Grub Street Grub Street New York

Four-star chef Daniel Boulud: You’ve seen him with a pig’s head, with a giant stuffed rat, in a jumpsuit, with charcuterie eyes, on the hood of a cab, and wearing an "EAT MY SAUSAGE" shirt and a trapper hat. Here’s another one from the scrapbook, courtesy of the Food Network South Beach Wine & Food Festival Cookbook. See also: page 146, Mario Batali hand-feeding Danny DeVito a lamb chop.

Welcome to “How Do You Make That?”: You tell Grub Street about a restaurant dish you’re dying to make at home, and we fetch the recipe from its creator. Here’s a summer-appropriate request: “Papatzul's fish tacos! They are the best!” A plea as simple as it is moving. Here’s the recipe below, care of chef-owner Thierry Amezcua.

In this slider-saturated town, there’s a new one: the panelle slider, a chickpea fritter topped with ricotta and caciocavallo on a brioche roll. It’s one of a dozen Italian small plates on offer at Stuzzicheria, the 50-seat Tribeca spinoff of Bar Stuzzichini, slated to open for aperitivo and dinner next Friday. Dishes like “two ricotta” crespelle with eggplant, tomato, and ricotta salata have a Southern Italian slant, and so does the wine list. The cheese-and-parsley ring sausage is made in-house, and Monday’s mussels special comes with pizza bianca and a small draft beer. Check out the menu (and more pictures) below.

A couple of spinoff cookbooks are due out soon. First, Rodale will publish the MasterChef Cookbook at the end of this month. Interesting fact: Gordon Ramsay gets almost no play in it whatsoever. Though Joe Bastianich and Graham Elliot pen splashy forwards and contribute recipes, and (along with the contestant contributors) get lots of photo love throughout the 260-page book, Gordo is only mentioned in passing a couple of times, and there are only a few photos of him (none of them solo shots). What kind of snub is this? Meanwhile, the Food Network South Beach Wine & Food Festival Cookbook (out in November) features plenty of celebrity-chef porn, starting with a full-page shot of Anthony Bourdain, who pens a forward.

Andy Yang tells us he has closed the East Village outpost of Rhong Tiam. “It was a miscalculation,” he says of its predecessor Kurve, with its infamous Karim Rashid design. While Yang considers whether to remodel it (bringing the kitchen upstairs) and reopen it with a less off-putting décor, or to simply let go of the space, he’s focusing on his Gramercy outpost of Rhong Tiam, which soft-opened yesterday. As you can see from our photo, this is an operation every bit as humble as the NYU-area original (which closed owing to gas issues in the kitchen), with a to-go counter and a handful of seats off to the side. Yang hopes to reproduce the model all around town, and he’s hoping to succeed in the “Asian burrito” realm where David Chang notably failed, by peddling “roti wraps” inspired by Thai mataba. They consist of cabbage, beans, crispy basil, and lemongrass chicken wrapped up in a homemade roti (the roti is the only thing on the new menu, which you can see below, that isn’t gluten-free).

Katie Lee has been really into tacos lately. "I went to Mexico for a month earlier this year and ate all kinds of good food," she says. "I make fish tacos now, and I'm all about the sauces." The trip was research for her first novel, about a girl who falls in love with surfing and moves south of the border. "I always thought that if I wrote a novel, it would be about food," Lee says. "Maybe a girl who works in a bakery, a cook, this or that. But then I started surfing last summer and I was like, I found my story!" But that doesn't mean the book will be food-free. "Surf culture and street-food culture go hand-in-hand," she points out. Now back in the States, find out what she ate this week in our latest New York Diet.

Last week it was reported that Giuliano had closed less than a year after its predecessor, Roberto Passon, was renamed after chef Giuliano Matarese. Now owner Enrico Malta tells us it’ll reopen as a sister location of Lime Jungle, just three blocks away. The menu will be the same (with the addition of a whole red snapper) but unlike the original takeout location, this one will boast a bar serving organic wines and flavored margaritas, as well as a graffiti mural created by a waiter-artist at another Malta spot, Bocca di Bacco. Malta isn’t worried about cannibalizing the original Lime Jungle, which will stay in business after its spinoff opens on Monday or Tuesday: "If people want to eat in, they'll go to 50th Street. If they prefer to eat at home, they'll go to 53rd Street. If Duane Reade can open a store on every other corner, we can too."

Lime Jungle, 741 Ninth Ave., nr. 50th St.; 212-582-5599

Chuck Sudo alerts us to the work of Kate Gross, a photographer who got started taking pictures of farms when she began working the Kinnikinnick Farm booth at Green City Market. Her images capture a gritty yet tranquil picture of everyday life on small family farms that is strangely soothing. They've also led her to become more and more involved with farming and with helping city folk better appreciate where their food comes from; she now has a blog, Dishes and Dirt, and is trying to launch a resource website about local food and farming called Ingather. You can bliss out with more examples of her work at Chicagoist.

Local Photographer Looks to Create Local Farm Resource Website [Chicagoist]
Dishes and Dirt