Please bring back your wine cake, Rozanne Gold!

 No visit to Rozanne Gold’s grand, bohemian brownstone in Park Slope would be complete without a slice or two of her Venetian Wine Cake. Once sold locally through a bakery in the ’70s, it is one among the thousands of smart, delicious dishes Rozanne's created throughout her career. It’s also the only recipe that she does not give out. Instead, the cake has a permanent home in her airy kitchen, ensconced in a worn green cake tin on an iron stand next to the window.

So when I showed up one morning to interview Rozanne for a profile in this month's Eat, Drink, Local issue of Edible Manhattan, naturally she cut me several slices of her cake and brewed me a cup of coffee. “I had something vaguely like it in Venice,” she said of her creation, “very simple. I came home and kept on experimenting.” It was her husband Michael Whiteman’s idea to add rosemary, which Rozanne points out is more Tuscan, and typical of the Renaissance style of coupling the sweet and the savory. Her family and their guests go through at least a cake a week, and for the past 15 years, her housekeeper Irene has started her weekly visit off with coffee and a slice of wine cake.

In the picture above, you can see the cake on the right, and behind Rozanne, the beautiful collection of china serving platters that Michael has collected throughout his long career as an international restaurant consultant. 

 Rozanne’s done so many things well in her life, that it’s difficult to sum her up. In a way, her wine cake does it best. The author of the best-selling “1-2-3” three-ingredient cookbooks used little more than olive oil, sugar flour and rosemary for this toothsome torta, I guessed, yet there is a keen palate, a knowledge of culinary and cultural history, an entrepreneurial streak, and a poetic sense of refinement at play here.

Although she’s written 12 cookbooks and wrote a column on simplified entertaining for Bon Appétit for five years, the author candidly confessed as she prepared our coffee, that, let’s face it, entertaining on any scale takes some attention and effort. Being in awe of Rozanne from the outset, this came as something of a relief to me, a little as if Martha Stewart had just confided that she struggles to conquer a secret, messy, room in her home.

Our hours-long interview was fascinating because Rozanne’s life has been a string of adventures and achievements, and because she blazed her own unique trail through the Manhattan culinary world of the late '70s and '80s, when women often didn't get the get the respect and credit that they deserved. But the taste memory of her wonderful cake will probably be the most lasting for me. Let’s hope she brings it back on the market soon.

The making of a bespoke watch

It was Dedegumo CEO Bob Guest's idea to take the design from the back of my business card and use it as the taking-off point for a watch design.  Dedegumo's first U.S. store opened recently in Manhattan's Lower East Side, and specializes in handmade watches.

My friend, former Japanese classmate and Dedegumo artisan Kai Bailey took on the challenge of translating card design to watch. He took the negative white space shape of the card's design and reversed it to create the two swooping boomerang-shaped images on the watch's face, outfitting it with jagged-edged black hour and minute hands and an elegant curving red second hand. The gold face is scored with ray-like lines and stamped with the Dedegumo cloud logo. The overall effect is Deco meets industrial, and it's very handsome.

The wrapping up of a Dedegumo watch is an art form in and of itself. Kai arranged the watch's double-length band around a plump beige pillow and placed it in a cloud-emblazoned cedar masu, or sake cup.

Then, he channeled memories of his mother tying furoshiki, and began wrapping. Tied properly, these Japanese-style cloth squares make beautiful and practical satchels, with their knots serving as handles. I picked out this flame-orange and cream colored furoshiki; all of Dedegumo's are made in Japan. "We tried making them here but they just weren't the same quality," Kai told me.

Here's the finished package, looking cute as a button.

Toyo Miyatake's presence grows in L.A.'s Little Tokyo

On my recent trip to Los Angeles, I met with three people who are making a difference in the L.A Nikkei community, Bill Watanabe, executive director of the Little Tokyo Service Center and president of the Little Tokyo Historical Society, and Vicky Murakami-Tsuda and Yoko Nishimura of the Japanese American National Museum.

Little Tokyo is no longer the sleepy enclave of Nisei-run stores and restaurants that I remember, its whiff of modern-day Japan emanating from the New Otani Hotel. There are fewer Japanese residents now, a burgeoning Korean population, and an active night-life scene animated by hipsters of all nationalities. The wildly popular Kogi BBQ-to-go truck, which makes regular stops in Little Tokyo to dispense Korean-Mexican hybrid comfort food (kimchee quesadillas!), is emblematic of the new Little Tokyo.   

