Clark Wolf's Rants, Raves, Diatribes...and a few other Thoughts

Blessed Sliver of Very Good Food

By Clark Wolf

Journalists love to declare certain restaurant locations “jinxed” when a couple of enterprises try a spot and fail – usually for very good reasons that may be entirely invisible to even the most well trained investigative eye and blog. 

The rent structure may be completely unreasonable.  The street may need to be dug up for two years.  Scaffolding may be about inhabit the land.  Partners may hate each other and – with landlords- may be embroiled in on-going conflicts that none can safely reveal but that hamper urgently needed action.   

In fact, we saw just such a spot in Sebastopol that didn’t work out for a few good reasons;  it wasn’t the spot that was jinxed, it was the fundamentals (cost of the building, debt load requiring outsized rent and ownership that really had little idea what the local community would sustain).  It’s currently up and buzzing and in the middle of things in many new good ways.

But sometimes an odd little spot can be blessed, imbued with magical charm and draw, even if it sits in the corner of a parking lot, overlooking a busy intersection, in one of the less attractive areas of an often funkified town. 

Enter Bartavelle.  Slipped right into the spot that housed the beloved Café Fanny for many years, there are many conventional reasons why this spot might not be considered ideal.  Besides the stated obvious, there is no exhaust hood, no conventional cooking line and no big name chef associated with what is essentially a rather perfect food and drink bar. 

It is, however, wedged between two beloved Bay Area institutions – Acme Bread and Kermit Lynch Wines (KL is the landlord) that help put it on the local, regional and even national radar (ok, maybe international too).  It also comes of, you should excuse me, organic evolution.  Suzanne Drexhage is the owner, operator, chief cook and bottle washer, as they used to say.  She’s worked at Chez Panisse and at Kermit Lynch.  She shares an aesthetic and perhaps even a vision of food and wine in our lives with those other food families – in fact we’re vaguely related ourselves.  At 19 she was a cashier at the San Francisco Oakville Grocery that I helped open and run in the very earliest of the 1980’s.  She’s joined by her own son Sam, and the legacy moves along.

Here’s a situation where much of the good will build by the simple joys of Café Fanny – which too many of us had not visited in a very long while before it closed last year – was warmly passed along to a freshened location that seems to meet even more of our wants and needs than it precursor.  The food is delicious and the service so thoughtful and unpretentious it feels like you know every one of the folks working there, or that they somehow know you, or want to.  This is a little slice of the very best of why many of us do what we do.  Simply delicious food and drink in a thoughtful, pleasant spot, for all the right reasons. 

ICAP Awards

This is me at IACP accepting the award on behalf of another Rizzoli entry La Cucina Italiana.  Looks like I’m just happy to be there!

Marion Nestle Food Studies Collection Dedication Ceremony

Cecily Brownstone’s nephew gives the Marion Nestle Food Studies Collection CB’s rolodex, with Julia Child’s phone number!

Roof to Table? Our Food May Be Closer Than We Know

The future of food may well be really, really local. Or should I say close. How about calling it Wall to Table (as in hanging gardens), or maybe Cellar (a nicer thing to call a basement) to Table? Maybe even in a planter box right on our dining table. Chia Pets with a side of Russian Dressing, anyone?

I mean, how in heaven's name are we going to feed billions more people if we grow, raise and make food the way we’re doing it now? Can we really rely on underpaying emerging nations and subsidizing corporate farmers to sell bland ingredients to large companies making so-called food-like products that make us fat and sick? Can we continue to have all that money – in the middle, between the farmer and us – go to people (‘cause as we all know, corporations are people, too…) who are adding no real value, but taking a whole lot from both sides of the deal?

Many of these questions will be discussed Thursday, when food writer Mark Bittman hosts a discussion on the urban food supply at the New York Times Energy for Tomorrow conference.

What we know is that our current farming system is broken. We’re virtually sucking the nutrients out of tired earth, then attempting to replenish it with edited, synthetic ones, to grow subsidized mono crops that are leading us to the kind of collapse too horrifying to imagine. We’re cutting down rain forests, ignoring so much of the nutrient value growing right there, to raise trendy crops of magical single foods with no sense of the balance, no plan for the future.

Remember, the West was the new frontier, in part, because, as farmers used up the land in the middle of the country, they simply moved further on down the road. As they hit the Pacific Ocean, they soon had to start thinking about creative alternatives we -- and Chinese farmers 2000 years ago -- call sustainable. Even the great early 20th century adventure writer Jack London understood this enough to dig in and start employing smarter, more thoughtful methods. There’s still a park with his name on it in Sonoma County, Calif., where you can see terraced farmland and a humane and smart Pig Palace, where our porcine pals lived the good life before becoming ham, bacon and darn good sausage. But going back is only part of the equation. We need to revisit the kind of multipliable diversity studied by London and old plant wizard Luther Burbank and then employ every new technology we can muster in support of practical preservation and the circulation of precious earth and water into a system that is truly self-sustaining.

