News

The Shots Heard 'Round the World

2013-05-20T15:16:43Z

[courtesy of gawker] sietsemaThe news came sometime late last Friday morning. Robert Sietsema, who had been with the Village Voice for two decades, was fired from his post as food critic.

Three days later, Tejal Rao, the yin to Seitsema's yang at the Voice, and recipient of a James Beard Award for restaurant criticism this month, has resigned.

Nightlife columnist Michael Gusto and theatre critic Michael Feingold, a Pulitzer finalist for criticism in 2009, have also been ______ (fill in adverb of your choosing) let go, and staff writer Nick Pinto has recently given notice that he's out after his next feature.

Layoffs and resignations ensued after Christine Brennan, executive editor of Voice Media Group, told Voice editors Will Bourne and Jessica Lustig to fire 25% of their twenty-person staff. The company's press release reads in part, "This restructuring will allow the Voice to continue offering superior content and products to its New York audience." But Sietsema, Rao, Pinto, Gusto, and Feingold have left behind colossal pairs of shoes – the filling of which is nigh impossible.

Eat the Week; May 13th - May 17th

2013-05-18T18:45:13Z

The last day of retail for Joe's Dairy | A look at the GoogaMooga grounds four days before the festival | Pete Wells gives one star to Caravaggio on the Upper East Side | Signage goes up at Costata, now open in the former Fiamma space | We eat at Today's Cajun Seafood in New Orleans | Donde Dinner? - 67 South 6th Street

Donde Dinner? - 67 South 6th Street

2013-05-17T21:10:24Z

Donde Dinner? wants to make your next dining experience an adventure. So, every Friday, we pick a restaurant and post its address for you. The catch is, that's all the information you get. No name, no type of cuisine, and no Googling. But first, here's last week's address:

700 East 9th Street = The Wayland

This week's restaurant follows typical Donde Dinner? fashion. Price, quality, and accessibility have all been taken into account. You won't be waiting at the bar for two hours with $15 cocktails and you never have to worry about a dress code. Just hop on the train, or your feet, or your bike, and head to:

67 South 6th Street (map)

Today's Cajun Seafood in New Orleans

2013-05-17T17:12:27Z

Today's Cajun Seafood landed on our radar after some unsavory locals sold the joint to us as the place to go for spicy crawfish and boiled turkey necks. So after a humbling trip to Caffin Avenue and the rest of the Lower Ninth, and after fried chicken livers and pepper jelly brunch at Elizabeth's in Bywater, we stopped by Today's for a pound of crawfish ($3.59) and a turkey neck ($1.80).

Today's Cajun is a lunch counter. It's a small space with four tables on one side where guests can sit and eat, but most folks get their food to go. A lot of the menu is prepared foods that are kept warm in steam trays. The meats continue to braise as they sit in their cooking liquid, so when an order is pulled the result is incredibly tender, flavorful protein. That was exactly the case with the turkey necks, which are cooked at Today's in the same boil that crawfish, sausages, pigs feet, corn, and just about everything else on the menu is. The combination of celery salt, paprika, black pepper, bay, chili, and cayenne that make up the boil yield a deeply satisfying, spicy, salty, and undeniably Cajun plate of food.

Delicate turkey meat willfully left the bone as we pulled at it voraciously with predatory fingers. By the time we realized we should get forks and eat like the civilized people we're not, what was left on the paper plate resembled a strange carcass toasting on hot sand in some far away desert. And as the last head from the pile of spicy, meaty crawfish was sucked and thrown onto the graveyard, we were left standing over our kill like proud vultures riding a liberating Creole wind.

Today's Cajun Seafood | 1700 Mcshane Place | 504-940-5995 | map

Show Me a Sign: Costata

2013-05-16T15:12:57Z

Signage has gone up recently at Costata, Michael White's three-story Italian steakhouse opening tomorrow night in the former Fiamma space. White got his New York City start in Fiamma's kitchen as the executive chef when the restaurant opened in 2002. Ahmass Fakahany, who is now White's partner in the Altamarea Group, was a regular there. His favorite thing on Fiamma's menu was a pasta with truffle cream, peas, prosciutto, and parm. That's why you'll find "Garganelli alla Fiamma" on the Costata menu.

PJ Calapa, who also runs the kitchen at White's Ai Fiori in midtown, is Costata's executive chef. In addition to pasta, crudo, and seafood, the steakhouse menu will have filet cuts, strips, ribeye (boneless and bone-in), porter house, porter house for two, and tomahawk for two in addition to lamb and veal. Seven sauces are available to pair with the array of steak options.

