R.I.P. Beppe

Since I’m about to sublet my apartment until next summer, I’ve been doing a ruthless decluttering, throwing out pretty much everything or giving it away. Tossing things out, ripping them up, hurling them into trash bins: It’s fantastic therapy. Highly recommended. As I wade through closetfuls of junk, I’ve been making a few observations, like my tendency to collect Best-of-NYC restaurant issues—annual tomes put out by New York Magazine, Time Out NY (my alma mater), et al. I rarely refer back to the issues, but somehow they still pile up year after year.

New York Mag’s Where to Eat 2004 issue caught my eye, and I scanned the restaurant Hot List from that year. Whoa—dozens of the so-called “Hot List” restaurants from ‘04 don’t even exist anymore. Felt like I was walking through a graveyard. I counted up the corpses: 40 restaurants on that Hot List—that’s more than a third of the 115 places listed—are now closed. Dead, gone. What does this all mean? read more NYC: Best or Worst Restaurant Town? »

Photo by Dwight Eschliman for The New York Times

Right about now, smack in sweltering late-July, I don’t so much want to eat ice cream as wear it, bathe in it, BE it. But I also want to eat it, lots of it—hence the five pints currently jammed into my freezer. And just in time, along comes my friend Anna Sussman’s new blog, the ice-cream-lust-inducing, fearlessly titled Lick Me Everywhere.

The blog just launched this week, but I’ve already learned three new things:

1) Must try yakult, a bottled yogurty frozen thing that’s ubiquitous in Japan, China, Brazil, and elsewhere, but so far I haven’t come across it in NYC. Now, naturally, I’m going on a hunt.

2) Candy Kitchen in Bridgehampton: Meh.

3) There’s such a thing as tabbouleh sorbet. Not surprising, perhaps, since there’s now an everything flavor of everything. Tabbouleh sorbet, amazingly, isn’t served at San Francisco’s Humphry Slocombe, and it may actually be the only flavor they don’t have. Yet. Find it instead in the Ethnic Paris Cookbook — if you must.

The blog’s author, Anna Sussman, just moved back to NYC after living for a while in Beirut, where I’ll be headed myself at the end of August. One of the first things I’ll be eating as soon as I land in Beirut: Lebanese ice cream, unusual and fabulous and bewitching thanks to its stretchy texture, which comes from sahlab, i.e. ground orchid root. I always had a crush on that wild elastic ice cream when my family lived in Beirut; then when we moved to the States (I was in fourth grade), suddenly there was no more of it in my life. Until now…

In NYC, Ilili is doing a fantastic homemade version of Lebanese ice cream, in chocolate, pistachio, apricot, and milk (yes, milk) flavors. Suddenly I’m daydreaming about grabbing a seat at the bar, a couple of scoops, a shot of Turkish coffee… then a luscious summer siesta. See ya.

Salumé is one of those ultra-boxy, shiny, clean-lined spaces that look suspiciously sleek at first—too sleek to be turning out soulful Italian sandwiches, not to mention sandwiches you’ll want to pay double-digits for. What finally got me inside, a few weeks after the place opened on West Broadway near Grand Street earlier this summer, was the owners’ mission to redefine panini for an audience trained to believe “panini” means “pressed sandwich,” as opposed to “sandwich.” So they don’t press the sandwiches here, because as owner Michele Colombo (his wife Alessandra designed the space) says on the website: “Pressing panini dries out—and sometimes burns—the ingredients, which compromises their uniquely delicate flavor, texture and taste.” True that.

Salume’s menu lists about 25 sandwiches. Racked with indecision, I tried to order the combo of four mini-sandwiches, “for an Italian tasting journey,” which turns out they don’t do anymore. Too bad. Finally settled on the Courmayeur ($11.50) : prosciutto cotto, fontina, arugula, tartar sauce on slightly toasted ciabatta. On first glance: too small a sandwich, too high a price. On first bite: Exceptional ingredients, especially the fresh arugula and tangy tartar sauce and supple prosciutto (bonus is that the “cotto,” i.e. cooked, prosciutto is less stringy and presents fewer stuck-in-teeth issues than the “crudo” kind). There’s even too much prosciutto in the sandwich. Salume aims for a 2:1 topping-to-bread ratio, which is admirable but potentially in need of a tweak. And speaking of ratios, the bread has a deeply satisfying play of moistness-to-crunch —and frankly the whole sandwich, minus maybe a smidge of ham, was highly tasty (“very good,” to use a favorite Sifton-ism). Trouble is the price.

