Eat the Week; June 3rd - June 7th

We head over to Red Hook for lunch at the ball field food trucks | Pete Wells files a shining three-star review on Carbone | Some picture updates on the progress at the Gowanus Whole Foods | Donde Dinner? - 1 Fifth Avenue

Donde Dinner? - 1 Fifth Avenue

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:

12 Saint Marks Place = Han Joo

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:

1 Fifth Avenue (map)

Checking In On the Gowanus Whole Foods

We brought you pictures of the Gowanus Whole Foods project back in March, after foundation beams were placed and the 52,000 square-foot skeleton was taking shape. Nearly three months later, support beams are in place and the exterior shell is being put up. Construction is moving quickly, but the Gowanus Whole Foods is still a ways from opening. A worker said the goal is to open in January.

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Three Stars for Three Stars and Carbone

It was no holds barred for Mario Carbone and Rich Torrisi when they were developing the concept for Carbone. As Italian Americans, they wanted their third restaurant to pay homage to their heritage and the food they grew up with. In an interview for Serious Eats, Torrisi and Carbone defined the concept to the website's founder Ed Levine thusly: "We [Torrisi, Carbone, and business partner Jeff Zalaznick] say updating Italian American fine dining. If you think about it, it's hard to find fine dining that's truly Italian American, you know? And it's perplexing that in this city of all cities, with such a huge Italian American influence, there's not one bastion of that cuisine."

The early word on Carbone was a mixed bag. Some diners loved the new dining experience while others filed complaints on the food and the price they paid for it. Now that the restaurant has been open for three months, Pete Wells has filed on the mid century-inspired, Italian-American bastion.

"Carbone has a technical prowess that can make you giddy;" Wells writes, "a lust for excess that can, at times, make you a little queasy; and an instinct for sheer entertainment that makes a lot of other restaurants seem like earnest, unimaginative drones." The critic notes the over-the-top, Hollywoodesque experience. He writes, "Like Tarantino’s love letters to pulpy exploitation films, Carbone affectionately picks up the clichés of its genre, twirls them, then hurls them at your head."

At Carbone, Mario Carbone and Rich Torrisi have taken a classic cuisine and made it their own, an approach to cooking they used to wow the city at Torrisi on Mulberry Street. On Thompson Street, they've done it with dishes like country ham from Kentucky and spicy chili ribs that merely wave in the general direction of the Italian pantry.

There are classic dishes on the menu whose recipes were born out of the influx of Italian immigrants to the states. Of the shrimp scampi, Wells notes, "No shrimp scampi has been handled as gently or luxuriously as Carbone’s chorus line of langoustines." There's the "$50 veal parm" too. "Served with a fried shaft of bone," writes Wells, "it’s a shock-and-awe dish, and the most shocking thing about it is that there is no real revisionism here; it is a veal parm, the way you always hoped it would be." Wells praises the efforts of Carbone, Torrisi, and Zalaznick, and awards their hot new Italian-American lovechild three stars. [NYTimes]

Lunch at the Red Hook Food Trucks

The Red Hook Food Vendors return to Bay and Clinton Streets near the ball fields in Red Hook each year as the weather warms. The lines seem to grow longer as more people come to enjoy the delicious, authentic Latin American cuisine on offer there, but the wait is always worth it. We swung by over the weekend for tacos, sopes, huaraches, and banana shakes.

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Eat the Week; May 27th - May 31st

Pete Wells weighs in on Taquerica Tlaxcalli in the Bronx and Salvation Taco in Manhattan | We try the hot chicken from Peaches Hothouse in Bed-Stuy | Donde Dinner? - 12 Saint Marks Place

Donde Dinner? - 12 Saint Marks Place

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:

540 Ninth Avenue = Tabata Ramen

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:

12 Saint Marks Place (map)

Hot Chicken at Peaches Hothouse

Fried chicken needs to be fried to order. Par-cooked chicken finished in the fryer or chicken that's fried and kept warm under a heat lamp doesn't do the final product justice. Our chicken at Peaches Hothouse wasn't cooked to order. The chicken was flavorful and spicy, but not as good as it could have been. It was dry from sitting around and being kept warm after it was cooked, and nowhere near the intensity of the hot chicken at Prince's, the Ewing Drive storefront in Nashville Peach's has drawn inspiration for their Nashville-style chicken.

At both places, the chicken is dipped in a wet rub that has a heavy dose of cayenne, then dredged in flour, also laced with cayenne. The result is a deep, dark, spicy, red hued skin. You may order chicken at Prince's mild, medium, hot, or extra hot. Peaches offers regular, hot, or extra hot. We sweat through an order of medium at Prince's a few months before Digest NY launched, but swear we can still sense the tingling heat from cayenne-laced chicken. Extra hot at Peaches is a cool meal by comparison.

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