Claus Meyer, the star Danish chef and co-founder of world famous Noma, has a few big projects in the works that he hopes will be a bit more accessible than a Michelin star. Chief among them is a combined restaurant and culinary school opening later this year in a former 99 cent store in Brownsville, both of which will be geared chiefly towards residents of the neighborhood. This is the second school-restaurant combo from Meyer, the first being Gusto in La Paz, Bolivia. Both neighborhoods were chosen for their limited access to healthy food, with the goal of empowering residents and the local economy by providing affordable dining and education together.
Applications are currently open to Brownsville residents aged 18-24 for a year long culinary program at the new school. Meyer’s team also plans to offer free cooking classes to residents throughout the year, and serve food from the neighborhood at the 40 seat restaurant. Additional details have yet to be set in stone, although there are sure to be plenty of fans of Meyer who treat the spot as a destination restaurant, no matter what it looks like.
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Gusto in La Paz, Bolivia
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The song, now watched almost three million times on YouTube, includes an (explicitly worded) line about visiting Red Lobster after sex. That line immediately (and perhaps predictably) blew up social media with references to the seafood chain. The phenomenon might have ended with a few tweets, but instead Red Lobster’s sales actually spiked 33% according to CNN. Of course, that kind of publicity may only provide a flash in the pan, but if you’re looking for flash, nobody brings it better than Beyoncé.
Ravi DeRossi, the restaurateur behind Death and Co, Avant Garden, Mother of Pearl and 12 other bars and restaurants around the city, is making a serious push to turn all of his operations fully animal-free. He’ll be starting by expanding the already vegan Avant Garden into multiple spinoff concepts, as well as closing the charcuterie-focused The Bourgeois Pig and reopening it as vegan wine and tapas bar LadyBird. All of his restaurants are in for some sort of shake-up, and it seems his mixologists won’t be safe either, as cocktail and beer lists will be purged of the often ignored animal ingredients that are sometimes used in drinks.
The Nonprofit Open House New York states as their mission “promoting a greater appreciation of the city’s built environment; broadens public awareness by exposing diverse audiences to distinctive examples of architecture, engineering and design,” and what’s a more impressive feat of engineering and design than the city’s food system, which brings some of the greatest food in the world to millions every day?
Danny Meyer may have been the first to really make headlines by eliminating tipping, but Andrew Tarlow has now gone a step further by taking on the anti-tipping movement’s PR as well. Marlow recently pitched a standard sign which he believes all gratuity free restaurants should display in their windows in order to help retrain guests who have spent their whole lives living in a world of tips.
After a brief stint with a second location in Greenwich village last year which closed after six months, the 7 year-old Bark Hot Dogs will officially close up shop completely on February 7th. Bark was a Park Slope standby for many years, and owner Joshua Sharkey had previously talked about plans to open a different Manhattan location in a new neighborhood. That now seems unlikely, although Sharkey has been vague on the exact reasons for closure, stating only that (unlike the Greenwich Village location), rent was not the primary factor.
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