Jerry’s Asian Opens Today in Tribeca; Gold-Plated Twinkies in GreenpointThe owner of now-closed Jerry’s opens an Asian restaurant on Chambers Street, a new shop in Greenpoint is selling newfangled twinkies coated in gold, and there’s still non-hyped ramen to be had in the East Village in today’s neighborhood food news.
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Herb Wilson Takes Charge at the Soho and Tribeca GrandThere isn’t much Herb Wilson, the newly appointed executive chef at both the Tribeca Grand and the Soho Grand, hasn’t seen over the years. He’s cooked at good restaurants and mediocre restaurants, been praised (as the chef of Jack’s Fifth, for example), been obscure (a five-year run at Wall Street watering hole Bull Run), toiled in small kitchens, and overseen platoons. But he’s not well known outside the business. Gael Greene once called him, admiringly, a “skilled journeyman.” Now he’s come into the biggest job of his career, a happy ending if ever there was one, and it’s hard not to feel happy for the guy.
Classically trained in France by the legendary Troisgros brothers and a protégé of the late Patrick Clark (and like him one of the few African-Americans chefs in town), Wilson makes up in experience what he lacks in star power. He accomplished the very difficult feat of getting two stars at three different restaurants, from three different Times reviewers at Le Refuge, Bambou, and most recently Jack’s Fifth. And he’s one of the few working New York chefs to have been steadily employed here for over twenty years. Which, as far as we’re concerned, is reason enough to like him. Wilson’s first full menus at both hotels won’t appear until spring, he tells us. But having just started at his new post, he feels prepared to take over the restaurants, banquets, and room-service programs too. Why not? “It’s all cooking,” Wilson says confidently. “It’s what I do. I’ve been doing this a long time.”
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Waverly Inn Chef John DeLucie to Publish Tell-AllFrom toque to bard.Photo: Patrick McMullan
We’ve always thought that what happens at the Waverly Inn stays at the Waverly Inn, but that may change, given this recent deal announcement on Publishers Marketplace:
Chef at New York’s The Waverly Inn John DeLucie’s THE HUNGER, a la Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, [sold] to Dan Halpern and Emily Takoudes at Ecco, for publication in Spring 2009, by Rebecca Oliver and Richard Abate at Endeavor (NA).
The New York Diet
Single Girl Imogen Lloyd Webber Hops Between the Waverly and Beatrice Inns
Imogen Lloyd Webber says she relishes dining as a single woman — “You can eat cereal for dinner if you want to” — and she should know. She’s the author of the recently published Single Girl’s Survival Guide. “When you’re dating someone,” she says, “you tend to keep up with their eating habits.” (Not that she wasn’t happy, when in town from London, to keep up with her father Andrew’s dinners at the late Manhattan Ocean Club). This week, though, she struck out on her own and hit some more au courant restaurants.
