Mario Batali recently described his New York City food hall Eataly as a “temple,” as a place where “food is more sacred than commerce.” And while a preview of the place last night revealed there will be a heck of a lot of commerce in this place, he may be right. When it comes down to it, Eataly is nothing short of epic, a giant Slow Food mecca of all things Italy. At its core, it’s a fancy Italian grocery store with individual retail departments offering the best of everything (pastry, bread, a butcher, a fishmonger, pasta, cured meats, cheese, hand-made mozzarella, etc.), some of which are directly connected to their own sit-down restaurants with waiter service.
And then! Gelato! A coffee bar! Panini! Pizza! A wine store! A bookstore! Housewares! A cooking school by Lidia Bastianich! A planned rooftop beer garden! All with bi-lingual signage everywhere explaining Eataly’s philosophy. “It is not just a market, but a food experience,” one sign reads. Everything for everyone! The only thing that’s missing is pony rides. In Vegas there’d be a roller coaster involved.
Late autumn in Spain’s Alt Penedes, in the hills outside of Barcelona. The annual harvest that yields the area’s dry red and white wines has past weeks before. Yet there are still white grapes on the vine. They’re beyond ripe. Morning mists blow in off the sea. A fungus forms on the grapes. It begins to suck the moisture out of the fruit. The grapes appear to be decaying. For the DG Viticultors vineyard and winery, everything is going exactly as they’d hoped.
DG Viticultors produces three white desert wines, or “mist wines,” from these grapes. The late harvest enables the grapes to over-ripen beyond the sweetness levels necessary to make dry wines. The fungus, called botrytis, or “noble rot,” then draws moisture from the grapes, further concentrating their flavor and sweetness. The resulting wine, under the best circumstances, balances sweetness with acidity, and offers pronounced flavors of ripe peach and toasty honey. This centuries-old winemaking process is thought to have originated in Tokaj, in Hungary, and continues today with the celebrated Sauternes wines of France and the Beerenauslese and Trockenbeerenauslese wines of Germany.
Caligo: A Family Of Three Noble Desert Wines From Spain | BaseNow.
Caligo from BaseDesign on Vimeo.
If you also ask you what Cococook, then youre in the right place. Cococook, besides having a name that coos, is a restaurant which offers on site to take, or even to fight, nice dishes stamped, whose motto is Gourmet, Healthy and Balanced. And we, we love!
The food is so healthy food and gourmet products, fresh produce and organic ingredients for good health such as flour, sugar and unrefined grains, vegetable fat, etc.. It comes on the run, by chance, and can even be delivered … bike-if you please!
A small preview of the menu based on foccacia sandwiches types, pies or other savory cheesecakes, salads, hot dishes, desserts to die for … Not to mention the juice pressed you drink per family of colors: red, yellow, orange, to choose according to mood. Cococook, building on its success, has opened a second restaurant on Rue de Seine in the 6th.Please take a look at their website, the intro kawai worth a visit.
If you’re under the impression that the case is closed on the question of countertops, than you clearly haven’t perused the culinary landscape of sunny Spain, wherein a product called Silestone has caught the eyes (and the knife blades) of chefs from Galicia to Granada. Silestone was created by Cosentino Group, “a family-owned and wholly Spanish group focusing on the design, production, and distribution of surfaces for kitchens and bathrooms.”
Who knew they’d look to crystallised silicon dioxide (SiO2, for those with fresh memories of the periodic table), otherwise known as quartz, a natural compound whose formidable hardness and resistance to acids makes for excellent performance in the kitchen.
Silestone contains 94% quartz, meaning that it’s well-equipped to weather the perpetual barrage of chopping, slicing, dicing, filleting, and broad-edge squishing (and there’s a lot of that in Spain, given the national fetish for garlic). In addition to the prospect of an un-nickable cutting surface, Silestone offers an uber-hygienic cooking atmosphere: it’s the only quartz work-top with anti-bacterial protection. Couple that with attractive uniformity and an intrinsically beautiful color palette—one that includes solid colors as well as quartz’s organic translucent veining—and you have a work surface that rightly deserves to transcend the ocean-bound confines of Iberia.
