On Monday, May 13, Jean-Georges Vongerichten got into a car outside his apartment in the West Village and asked to be taken to the airport. It would have been an odd time to leave town: The next day he was opening a new restaurant, the Fulton, in Lower Manhattan, on the waterfront facing Brooklyn. But…
Good morning. What are we supposed to think about shrimp? That’s the question we asked Melissa Clark a few months ago, wondering which shrimp we ought to buy for our pla goong, our jambalaya, our favorite pizza. We were worried about the farming practices that brought some shrimp to market, the labor of enslaved people,…
Ladies in dresses and gentlemen in suits. Gilded cornices and crystal chandeliers. The clinking of silverware and the din of laughter. On a recent Tuesday afternoon, Astor Court, the soaring dining room at the St. Regis New York, was humming, just as it did a century ago. Almost. Afternoon tea, traditionally a small, sociable meal…
For the entirety of Prune’s 20 years, I’ve confined myself — with pretty strict discipline — to cooking within a European-and-Mediterranean idiom. It has been two decades of salsa verde, gremolata, sauce gribiche and maître d’hôtel butter, with all the rest doused in olive oil. Of course, giving yourself the entire European-and-Mediterranean pantry is hardly…
We Americans may enjoy our tuna and savor our salmon, but nothing makes us weak in the knees like an overloaded buffet of all-you-can-eat shrimp. Whether it’s battered and fried, steamed and cocktail-sauced, or boiled until tender in spicy brine, shrimp is a national obsession. Our consumption has been escalating, up to about 4.4 pounds…
Headliner Brasserie Saint Marc An ambitious project, four years in the making, from Karin Agstam, a model and actor who owned the restaurant Station in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is ready to open. Ms. Agstam was so smitten by the arched, brick-walled East Village space that she was determined to make it a restaurant. Now, it has…
Over the years, I have eaten many bowls of pasta with clams that have been rewired by a chef who was trying to stand out. But I had not come across one that made as much sense to me as the big, sloshing platters you get at old-line Italian-American clam bars like Randazzo’s until tripping…
Whether farmed or wild caught, the cheaper the shrimp, the more likely it is to have been treated with chemicals, particularly sodium tripolyphosphate and sodium bisulfite. Sodium bisulfite is used to keep shrimp shells from undergoing melanosis (also called black spot), which is a darkening of the head and shell after the shrimp are harvested…
The legend of Camembert is one of daring escape and dairy espionage. The cheese was invented in 1791 when a priest from Brie (yes, like the cheese), took shelter with a dairymaid, Marie Harel, as he fled France’s anticlerical government. He taught her to make cheese with an edible rind, as local lore tells it.…
Those pumpkin seeds you might buy to nibble, use in cooking or mix into granola probably come from China, the world’s largest producer of pumpkins. Two American producers of pumpkin seeds — Stony Brook WholeHeartedFoods in Geneva, N.Y., and Autumn Seed in Corvallis, Ore. — estimate that at least 75 percent of the seeds sold…