En route from Curry House in Weller Court to LTSC’s offices on East Third Street, Watanabe showed me another change, one that harks back to the even earlier time of the pre-War Little Tokyo Issei. A newly named street, Toyo Miyatake Way, and a full-scale bronze relief of the pioneering Issei photographer now draw the viewer's eye in front of the Sakura Crossing luxury apartment complex on San Pedro Street between East Second and Third Streets. Watanabe, whose passion is preserving Little Tokyo History, convinced Sakura Crossing’s developer, Related, that the street and relief would be an ideal way to give back to the community, and the new landmarks were inaugurated in February before a crowd that included Watanabe, city dignitaries, proud Miyatake family members and Related representatives.

Miyatake is most famous for smuggling camera parts into Manzanar, the World War II concentration camp where he and his family were imprisoned in April 1942. First surreptitiously (cameras were forbidden in all 10 concentration camps), then, as rules loosened and he gained the trust of the prison director, openly, Miyatake took 1,500 photographs of Manzanar. The relief, which is modeled on a photograph of Miyatake believed to have been taken right after the war, bears this quotation: “Smuggling a lens into Manzanar, this is my duty, to document camp life so this kind of injustice never happens again.”

Miyatake and his family could have relocated to Salt Lake City, Chicago, or New York, as some Japanese did to avoid evacuation and imprisonment amid the rabid anti-Japanese fervor that swept the West Coast after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Instead, the fine art and Japanese society portrait photographer, then 47, chose to stay. He was forced to shutter his Little Tokyo photographic studio, but requested that his family be evacuated and imprisoned with the Little Tokyo residents that he felt most kinship with, rather than his East Los Angeles neighbors. It was in Little Tokyo's effervescent cultural and arts scene of the 1920s where he first made his name, and became the go-to photographer to record births, graduations, weddings—any event of note in the personal and civic lives of L.A. Japantown's residents.

As his reputation grew, Miyatake and his wife Hiroko became tireless hosts to a stream of Japanese dignitaries from film stars to athletes. Before and after the war, a trip to Los Angeles by a celebrated Japanese national almost inevitably involved a visit to the Toyo Miyatake Studio to pose for a portrait. “The portrait file in his studio is in itself a history of cultural exchange between the United States and Japan,” wrote the Japanese photographer and editor Eikoh Hosoe; Miyatake played the role of a “private consular representative, taking care of the Japanese who visited the United States.” Miyatake also landed jobs as personal photographer to Thomas Mann and John Barrymore, and became a disciple of Edward Weston, whose work he tirelessly promoted.

Where Miyatake’s career would have gone had he not been imprisoned during World War II is unknowable, but his contribution to the documentation of the unjust and unconstitutional prison camp experience is clear cut. Happily, there seems to be a growing appreciation of Miyatake. Little Tokyo’s first tribute to him, sculptor Nobuho Nagasawa's  bronze replica of his hand-made camera, is on view in front of the Japanese American National Museum on East First Street. An exhibit of Miyatake’s photographs is showing, for a short time longer, at the Tolerance Education Center in Rancho Mirage, CA. I’m glad to see the addition of Toyo Miyatake Way and the bronze relief—further assurance that one of our cultural heroes will not soon be forgotten.

David Bouley's apple foyer

In pursuit of another story recently, I had the chance to sit down with David Bouley, the brilliantly creative chef who has staked out a corner of Tribeca as his own laboratory for refined French fare, pretty patisserie products, Austrian explorations and authentic Japanese food. His downtown empire is constantly in a state of flux, so the tiny space that used to be called “Upstairs” will become Bouley Studio and the former French-Italian hybrid Secession (in an even older incarnation, it was the Austro-Hungarian Danube)  will soon open as Brushstroke, a kaiseki and sushi restaurant done in collaboration with Japan’s Tsuji Culinary Institute in Osaka.

The chef had just returned from Japan and was raving about the fantastic vegetables he encountered in Kyoto: turnips, carrots, daikon, cabbages and round eggplants. “Kyoto eggplants are the best,” he told me, “you can eat them like an apple.” Of course he brought back seeds and will try to grow them here in New York. We shared a moment of worry about the Tohoku earthquake, and the chef reckoned that the record closeness of the moon to the earth at the time could have been a factor in that natural disaster.

