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.