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A Guided Tour of Pig Parts, Here in New Pork City
Posted 05/14/08 in Grub Street: NewsFeed
Where to get the best parts of the pig, from snout to tail, according to 'Time Out New York.'
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Sarabeth’s at Lord & Taylor; Children’s Cookbooks So Hot Right Now
Posted 05/14/08 in Grub Street: Mediavore
Plus: A great French chef passes on, Nathan's Famous begins posting calorie info, and more in our morning roundup of food news and gossip.
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Get the Best of West Coast Charcuterie at Mia Dona
Posted 02/29/08 in Grub Street: NewsFeed
If you’re not going to the Astor Center’s Head-to-Tail dinner with Chris Cosentino on Tuesday, you can also find his food at Mia Dona, the only New York restaurant serving Cosentino’s charcuterie. Cosentino met Mia Dona owner Donatella Arpaia when shooting The Next Iron Chef, on which he was a contestant, and goes way back with the restaurant’s executive chef, Jason Hall. “We use their lonza (pork loin). It’s amazing. The fat cap is like the finest lardo. And the meat itself expresses the purity of pork — it’s perfectly seasoned and cured, ” he enthuses. Mia Dona serves the lonza on two crostini — one with sheep’s-milk ricotta and Sicilian oregano, and the other with winter-citrus mostarda — but Hall would like to use even more: “I want to use a lot of Chris’s stuff, but we can’t overwhelm the menu all at once.” Cosentino, whom we think of as California’s answer to David Chang, also sells his charcuterie online. Visit Boccalone to order for yourself. Related: Back-to-Back Feasts Will Break the Bank, Blow Your Mind Video: Inside Mia Dona's Kitchen
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DeBragga and Spitler Will Supply Great Steakhouse Meat. Should You Buy It?
Posted 01/14/08 in Grub Street: User's Guide
Steakhouses are valued for one thing: their meat. There are no chefs, and no one goes there for the décor. So if the meat is available elsewhere, such as DeBragga and Spitler’s new retail operation, why bother with the steakhouse? The beef supplier, one of New York’s most established, was once the source for most of the city’s top steakhouses, and still supplies some of the best, such as Craftsteak and BLT Prime. Now you can buy a steak that is “exactly, absolutely” the same, says DeBragga’s Marc Sarrazin. Other top meat operations, like elite-meat specialist Pat LaFrieda, and small-farm evangelist Heritage Food USA, have made their stuff available to the public as well. So the question is this: Is it worth it?
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Esca Chef to Work for Mets; Bourdain Back on Food Network
Posted 12/14/07 in Grub Street: Mediavore
Esca chef David Pasternack will be right at home in the new Mets stadium come 2010, running a place called the Fish Shack. [Insatiable Critic] Related: Hark! New Shake Shack to Open at Shea Stadium Kim Severson just ruined our breakfast with a look at PETA’s "Got Pus?" campaign and the question of whether or not milk contains pus. Let's all share the nausea, shall we? [Diner’s Journal/NYT] A Brooklyn pizza maker accused of gunning down a mobster was acquitted yesterday, but the case still reinforces those old mafia-in-cahoots-with-Italian-joints stereotypes. [NYDN]
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Pig Farmer to Deliver Pigs in Pig-Fueled Truck
Posted 12/12/07 in Grub Street: NewsFeed
Bev Eggleston, the Virginia pig farmer trying to revive Ossabaw pigs, has refitted his truck to run on barbecue grease! He's struck up a symbiotic friendship with Hill Country’s Robbie Richter (Richter gets to try great pork, Bev gets to eat great barbecue), and the two have come to an understanding by which Richter will save his grease for Eggleston’s special diesel engine. The idea’s not as crazy as it sounds: San Francisco asks restaurants to recycle grease for the city's bus fleet.
