Justin Smillie was fired as chef at E.U. on Wednesday. Owner Jason Hennings blames the departure on Smillie's unwillingness to cut costs. “After six months of 45 percent food costs in a recession, Justin paid more respect to the Greenmarket than to the restaurant.” Smillie, who had replaced Akhtar Nawab, took his entire staff with him this week. An interim crew is running the restaurant, and Hennings has yet to name a new chef. He's not too worried about that, though. “E.U. was never intended to be a chef-driven concept. It’s more about paying homage to traditional European cookery.” A call to Smillie reached a full voice mailbox. Smillie did enthuse about the greenmarket as recently as last month in an interview with Shiftdrink: "In market season, which just started right now, I’m usually at the green market four to five days a week—between Union Square, Brooklyn; I hit Abington Square on Saturdays. We’re all over the place... I think my cooking relies heavily on my relationship with that, I mean, it doesn’t get any fresher than that." No, it doesn't. But it does get cheaper, sad to say.

In what might be the most blatant act of Haute Barnyard marketing yet, Tocqueville has introduced a new Greemmarket menu (paired with “organic, sustainable, or biodynamic” wines, naturally), and when you buy it, you get your very own Greenmarket bag. Because, after being inspired by the asparagus salad, wild-ramp-and-English-pea risotto, and salmon in lovage broth, you are bound to feel impelled to run down to the market and start buying your own local vegetables in short order. And it wouldn’t do to use disposable plastic bags for a job like that! The menu begins tomorrow for both lunch ($36) and dinner ($48); it's $30 extra for the wine pairing. Dirt to sprinkle on your shoes is optional.

Hundred Acres, the Haute Barnyard-er that Vicki Freeman and Marc Meyer are opening in the Provence space, has hit OpenTable. Opening night is next Thursday, May 22, and, as of this posting, it’s wide-open, including that coveted two-for-eight slot.

Restaurant Profile: Hundred Acres [OpenTable]
Restaurant Openings: Week of May 19 [NYM]

Is it just us, or has the entire city turned aesthetically schizophrenic? How can the forces of anti–fine dining, led by David Chang, be at the forefront of gastronomy, while, uptown, restaurants like Eighty One, Dovetail, and South Gate are springing up like ramps, avatars of a genre supposedly half buried in the proverbial potter’s field? As Florence Fabricant writes in the Times today, haute Greenmarket hegemony continues to hold sway, and yet here come Benoit, Bar Boulud, and Bouley’s new French project resurrecting blanquette de veau and lobster thermidor. Is there some key to understanding the city’s culinary Zeitgeist right now? Or is this just a period of historic fecundity and instability, like the Roman empire after the death of Augustus? Either way, it adds up to a lot of very different, and very good, restaurants. Maybe New York will never have a single ruling spirit again, but rather a confederacy of aesthetics. If so, we could live with that. As long as lobster thermidor is in there somewhere.

There’ll Always Be a France, Especially in New York [NYT]

“We've changed everything,” says Willis Loughhead, the new chef at Country. Working closely with Geoffry Zakarian, Loughhead is implementing a sprightly, Haute Barnyard–ish menu that should help to rejuvenate the restaurant's somewhat stodgy reputation. “My style is characterized by a lot of olive oil, vinegar, fresh lemon — a lot of brightness.” The new menu, rolling out this week, will include a soft-shell crab with pea greens, pea shoots, and pea tendrils and a pistachio-yuzu vinaigrette; a seared bison tenderloin with white and green asparagus and purple baby artichokes; and a full-bone, dry-aged Nebraska prime rib for two. “We're doing everything differently now,” Loughhead says. “We're breaking down whole animals, making our own charcuterie.… And now that the Greenmarket is about to explode, you're going to see so much from us based on that. It's going to be very market-driven. Right now, I'm waiting for ramps, for instance. Just wait till they come in.” We'll settle for the crabs and steak.

When last seen, the Tasting Room’s Colin Alevras was hard at work on his Old MacDonald’s Burger, attempting to revolutionize the form. “Everyone has a burger, and I swore for twenty years that I wouldn’t make one unless I could completely rework it in a way I believed in,” says the chef. Well, he’s done it, and the resulting concoction is made of Piemontese grass-fed six-week dry-aged beef. And that means the whole animal: beef heart, beef liver, bone marrow, heart, tongue, liver, flatiron, brisket, shank, clod. The burger also features Ouray raw cow’s-milk cheese from Sprout Creek Farm and a beer-and-butter bun (of organic local whole wheat, natch) of Alevras’s own invention. “I haven’t seen anybody reconsider the burger from the cow up. We don’t hide behind its casualness. We are remaking the world’s most overlooked food,” the chef boasts.

Having accomplished his dream of serving the eggs of eight different birds at one brunch, Haute Barnyard enfant terrible Colin Alevras of the Tasting Room is now contemplating his own high-end burger. But only if it “isn’t just another burger or some kind of over-the-top tarted up silliness. It had to have integrity.” Fair enough. So what did Alevras come up with? “I’m still working on it,” the chef tells us, “but we won’t be using pork fat like some people do, because then it’s just a sausage.” (Take that, Ryan Skeen!). “I want to put neck meat in there and tongue and heart and a little bit of calves’ liver for flavor. And why use fat, which just melts away anyway? I’m going to use marrow for fat, which will stay intact and also have a beefier, deeper taste.” Alevras is ensconced in bun and cheese issues, but the burger will debut for brunch service on March 30. Its name? The Old McDonald Burger. How's that for Haute Barnyard?

Related: The Tasting Room Lays Eight Eggs on Us

In what has to be the clearest example yet of Haute Barnyard run amok, Eighty One has sent us a scroll containing a list of “81 people who bring Eighty One to life.” Rob and Robin weren’t kidding when they said the ingredients were meticulously sourced — everyone gets credit from the “mushroom expert” to the frog’s-legs purveyor to exec chef Ed Brown’s body double. There are more shout-outs here than on a Diddy album, but we suppose it’s not the worst idea — Brown wouldn’t want to be accused of making false organic claims.

PDT’s winter cocktail menu debuted last night, and we are still hung-over. Mixologist Jim Meehan consulted his peers for the menu, which includes contributions from Pegu’s Audrey Sanders, Tailor’s Eben Freeman, “International cocktail maven” Charlotte Voisey, and others. There’s even a nod to Adam Platt in the description of PDT bartender Don Lee’s Benton’s Old Fashioned, a combo of bacon-infused bourbon, maple syrup, and angostura bitters: “the crossroad of Haute Barnyard and Barroom.” (If this keeps up, we’re going to have to add Haute Barnyard to the banished-words list soon.)

You don’t have to look far to see spring vegetables on menus all over New York. But look for local spring vegetables, and you may find they’re AWOL. Unseasonal weather has put the kibosh on many area sources, and for chefs that pride themselves on local ingredients, it’s a problem.

Eric Lind, the chef who opened Flatbush Farm, has left the Haute Barnyard hit. You may be disappointed to learn that neither of the two projects he’s consulting on center around seasonal foods: Stella Maris, a recently opened restaurant on Front Street, specializes in modern Irish cooking; Nelson Blue is a New Zealand–themed gastropub also on Front Street set to open in mid- to late April. Once he’s done downtown, Lind plans on another eatery of his own, likely in the “rustic, organic, country style” he established at Flatbush Farm. “This is the food that really appeals to me,” he tells us, “and the food that I like to eat.” He’s not the only one.

Related:
Haute Barnyard Take on a Classic SoCal Sandwich
Flatbush Farm Takes Haute Barnyard to the Next Level