Why Are So Many Great NYC Restaurants Closing? It’s Not Just The Rent: It’s happening all over New York City, to restaurants big and small, from acclaimed pioneers, like WD-50, Union Square Café, Telepan, the Campbell Apartment and the Four Seasons, to more humble and beloved spots, like Bianca, Hamilton’s and Brooklyn Fish Camp. All shuttered or packing up because the rent is due and it’s too damn high. How high? The Seagram Building’s owner, RFR Holding, is said to have wanted to raise the Four Seasons’ annual rent to a market rate of $3.7 million from $784,000. Mark Grossich, who took over the Campbell Apartment space 17 years ago, was paying $350,000 a year and offered to pay his landlord, the MTA, $800,000 per year to save his bar. Not enough. Nightlife guru Scott Gerber made a bid for $1.1 million a year, and after a contentious lawsuit with the MTA, Gerber got the deal. Union Square Café’s rent was tripled. No credit for making the neighborhood great in the first place.
Thomas Keller on That ‘New York Times’ Review and the Future of Per Se: “Everyone around me was freaking out.” Thomas Keller, six foot two and dressed in jeans and a polo shirt, is sitting across from me at the noisy Italian restaurant Ciccio, in Yountville, California, waving his hands and talking about the scene in his office on a winter morning earlier this year. “Everybody was expecting an immediate response, because that’s the world we live in,” he says. “It was devastating.” Keller is the chef and proprietor of two of the world’s most revered fine dining restaurants, as well as a handful of popular and well-respected less formal establishments. But on January 12 the New York Times had knocked Per Se, his seemingly untouchable restaurant on Columbus Circle in Manhattan, down from four stars (its highest rating) to two. In the process the paper’s lead critic, Pete Wells, issued one of the harshest demotions in recent memory.
You Can Build Your Own Brick Pizza Oven: Rome may not have been built in a day, but this brick pizza oven can be. Mike Senese, the executive editor of Make Magazine, built his very own brick oven with a little help from his friends. Senese writes that a brick oven offers the high temperature (800 to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit) that helps pizzamakers achieve that thin, crispy crust we all dream about. He puts together a brick-by-brick how-to for putting together an affordable, easy-to-assemble oven that only requires some bricks, wood, iron, clay and cement! Bonus: The oven is also easily disassembled.
What Chef’s Table’s new France-themed season says about the western world’s culinary juggernaut: Maybe the most interesting thing about “Chef’s Table: France,” the third season of filmmaker and Emmy-nominated director David Gelb’s hit documentary series Chef’s Table, is what this artfully composed tableau doesn’t say about the state of French cooking in 2016. Because implicit in the lush and narratively elegant profiles of the four chosen chefs who comprise the season devoted to France—Alain Passard (Arpege), Michel Troisgros (Maison Troisgros), Adeline Grattard (Yam’Tcha) and Alexandre Couillon (La Marine)—is Gelb’s judgment on the state of Gallic gastronomy today.
Chef Gaggan Anand is obsessed with Japan, he plans to move there by 2020: If you have been following Chef Gaggan Anand on Instagram (@gaggan), you’ll have noticed his current obsession: Japan. The chef-owner of his eponymous restaurant, ranked no 23 in the world and no 1 in Asia (twice in a row now by Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants), is in love with the country, and with good reason. In 2020, Anand plans to shutter Bangkok-based Gaggan and set up a weekend-only restaurant in Fukuoka, a Japanese city known for its ancient temples and beaches. Though the 38-year-old chef refuses to divulge details, he says, “It’s my exit plan from Gaggan. I want to do a restaurant in a house, 12 seats only, and cook simple, comfort food.”
How Do Criminals Launder Money Through a Restaurant? No one would have described Mizu Sushi Lounge in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico as nondescript. It wasn’t a traditional Mexican restaurant by any means. Patrons dined on deep-fried sushi rolls, and washed the quasi-fusion food down with icy glasses of sangria. Mizu hosted anniversaries, birthdays, and Oscar-viewing parties — and guests made sure to document each boisterous celebration on Facebook. In fact, more than 500 people “checked in” to Mizu via various social media platforms, and many gave it high marks on online review sites. It was a place to see and be seen.
The great wine fraud: Rudy Kurniwan amassed a vast fortune trading in rare wines. Trouble is, he was bottling them himself. Ed Cumming reports on a vintage swindle. The world’s biggest wine forger started small. It was the early 2000s, and a young man who went by the name of Rudy Kurniawan began to make a name for himself on the Los Angeles scene. He had swept-back hair and a hearty laugh. More importantly, he had pockets of seemingly infinite depth, so his new friends overlooked his mysterious origins. It was said he came from a wealthy Sino-Indonesian family, living large off handouts. But nobody pressed too hard as long as the dinners – and booze – kept flowing.
What and where to eat and drink in Northern Ireland: It’s the year of food and drink in Northern Ireland making it a very tasty time to visit. That’s no surprise given this sector is the country’s biggest manufacturer, contributing US$6.5 billion to the economy, with most of the produce on restaurant menus locally, sustainably sourced – thanks to 30,000 farms, many of which are family-owned.
Leave a Reply