Get Your Seder on at Seymour BurtonConsider the exiled East Village Jew: She sits in a 350-square-foot walk-up tenement inferior to the one her great-grandmother occupied a hundred years earlier. She hasn’t been to shul in years. Her Sri Lankan boyfriend took her for a whole hog feast at Daisy May for their anniversary. But there’s still a way for her to get back to her Jewish roots, because Seymour Burton is doing a Seder on April 20, the second night of Passover.
intel
How Is a Park Slope Seder Different From All Other Seders?“All right,” said the rabbi. “We’ll try to get to the food as fast as we can.” Rose Water, the Haute Barnyard Park Slope restaurant, was holding its second-annual second-night Passover Seder, and the obstacle between the starving, secular attendees and the five-course prix fixe was an hour-long ritual leavened, as it were, with trademark neighborhood sanctimony. The plagues recitation became a mini-lecture on abused women (the modern-day plagues were rape, shame, and so on); we were even more riveted by the time- and nabe-specific Four Questions.
User’s Guide
Easter Meals, Six Ways (and Five Days) From Sunday
There’s more to Easter than binging on Peeps and throwing up in church — 2,000 years of beautiful history, for one, and special Sunday dinners for another. Last week, we told you where to have unusual Seders; this week, Rob and Robin tell us where to get the best Easter meals. Because our Borg-like database must continually grow — it will someday consume us all — we’ve nabbed you the menus. They run the gamut from old-school Easter antipasti and spaghetti with lamb ragù (at Lupa) to whole-roasted lambs (pictured above), rotated on the sidewalk in front of Estiatorio Milos. And none of them, we’re glad to report, include Peeps.
Easter Feasts: Uptown
Easter Feasts: Downtown [NYM]
User’s Guide
Seder Gets Spicy!Happening as they do at Uncle Marty’s and in church basements, Seder meals aren’t usually known for being very tasty. But if you’re not worried about the meal being kosher — we won’t say anything to Marty — you can go out and have an Italian, Mexican, or even Indian Passover celebration. Here’s where to go.
in other news
Everything Is PesadichWe somehow missed the news Friday that Park Slope’s own Wise Son, Jonathan Safran Foer, has announced he will publish his own version of the Passover Haggadah. Why? Are the 4,000 known versions of the book insufficient? As he explains in the current Forward, it’s because he doesn’t think those versions are good enough.
“We talk about slavery every year,” Foer said. “We talk about the movement toward freedom every year. But when was the last time a Seder made you really feel those things in a deep way — when you said, ‘I want to become more active, say, in stopping what’s going on in Darfur’? Because if that’s not an example of a situation that needs this movement toward freedom, nothing is. Or, ‘I need to work harder to make my life more energy independent,’ because we are slaves to energy right now.”
Next year in a Prius!
Jonathan Safran Foer to Release English Version of Haggadah [Forward]
the morning line
Mother of Mercy, Is This the End of San Gennaro?
• Now that’s not very Italian! A subcommittee of Little Italy’s community board voted against approving the annual San Gennaro feast, calling it a noisy nuisance. (The CB’s votes are merely recommendations to the city, though.) Zeppoles will fly! [NYDN]
• Every night can be a night at the museum if you’re the lucky (and rich) person who paid $276,000 for a dinosaur skull, or $4,500 for a mummy’s hand, at yesterday’s I.M. Chait Gallery natural-history auction. [NYT]
• Hillary sets a new early fund-raising record, trotting out five-star attraction Bill and netting an Obama-and-Edwards-are-gagging-worthy $10 mil over four events in one week. [NYDN]
• Not just the real thing, but kosher, too. The just-for-Passover version of Coca-Cola — made with real sugar, not corn syrup, because corn’s among the Passover no-nos — is again available in area supermarkets. [NYP]
• State Senator Jeff Klein wants to rat out (ha!) dirty restaurants by giving eateries an A-through-F health grade they must post at their doors. Can penitent taco chains earn an “E” for effort? [amNY]
Mediavore
Were You Aware That Chinese Takeout Is High in Salt and Fat?Shocking health news of the day: Chinese food, at least the kind we eat in New York, is outrageously salty and fatty. [NYP]
Meanwhile, Chinese buns are only getting more popular in the city’s better restaurants. [NYDN]
Bret Thorn, Nation’s Restaurant News’ restaurant blogger and a longtime observer of the scene, gives his Beard Award picks. [Foodservice Blog/Nation’s Restaurant News]
