The duck roaster that Maialino inherited from its predecessor Wakiya is a stainless steel drum about a person high and 3 people wide. Its use in a Roman-inspired kitchen requires a stretch of imagination, a stretch that sous-chef Dan Dilworth just pulled off. Dilworth saw in the duck roaster the makings of a compost container. He saw in halved Fiji water bottles pots for his seedlings, in old mixing bowls a home for his herb garden, and in rubber kitchen mats insulation for his compost container.

Over the last months Dilworth, with the help of front-of-the-house manager Kevin Denton, has constructed an edible garden on the roof of the Gramercy Park Hotel out of rejected Wakiya hand-me-downs and the daily waste of Maialino.

Dilworth squeezes benefit from everything at hand including rainwater and a brick wall. He gathers raindrops in old grease tubs, piping the water through beds of eggplant and squash. He concocted a pulley system attached to the building’s brick wall that allows him to raise and lower tomato plants growing in recycled plastic containers.

Dilworth didn’t train as an engineer or a gardener. He’s a cook, doing what a good cook does best – taking what’s at hand and making something better. On this rooftop, Dilworth serves up an improbable oasis of comestibles that just happens to overlook the Manhattan skyline.

Daniel Dilwroth next to climbing cucumbers.

Blue Bottle Coffee Company: Opening Night in Williamsburg

Stumptown Coffee Roasters: Red Hook

Roasted coffee beans don’t live long. One day of a bean’s post-roast life works out to about 7.5 human years. Oxygen takes over; carbon dioxide dissipates. By day fourteen or before, the bean flatlines. There’s what Blue Bottle owner James Freeman calls “a magic day for all coffees” between days three and six after which a kind of coffee bean dementia sets in. It becomes temperamental to work with and tastes flat, which is why the opening of Blue Bottle and Stumptown roasting spaces in Brooklyn is good news for New York coffee drinkers.

Freeman, who started Blue Bottle in San Francisco, joined Portland-roaster Duane Sorenson of Stumptown Coffee in crossing the country to open roasting facilities and cafes in New York. On March 10^th, Freeman opened a roasting space in Williamsburg. There coffee drinkers can sip away at a wood counter while the coffee roasting spectacle unfolds like performance art a few feet away. Stumptown began its roasting operation in Red Hook last summer to serve not only its NY-based wholesale accounts but its own cafe in the Ace Hotel.

The eastward migration of West-coast roasters isn’t just a coup for NY coffee hounds who’ve been relegated to Joe’s and Grumpy’s for museum-grade cappuccino hearts and latte leaves. The move means happier beans, a lighter carbon footprint, and reprieve from the logistical nightmare of cross-country shipping.

After being roasted, coffee beans start out-gassing carbon dioxide in force, and according to Freeman, there’s a lot of flavor information in those gases. “Coffee is fragile,” he said. “We like it up to a week or so after it’s been roasted. You can clue in to what it’s doing.”

For Sorenson, the coffee is best to work with and has the freshest profile between day three and day eight. “We’ve always encouraged everyone to be able to roast our coffee within ten days. Fourteen max. If that time gets in the way, we recommend a closer roaster to purchase from.”

Local roasting also has environmental pluses. Not only can roasters avoid a fuel-guzzling avian shipment of coffee beans, packaging doesn’t have to be oxygen full proof. Blue Bottles coffee bags are compostable and don’t need plastic de-gassing valves.

Supplying roasted coffee to cafes and restaurants also presents logistical hurdles. Restaurants, in particular, can’t always predict how much coffee they will go through from week to week. Guests favor decaf over regular for a three day stretch. Training a new barista requires an extra five pounds of coffee. A ten-pound coffee rips in transit. I was a manager at Gramercy Tavern when it switched to Blue Bottle, and in the first weeks of the transition, I could dial the office number with eyes closed and one hand tied behind my back. Blue Bottle fielded constant calls for tracking numbers and assurances that reinforcements were coming, but when the roaster is ten states away, there are no quick fixes for running out of coffee.

Local roasting takes the focus off tracking numbers and one-way degassing valves. Life, especially the coffee bean’s, is just too short for all that.

Introduction: As master of cheese and much more at New York’s Gramercy Tavern, you’d be forgiven for not knowing that executive sous chef Chris Bradley also has a way with words. In an ongoing series of New York restaurant reviews, Bradley sacrifices himself to raw langoustine tail, barbecued eel, and ostrich egg to give us a taste of New York.

L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon

I wish I was better versed in the specifics of interior design so that I could better describe the peculiar lighting effect that caused me to feel, upon stepping into this restaurant, that I had been transported into a Wong Kar-Wai movie set in some future Asian territory where French was the preferred mode of communication and cuisine the intermediary bridge between word and deed. Perhaps it was aided by the long trek through multiple lobbies in the Four Seasons Hotel that left me unsure of what street in which city I had just departed, but the foot level luminescence aimed skyward set the room aglow like a jewel adorned solarium.

