It took two months for JoAnn Clevenger to reopen Upperline, a traditional Creole restaurant in New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina devastated that city in 2005. This time, a virus has closed the place, probably for a lot longer. It didn’t take long for her to realize that a takeout operation wouldn’t keep the business alive,…
Of all the comforting, carb-heavy starches of the kitchen, potatoes rarely make it to the center of the plate. Unlike rice and pasta, which often take the starring role in main courses, potatoes are relegated to the sidelines — usually as fluffy fleshed arm candy to some meaty protein hogging the limelight. But to me,…
They are a new class of emergency medical workers: the more than two million Americans reporting to work each day to sell food and other household staples to a country in the midst of a coronavirus pandemic. As shoppers swarm stores, snapping up everything from milk to toilet paper, cashiers are there to ring them…
Hello, Five Weeknight Dishes readers. Are we still having weeknights? Is it time for dinner? I think it’s safe to say that most of the daily cues we use to structure the day are out the window. It’s easy to lose track of the hours. But I will also say that the days when we…
For some time, the biggest thing in beer was bold hops, and lots of them. Brewers used them to create flavors and aromas as over the top as a Times Square billboard. Now you’ll need a microscope to find the most important ingredients at breweries like Ebb & Flow Fermentations, a microbial-minded operation in Cape…
Like workers in most other fields, restaurant people speak their own language. They talk about covers when they mean customers, sourcing instead of shopping, and cocktail programs, which civilians would just call cocktails. This week, an eerie new term has rippled through the business: contactless delivery. The concept is simple. The kitchen prepares food that…
There’s no doubt about it: It’s an uncertain and scary time, but you and your loved ones still need to eat, and the act of preparing and serving a meal — even a simple one — can bring great comfort to the cook as well as to the diner. If you have a decently stocked pantry,…
The Union Square Hospitality Group, one of the nation’s most prestigious restaurant companies, laid off 2,000 employees on Wednesday morning “due to a near-complete elimination of revenue,” the company said in a statement. That number represents 80 percent of the company’s total staff, at 18 restaurants in New York City, two in Washington and its…
With coronavirus anxiety rising, your major concern is probably not whether you can get fresh figs or an exotic pink pineapple from Costa Rica, but having eggs, fresh lettuce, pork chops and the like delivered to your door might be. Baldor Specialty Foods, a wholesale grocer based in the Bronx, will open for retail sales…
Good morning. How are you holding up? Millions and millions are at home this week, sheltered in place, self-quarantined, working remotely, home-schooling, feeding one another soups and sandwiches, keeping panic at bay. Others have headed into work at the hospital or police station, the plant, the supermarket. There are people collecting garbage, building things, reporting,…