Posts for category ‘Stories’

After he wowed us with his lamb bacon, Danielle and I knew we had to hit up Chef Bobby Hellen of the Belgian gastropub Resto for a Good. Food. Stories. Q&A. Bobby, a native New Yorker, has been with the Resto team since the restaurant’s 2007 opening, and now leads the kitchen as Executive Chef.

Though the restaurant is most well-known (along with the vast selection of Belgian brews) for its pork-focused dishes and nose-to-tail eating, Bobby also serves up heaping amounts of locally-sourced produce alongside his housemade charcuterie, meats, and poultry from New York-area farms like Four Story Hill. For the more adventurous, the Resto team offers the Large Format Feast, where a whole animal will be broken down and delectably prepared for your large group (they’ll feed up to 18 people).

>> Read on to find out how a grapefruit changed Bobby’s life. >>

The beach reflected in the mirrors in front of Tatiana Cafe. Photo credit: Jessica Scranton

Although it may seem odd, a trip to Brighton Beach on one of the coldest days of the year just seemed to make sense. New York apartments are notorious for being dry and overheated and I had been hunkered down in mine for weeks, resisting the cold months as fully as possible. I needed to surrender to winter, an act that does not come naturally to me or my Mediterranean blood. The Russian community that dominates Brighton Beach is well acquainted with the cold and know how to live well with it. From them I would take my cues.

Underneath the subway tracks, I pressed through the crowds of Sunday shoppers on Brighton Beach Avenue toward the boardwalk and the great, freezing Atlantic Ocean. I breathed in its promise, knowing its frigid response was not a rejection, just a “not yet.” Here on this stretch of the Brooklyn Riviera, elderly Russians dressed richly in furs huddled together against the green wall of the boardwalk. Yet, the mood was distinctly solitary as few people spoke to each other. If I looked too closely, people would avert my gaze. When I picked up my camera, hands appeared and bodies picked themselves up and moved on. A casual smile or hello was met with a stern turning away. This was winter, people seemed to say, a time for quiet and solitude.
>> Read on to find out what was discovered in Brighton Beach >>

Today we happily welcome new contributor Berfu Durantas-Masters. Born in Istanbul, she recently married her husband John with one nagging worry—could they eat together, happily ever after? This is the first piece in a series for Good. Food. Stories.

One of the earliest conversations between my husband and me during our days of courtship was about food. He is half English-Irish and half Greek, and it was this morsel of Mediterranean blood that gave me hope that he would revel in my olive oil-based Turkish cooking. Our short food conversation ended with me asking alarmingly, “What do you mean you don’t like fried fish or olive oil? You’re half Greek, for God’s sake!!” And so our culinary adventure began.

My husband likes store-bought salad dressing, Hot Pockets, frozen pizza (frozen anything, really), Eggo’s, and American cheese. Basically his palate craves chemicals and freezer burn. This is a far cry from the fresh foods and everything made from scratch mentality that I grew up with. So as our wedding day quickly approached, the questions arose as to how I would feed the 6’3” love of my life. How could I possibly get him to let go of the butter and dip his bread into olive oil instead? Would he ever eat a salad without ready-made blue cheese dressing? Would he ever like vegetables?
>> So how did Berfu convince her John to give up the Hot Pocket and try mucver? >>

Arthur Avenue, the heart of Little Italy in the Bronx, usually bustling with shoppers and tourists was less so this week because of the beginning of Lent.  The fish market was busy, but the butcher shops were relatively quiet as meat is off limits to Catholics on Ash Wednesday.

Italian food on Arthur Avenue is seasonal and by seasonal I mean driven by the holidays. Yes, the heart of cooking in Italy relies on fresh ingredients, harvested at their peak, but in Italian-American communities it means having  zeppole and sfingi (cream puffs) for the feast of Saint Joseph, fish on Christmas Eve, and, for handful of the old-timers, a pudding called sanguinaccio during Lent.  (Pronounced san-gwee-nacho.) This week, handwritten signs on paper and in chalk popped up around the Arthur Avenue bakeries. They will remain in place  until Easter Sunday, and then disappear once again.
>> Read on to discover the not-so-secret ingredient in sanguinaccio. (For those who took Latin, it’s exactly what you’re thinking.) >>

The Good. Food. Stories. team is extra-pleased to present today’s guest post from Jessie Knadler, a former Manhattan magazine writer and editor who now lives in rural Virginia with her husband, 30-odd chickens, two rambunctious dogs, and a host of farm equipment. Her adventures as a city girl attempting country living are chronicled on her “awesome blog” (her words and our feelings exactly) Rurally Screwed. We’re eagerly awaiting her canning-focused cookbook with co-author Kelly Geary that will be published by Rodale in Spring 2011.

When I first moved from Manhattan to rural Virginia four years ago, I assumed I was saying goodbye to the foodie fascism that had taken hold of the city. I took it as a given I’d never have to overhear two Brooklyn yoga moms prattle on about the virtues of free-range eggs for little Dexter and Elliot or listen to well-meaning friends pester waiters with questions like, “Is this beef really grass-fed?” I was fed up with thinking I too had to define myself by what I ate.

If only I was a little more organic, a little more free-range, steel-cut, Meyer lemon-eating, blah-blah-blah, I’d somehow be a better person. To me, the pursuit of dietary asceticism seemed like just another form of subtle social stratification, right up there with carrying the right handbag, only somehow less shallow, more “real.”

So I was excited at the prospect of moving somewhere where people, I assumed, still ate Slim Jims and where cocktail party food centered around Philadelphia cream cheese in various guises. I thought the most probing food question I’d encounter here was “Does the chicken fried steak come with brown or white gravy?”

Well, this is what happens when a pampered urbanite moves to the middle of nowhere—you quickly realize how provincial and ignorant you really are. Organic piety, I’ve since realized, extends to small-town America as well, to conservative communities where the rebel flag still proudly flies and where 30-somethings don’t think much about living in a cabin or a yurt.
>> Read on to find out about Jessie’s experiences in small-town food snobbery and how she’s fighting back >>