I suspect we may end up with a construct very much like the imagined world of futuristic storytelling that sees us in a bubble – sphere, in fact – where everything has to work together as a universe. Think the Jetsons, with heirloom tomatoes.

Make no mistake, unless we’re smacked by a major asteroid or runaway galaxy, the earth will probably go on spinning, and life in some form seems destined to be around for a good long time. The question is, will we be along for a longer well-fed ride, or will we become lunch for some smarter or at least more-focused feeder?

OK, this is full of gross oversimplifications, but I do have a few additional thoughts. Heirloom seeds that are productive, give delicious food and produce nutritious anything will continue to become more valuable and may in fact one day be used like money: edible currency, if you will. Simple systems that recycle and replenish, capture, clean and utilize from our natural surroundings – like good rainwater systems – may well be as common as vacuum cleaners. Rents may go up depending on how much sunlight and therefore feeding fuel hits our roof or window or panel, or planter box. Already, real estate values go up (even in Flint, Mich.) with proximity to farmers markets and community gardens – instead, or along with, access to golf courses and good schools.

With a mighty push, or against our will, we will need to come around again to the age-old knowledge that we simply must have food and water, fresh air and sunshine to survive and thrive, and that the appropriate amount of energy – pun intended – must go towards getting that right. And, in the end, it could mean something really good to eat.

So here’s where creative minds deserve to run free. What’s in your future lunch box and how does it get there?

Full article here

Marion Nestle Food Studies Collection Dedication Ceremony

Carol A. Mandel, Dean of the New York University Division of Libraries, Marvin J. Taylor, Head of Fales Library & Special Collections, and Clark Wolf cordially invite you to celebrate the naming of the   Marion Nestle Food Studies Collection at the Fales Library & Special Collections New York University   Thursday, April 18, 2013, 4:00 PM   Please join us at:   Fales Library Elmer Holmes Bobst Library 70 Washington Square South, Third Floor New York, NY 10012   RSVP to rsvp.bobst@nyu.edu with your name and title/date of event   Program at 4:00 PM; reception to follow

Good News for American Restaurants

Usually, journalists who cover food trends like to see at least three strong examples of something going on before they declare it a Trend, capital T. I’m gonna go out on an artisan limb here and proclaim something I see that I hope will spread like bad gossip in a hot kitchen.

We’re going to stop wasting fully built restaurants just so we can exercise our design egos, take what we find, make it a little better and start serving really good food.

It’s very French. And generally European. A place gets sold, the new owners paint the bathroom, fix some of the kitchen equipment, put up a new menu box out front and get going. In New York City, it lives in the form of a newly successful and extremely delicious restaurant christened Calliope.

This is a spot that was previously, well, a few things. The last iteration sported a fairly comprehensive bistro look but just couldn’t make a business on a busy East Village corner. The new owners, a pair of chefs called Ginevra Iverson and Eric Korsh (who happen to be married to each other), have had solid experience on a couple of coasts and wanted to serve good, solid food – that in New York City feels transcendent – and make with the restaurant thing. They have succeeded in part because they seem to be putting all of their resources, talents and efforts into making mouthwatering food and treating everyone extremely well. When’s the last time a server spontaneously blurted that they “just love working for wonderful people who actually care about everyone else”?

So maybe this is a Recession Resulting trendlette, or maybe it’s the wave of the future. Or at least a significant ripple in the sea. In any event, it’s a really good way to go, expecially if you want to build a solid business, and the foundation of long-term success. Please pass the… everything!

Full article here

A Downtown Renovation With a New Flavor

A corner of Lower Manhattan that has long been thick with corporate towers but thin on interesting cuisine is about to get a vast new food court filled with the kind of small, idiosyncratic vendors normally found in Brooklyn or on the Lower East Side.

Eight “fast casual” restaurants have signed leases with Brookfield Office Properties to occupy a $40 million second-level gallery adjacent to the glass atrium and palm trees of the Winter Garden, in the World Financial Center. To be called the Dining Terrace, it will extend the length of a football field — 300 feet from north to south — and seat 600 customers in a central court overlooking the Hudson River. Six more tenants are expected to sign on before it opens early next year, as part of a $250 million renovation of the World Financial Center.