Walking through the Brushstroke as it was being readied to open felt like being in a  Japanese woodworker’s atelier: the long, narrow room was filled with rough-hewn wood set at asymmetrical angles, glowing light and busy Japanese workers. The artisans and many of the materials for the restaurant are from Japan, and the room (like the food, I hope) promises to be stunning.

But what I really wanted to show you was the famous foyer to the flagship Bouley. In the restaurant’s first incarnation of the late ’80s, a dreamy country-French maison filled with flowers, the chef placed crates of apples in the entrance. According to Bouley, they, like so much of what he does, harked back to his childhood in Connecticut. Bouley explains, “The apples and quinces smelled so good at my grandmother’s farm. My brothers and my sister and I used to hide among the quinces, and my mother and my grandmother both put quinces in with the sheets and towels. We grew up with that, and having a real connection to what was happening outdoors.”

The tradition of always having fresh apples in his restaurant foyer, however, actually began as a mistake. The chef had gone to the theater and in his haste, left some crates of apples there. When he returned, the scent was so magical that they became a fixture. At the current Bouley—more sumptuously attired in rich silks and velvets, and hung with vibrant paintings of the southern French countryside—the foyer presentation, too, has undergone a makeover. Bouley had high-tech stainless steel shelving constructed for his apples, 3,900 in all. But it is the foyer during the fall Concord grape season that really makes people stop in their tracks, says Bouley, as they take in the rich, musky scent with amazement. “They step in, they stop, and they just look around,” he says. That alone is worth a trip come October.

Food writer and West Villager Mimi Sheraton shares some Village faves and other food-related opinions

Food writer Mimi Sheraton has been a Greenwich Village resident for 67 years and with her husband, retired importer Richard Falcone, lives in a West Village townhouse. Sheraton, who served as restaurant critic for The New York Times for eight years, grew up in a food-loving Brooklyn household. She studied marketing and journalism at NYU, and began her career writing about home furnishings before switching to food writing for The Village Voice, Town and Country and New York magazine. She joined the Times in 1975. Among her 16 books, my favorite is her 2004 memoir Eating My Words: An Appetite for Life¸ which evocatively describes the “pleasantly shabby” Greenwich Village of the ’40s and ’50s stuffed with more than its share of Abstract Expressionist painters, psychoanalysts, potters and weavers. She also wrote this lovely tribute to our shared street, "West 12th Street by the Numbers." Although a few of the places Sheraton describes in her 2006 Times article are no longer in business, they are but very recent changes to a neighborhood that she has seen evolve for over 60 years. (Note the picture of the best vegetable purveyor at Abingdon Square, Nevia No.)

Here, Sheraton shares with Walking and Talking her thoughts on the West Village dining scene, New York City dining trends and other food-related topics.

What are a few of your and your husband’s favorite places for a quick lunch in the West Village? For a nice dinner?
Elephant & Castle for lunch. Tougher to pick for dinner. Between Gotham Bar & Grill, Wallse, Da Silvano, Perry Street...depends upon what you mean by "nice."

What foreign country or region do you most enjoy eating in?
China

In a recent interview in Capital New York, you made some tart comments about Brooklyn restaurants, food trucks, David Chang and Times critic Sam Sifton, which created quite a stir on the internet. What has the fallout been from that article, and do you have any further thoughts on those topics?

Fallout has been a lot of publicity and further blogging by others. Great exposure for me. I still mean what I said but I did go to Brooklyn on March 12th to see Diary of a Madman at BAM…worth the trip but I did not go to a [Brooklyn] restaurant.

What ethnic cuisine do you think New York City does best? Worst?
Italian is best. Mexican is worst.

If you could pick one global chef you would like to see open a restaurant in New York, who would it be?
Fergus Henderson, nose-to-tail chef of St. John restaurant in London.

What do you think of the global restaurant empires that so many chefs seem to aspire to these days? Who does it well and who doesn’t?
It is okay with me if they do them well, but I can't remember going to one such when abroad as I prefer to go to strictly local places when traveling, even within the U.S.

Do you ever order take-out? If so, what is your favorite place?

We rarely order take-out but if so, do it quite locally which means Good or Benny's Burritos on Greenwich Ave., or Tartine on 11th St. at West 4th. Have not found good Chinese or pizza take-outs. I'm never totally pleased with anything take-out…the food always seems to have lost its soul and is soggy and tepid, even from the best places. I’d rather prepare scrambled eggs or spaghetti with olive oil and garlic, or maybe even oatmeal with butter, salt and lots of black pepper.

Who is your all-time favorite food writer?
A.J. Liebling

What is your food guilty pleasure?

