Menu Talk

On this week’s podcast, Pat Cobe, senior menu editor of Restaurant Business, and Bret Thorn, senior food & beverage editor of Nation’s Restaurant News and Restaurant Hospitality, discussed the time they spent on and near the water in New York City. Pat took a ferry down the East River to Wall Street to check out Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Tin Building, a much-ballyhooed food hall that neither co-host had had a chance to visit yet. Pat enjoyed a savory buckwheat crêpe, and observed that she also had the option to have a South Indian crêpe-like item called a dosa, a fact that dovetailed nicely with a feature that Bret had just written on chicken curry, one of the fastest-growing types of chicken dishes on menus these days. Bret has taken to watching the birds flying over Sheepshead Bay, where he lives now, and he strolled along the bay to Rocca, a Turkish-accented restaurant with a bayside view, where he had a light meal of various mezze dips such as labneh, hummus, babaghanoush and Turkish bread. Pat, too, had sampled a Turkish food she’d never had before, a tiny dumpling called manti, which she had with labneh at a Turkish place called A la Turka. In other food samplings, Bret was sent Buffalo Wild Wings’ chicken wings with its new Bacon Buffalo sauce as well as its Triple Bacon Cheeseburger. The guest this week is William Dissen, chef and owner of The Market Place in Asheville, North Carolina, as well as three-unit Billy D’s Fried Chicken. Dissen recently returned from a culinary ambassador mission to Malaysia, where he cooked for stateless children near the city of Kota Kinabalu. He also recently published his first cookbook, “Thoughtful Cooking: Recipes Rooted in the New South.” Dissen said the book reflects his own ethos of using wholesome, local food, and he advocates for people to cook that way at home, too. The restaurateur doesn’t just help Malaysian kids. He’s also involved in education programs for young people at home in North Carolina, and he discussed that mission and also shared strategies for keeping his restaurant’s staff engaged, motivated and excited to provide great hospitality.

On this week’s podcast, Pat Cobe, senior menu editor of Restaurant Business, and Bret Thorn, senior food & beverage editor of Nation’s Restaurant News and Restaurant Hospitality, talk about how tennis players aren’t the only stars at the US Open, which kicked off on Monday. There’s a lot of star power off the courts, with more than 20 top New York City restaurants and chefs offering their specialties over the next two weeks. The podcast guest this week is JJ Johnson, a well-known TV chef, James Beard award-winning cookbook author and founder of Fieldtrip, a fast casual bowl concept that reflects the chef’s Afro-Caribbean roots. Johnson worked as a fine-dining chef before opening Fieldtrip, which now has four locations, including the newest at the Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas. Johnson started Fieldtrip to bring healthier, affordable restaurant food to his Harlem community. He sources top quality ingredients, including rice from farmers in North Carolina, to curate his rice bowls, which also include fresh vegetables and proteins for a complete meal. All the sauces are made from scratch to give the bowls unique flavor profiles. Listen as chef and restaurateur Johnson describes his vision for Fieldtrip, his cooking adventures at Martha’s Vineyard and his plans for the future.

On this week’s podcast, Pat Cobe, senior menu editor of Restaurant Business, and Bret Thorn, senior food & beverage editor of Nation’s Restaurant News and Restaurant Hospitality, discussed pumpkin spice season, which is upon us in August just as it is every year, despite annual complaints that it arrives too early. But as Pat observed, operators know when their customers want to start buying those autumnal items, and that time is now.  It's also “Restaurant Week,” in New York City, which now lasts for a month, and Pat made it to a long-standing Jean-Georges Vongerichten restaurant, Perry Street, where son Cedric Vongerichten helms the kitchen. For dinner, she had great pea soup, fried chicken with sweet corn sauce and molten chocolate cake, paired well with sparkling wine, Grüner Veltliner and a berry-flavored spritz-like dessert cocktail. All in, it was $60 for dinner and another $40 for the pairings. That’s a good value in New York City, but Pat also took a trip to the Berkshires in Massachusetts, a popular summertime getaway for New Yorkers and Bostonians, and was surprised and delighted to find that entree prices there were considerably lower than at other seasonal resorts in the Hamptons and Cape Cod. Bret stayed local, but enjoyed a good $12 cocktail at his favorite bar, Logan’s Run in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope, and reported in Restaurant Hospitality’s New on the Menu column about a cocktail that was a cross between a spritz and an Espresso Martini. The podcast guest this week was Paco Moran, who won season 52 of the TV competition show “Chopped” and is also the executive chef of Loreto, a Mexican seafood restaurant in Los Angeles. Moran’s a native Angelino whose parents are from El Salvador, and he started working in restaurants at age 17, when he had a child on the way and needed to make money. He worked hard in professional kitchens at a time when those environments could be quite harsh, and Moran has taken a different approach in managing his own restaurant. He said the cruelty of the past isn’t necessary and he wants his restaurants to be fun to work in. That’s especially true since his son, now aged 16, is working for him too. That has taught him and his crew patience, both to their benefit and to that of the young cooks who are joining his team. Although he is now an executive chef, Moran loves to get back on the line and cook.

