Tag: food

Brains

I love the custard-like richness of brain, though I admit that for some reason I have to make a bit of an effort to edit out my consciousness (and I’m not making a cute joke here) that it’s brain I’m eating. I make that effort because the reasonable part of me recognizes no difference between shank, breast, brain. It’s all from the same dead animal.

Restaurant Landmarks

This is really cool. Serious eater maportofu started a Talk thread and points out that there’s a handful of New York City food and drink destinations with labels on Google maps: “I find it funny that it actually has labels for Magnolia Bakery and The Bitter End. I also see a label for Lombardi’s, Fraunces Tavern. Mysteriously, none for Shake Shack.”

21st Century Food

Let’s finally embrace the truth that food is not something to be taken for granted. As a culture, we need to be more curious about where our food comes from. We need to buy from farmers who are trying to do things the right way. We need to think before we eat. If we do, we’ll find that our cuisine and eating habits will more closely resemble those of the nineteenth century than the late twentieth. Hunting will be less about the buck points and more about the meat. Nose-to-tail eating will make a comeback–not because of fashion or Fergus Henderson (whom I love), but because of scarcity and price. And small-scale farming–little vegetable gardens in the backyards of homes in cities, suburbs, and the countryside alike–will become not just economically sensible but cool. Hell, maybe foraging for mushrooms and wild fruits will become a seminormal skill again. At the table, this means our plates will be heavier on grains and greens, and meat will shift from the center of the dish to a supporting role–the role it’s played throughout history in most of the world’s cuisines.

the meat glut is over, and people will learn to eat right.

Beer Table

an intimate drinking and eating room in Park Slope, Brooklyn that serves a daily selection of rare and special beers paired with an assortment of cheese, charcuterie, homemade snacks, preserved foods, and small meals.

Di Fara

Fame has come late for Domenico DeMarco, who for 40 years has operated Di Fara Pizza on Avenue J in Midwood, Brooklyn. Since 1999, the year that a favorable review in a city guidebook put his pies on the map, Mr. DeMarco has graced the cover of The Village Voice (the ”Best Italian Restaurants” issue in June), and his restaurant has topped the Zagat list of the city’s best pizzerias in 2004 and countless other guides to slice-related nirvana.

Through it all, Mr. DeMarco has changed very little. With his hair slicked back and flour on his shoes, he has continued to make each pizza personally as 3 of his 7 children labor in the back. He maintains beds of basil and rosemary on the windowsill, and imports nearly every ingredient from such faraway lands as Israel and the Netherlands. The man insists on no less than 3 different cheeses on each pizza, and chowhounds line up, sometimes for more than 1 hour to buy a regular slice for $2.50 or the Sicilian for $2.75. The city’s reigning pizza deity is pleased by this sort of success, but he is hardly surprised.

2010-10-25: man, i still haven’t been 😦

2018-06-12:

Longtime customers have noted fresh cows’-milk mozzarella in and out of rotation with the firmer, low-moisture variety. Grana Padano, once a fixture of Di Fara, stopped making appearances after the countertop-mounted rotary grater broke. Parmigiano and Pecorino replaced it for a while. There was even a short-lived era where the crusts were enigmatically burnt, seemingly by design, and that’s where things turn philosophical. “Dom’s pizza is a flowing river in that the only thing you can really count on is perpetual change, and that’s part of what’s interesting about it. He hasn’t stuck to the same method for 50 years.”