Dining & Wine

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

While Melissa Clark was researching her article on whole wheat pasta, she had Anna Klinger, chef and a co-owner of Al di Là in Park Slope, Brooklyn; and Emma Hearst, chef and a co-owner of Sorella on the Lower East Side, taste some of the pastas in her kitchen in Brooklyn. I was there too.

What was most striking was the wide spectrum of good pasta to bad pasta. The best was so clearly the winner (subtle wheat flavor and most spaghetti-like texture) and the worst was so clearly the loser (disintegrated in the mouth and tasted gluey), while the ones in the middle, though differentiable, were nothing to write home about. Read more about the tasting over on Ms. Clark’s blog.

Mark Bittman

Daily, it seems, I find myself preaching the benefits of a well-stocked pantry, and of cooking a pot of beans and a pot of grains once a week or so. Here’s a good example of why.

A family member was ill, and I wanted to bring him something warm and nourishing and fall-like. For a variety of reasons, I had to stay home and cook; when I looked around, there was what you’d call “nothing.”

But there was a little bowl of wheatberries I’d simmered earlier in the week (and eaten, by the way, with tomatoes, shallots, and soy sauce, for a terrific breakfast), and a plastic bag filled with beans that I’d cooked and frozen a couple of weeks before. Needless to say I also had carrots, celery, and onions, as one always should; a zucchini that happened to be lying around; a lone bell pepper; and a tomato. Read more…

Oh, man. I wanted to like Xiao Ye so bad. The chef and owner is a guy named Eddie Huang, who has an excellent little sandwich place on Rivington Street called Baohaus.

He can cook for real. He has terrific taste in hip-hop. And he has a great blog called Fresh Off the Boat. On it he writes entertainingly and well about youth and restaurant culture, and about the process that led to the opening of Xiao Ye. If you go read those posts, you’ll see some of what excited me about the place, and continues to.

And here’s my review. Do you feel me? The comments are open.

HO/Associated Press

Until the scream punctured the air at roughly 9 p.m., patrons and executives of the restaurant said, Monday night was quiet and glittery as usual at Jean Georges, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s four-star kitchen and dining room on the first floor of 1 Central Park West. Diners were tucking into yellowfin tuna ribbons or gently smoked squab, talking cheerfully as staff members padded silently through the elegant, carpeted room.

Then a cockroach appeared on the ironed white cloth of a table of five diners.

The visitor’s effect was immediate and terrible, said Lois Freedman, a spokeswoman for Mr. Vongerichten, who was not in the restaurant at the time. “A woman at the table screamed and the whole restaurant went quiet,” she said.

Roach! It is both a diner’s and a restaurateur’s worst nightmare, say both groups: a cockroach or water bug making its presence known in a restaurant or private dining room in the middle of a meal, inserting creepy and crawly into an experience that should have neither. Some people grimace, others scream. Acute embarrassment rises in the breast of the evening’s host. For professionals and amateurs alike, there is always some question about what exactly to do. Read more…

Nurit Asnash Submitted by Nurit Asnash of Bellevue, Wash.: farina porridge mess, in which farina cereal is sweetened with milk and sugar and topped with sprinkles. More photographs.

Inspired by last week’s story on the popularity of spaghetti tacos, we asked readers to submit photos of the food their children ask them to cook. Here are the results.

In the wine business, the quality of the marketing is often as important as the quality of the grapes, and sometimes even more so.

Consider the recent efforts of Nancy Sinatra, daughter of Frank Sinatra, who has been traveling the country hawking a pair of wines attributed to Sinatra Family Estates. No, Ol’ Blue Eyes was not making a little red in between escapades with the Rat Pack. He did not do it his way. And Nancy’s boots were not made for stomping grapes.

Sinatra Family Estates is a show business partnership between Frank Sinatra’s estate, his three children (Tina, Nancy and Frank Jr.), a winery owner (John Schwartz of Amuse Bouche in Napa Valley) and, natch, a Vegas tie-in, Danielle Price, executive director of wine for Wynn Resorts. Read more…

Getty Images

Weather Up, Kathryn Weatherup’s latest eponymously named cocktail bar — set to open at 159 Duane Street in TriBeCa in early November — is one saloon that will never have to send out for ice.

“We’re going to be the first bar on the East Coast of the United States that is doing in-house ice harvesting and production,” said partner Richard Boccato. Whether that’s precisely true or not, as any cocktail aficionado knows, ice — its purity, its size, its shape — is of paramount importance to the modern mixologist. The ice-works will be in the basement, but chunks of the cold stuff will be on display through the bar, cut into pieces by “bandsaw, chainsaw, chisels, hammers, and other torture devices,” as Mr. Boccato put it.

The ice machine is called the Clinebell CB300X2 Carving Block Ice Maker, and costs $6,000. According to Mr. Boccato, it produces two 300-pound blocks of crystal clear ice every three to four days through a slow-freezing cycle. A pump mounted inside the machine’s cabinets circulates the water, thus preventing impurities from freezing into the block, and as well as the formation of troublesome oxygen bubbles and striations which make carving difficult. Read more…

Philippe Bertineau, who had been the executive chef at Payard Patisserie and Bistro, which closed in 2009, and had more recently been at Balthazar, will take over the kitchen at Benoit, Alain Ducasse’s restaurant in Midtown, a branch of a venerable Paris bistro. He will start on Oct. 25, replacing Pierre Schaedelin, who was the chef and a partner, and who will be pursuing other ventures. Mr. Bertineau plans to revise Benoit’s menu, adding dishes like an upside-down cheese souffle and crispy pig’s trotters.

Kenzo Tribouillard/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images When most of Beaujolais was focused on mass-market wines, Marcel Lapierre and his friends were focused on making small quantities of top-quality wines.

Marcel Lapierre, the Morgon vigneron who was instrumental in reviving the reputation of Beaujolais, died Sunday night after a long battle with melanoma. Lovers of Beaujolais, and lovers of wine in general, will miss him.

It’s not that Mr. Lapierre was the best Beaujolais producer, or even the best Morgon producer, although I loved his wines for their lightness and elegance. Still, favorites are all a matter of taste. More important, though, was Mr. Lapierre’s leadership. Read more…

Larry Busacca/Getty Images Franklin Becker

Eugene Remm and Mark Birnbaum, who own Abe & Arthur’s in the meatpacking district, plan a new American brasserie-style restaurant, Lexington Brass, to open this winter in the 48Lex hotel at 517 Lexington Avenue (48th Street).

Franklin Becker, the chef at Abe & Arthur’s, will be the executive chef, with Marcellus Coleman, the chef de cuisine.

An earlier version said that Mr. Becker would be a consulting chef at Lexington Brass.