Eben Freeman, who will also run the cocktail program at Altamarea Group's Tribeca project the Butterfly when that opens in the coming weeks, is in charge of the bar program at Costata. Hristo Zisovski, who joined the Altamarea Group in 2010 after seven years at Jean Georges, is the beverage director.

Costata's three floors seat around 170. A small standing bar and 35 seats make up the first. The second has an eight person bar, lounge, and 65 seats, and the top floor is a private event space that can accomodate up to 60 guests.

Costata opens tomorrow night.

Four Brothers and One Star for Caravaggio

2013-05-15T17:28:46Z

[benjamin petit for the times]Pete Wells heads uptown for his review in the Times today and files on four-year-old Caravaggio. The Upper East Side restaurant is owned by the four Bruno brothers. It opened in 2009 and throws back to the era of white tablecloths and dress codes. "Caravaggio," writes Wells, "is defiantly elegant in an age that sees white tablecloths as a medieval relic whose sadistic power to stand in the way of a good time is second only to that of the chastity belt."

In the dining room, elegance takes the guise of fresh flowers and a selection of well-curated art. There's "a signed Matisse lithograph," "a pair of Ellsworth Kelly prints," and "a pair of Frank Stella paintings." "Donald Baechler has covered the entire back wall with a crowd of the eeriest children in the world," the critic writes. "The mural is unsettling," Wells notes, "but it has the hovering, electric presence of real art."

Of Caravaggio, "It is one of the most civilized Italian restaurants to turn up anywhere in the city in the last few years," Wells writes. But he also cites ample inconsistencies in the kitchen, and with the all-too-common, steep Upper East Side prices, the critic awards just one star. "First-time travelers should be warned: no matter what the euro is trading at, the exchange rate on the Italian Upper East Side is always awful." [NYTimes]

Return of the Great GoogaMooga

2013-05-14T15:48:58Z

The Great GoogaMooga is returning to Prospect Park this weekend. Last year's festival drew 30,000 people and left Superfly, the entertainment production and marketing agency that runs the event, scurrying to keep up. Festival goers had a laundry list of complaints last year, but the team has reworked the format with hopes to avoid making the same blunders. The Googa website notes, "It’s fair to say we learned a lot last year. We’re changing, adding, tweaking, building—to make this year’s festival better for you in every way."

This year's festival launches Friday, with a Kickoff Concert featuring Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Flaming Lips, and the Darkness. Tickets for that event are $55, but the rest of GoogaMooga is free (tickets were granted to those who registered on a lottery basis). There will be ten more fod stalls than last year, making a total of 85 contributing restuarants and, unlike last year, most of these vendors will have bottled water for sale. Guests are also allowed to bring their own now. Temporary cell towers will be brought in to ensure reliable phone service, so guests will be able to go nuts on Instagram.

Fences have gone up around the perimeter of the festival grounds, but we got in yesterday to snap a few pictures of GoogaMooga Part II coming together in Prospect Park.

So Long, Joe's Dairy

2013-05-13T17:29:13Z

Joe's Dairy has sat on Sullivan Street between Prince and Houston for nearly 80 years. In 1977, Anthony Campanelli and his family took over the operation from Joe Aiello. After running the mom and pop shop for 35 years the family has decided to call it quits, and Saturday was the last for the iconic Soho storefront. The wholesale aspect of the business will remain. So their products will still be available, you just won't be able to stop in for amazing mozzarella sandwiches or chat with the Campanelli's and neighbors that have been shopping there for decades.

We stopped by to take pictures Saturday and ran into Piero Iberti and Jeremy Zalben, two native New Yorkers who started filming a documentary about Joe's two years ago. They found out Joe's was closing the night before and spent all day Saturday filming, interviewing patrons, and trying to make sense of it all. Hail came down in sheets and seemed to be washing away a New York legacy. We endured the storm under the small green awning at 156 Sullivan Street, each of us aware it was the last time we would ever do so. Here's a teaser for the documentary, and a toast to the end of an era.

Eat the Week; May 6th - May 10th

2013-05-11T16:40:26Z

Scenes and bites from Jazz Fest in New Orleans | Signage goes up at Dinosaur BBQ in Park Slope | Pete Wells awards two stars to Pearl & Ash on Bowery | We try the roast beef po' boy at Domilise's in New Orleans | Donde Dinner? - 700 East 9th Street

Donde Dinner? - 700 East 9th Street

2013-05-10T20:30:19Z

13 Doyers Street = Nom Wah Tea Parlor

700 East 9th Street (map)