read more Soho: On Italian Sandwiches and Non-Italian Shoes »

Too fried from the August-in-June heat to figure out what you want to do this weekend? Hit the NYC Food Film Festival, where all you have to do is show up, lounge around, watch short films about food, then eat the stuff on screen. I went to one of the events last night, Brad Farmerie’s Southeast Asian Street Food Market at Astor Center, where chefs from Double Crown (Farmerie and his staff), Betel, and Kampuchea served up things like beef tendon balls, dessert burritos (filled with cantaloupe ice cream), and squid chips, inspired by the food in various short films that were screening at the same time. Apparently pig’s blood popsicles were also in attendance but I got there too late (dammit). There were also loads of snacks that didn’t make cameos in the films, like a fantastic Thai beef salad and a mini banh mi.

I couldn’t help wondering if a couple of the less-impressive short films were cooked up specifically for this festival — so that local NYC chefs could then recreate what’s on screen—but whatever. I was too busy eating and craning my neck to see the screen to get much quality time with all the films themselves (I did like one I did see, called “Night Market Taipei”). Taller guys standing in front of me were laughing throughout a bunch of the films, so I have a feeling I missed out. But I kept busy scurrying around, drinking Tiger Beer and Riesling, and making sure I tried all the luscious snacks —before, er, dinner at Kenmare.

Tonight and tomorrow’s events are sold out, but the ones on Sunday aren’t: On Sunday at noon at the Tobacco Warehouse in Brooklyn, there’s “It’s Grits,” a short 1978 film about grits by director Stan Woodward, followed by a grits cookoff by 30 NYC chefs—and more grits than you’d possibly ever want to eat. Sunday night at 6pm, same place, it’s the Brooklyn Burger and Beer Party, with a screening of a film called “Beer Wars” with an all-you-can-eat burger and beer scenario…

Ed Mitchell's pulled pork sandwich

There’s something to be said for massive rainstorms that crash down on a jammed outdoor event. I decided to show up at the weekend-long Big Apple BBQ Block Party in Madison Square Park yesterday (Sunday) rather than Saturday, and it turned out to be totally the wrong day weatherwise. But in crowd-control terms, I scored big-time. In the past I’ve said I’d never return to the Big Apple BBQ fest ever again—the giant mass of humanity shoving through the small park tends to turn a potentially joyous meat-fest into a pain-in-the-ass mosh pit. But Sunday, as sky-to-earth waterfalls crashed down in the late afternoon, most of that mob scurried off, leaving a manageably medium-sized crowd standing in line at the stands, run by cult pitmasters and barbecue joints from all over the U.S. (well, from the barbecue zip codes that count), from Ed Mitchell in North Carolina to Pappy’s in St. Louis.

It’s pretty dicey eating pulled pork sandwiches in the rain—a friend and I took turns holding the umbrella over our plates to keep the soft yellow potato buns from dissolving— but it’s much less maddening than fighting hordes in the blazing heat. Even despite the rain and the much-diminished crowds, the beef-brisket stand run by Austin’s Salt Lick BBQ sold out well before the 6pm closing bell, so I missed out this time. But Ed Mitchell’s vinegary North Carolina-style whole hog didn’t disappoint. The man pit-roasts a hog like no one else. My friend and I got a little overzealous with the vinegar sauce (a North Carolina signature), but a few watermelon mojitos at nearby Tabla washed away the excessive tartness assault (completely our fault), put us in a sweet daze, and lubricated the whole afternoon even more beautifully than the rainstorm.

You should probably be doing something else right now, shouldn’t you? But here you are, browsing through Salmaland (for which I thank you), looking for new food thrills to chase down. Might you suffer from a disorder — say, Restaurant A.D.D.? Until the condition makes it into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, we won’t know for sure. But my essay in the July issue of Food & Wine, on “The Rise of Restaurant A.D.D.” makes a stab at a diagnosis. As diseases go, this is not a bad one to have. A little expensive, a little time-consuming, sure. Could even get you fired if you’re not careful. (A woman who showed up at NYC’s short-lived Cookie Bar pop-up store, mentioned in my story, had to tell her boss she was running to Duane Reade for a minute— but I left her out of the essay lest her boss stumble into it.) My essay is mostly about pop-up restaurants, and limited-edition menu items, and the kinds of ephemeral, vanishing, get-it-while-you-can food experiences that seem to be everywhere right now. But if you need a new restaurant to try every time you go out, you’re probably one of the disease’s silent victims too. Stay tuned for treatment solutions. In the meantime, the doctor is in: Salmaland is always here for you.

