Tag: food

Moroccan Pancakes

Moroccan pancakes, or beghrir, aren’t your everyday flapjacks. The semolina batter is yeasted and cooked on only one side, allowing the other to develop the countless tiny “eyes” that give the dish its nickname, 1000-hole pancake. In the new Smile to Go canteen at the Freehand Hotel in Gramercy, Marden cooks them in batches and reheats them in the oven, then tops them with seasonal-fruit compote, house made ricotta, and pistachio honey.

Kish-Kash

Moroccan-style couscous is clearly the star here, and a slim menu supporting the fluffy grain. It takes over 2 hours for Admony to make a batch in a method rarely seen in New York City — she learned how to make it as a child from her Moroccan neighbor — and the final product is no comparison to the grocery version. “I’m going to show New Yorkers how they eat couscous all wrong. People ask if it’s going to be Israeli couscous, and I get really upset. That’s pasta. Couscous is a fine semolina. You need to steam it twice, pass it through the sieve twice. You have this horrible aftertaste in instant stuff. There is no comparison; I can’t eat that.”

Bocce

Bocce, where diners can play games of bocce and also eat pizza and share plates. The pizzas come from executive chef Tim Meyers and pizza consultant Anthony Falco, who both used to work at Roberta’s. “They can’t replicate Roberta’s wood-burning brick ovens on Bocce’s electric grill, but are still pretty tasty”. But he was particularly surprised by the share plates, like the calamari-and-shrimp fritto misto, which “was perfectly battered and succulent.”

Best NYC Restaurants 2018

Yet, in spite of expensive remakes of familiar dishes, many restaurateurs still manage to turn out spectacular food at more modest prices, and I’ve found myself eating as well this year as in any other. In fact, better. Roman pies called pinsas have flourished at Camillo. Some of my faves at Pheasant include fried polenta with mixed mushrooms

Queens Night Market

The nighttime market is known for its wide selection of dishes, and this year’s list of confirmed vendors reiterates that variety, with bites like puffy Hong Kong-style egg waffles from Eggloo, crispy Trinidadian shark sandwiches from Caribbean Street Eats, Peruvian ceviche from Inti Sumaq, and Taiwanese popcorn chicken from Bstro. There are also sweet summer treats like mochi, shaved ice, bubble tea, and ice cream (including fried ice cream).

Mani in Pasta

East Village’s 5-month-old pizza restaurant Mani in Pasta from chef-owner Giuseppe Manco is apparently already a hit. Manco spent the first part of his career making Neapolitan-style pizzas in Italy and the US before switching to Roman-style pizzas, which he’s now considered a specialist in. Critics at Grub Street note that his pan pizzas are “terrific,” highlighting the margherita and carbonara versions in particular. The restaurant also serves up Roman pastas and pinsa, flatbreads made with the same dough as the pizzas but pressed thinner.

Heirloom Beans

Then 1 day, in 2003, Thomas Keller came by. His restaurant, the French Laundry, which would later earn 3 Michelin stars, happened to be in Yountville. “I remember, he had probably 10 different beans on the table. To get something that freshly dried was a revelation.” The bean that caught Keller’s eye was a greenish-yellow thing with a red-rimmed eye, like a soybean with a hangover. Called the Vallarta, it was on the verge of extinction when Sando found it, but it had a dense, fudgy texture and gave a good broth. “Steve had taken something that used to be just a dried bean and raised it to a new level, where the flavor was really intense and it cooked so much more consistently”. Within 1 month, it was a staple of the French Laundry. Within 1 year, every chef in California seemed to be serving beans.

2022-03-10: A huge bean collection

We have 36k different types of bean collected. Every single one has a story to tell and could be the solution to so many of our planetary challenges out there. Many of these beans have been collected over the last hundred years from around the world. And what’s really fascinating is most of these beans have never been characterized. The researchers don’t know how these beans grow what they look like, what environments they would thrive in. So, we’ve partnered with them to use our technology to understand those beans’ capabilities for the first time. It took us 30 years to produce a drought-tolerant bean where we found the trait for drought tolerance in one of these beans in the collection. With the technology of Mineral, we can move into absolute precision in finding these types of traits much quicker, much cheaper and much more efficiently.

Outstanding Tacos

Tacos have nearly taken over from slices of pizza as the culinary backbone of New York City. Over the last 30 years we’ve learned to love the southern Mexican style of 2 corn tortillas flopped over a meaty filling, sprinkled with onions and cilantro. But other types of tacos have flown in the window, too, reminding us of the days when all we had were hardshells. Like your tacos rolled? Or tiny? Or with a flour tortilla? Or with a dab of guac? Freighted with organs? Or “Arabe? style — wrapped in a flour tortilla like shawarma? We’ve got ’em all, and more. Here are our favorite taquerias, curated by Eater critic Robert Sietsema. And it’s not that we don’t love chef-driven tacos, fusion tacos, or tacos produced by chains: We do! But this collection is reserved for humbler classic specimens.

Avant Garden

East Village fine dining vegan restaurant Avant Garden is making its way to Williamsburg. The new Avant Garden will feature a menu helmed by chef Tony Mongeluzzi, who has been cooking at the Manhattan flagship for the past year and a half and will remain the executive chef there as well. The menu for Williamsburg will offer the same fine dining approaches to vegan food as the East Village outpost but will primarily feature dishes unique to the Williamsburg location.