The restaurant consists of little more than two curving banquettes and a kitchen framed by bar seats, the sum set just off to the side of the hotel’s pre-existing bar and lounge. I could easily imagine this backroom as an empty wing of that bar in a prior life, too far of a trek from table to counter for one of the guests to justify even leaving the comforts of their room upstairs. But with M. Robuchon now entrenched in the void, the workshop takes center stage in the world of haute cuisine.

The food is unmistakably the product of M. Robuchon’s evolution since leaving behind his formal ways and adapting the Japanese omakase to the French palate. There is still a degustation menu as well as the traditional “les entrees froides et chaudes” and “les poissons et les viandes”; but a thorough scan of the left hand side of the menu reveals that everything makes a less expensive appearance in a small portion role. A raw langoustine tail is turned into a mosaic of translucent circles dressed simply in lemon and olive oil, then dotted here and there by tweezered hands with caviar and micro herbs. The sushi cliche, barbecued eel, is revived once its sweet glaze is sandwiched around cubes of smoked foie gras terrine. Frog legs, stripped of every bone except what’s necessary to lift it from the pools of garlic and parsley purees, are perfectly coated in delicate bread crumbs devoid of any greasy residue. An ostrich egg shaped bowl arrives and the top is removed to reveal nimbus clouds of anise and briny sea urchin roe.

Joel, as I began to refer to the man across the Atlantic who visits this restaurant less frequently than most of us visit the dentist, has always been a fan of cooking “a la plancha” and here it is employed to roast a moist turbot, the filets bathed in artichokes barigoule enriched with deeply smoked ham. J-bones, as I began to call this man as the third glass of Burgundy began to invade my senses, rose to culinary fame with his treatment of puree de pomme de terre, the transubstantiation of potatoes into a butter enriched potato pudding. The lesson of tradition and decadence continued as these potatoes made their appearance in the signature “la caille au foie gras caraelisee et sa pomme puree a la truffe noire”, a quail stuffed with foie gras and garnished simple with a side of the famous potatoes smothered in black winter truffles.

I wish I could continue to wax so rhapsodically about the desserts but by this time more food was simply adding insult to injury I had done my waistline and arteries. A baba as light as air floated over thyme scented pineapple and Okinawa black sugar ice cream. My savior proved to be the delicious lemongrass nage with diced fruit and basil-lime sorbet. The magic of the moment all came crashing down as I realized that transformative journey to another world would now have to be done in reverse with the extra baggage I’d just consumed. I’d somehow become M. Robuchon culinary Sherpa, only he’d carried me up to the top of Everest and I only had to lug the burden home and to work the next morning.

It’s illegal to ship an “imperfect” tomato from Florida. A few years ago an innovative produce farmer, Joe Procacci, decided he would grow his tomatoes for flavor instead of shape. He developed a delicious, juicy tomato that he called UglyRipe. In 2004 the Florida Tomato Committee, appointed by the US Department of Agriculture, ruled that these tomatoes could not be shipped out of state. They said all tomatoes must be indistinguishable in appearance and shape from one another. In other words, all Florida tomatoes must be perfectly round and unwrinkled.

That news report about the Florida tomatoes stayed in my mind. Last summer I decided I would search out and photograph fruit and vegetable anomalies. Finding them was a challenging task. They don’t exist in supermarkets, and they’re even rare at farmers’ markets, because odd vegetables don’t sell and are separated out and left on the farm. I realized that I was going to need help. The first person I approached was Nevia No, who had a stand at the Union Square Farmer’s Market. She was amused by my idea, so she set aside as many odd vegetables as she could. Other friends helped, too, but I needed more.

One torturously hot Saturday I was dragging myself through the Union Square Market looking for a specimen or two but to no avail. I was hot and tired and ready to give up. Then I heard a shopper exclaim, “Wow, look at these amazing things. Right in front of me was a small display of strange veggies, the most amazing of which was a zucchini that looked like a duck.

“I’ll take them all.” I told the person at the cash register.

“Not for sale.” he said.

“How can that be?”

“The boss won’t let me sell them.”

“Where’s your boss?”

He pointed behind me. I saw a small, energetic Muslim woman who had been keeping half an ear to the conversation.

“Please,” I said.

“No.” She disregarded me completely and continued to refill a bin of tomatoes.

Then it occurred to me that she might know my daughter who worked for a restaurant that bought large quantities of vegetables at the market. “Do you know Molly Kaplan?” She looked up at me for the first time.”Does that count?”

There was a long pause. “You can borrow them, but you must bring all of them back to me at Thompkins Square Market by 10 am tomorrow.”

That’s how I met Haifa Amouri who loves these strange vegetables as much as I do.

