BITE will keep you in touch with what I’m eating and what I love and what I left on my plate. I’ll share dialogues I have with heroes and divas, princes and barracudas and what I overhear from the next table. Not every day will I have a meal worth writing about, I suspect, not good enough, not bad enough. Dear friends have asked me if I could try to be meaner so I fit in better on the net. I intend to try. As any man who has lived with me will tell you, I was born to be a critic. Of course, isn’t it the critic who has the thinnest skin of all? I must admit to a certain anxiety. It’s been a long time since I wrote without an editor, a fact checker and a copy-reader to catch my errors, misspellings and typos. I apologize in advance. I’m left-handed and that can sometimes be confusing. I might have stopped reviewing restaurants twenty-five years ago when my first novel, Blue Skies, No Candy lingered on the best seller list. But I am addicted to instant gratification. So I’m still here. On my death bed, I am sure my last words will echo those of the sister of Brillat Savarin:
“Bring on dessert.”
February 8, 2010 | BITE: My Journal
5Napkin Burger/Szechuan Chalet
I’m as much into denial as anyone so I allow myself a burger once a week, usually by-passing the potatoes for a double order of cole slaw and a handful of frites I snitch from my mate’s plate...
February 1, 2010 | BITE: My Journal
Colicchio & Sons, est. 2010
Here’s a preview of a new reality for Bravo’s Top Chef warrior, Tom Colicchio. Chopped, chewed up and simmering in just three weeks…
January 18, 2010 | BITE: My Journal
Parky Pig
I brace for the roar of the bar, but quickly a host leads us past the melée into the comparative calm of the trattoria dining room...
January 10, 2010 | BITE: My Journal
Cascabel Taqueria
First sight through the window makes me anxious: it’s tiny, crowded, a little queue of people waiting. Second glance makes me laugh…
January 4, 2010 | BITE: My Journal
The Breslin
The six of us are cruising out of control. It's all that piggy stuff. I'd like to hope we're just caught up in an end of the decade seizure…
December 28, 2009 | BITE: My Journal
Square Meal
I imagine I see the ghosts of ladies who lunch in hats and men in seersucker suits. I recall long gone spots like the Women’s Exchange…
December 21, 2009 | BITE: My Journal
Eleven Madison Park
This is not just the fabled Meyers service. It’s the theater of four stars…
December 14, 2009 | BITE: My Journal
Tuesday? It Must Be Obao
Landlords are just begging Michael Huynh to take their abandoned restaurant spaces, and he must leap in now before the economy turns…
December 7, 2009 | BITE: My Journal
Café Boulud Reentry
How benign it feels tonight in the discreet buzz...
November 23, 2009 | BITE: My Journal
Le Caprice
It’s jazz age sexy, shiny black with beveled mirrors, art deco sconces and photographs from the Sixties by David Bailey…buzzing all the way to the kitchen…
November 16, 2009 | BITE: My Journal
Gastropub: Tanuki Tavern
It’s the new venture of the week for endlessly optimistic feeding mogul Jeffrey Chodorow, downsizing what was once Ono in the Gansevoort Hotel, into a fantasy of an izakaya…
November 9, 2009 | BITE: My Journal
Starting Over: SD26
A wall of wines and a fancy do-it-yourself wine dispenser is getting a lot of action from a cluster of young people. The crowd is three deep at the long bar and all the small round tables in the lounge are populated…
November 2, 2009 | BITE: My Journal
Casa Lever
Sant Ambroeus, the espresso, insalata and pastry crib for gossip girls of all ages, hardly seems like the smartest fit for Lever House in the tug of war for midtown power lunchers…
October 26, 2009 | BITE: My Journal
Gospel Uptown
I didn’t need a Renaissance or even the chance of a Bill sighting to bring me to Harlem. And I could use a little “Healthful Soul Fusion Cuisine…”
October 19, 2009 | BITE: My Journal
Abe & Arthur’s Restaurant...
It may sound like a delicatessen but on this rainy Thursday night it’s a hive of hipsters and heel-totterers…
October 12, 2009 | BITE: My Journal
Sfoglia Stretches Out...
The late-summer shutdown to rejigger the entrance, stake a claim to a small carryout shop next door, Tutto Sfoglia, and double its tables has not quite absorbed the crowd’s demands…
date
October 5, 2009 | BITE: My Journal
A Voce West
Now chef Missy Robbins stakes her claim to this turf with a bold prelude: fat slices of focaccia slicked with oil…
September 28, 2009 | BITE: My Journal
TwoE@The Pierre/Gansevoort Cafe
I feel rich and vaguely upper crust just sitting here as waiters bustle around, pouring, discreetly setting down overflowing chip bowls to replace ravished ones unasked…
September 21, 2009 | BITE: My Journal
Ed's Chowderhouse
Recruited as consultant here, Ed Brown has distilled New Jersey sea shore and Montauk getaway tradition into tonight’s quartet of chowders…