L'Apicio is Open

[photo: krieger] dining room at l'apicioJoe Campanale and Epicurean Management have officially opened L'Apicio.  Dinner kicked off last week at 13 East 1st Street on Thursday night.  The 170 seat restaurant is the team's fourth project and the second to open from our Taste of Tastes to Come list.

Gabe Thompson's Italian-inspired menu showcases his knowledge of the country's cuisine.  L'Apicio offers a variety of salads, meat, fish, pastas, and a handful of "Polenta all Spianatora," where a stew or ragu is served directly on top of polenta.  Pastas range from $14 (Spaghetti - spicy tomato sauce and basil) to $22 (Tajarin - porcini mushrooms, garlic, and thyme), and sweetbreads show up for $17 with agnolotti and mascarpone.

Joe Campanale has taken care of the beverage options at L'Apicio.  Beer is broken down into "Draft," "High Octane (high alcohol %)," "Sessionable," "Quirky," and "Hoppy."  House cocktails come in at $13.  A few Champagne options take the list to France, but otherwise Campanale has stayed in Italy and the states to curate the wine list.  Sparkling, white, orange, rose, and red wines are all offered by the glass.  The bottle list breaks down selections into two categories: "New World" and "Old Country."  New World refers to those wines being made domestically, where wine makers tend to take a modern approach to wine making, i.e.  temperature controlled fermentation and the use of small barrels.  Old Country wines refer to those coming from Italy, where tradition, more often than not, dictates wine production methods. 

Sunday-Wednesday, 5:30pm – 11:00pm, Thursday-Saturday, 5:30pm-12:00am

L'Apicio | 212.533.7400 | 13 E 1st St | www

Eat the Week; Oct 15th - 19th

Welcome back to Eat the Week, a compiled list of our posts from the week that we top with a picture for you.  That up there is Ippudo on 10th Street, soon to be opening a Midtown location.  Here's what we ate this week:

Our five favorite things we overheard at the 5th annual New York City Wine and Food Festival | Carmellini names new French project: LAFAYETTE | A recap of Le Cirque's book launch party we got to attend | Pete Wells files a (surprising?) two-star review on Blanca | Ivan Orkin's menu for the five-course dinner he cooked at the Breslin | Noah Fecks and Paul Wagtouicz's The Way We Ate website gets a book deal | We review Ganso in Downtown Brooklyn | Wylie Dufresne announces he's opening a second restaurant: ALDER | Donde Dinner? - 69 Thompson Street

Donde Dinner? - 69 Thompson Street

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

46-48 Bowery = New Malaysia

This weeks spot 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 don't have to worry about a dress code. Just hop on the train, or your feet, or your bike, and head to:

 69 Thompson Street (btwn Broome and Spring)

Wylie Dufresne to Open Alder in the Spring

Wylie Dufresne has been serving the world from his culinary cubicle on the Lower East Side for nearly 10 years. As wd-50 approaches its ten year anniversary, Dufresne readies to open his second restaurant.  Alder wil open next spring in the former Plum Pizzeria space at 157 Second Avenue. GrubStreet revealed yesterday that the "50-seat pub" is going to serve "modern casual food and well-crafted cocktails."  Alex Stupak, the former pastry chef at Dufresne's LES atelier, and whose Empellon Cocina has been packed since it opened on First Avenue back in February, predicted Dufresne domination yesterday via Twitter: "Alder! Wylie is going to dominate the East Village!" [GrubStreet]

Review: Ganso

Fort Greene, Prospect Heights, Park Slope, Boerum Hill, and Downtown Brooklyn all converge at the newly opened Barclays Center in Brooklyn.  The borough has yet to see the full impact the new stadium will have, but many of the surrounding neighborhoods seem to be diving headfirst into New York’s recent ramen renaissance.  Park Slope got Naruto Ramen earlier this year.  In Prospect Heights, two Morimoto vets serve the dish at Chuko.  Smith Street, just out of the stadium’s reach in Carroll Gardens, recently welcomed Dassara Ramen.  While Boerum Hill and Fort Greene await their respective ramen spots, Downtown Brooklyn gets Japan’s iconic noodle dish at the hands of Harris Salat and Ryuji “Rio” Irie.

