The Restaurant Doomsday Clock Moves Closer to MidnightThe story is a sadly familiar one, but Crain’s tells it well today: how crazy-ass Manhattan rents are driving even successful businesses into the potter’s field and how a restaurant recession may well be in the works as a result. None of the places mentioned in the article, such as Frank’s, Tuscan Square, or the brilliant Itzocan Cafe, were by any means empty, which makes us worry for places that don’t happen to have huge buzz machines and/or celebrity chefs behind them. Of course, if they are forced to move to the bleak outer-borough neighborhoods, where one of Grub Street’s editors resides, we won’t complain.
Eateries Forced Out by Soaring Rents [Crain’s NY]
The Underground Gourmet
Tuscan Square’s Meatball Maven Gets His Say — and Sandwich of the
If you saw Page Six last Thursday, you know that there may be a vast meatball conspiracy upon us. A quick recap of the item: Restaurateur Pino Luongo yields to no one in his devotion to the study and the making of meatballs, and along with Coco Pazzo chef Mark Strausman, he is feverishly scribbling a manuscript entitled Two Meatballs in the Italian Kitchen. Yet Luongo was ignominiously left out of an article by the Lee brothers in the Times’s Dining Section entitled “The Expanding Meatball Universe,” which traced the not-so-recent popularity of the things to the giant beef-veal-and-pork orbs made by Ápizz chef-owner John LaFemina (author of A Man and His Meatballs). Luongo smelled a rotten polpetta.