As we saw some time back with Okite—another surface material made mostly of quartz (93%, in fact)—Silestone is also ideal for kitchens because it lacks porosity, that tendency to suck up liquid that renders granite less than ideal. This not only means that Silestone stays extremely clean and nigh-on germ-free, but also that it never stains, surely a godsend for designers as well as chefs, especially those with a yen for the aesthetic beauty of well-arranged foodstuffs and a put-together kitchen.
Tribeca’s Takahachi Bakery officially opened to the public yesterday after a soft opening last week and minor elevator issues. Does the name sound familiar? It should. The owner is Hiroyuki Takahashi, the owner of Takahachi restaurant in the East Village.
This Japanese patisserie/bakery/sandwich shop/gelateria is a welcome sight for those of us still weeping over the loss of Bouley Bakery and deprived from the likes of Cafe Zaiya in Midtown. Takahachi is like a fancier version of Cafe Zaiya, with prices slightly higher—but also with sweets and savories that are much more creative, as well as a rather large selection of housemade macarons.
The best part? There are tons of matcha desserts, which have been a lifelong obsession of mine. Like Mochi An-Pan, plush rounds of matcha-dusted baked buns stuffed with mochi and red bean filling. Or better yet, a Matcha Crepe ($4.50) in which a matcha pancake (of the soft, more tender nature, not the traditional crisp French crepes) is filled with azuki bean-speckled whipped cream, and folded into a neat rectangle. Packaging, of course, is simply too cute for words; take a bite and marvel at all the layers.
Cakes range from the traditional Strawberry Shortcake, to bright, fruit-studded Cassis Make layered over a chocolate almond base. But it was the Orange Wasabi Mousse ($4.25) that caught my eye. Wasabi mousse? Indeed! I was skeptical at first, but the wasabi element is so light, it’s nearly undetectable, except for the lingering heat that kicks in at the end. It starts with the sponge cake base, then a layer of whipped cream, another layer of sponge cake, followed by bright orange gelée, and finally the wasabi mousse. The slight heat plays well off the sharp and bright gelée, rendering the cake element almost unnecessary.
There are also mini cream puffs to be had, offered in a myriad of flavors, three pieces for $4.50. Moving from left to right, we have a Shiso Cream Puff, the filling a summery green from the fresh shiso leaf itself, very minty. The cream was a tad too gelatinous, but still worth a try for an out of the ordinary flavor. In the middle is the Caramel Cream Puff, topped off with a crunchy caramelized disk. Black Sesame Cream Puffproved to be my favorite from the trio, the filling dense and smooth, and the nutty sesame far from shy in intensity.
There are plenty more goods to cover in this bakery—sandwiches, savory pastries, and gelato, of course—we will be back soon!
25 Murray Street, New York NY 10007 (map)
212-791-5550
via Sugar Rush: First Look at Takahachi Bakery | Serious Eats : New York.
Dining Explosion in Sydney
With rising emphasis on provenance, flavour and fun, the dining scene has shifted from formal to fresh, write Terry Durack and Joanna Savill.
Anyone interested in a crisp linen tablecloth should have no trouble snapping up a bargain on eBay. There are quite a few restaurants around town choosing to go unclothed.
It’s all part of a shift towards more casual, accessible dining as a new generation of chefs and restaurateurs focuses on food, flavour and fun rather than formality and frills. So tablecloths are no longer the defining fabric of great dining and nor are their traditional accomplices: multi-million-dollar makeovers, uniformed staff and trundling trolleys of cheese and cognac.
This year has also seen the rise of small bars, many as devoted to food as they are to cocktails or wine.
Sydney dining has changed, say Good Food Guide editors.
[Translate]