Click to read more ...

815 Issues of Gourmet Magazine, 2 Guys, 1 Book

Wanna know what grandma ate in 1947?  Or maybe you're curious to know what Uncle Lou was eating the night before Green Bay spanked Kansas City in the first Super Bowl back in 1967.  Well, thanks to two guys named Noah Fecks and Paul Wagtouicz, their collection of every Gourmet magazine ever published, and their website The Way We Ate, these answers and hundreds of others you can think of will slowly be revealed... over the next 15 and a half years.

The Way We Ate website explains the mission behind the project Fecks and Wagtouicz launched January 1st, 2011 as "Looking back on a century of great cooking. Year by year. Month by month. One recipe at a time..."  Their hard work and creativity paid off.  The blog just landed a deal to be published in book form next fall by Touchstone Publishing.

Says Fecks in the above video, "I never really thought how much my life would change when I baked my own bread, but it's not about having a Rolls Royce.  It's about, you know how to bake bread and have that with your friends.  That's incredible.  Rolls Royce is nice.  You can drive around with a loaf of bread in it, but..."

Ivan Orkin Reveals the Menu for Tonight's Tasting at the Breslin

[melissa hom] orkin at noodle bar in july"Alright, the menu is official so start salivating and get a ticket for tonight, only a handful left!" is how an earlier tweet from Ivan Orkin read, in which he revealed the menu to tonight's pig butchering demonstration/5-course tasting/sake and sochu pairing taking place at the Breslin.

New Yorker's had a chance to taste Orkin's food earlier this year at two seperate "invasions" he did of Momofuku Noodle Bar.  Tonight's another shot at the recipe's Orkin's been perfecting at Sun Noodle in Teterboro, NJ.

The event serves to introduce Orkin's New York brethren (Orkin's a Long Island native) to the food that he will be serving when his Tokyo ramen export lands somewhere in downtown Manhattan early next year.  Tonight, April Bloomfield will do the butchering, Ivan Orkin will do the cooking.

Here's this from theBrown Paper Tickets page, where you can also get your ticket(s), "While living and working in Tokyo, Ivan closely followed the New York City restaurant scene and noticed the growing popularity of April's restaurants. Some of his dishes have been inspired by her cooking style and how he imagined she would prepare ramen at The Spotted Pig."

Dinner's tonight at 6pm.  Act fast.  Slurp Loudly.

Two Stars for Bushwick's Blanca

[ramsay de give for the times] the juke box at blancaMuch has been said about Blanca since it opened in April, including the fact that guests may pick records provided by the owners to soundtrack their meal.  The restaurant is Roberta's newest family member and it's home to Carlo Mirarchi's multi-course dinner that he serves to only 60 guests a week.  Sam Sifton wrote about "A Sleek Surprise Around Back of Roberta's" in June, Bon Appetit placed Blanca second on their America's Best New Restaurants List, and Adam Platt's three out of five star review of Blanca came out last Monday.  In our post about his review last week we asked, " What would Pete Wells do?"  Turns out he'd give it two stars.

Located on the Roberta's compound at 261 Moore Street off the Morgan stop on the L train, Blanca gives the city its fourth tasting-menu-only chef's counter.  David Chang's Momofuku Ko came first, then Cesar Ramirez gave the world Chef's Table at Brooklyn Fare, and Matthew Lightner's food quickly reached cult status at Atera, his 12-seat Tribeca totem that opened in March.  That restaurant earned three stars from Wells in July thanks to a "steady sense of wonder."  Blanca falls a star short of Atera and two short of the Times' ultimate reward due to some inconsistencies in the 27-course meal:

Despite a few misgivings, Wells sees plenty of potential in what Blanca and its staff is doing, saying "More often, though, it is not Blanca’s ragged edges that impress so much as its polish and sophistication. Mr. Mirarchi and his staff are trying to find a new voice for fine dining, one that is both gracious and fun, and that could do for Brooklyn now what places like Chanterelle and Montrachet did for downtown Manhattan a few decades ago."