Tag: food

Open Streets

DOT presented its renovation plan for the intersection of Ninth Ave. and 14th St. to Manhattan Community Board 4 on Wednesday evening. Ryan Russo, DOT’s Director for Street Management and Safety, explained that the agency is taking advantage of a scheduled repaving of Ninth Ave. in mid-July to respond to long-standing community request to remove the 2-block northbound contra-flow traffic lane from the avenue, which has been blamed for several pedestrian fatalities

the NYC DOT seems quite pragmatic, coming up with workable solutions in months rather than decades.
2008-07-31:

For Mr. Tsao, taking over a piece of the bridge for a dinner party, as he did Friday night and likes to do at least once each summer, is an act both political and personal, a conscious gesture of civic engagement and a way to lay claim to a terrific party space. He is captivated and inspired by the persona of the 19th-century flâneur “the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes.” Being a flâneur “is all about taking in the world we’ve been given; we want to embrace it and engage with it.”

more take back the streets stuff.
2011-01-06: nice! astor place is currently a downside of living in the east village. not much longer.

2013-10-09: janette is one of my heroines. she is responsible for a huge quality of life increase in nyc in the last 5 years. in this video she talks about how she made even that pimple on nyc, times square, bearable.

2020-04-30: Restaurant reopening could include seats on closed streets. Perhaps this will trigger a longer-term change in street usage, which would be a great thing.
2021-01-28:

The New York City Council voted Thursday to approve Intro. 1116-B, the legislation that will create 4000 new permits for street vendors in the city over the next 10 years.

This is a tiny step in the right direction. The future of much of NYC is in the street, we shouldn’t limit these permits at all. Let a million flowers bloom.

Perfect Rice

The pressure makes it possible to boil the water in the cooker at a higher temperature, thus making for fatter, shinier and sweeter grains of rice. The air-sucking filter creates a vacuum causing the rice to absorb water more quickly while it soaks.

2022-01-23:

The World’s Best Rice comes in a sturdy, gold-embossed box containing 6 slender packages. Sold for ¥10800 for 840 grams, it’s 30x more expensive than what you’d pay at a supermarket in Japan. The Guinness World Records named it the priciest rice on the planet in 2016. Japan’s rice milling and processing giant Toyo Rice Corporation, which sells the product mainly to well-to-do customers in Japan, the United States, and Singapore, commands the princely sum by blending several of the top-placed finalists chosen by judges in a blind tasting of the International Contest on Rice Taste Evaluation, the country’s most prestigious rice competition, which takes place each November. The winning batches are stored in temperature-controlled rooms for at least 6 months before the kernels are milled to remove the tawny outer bran—but never the ultrathin umami layer around the starchy core. You simply won’t find better-tasting short-grain white rice anywhere.

Enclume

We signed up for the “Underground Menu”, advertised as “No holds barred, no deviations” and running to as many as 26 courses. The chef Simon Rogan is possibly the most innovative chef in the UK, pushing forward concepts and ideas in molecular gastronomy more than anyone except Ferran Adria. It’s safe to say that I was more excited about this meal than anything I’ve eaten since the Fat Duck. This was “Charentais melon, horseradish, smoke”. It’s an elaborate inversion of the expected ingredients. The green ball is not melon, but actually a perfect sphere of horseradish cream, with a crisp coat, similar to a chocolate truffle with a liquid center. It was floating in melon juice/foam, dressed with drops of red salmon oil.

Molecular gastronomy at its best.