The restaurants include an outlet of Umami Burger, a Los Angeles-based chain that offers house-ground patties infused with a savory flavor-enhancer that includes dried shiitake mushrooms and ground seaweed; Num Pang, a Cambodian-inspired shop for made-to-order sandwiches, which already has three outlets in Manhattan; and Little Muenster, which offers what it calls “super-fancy grilled-cheese sandwiches” in its two stores in Brooklyn and Manhattan.

Also arriving will be Dos Toros Taqueria — inspired by the Gordo Taqueria chain in the Bay Area — selling house-made hot sauces and upscale ingredients for its Mexican tacos, burritos and quesadillas; Chop’t, part of a salad chain that offers 60 fresh ingredients and 25 homemade dressings; and Sprinkles, an outlet of the influential Beverly Hills-based bakery chain with 20 varieties of cupcakes.

The terrace will include the third shop of Skinny Pizza, a Long Island-based chain that sells thin-crust pizza in standard, whole-wheat or gluten-free varieties, with antibiotic- and-hormone-free meats, and Dig Inn, a health-food restaurant that also features hormone- and antibiotic-free ingredients.

“These restaurants are not just your usual suspects,” said Edward P. Hogan, national director of retail leasing for Brookfield, Lower Manhattan’s largest office landlord, which owns the four towers of the World Financial Center, including the Winter Garden. “We see this as a destination dining location for downtown Manhattan. We want to be the heart and soul of this new neighborhood that is beginning to emerge down here.”

The area, in the shadow of the 1 World Trade Center building now under construction, is populated by corporate workers, tourists and a growing number of residents, particularly in Battery Park City, where restaurant options are few.

Clark Wolf, an independent restaurant consultant based in New York, said the Dining Terrace would break new culinary ground. “The old food-court idea was to go after concepts in tried-and-true categories, usually past their prime,” he said, referring to burgers, pizza and sandwiches. “But this is by no means the traditional food court. All of the new restaurants are nonstandard choices that are at the higher end of their category. You are not going to see them on every corner.”

Full article here

 

Food & Wine Editors Top Ten

 

Get your copy here

Big Idea 2013: How Chicken Can Change the World

If I had my druthers, the Big News in Food in the New Year would be chicken, chicken and more chicken.

Food is the largest industry in the world and yet any little thing that happens, even in a tiny locale, can have a huge impact across the globe. Let’s face it, there’s chicken everywhere, on everything and for the most part, well, it’s really pretty bad.

I had the pleasure of being on British Airways, in first class, going to Paris recently. When the attendant asked me what I wanted for my dinner, I asked how the chicken was. “It tastes pretty man-made, I’m afraid to say," she said with a knowing smile. I had the beef.

We both knew exactly what she meant. Dry, tasteless, industrial. I don’t care what the big companies tell you in zillion-dollar advertising campaigns, lousy chicken is just no good. Birds bred for overlarge white meat breasts and quick development are just never going to give the depth and range of flavor of a really good farm chicken.

In fact, during that Thanksgiving stay in Paris, I had roast chicken three memorable times in six days. The first was at Brasserie Balzar, near the Odeon, in the 6th arrondissement. I’ve been there many times and my friend and I found the poulet rotie every bit as succulent and delicious as every time before. The simple meal was so good that we went back and had the exact same meal again for lunch the next day. A few days later we had a rotisserie cooked black foot chicken (that’s a famous and beloved variety in France) at another memorable spot. Different flavor, but definitely “chickeney."

The birds really do thrive in many environments -- on Brooklyn rooftops, in suburban back yards, even on farms! -- and are not terribly difficult to keep happy. When raised properly, chicken presents a range of flavors and textures that are appealing and good with a lot of different kinds of dishes, and can be a successful part of many localized and sustainable food systems. It does not have to be industrial bland and pellet-like.

People the world over love chicken, think of it as an icon of home and family cookery, security and wealth and know how versatile and valuable it can be as a food. If we went back to being smarter and more thoughtful about how we raised, cooked and selected our birds, much else would follow. It’s when we demand goodness in the simple and the familiar that the bar gets raised across the board.

These continue to be bumpy and challenging times. Paying attention to what’s really important and valuable continues to be good sense, in business and in life. There’s nothing more delicious then a wonderful roasted chicken. And don’t even get me started on eggs.

Full article here

101 Classic Cookbooks Party in DC

This is me talking to the DC chapter of Les Dames d'Escoffier about the NYU Rizzoli book 101 Classic Cookbooks, 501 Classic Recipes. 

Event was at the home of Dame ( pronounced dahm, really) Joan Nathan who wrote a book included in the Book. 

Got to meet Carla (also pictured) and tell her that her show The Chew was my idea. She tells me they're slowing it down and adding more conversation. Nice!