Todd English

Foodwise, there aren’t too many things NYC doesn’t have. Sounds arrogant, but it’s true. One thing our food-tastic city didn’t really have until now: a glorious food hall like the ones in Tokyo—a gigantic gleaming space outfitted with all manner of shiny stations selling everything from gorgeous cheeses to freshly shucked oysters to made-to-order sushi and grilled meats and noodle bowls and hallucinatory pastries. Unless you count the Cellar at Macy’s, which I don’t. Or the Grand Central Market, which is pretty solid but ultimately too railroady, in both design and location, to be as wondrous as food halls like KaDeWe in Berlin, or Harrod’s in London, or the dozen depachikas (food floors) like Isetan in Tokyo.

Enter the Plaza Food Hall by Todd English, a strange subterranean U-shaped space at the Plaza Hotel that nonetheless comes the closest NYC has to the sort of carnivalesque food fantasyland I’m talking about. It officially opens on Friday, June 4. At the media preview the other night, I had a juicy mini prime rib sandwich at one station, glistening yellowtail sashimi at another, gingery pork dumplings and a sesame-oil-slicked soba noodle salad at another, thin-crust pizza at another. Todd English was roaming around, with that cartoon-like presence he always seems to bring to a room: the oversized tanned head, the permanently smoldering eyes, the goodtoseeya smile, that misfit glamour of outsize celebrity. I’m not entirely clear on his involvement in all the food stations here. Doesn’t matter. Whatever he is or isn’t doing, the food on offer is highly appealing so far. read more NYC Gets Its First Tokyo-Style Food Hall »

The Daniels (Humm, left, and Boulud, right). Pic via Metromix.com.

Here’s a shoutout to the Salmaland favorites that won big awards this past week at the James Beard Foundation Awards, which the restaurant industry likes to call “the Oscars of the food world.” Red carpet, ballgowns, long speeches: check, check, check. Yours truly didn’t rock a ballgown this year (actually, never have at the Beards) but did get somewhat gussied up, in annual tradition. Fun night was had: Too much food, too many drinks, and er too many speeches. I’d like to say I’m still recovering a week later, hence the slight delay in reporting on the event. But truth is: Loads of deadlines for various magazines and editorial projects I’m working on, so my own little self-imposed Salmaland deadline had to wait. Read about the Beards ceremony and after-parties here and here and here. Now, on to the winners—not all of them, but the ones you might want to know about.

First, the NYC winners:

Marea: Best New Restaurant. Nationwide!

Standard Grill: Outstanding Restaurant Graphics, “for the best restaurant graphics executed in North America since January 1, 2007.” Damn, 2007?

Other big NYC winners: Eleven Madison Park (for Best Chef New York City); Daniel (for Outstanding Restaurant); Keith McNally (of Pulino’s, Balthazar, Pastis, Minetta Tavern, et al, for Outstanding Restaurateur); Jean-Georges (for Outstanding Wine Service); and Craft (for Outstanding Chef Tom Colicchio). Some of these haven’t made an appearance yet on Salmaland, only out of a combination of sheer obviousness and chef-mega-stardom. But hit all of these restaurants, if you can, in your lifetime—or on a regular basis if you’ve got an enviable supply of time and money and fresh dry-cleaning. read more Restaurant Oscar Night: The Results »

Kenmare pic via Gothamist.com

Because I keep getting the question, “What’s a sceney new restaurant where I can take my hip client/my friends from out of town/the model who consented to go out with me,” here’s a short-list of Sceney New Places in NYC. I’m not necessarily ready to vouch for any or all of these, as far as how consistently good they are or aren’t (in cases where I am, I’m linking to the fuller Salmaland writeup). I’m just saying, if you want Sceney and New, or new-ish, circa spring 2010, this is where you want to be…

Btw, right now this list includes Manhattan only (I know, I know). That’s only because the people asking these questions are usually only interested in Manhattan for some reason. Or maybe their out-of-town clients are. Anyway, here goes for now, and more coming soon:

Downtown:

Pulino’s

Kenmare

The Standard Grill

Midtown/Uptown:

The Breslin

East Side Social Club

Ma Peche (lunch only for now; dinner starts in early May)