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.

Gascony tradition, fruits of the sea: Laurent Manrique in the kitchen at Millesime

Chef Laurent Manrique is back on the scene, and New York is lucky to have him in the kitchen at Millesime in the Carlton Hotel. He’s landed with a salty splash at this airy seafood bistro, where his impeccably prepared dishes have the feel of instant classics. Manrique—ex of the Michelin two-star Aqua and Campton Place in San Francisco, and Peacock Alley in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel—still has one foot firmly planted on the West, and for him, preferred coast. He oversees Café de la Presse and Rouge et Blanc wine bar in San Francisco, and makes the cross-country commute regularly. His executive chef at Millesime is Alan Ashkinaze, formerly executive chef at the Warwick Hotel and chef de cuisine at the Waldorf Astoria.

At Millesime (formerly home to Country), unpretentious red banquettes and lighting reminiscent of a nineteenth-century gaslit brasserie are sandwiched between the building’s original Tiffany domed ceiling and its tile floors. The vibe is casual, though the expert service is anything but. Manrique wanted an unpretentious seafood place where patrons would feel free to enter in flip-flops, and where the menu was honest and straightforward. “Right now,” he told us at our dinner last evening, “this is what I feel like cooking.”

A dozen carefully sourced oysters from both the east and west coasts (Big Rock from Cape Cod, Shibumi and Hama Hama from Washington State among them) started the evening off in a lipsmackingly briny fashion. Manrique disguised silky squid as corkscrew pasta in his trompe l’oeil “calamars carbonara,” and coated it with a smoky bacon, parmesan and cream sauce. The grilled Caesar salad, a joint invention of Manrique and his good friend and fellow Buddhist Eric Ripert, gave a lift to this tired menu staple with the addition of meringe beaten into the dressing, and a topping of smoked cod, caramelized onions and a drop of lime. But the pièce de résistance had to be the lobster pot au feu for two, involving a two-pound lobster, seafood sausage (it tasted like a more refined, French variation on Japanese kamoboko fish cakes), a bouillon of deep character and some dynamite condiments: a tarragon-infused béarnaise, seaweed aioli and salty pickled sea beans. The simple fish dishes, which you can order grilled or griddle (here called plancha) roasted, come with likewise perfectly executed sauces; the lemon mousseline is ethereal, almost dessert-like.

True to his Gascon roots, Manrique offers homemade Armagnac prune ice cream and toasted brioche—my favorite dessert, although I would never turn down an offer of his bracingly astringent orange custard topped with caramelized orange slices, or a caramel and espresso pot de crème twin set.

Millesime
92 Madison Ave. at 29th St.
The Carlton Hotel
(212) 889-7100
millesimerestaurant.com

Of saints and sardine tins: Lynne Block's port-a-shrines

Last month I blogged about tree decorator extraordinaire, my neighbor Lynne Block. A few days ago, she invited me to her apartment to take a look at the religious shrines she makes out of sardine and other tins. Little did I know that without even leaving my building, I was in for a trip to an apartment-size cabinet of curiosities, and the lair of a true folk artist.

Lynne’s double-unit living space, which she shares with her husband and bestselling crime author Lawrence Block, is bursting at the seams with the booty of their world travels (over 140 countries visited; they lost exact count a while ago), including collections of crystals, masks, paintings and ceramics. As she led me through the apartment, one room gave way to another, revealing a cache of her husband’s Edgar Awards, bedroom walls coated in opulent, gold-flecked paint, and a hallway with a canopy of shimmering, gauzy fabric and shiny stars. It occurred to me that Lynne could have had a successful career as a set designer had she wanted to.

Her expressive eyes and silver-streaked hair bring to mind Anne Rice, only more beautiful; in fact the two share roots in New Orleans. Lynne lit out immediately after graduating from high school with $40 in her pocket, did odd jobs and taught herself bookkeeping. Despite over 40 years spent living in Greenwich Village, her apartment--especially the room dedicated to her shrines and altars--exudes the moss-covered, gothic perfume of New Orleans. Against one wall of the south-facing room, an elaborate, multi-tiered and heavily embellished altar display drips with angels, saints, masks, rosary beads and other religious objects, presided over by paintings of sacred scenes and crosses.

               

On the opposite wall, Lynne has installed a more austere, eastern-style shrine. The pile of rocks sitting at the foot of the Japanese tansu cabinet is composed of one specimen from each country that she and her husband have visited.  A head of Buddha, a statue of Ganesha, and a photo of the Dalai Lama share the tansu with an assortment of other eastern relics and one visiting western saint.

               

Lynne’s hand-made shrines blend in seamlessly with the antique artifacts on the western shrine: Her Paul the Hermit’s garment of palm leaves is made of tiny, lustrous green beads; the arched edges of the tin cover are beaded in amber to resemble the gothic arches of an altar. In another tin, the messenger angel Gabriel, index finger in air, is half-revealed behind the tightly wound, rolled-down top of a sardine tin, (these old-fashioned tins with key openers are harder to come by these days, notes Lynne). Much better than my snapshots of Lynne’s Port-a-Shrines, as she calls them, are photographer Jim Coyle’s examples on Flickr, “Private Altars.” (All of the shrines pictured in that album, except for numbers 373, 378 and 383 are Lynne’s. The others were made by a friend in homage to hers.)

This tinfoil-embellished shrine is titled "All Hearts Are Sacred"

The Port-a-Shrines came to life first in the late 1980s when Lynne and Larry took to the road for two years to drive across the country. They made a pit stop at a writer’s colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. While Larry wrote, Lynne gathered all the materials she needed, and began making her shrines. The impulse to make them, she says, came in part from the fact that she was raised by nuns in a New Orleans orphanage, in a building that was eventually turned into Anne Rice’s doll museum. One of Lynne’s jobs during her seven years at the orphanage was to take care of the chapel.