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Virginia Pig Farmer Is the Toast of the New York Pork World
Posted 10/26/07 in Grub Street: NewsFeed
It sounds like a fairy tale: Some Spanish hogs, brought over by Spanish colonists in the sixteenth century, take over an island off the coast of Georgia and run wild there for hundreds of years. Feral and boarlike, they are also about the best tasting pork imaginable, and cousins to the world’s most celebrated ham. Is it a fable, conjured by the heated imagination of foodies? Or an eye-opening truth, as irrefutable as a piece of gamey and rich roast pork? We’re happy to say that it’s the latter. Bev Eggleston, of Eco-Friendly Foods in Virginia, has started selling his amazing pork to a handful of New York restaurants, and soon he may be giving the Spanish a run for their money in the ham business.
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Fergus Henderson to Cook Tomorrow at Savoy, Wednesday at the Spotted Pig
Posted 10/08/07 in Grub Street: Foodievents
We stopped by Soho House last night to speak to Fergus Henderson, the celebrated London chef whose gospel of offal, Nose to Tail Eating, conquered the culinary world back in 2004. Henderson and his friend Justin Piers Gellatly, his dessert chef at London’s St. John, have written a sequel to Nose to Tail called Beyond Nose to Tail (“It’s like Buzz Lightyear, isn’t it? Infinity and beyond?” Fergus said of the illogical title). Henderson will be cooking some of his signature dishes from St. John tomorrow night at Savoy and Wednesday at the Spotted Pig; both evenings are open to the public.
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Trabocchi Reinvents Porchetta at Fiamma
Posted 09/27/07 in Grub Street: The Annotated Dish
Fabio Trabocchi gained fame, and a James Beard award, for his modern Italian food at Maestro in Virginia. Now, he's Michael White’s replacement at Fiamma, and his contemporary take on porchetta, the most intensely rural and down-market of dishes, is a fair example of Trabocchi’s style: “In Italy, porchetta is a pig on a spit with wild fennel. It’s either boned and stuffed in a meat-loaf shape or opened up, like a book, on a spit. It’s something we tried to reinvent with a modern version without losing the original flavors.” As always, mouse over the different elements to see them described in the chef’s own words.
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Il Buco Goes Hog Wild Thursday Afternoon
Posted 09/18/07 in Grub Street: Foodievents
Il Buco’s annual Sagra del Maiale festival (pig party to us Americans) runs Thursday from 1 to 6 p.m., and it kills us that we can’t go. The restaurant, which has always been a source of ingredient-driven Italian food, has taken its aesthetic up a notch under chef Ignacio Mattos’ watch. The pigfest is perfectly symbolic of that — it’s not just whole hog, but Ossabaw pork from an island off Georgia. It’s one of the most intensely flavorful pigs in the world, with a taste reminiscent of Spanish Ibérico hogs, wild boars, the sound of rushing water, first kisses in prehistoric South American jungles, and your first pork chop. The menu, which includes barbecued pork, Ossabaw panini, ricotta fritters, farmer's-market panzanella, and wild arugula with lemon, red onion, and Pecorino, is a paltry $20 a plate. Do what you can to get there; it looks to be pretty special. Sagra del Maiale Festival
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Mere Mortals Confront the Ultimate Ham
Posted 09/04/07 in Grub Street: NewsFeed
It’s the ultimate prize, the holy grail for pork-lovers: the famed jamón ibérico de bellota, the black-footed, acorn-fed Spanish ham. It’s illegal in this country, but one of our meat operatives managed to smuggle a bit across the border. We arranged a little taste test among some New York staffers to see what the ham — about which Casa Mono chef Andy Nusser says: “Once you taste ibérico, you can't compare it to anything else" — tastes like to non-foodies. Would the man in the street be as moved? We didn’t tell our panel the ham’s identity, or hint of its vast, cultlike fame. Their reactions?
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Shake Shack Hamburger and Little Owl Pork Chops Can Soon Be Yours
Posted 08/30/07 in Grub Street: NewsFeed
The famous ground-beef mixture from Pat LaFrieda has been the talk of burger circles the last few years — a dizzying time in which the Spotted Pig, Shake Shack, Stand, and half a dozen other contenders have taken the previously humble sandwich to the proverbial next level. The source of all that burger greatness, as Men’s Vogue recently wrote, is LaFrieda, the city’s top source for high-end wholesale meats. Scratch the wholesale part! Soon, and for the first time ever, the burger that launched a thousand blog posts will be available at the retail counter at Market Table, Joey Campanero and Mike Price’s new restaurant in the West Village.