This week on Menu Talk, Pat Cobe, senior menu editor of Restaurant Business, and Bret Thorn, senior food & beverage editor of Nation’s Restaurant News and Restaurant Hospitality, zero in on Japanese tasting menus and a trendy pizza style. Bret paid a visit to Hakubai in the Kitano Hotel, a restaurant known for its kaiseki menu. Kaiseki is a Japanese tasting menu similar to omakase, but it’s more specifically focused on pristine, seasonal ingredients. Hakubai’s 11-course menu was paired with sake and the amuse-bouche stood out as one of Bret’s favorite parts. It was a very tender and succulent squid with a Japanese-style vinaigrette and caviar on top—another example underscoring caviar as the “it” ingredient this year. Pat’s pizza experience was a bit more down market but very tasty. She had dinner at Emmy Squared, a Detroit-style sit-down pizza restaurant that earned a spot on Restaurant Business’ Future 50 ranking of emerging chains this year. Detroit pizza is a rectangular pie that’s baked in a black cast iron pan so that every slice comes out with a very crispy edge. It originated in Detroit and may have some link to the auto industry but it’s now trending outside of that city—as proven by Emmy Squared, which is expanding on the East Coast. Pat had the MVP pizza topped with vodka sauce, pesto, burrata and Calabrian chilies and, as a New Yorker, she may just become a Detroit pizza fan.  Food halls have traditionally been another lower-risk way to test out a concept or menu, but they have evolved a bit since the pandemic. Pat shared her interview with food hall veteran Akhtar Nawab, who has opened and operated several in the last few years. His company, Hospitality HQ, tends to stick to smaller cities, such as Omaha, Charlotte, North Carolina, and metro-Minneapolis rather than New York, Chicago and L.A. Chef Nawab talks about the importance of having a good mix of cuisines. And the concepts don’t all have to be fast casual. A live-fire Brazilian-style full-service steak concept that’s clearly higher-end is doing very well in one of his newer food halls. Event spaces are also key to success; a place to host planned activities that turn food halls into destinations for more than eating and drinking.

This week, Pat Cobe, senior menu editor of Restaurant Business, and Bret Thorn, senior food & beverage editor of Nation’s Restaurant News and Restaurant Hospitality, discussed their visits to Tara Kitchen, a Moroccan restaurant run by Indian chef Aneesa Waheed with three locations near Albany, New York, one in Wildwood, New Jersey, one in Hyderabad, India, and one in the New York City neighborhood of Tribeca. Pat and Bret took separate trips to the Tribeca location, where Pat had brunch and enjoyed the 1,000-hole pancakes, a traditional Moroccan dish made with a yeast batter that bubbles and produces all those holes, giving the pancakes a lacy quality. Bret, coincidentally, had also visited the restaurant just to get a look at those pancakes and watch the chef prepare them. Pat discussed a story she wrote last week that was a deep dive into recent menu innovations in family dining. Many of the big chains in that segment, including IHOP, Denny’s, Perkins and Cracker Barrel have undertaken substantial overhauls recently as they try to find the balance between attracting new guests without alienating existing ones, all while providing value. Bret wrote about potatoes last week, and how, especially in the form of French fries, they can be a vehicle for introducing new flavors. It’s an increasingly common strategy to add lesser-known ingredients to something familiar to make them seem less scary. Bret said flavor combinations like Indian tandoori chicken or Vietnamese bánh mì can seem more approachable if you put them on top of fries. Pat noted other places where French fries are added, like on Bobby Flay’s burgers and on Primanti Brothers’ sandwiches. Then Bret shared his interview with Bryan Ogden, the chef of Bourbon Steak’s New York City location. He is also the son of Bradley Ogden, a pioneer in the modern American cuisine movement of a generation ago.