Not sure I feel "guilty" but I suppose that might mean hot dogs and salami of all kinds.

What bygone New York restaurant do you miss most and why?
Lutece, because it had wonderful authentic French food prepared by chef-owner Andre Soltner, who was totally dedicated, all in a pleasant but unpretentious setting with service to match.

What current food trend do you find appealing?

Southeast Asian, especially Thai and Vietnamese. I like the crunch and the spiciness but I wish we saw more of the serious, elegant dishes I had in Hanoi and not only the cheaper street-type food, however entertaining and satisfying that can be.

Dedegumo: Bespoke Japanese watches come to New York

The other day I visited a recently opened Japanese shop on the Lower East Side called Dedegumo. It's the first U.S. and first foreign branch of a Kyoto-based handmade watch shop, founded by designer Izumo Senko. For anyone interested in Japan and/or Japanese design, it's well worth a visit.

Atlanta entrepreneur Bob Guest fell in love with the shop during a business trip to Kyoto and decided to bring Dedegumo watches to New York. He found a tiny space on Orchard Street just south of Houston, hired Brooklyn-based woodworker James Harmon to craft gorgeous shelving for the tiny workshop/showroom, and installed reclaimed wooden floors from a Buster Brown shoe factory in Missouri.

The result is a Japanese-style jewel box of a shop that embodies the simple yet subtle aesthetic of shibui.

Guest hired six artisans, all of them designers or jewelry makers, to work two shifts in the tiny, well-laid out workshop at the front of the store, where visitors can observe them at work. One of them is my former Japanese classmate and friend, Kai.

A Nippy leather skiver and a built-in anvil fit snugly between two work spaces. Kyoto artisans from the main store flew in to train their New York counterparts, while Guest stocked up on watch parts from Japan and four miles worth of Italian leather for watch bands.

Bands, faces, and even the color of the watch hands can be customized, and each watch is made from start to finish by a single artisan, usually taking about three days to complete and quality check. Dedegumo’s 150 designs ($350-$650) range from the delicate to the quirky to the masculine, featuring hand-stamped brass frames and numbers, and intricately buckled leather bands.

The fight for a new Village hospital marches on

Borough president Scott Stringer promises he'll listen to Coalition members

I’m glad to see some community members keeping the spotlight on the need for a new Level One Trauma Center now that St. Vincent’s Hospital is gone. At first considered a fringe group with little power, the Coalition for a New Village Hospital has picked up political support and a loyal cadre of followers. You know it’s gaining in momentum when it has its own establishment, centrist and fringe groups.

The 200 or so concerned Villagers who attended last night’s meeting included a group called Hands off St. Vincent’s that has pledged to employ the tactics of non-violent direct action in order to get its message across. The group’s latest act of civil disobedience took place on February 8, when four members were arrested after staging a mock trial of elected officials and sit-in in the lobby of the shuttered hospital. The group charged eight politicians, ranging from U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer to state health commissioner Richard Daines with negligence and complicity in allowing the closing of St. Vincent’s.

               

At last night’s packed community meeting, several of the politicians that Hands off St. Vincent’s called out as being complicit in the shut-down were hand. Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, exhibiting a suitable sense of outrage, said the hospital’s board “ran it into the ground, and that still has to be investigated.” Also present were movement stalwarts Dr. David Kaufman, former director of HIV clinical research at St. Vincent’s; firebrand civil rights lawyer Thomas Shanahan, and former city council candidate Yetta Kurland.

Since the people that care about replacing the hospital are mostly middle-aged or older Village residents, there was a lot of shouting of “We can’t hear you!,” and “Use the mic!” It was a good bet that the few younger faces in the audience were either Hands off St. Vincent’s activists (they are an offshoot of an LGBT advocacy group) or members of the online media.

Shanahan created a witty presentation in the format of the “Jeopardy” game show in order to make the points that the process of developing the former hospital site lacks transparency and that no one really knows who controls land use on the corner of Seventh Avenue and W. 12th Street. He  and several other speakers referred to a recent health care survey that ranked our state 46^th in the nation in average emergency room wait time. New York’s average clocked in at close to five hours.  

Less activist-minded Village residents shake their heads and say this is a lost cause. Yet when 340 beds, most of them catering to low-income and indigent patients, the only Level One trauma center on the West Side between South Ferry and 114^th Street, and an ER that handled over 60,000 visits a year are suddenly eliminated and not replaced, it should matter to more people.