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Bacon Has Jumped the Shark
Posted 07/25/07 in Grub Street: Back of the House
The nation’s infatuation with bacon gets stronger every year, but now it may have gone too far. We were members of the Bacon of the Month club from way back. We too fell in love with the bacon-flavored chocolate promoted at the Fancy Food Show recently. We even hosted occasional bacon tastings, and just for good measure included everyone’s favorite breakfast meat in our recent Grub Street grilling video. But to say “everything should taste like bacon,” like the zealous producers of Bacon Salt do, is perhaps taking the obsession too far.
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Batali Protégé Goes for Her Share of the Limelight
Posted 07/23/07 in Grub Street: Openings
Iron Chef America fans know Anne Burrell as Mario Batali’s sous-chef on the show. (Spotted Pig customers know her as a regular.) The question now is whether she can actually cook when not doing Super Mario’s bidding. Her Centro Vinoteca is opening up this week with recognizably Batalian food: plenty of pork, robust flavors, and the kind of “why not” aesthetic that results in, say, deep-fried gnocchi in lamb ragù (“they’re like tater tots,” the chef says) or a poussin crusted with pancetta and rosemary paste.
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Chefs Are All Over ‘Ratatouille’; Allen and Delancey May Open After All
Posted 07/09/07 in Grub Street: Mediavore
Chefs say “Ratatouille gets it, it totally gets chef culture.” Even Tony Bourdain is onboard, calling it “the best restaurant movie ever made — the best chef movie.” [Ruhlman] Related: How Much Thomas Keller Is Really in ‘Ratatouille’’s Remy? Allen and Delancey may be coming back. Or rather, opening for the first time. [Eater] Related: Allen and Delancey Tripped at the Finish Line, Won't Open The good people of Iowa may not get the whole niche-pork thing, but they are happy to supply the product. [Des Moines Register]
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Mr. Chow Sued for $5 Million; Loans Crush Wannabe Chefs
Posted 05/08/07 in Grub Street: Mediavore
Michael Chow of Mr. Chow is hit with a $5 million lawsuit for skimming tips, demanding “cult-like attention” from staff, and utilizing “degradation as a management technique.” [NYP] Cooking-school graduates are being crushed by their student-loan debts: “The story is always the same. The school convinces the student they are going to be the next Julia Child or Wolfgang Puck, and the student will sign anything.” [NYT] The Smith and Wollensky Restaurant Group finally agrees to be bought out by Patina Restaurant Group [NYT] Related: The Secrets of Steakhouse Riches [Grub Street]
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Boqueria’s Renowned Rectangle of Rich Suckling Pig
Posted 04/25/07 in Grub Street: The Annotated Dish
Almost since the day it opened, tapas restaurant Boqueria has had the beau monde flocking to its rather nondescript block on 19th Street. Young Spanish-trained chef Seamus Mullen’s star dish is his suckling pig, a crisp, irresistible brick of concentrated pork goodness. As ever, mouse over the arrows for details from the cook himself.
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You Know You’re a Meathead When ...
Posted 04/11/07 in Grub Street: The Gobbler
The Gobbler recently introduced the world to what he called the “Refined Meathead” school of cooking. Meatheads are mostly male, pork- and offal-obsessed cooks who disdain classical (read “French”) haute cuisine in favor of an earthier brand of cuisine. Mario Batali is king of the Meatheads. David Chang is a Meathead. Daniel Boulud, who grew up eating robust Lyonnaise food and cooks the best pork belly in town when he feels like it, is a closet Meathead. Who are the rest of the Meatheads? How would you know one if you met one in the street? Here are the Gobbler’s Six Meathead Commandments.
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A Very Special All-Pork Program
Posted 03/01/07 in Grub Street: What to Eat Tonight
Welcome to a Very Special Episode of Grub Street. In honor of National Pork Day, we’re going to turn back the clock and look at some of the most memorable pork moments from our first six and a half months. We remember them as if they were yesterday …
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