“I think everybody should have an altar, a small sacred space for photos of loved ones who are gone, or who are far away at the moment,” Lynne told me.  Suddenly, and with great clarity, I recalled the small Buddhist shrine my grandparent’s kept in their bedroom, with a picture of my great-grandmother, and the offerings of food and drink that they prayed to and changed daily. It’s funny how it took years, and a messenger from another culture, place and time, to make me fully understand the significance of that other small, sacred space.

  

Lynne reached into one shelf of the altar and held out an antique ivory bobbin that she bought a decade ago in England for her granddaughter. Factory girls used to inscribe these with the names of boyfriends or with their own names; this one bears her granddaughter’s name, Sara, who is 23 now and about to embark on her grown-up life.  “It has lain on the altar all these years, soaking up good energy,” says Lynne. “I’ll give it to her when we go on her graduation trip in the spring.”  

Hunting for traditional Japanese osechi foods at New Year



Nippon Club Chef Hideki Yasuoka's osechi box



For a fun assignment, I spent part of last week on the hunt for Japanese New Year’s osechi box sets. Osechi refers to the various traditional Japanese New Year dishes that expats pine for when the end of the year rolls around. There’s always konbu-maki (seaweed rolls tied with strips of gourd), kamaboko (fish cakes), and soy-simmered tazukuri (anchovies), among many other dishes. Way back when, Japanese women spent days preparing these dishes, to be eaten by the family and guests who dropped by during the three-day celebration of the New Year. In order not to have to cook during this festive period, and to ensure the food stayed fresh (these were pre-refrigeration days), dishes were highly salted, and usually quite sweet as well.

Today, many young people would rather not eat the traditional foods, preferring freshly made sushi, sashimi or western food instead. Since supermarkets, department stores and restaurants all make and sell osechi boxes, the number of home cooks who prepare the whole feast from A to Z has diminished as well.There are still plenty of people who crave osechi, it seems, even if they don't want to go through the laborious process of making the dishes themselves. I saw this House of Japan item reporting strong sales in high-end osechi boxes in Tokyo this year, ranging in price from 30,000 to 205,000 yen (about $370 to $2,500).

Here in Manhattan, I discovered that several restaurants and Japanese grocery stores, including East, Restaurant Nippon and Katagiri (the oldest Japanese grocery store in the U.S.),sell osechi boxes to go. Hakubai restaurant in the Kitano Hotel serves a New Year osechi meal to customers in its dining room.

Plastic versions of New Year's kagami mochi (rice cakes) for sale at Katagiri

One treat was viewing and sampling the artistic osechi boxes created by chef Hideki Yasuoka of the members-only Nippon Club. I’ll let my picture of Chef Yasuoka's delicious masterpiece (above) do the talking for now. If you want to read the full account, you’ll have to wait a year, when my Edible Manhattan story on osechi appears, with much better photos by Max Flatow.

My evening with knife skills maestro Norman Weinstein

I’ve been cooking since I was a kid, but until recently had only a vague idea that there was a right way and a wrong way to slice and dice. All of this changed when I took a class from knife skills expert Norman Weinstein at the Institute of Culinary Education (ICE) in Manhattan. His workshops have been so popular that getting into one required keeping an eagle eye on class schedules and swooping down on a spot when a new series was posted.

When I at last made it to the Knife Skills 1 workshop, I was thrilled to meet the knife master in person, but crestfallen to find out that it was his second to last class at ICE; he was retiring, and would only be teaching a few professional classes at the institute after that week. He’s such a legend that he had to shoo Bon Appétit’s Barbara Fairchild, who popped in to pay homage, out of the classroom so he could start the session on time.

Feeling that I was learning from the last of the knife Mohicans, I soaked up every scrap of information, from the basics of kitchen knife construction to selection, maintenance and use. I learned that if you hone your knives on a steel after almost every use, you can minimize the need for sharpening, which will eventually wear away your knife. I also learned that honing steels wear out—when you can no longer feel the grooves along the instrument’s surface, it’s time to buy a new one.

Weinstein, whom I first encountered when I interviewed him for this WSJ story on knife sharpening services, was full of jokes, wisecracks and knife wisdom. “Never take a knife that needs sharpening to a guy driving a truck,” was one such pearl. Shoemakers and sketchy people who grind things other than knives are best avoided as well, he said. When asked what he thought of Japanese santoku knives, he said simply, “I believe in re-gifting.” [I know this is not the opinion of many chefs: my story on Korin Japanese Trading Corp. taught me this.] Weinstein believes that the complete kitchen needs only four knives: A 10” chef’s knife, a 6” utility knife, a paring knife and a scalloped slicing knife. For meat eaters, a carving knife would be a fifth addition.




Norman Weinstein's tomato peel rose.



My tomato peel rose.

It was the hands-on knife skills, though, that I found most eye-opening. I had to re-learn my grip (thumb and forefinger on the knife blade, second finger curled around the finger guard). We learned the “bagel cut,” for slicing laterally through treacherous dough fields, the “low technique” (for short stuff like celery and carrots) and the “high technique” for tall veggies, such as potatoes and melons). It’s all about using the longest knife you can (6” knives mean “you’re working far too hard,” Weinstein told us; let the weight of the knife do the work for you), relaxing the arm, using a light grip, keeping the slicing arm in constant motion and sliding more than chopping. If you’d like to learn the full Weinstein technique, tyou can order his knife skills book and DVD.

I sliced my way through stalks of celery, many carrots and several onions, but my pièce de résistance was a rose I made from a single piece of tomato skin. Perhaps I will take Knife Skills 2, although it’s not on offer at the moment, and won’t be the same without Weinstein at the helm. Happy retirement, Norman!