anything about it. But now we have, and after a herculean investment of time, labor, and funds, we are officially unveiling our spanking-new commenting system. Yes, all of your “worst post ever!” and “I saw Daniel Maurer drinking ouzo at 4 o'clock yesterday morning” insights can now be shared with the world, for the low, low price of registering and typing them out.

Nick Tosches, a writer best known for his books about the tormented inner lives of Jerry Lee Lewis, Dean Martin, and Sonny Liston, seems on the surface to be a weird choice to write about Tokyo’s Tsukiji seafood market and the world sushi trade. But Tosches’s article in this month’s issue of Vanity Fair should be required reading for anyone with even a passing interest in the subject. From its portrait of the market, which handles literally 4,000 times the amount of fish as the New Fulton Fish Market in the Bronx, to the elevation of bluefin tuna from its once-lowly status as an uncommercial “garbage fish,” to Tosches’s own twisted desire to eat the weirdest-looking thing he can find, the piece is wildly informative and has that slightly bent Tosches touch too.

If You Knew Sushi [Vanity Fair]