New York City Kitchen Notebook
An in-depth look at some of our favorite dishes and cocktails from our time on the ground in New York City.
SPAGHETTI StoRY
After a few drinks on a Napa rooftop during a break from filming Bravo’s “Top Chef,” Silvia Barban decided to put pasta in a smoker. Back in the kitchen at LaRina Pastificio & Vino in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, Barban drapes her fresh spaghetti over a speedrack and lets is soak up hickory smoke. “[The smoke] represents America,” she says. At pickup, she sauces the smoky strands ‘aglio e olio’ style with confit garlic and a few other nods to home: Calabrian chiles for her Calabrese mom, hazelnut breadcrumbs, and a showering of chopped parsley. With the dish, Barban tells guests a story in the universal language of the noodle. “This is my life in a bowl,” she says.
NEW OLD NEW YORK CANNOLI
When Chef Heather Pelletier took over the kitchen at Prohibition-era Chumley’s last year, she mined vintage New York for menu inspiration. She’s serving updated clams casino, tongue pastrami, and an 86ed burger (the term likely originated at Chumley’s, located at 86 Bedford). Then there’s her bombastic foie gras-chicken liver mousse cannoli—a reference to the Italian bakeries of Pelletier’s Staten Island upbringing with a touch of Jewish deli. Pelletier adds duck fat and black pepper to the shell, shallot jam on the interior, and pistachios for that Mulberry Street pastry case look. “We’re making nods to all the communities that have shaped New York in an Old New York space,” she says.
EVERYTHING BUT THE BREAD
It wasn’t a bagel that inspired Bartender Channing Centeno’s Bastille Bagel cocktail at Otis. He dipped a piece of Chef Scott Hawley’s everything-spice focaccia into barbecue sauce, and there you have it. For the cocktail sparked by a sneaky snack, Centeno infuses cognac with charred hickory wood chips and blends honey with sundried tomatoes. To these barbecue-y components, he adds dry curaçao, Amaro Montenegro, lemon juice, an egg white, and two drops of everything bagel tincture. The tincture is a bumped-up saline solution with 8 percent salt and 8 percent everything bagel spice per 100 grams water. He garnishes the savory cocktail with a dehydrated lemon studded with more everything seasoning. As for the BBQ-dipped bread? It’s still not on the menu.
ONLY IN BROOKLYN
At Di An Di in Greenpoint, Texan Chef Dennis Ngo cooks Vietnamese food in a historically Polish neighborhood, and there’s an item on the menu that may feel familiar to anyone who’s been dining out in Brooklyn during the past 10 years: pig tails. The dish is in homage to beloved Brooklyn Star, a Tex-Mex joint that opened in a historically Italian neighborhood in north Williamsburg in 2009 and closed in spring 2018 (to the chagrin of many, chief among them Texan Chef and Owner Joaquin Baca). The restaurant was part of that first wave that legitimized Brooklyn as a dining destination. With a bowl of pig tails, Ngo pays tribute to the lifecycle of a restaurant, the changing communities around them, and how we remember the food we love. Baca recently opened izakaya spot Teo in Bushwick.