When I’m lucky my refrigerator overflows with anomalous produce. And, yes, unless they’re loaners from Haifa, my subjects are also my dinner.

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- Carol Dragon

“Hey, tell me. How many women do you know who look out the window of their shop every day and see both of their ex-husbands walking by?”

Carmela Lucciola asked me this question as we sat drinking cappuccinos. I had spent the afternoon shooting pastries for the website she hoped to make.

It’s been a long haul, but Carmela has managed to triumph. Her cafe, Egidio Pastry Shop is known to have the best cannoli in the neighborhood. And when that neighborhood is Arthur Avenue, the lively, raucous Italian section of the Bronx, it’s no small matter.

Established in 1912 as a family business, the Egidio Pastry Shop has a history of women rising above the mistreatment of men. Carmela has had her own unfortunate share of that history, but she has triumphed with grace, willfulness and humor. Her hospitality is legendary. It doesn’t matter if she has known you for 20 years of if this is your first visit, she will treat you like a guest in her home. This has made her shop the nucleus for everyone who comes to gather the great Italian food that makes the neighborhood famous.

Carmela was born in Italy and brought to America by her husband, Paolo (Paul) Polombo, in 1973. In 1987 Paul bought Egidio’s Pastry shop and installed Carmella there. By now she had learned to speak English and Spanish by doing clerical work in the local Mount Carmel library. Paul was interested in developing a career in politics and saw the bakery as a stepping-stone; he wasn’t interested in the hard work required by the business. But Carmela was delighted. She was passionate about the bakery, the customers and the hard work, and everyone loved Carmela. As Paul developed his career, he also developed a taste for other women. The final straw came in 1995 when he announced that he was going on vacation with his girlfriend. She filed for divorce, and although Mr Palombo had a number of properties by then, all Carmela wanted was her bakery. It took her a year to win it. A few years later Mr. Palombo was found guilty of taking a bribe, was sentenced to 1,000 hours of community service and had to resign from his state job. He no longer had any businesses on Arthur Avenue. Carmela reigned.

In the mid-90’s Carmela married Raymond, the owner of Mt. Carmel Wines, a shop across the street from Egidio’s. Although they had been seeing each other for 4 years, the marriage, which to Carmela, was very happy, ended in 2 months when Raymond suddenly announced that he just couldn’t be married any more. Sitting with Carmela on one of her infrequent breaks, she looked up and said, “Ah, there’s Raymond walking by.” Shortly after that she pointed out Paul Polombo as he passed by. You see, several years ago he made it back to Arthur Avenue and opened Polombo Pastry several doors down from Mt. Carmel Wines.

Knowing a little about Carmela’s life, it’s easy to understand why she has her employees wear T-shirts that say: Life is uncertain, so eat dessert first.

Behind the scenes at Egidio’s:

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-Carol Dragon

Spring brought construction work to Union Square this year. On Greenmarket days, the farm stands are scattered into a confusing and unfamiliar pattern. Even in this bewildering jumble of white tents, it’s easy to spot Yuno’s Farm. The stand is teeming with shoppers who know where to find some of the best naturally grown vegetables in New York.

In early June I took the train to Bordentown, NJ to visit the farm. Nevia picked me up at the station, and we spent the afternoon touring some of the 100 acres. More than 150 varieties of vegetables and berries are grown using organic standards, natural fertilizers and manual weeding. Farmers must develop creative approaches to replace the use of chemical fertilizers and insecticides. (However, the term “organic” is unofficial without State certification.)

  

Those sweet, juicy strawberries that we savored in June have a history. They are a highly vulnerable crop and exemplify the challenges of sustainable farming. An entire field can be lost overnight if insects attack the plants or if the flowers are exposed to a late spring chill. Kwang and Nevia have developed an approach that works for them.  

Before planting the strawberries a large amount of natural compost is incorporated into the soil to enhance its quality. Irrigation tapes are laid beneath the surface of the field, then it’s topped with dry bark. The bark keeps the surface dry and discourages insects. Any time frost or hail are predicted, row covers (large expanses of a fabric that resembles heavy-duty cheesecloth) must be laid on top of the plants and anchored in some way. As soon as the threat is over, it’s removed. Again and again. All of this just for strawberries when there are 149 more crops to grow. 

Post Script (3/11/10): Nevia now has her own farm. Bodhi Tree Farm will be covered very soon. You can find Bodhi Tree at Union Square on Friday and at Abingdon Square on Saturday.-Carol Dragon

On a chilly Sunday morning my friend, Betsy Weis and I took refuge at City Bakery, an old favorite of ours at 3 West 18th Street. We were tired and stressed and needed the comforting aroma of coffee and pastry. During the hour we spent having breakfast we talked to a number of people, both staff and customers. What was their experience of City Bakery? We made this slide show with their answers. Click the arrow on the left to play.