Tag: food

2020 hindsight: how restaurants saved new york

Jim KempsterLeave a comment

On a warm August evening in 2020, Bob and I sat at a table on the uneven sidewalk outside Union Square Cafe (USC) for the first time since the pandemic began, watching the patchwork staff somehow making it work. USC’s new Chef Lena Ciardullo was back in her kitchen, but so was Chef Tom Allen from the Modern, who was serving as her sous chef until whenever his restaurant would reopen. Denez Moss, who’d left Manhatta to become the new general manager at USC only a month before lockdown, was pouring drinks, and Halle Murcek, now Guest Experience Manager for the entire restaurant group, was waiting tables. Together they managed just about everything at the front of the house (or should I say out in front of the house) with the skeleton crew they’d assembled.

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aunt sis’ dinky cookies

Jim KempsterLeave a comment

I spent this afternoon conjuring my mother Aurelia Kempster’s memory, once again, as I whipped up a batch of her crisp little Christmas cookies. Each step in the making brought visions of her. It wasn’t just her handwriting in the photo of her original recipe that my sister texted to me. I could also see that diminutive woman counting 20 tablespoons of Spry, scooping the measuring spoons back and forth quickly as if she were forming quenelles, and tapping them into the mixing bowl. Rolling the dough into little balls and gently pressing a baby spoon of colored sprinkles into a small divot on top.

Mom’s cookies were never the flashy show stoppers on the cookie table, but their simple flavors dominated by nutmeg are Christmas to me. Some of my cousins (who, unable to pronounce Aurelia, called her “Aunt Sis”), referred to her cookies with a wink as “Aunt Sis’ Dinky Cookies” because of their size (and hers).

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nyc recommendations

Jim KempsterLeave a comment

img_9871I was asked recently on Instagram for my NYC recommendations. They aren’t what you’d expect:

whatsup.tony
Hey jimkempster! Are you based in the NYC?? 🙂 I’m heading there to make Facebook videos and was wondering if you have any recommendations?! Thanks!

jimkempster
@whatsup.tony Recommendations?

Explore every minute you’re here. Eat whatever smells good. Attend anything hosted by artists or groups of artists.

Come up with the most idiosyncratic list of unique, bizarre, exotic, uncharted, beloved things you’re interested in and then Google them with “NYC” attached, and you’ll have 100 days worth of things to do.

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the hole story: waiting for cronut

Jim Kempster4 Comments

So, cut to the chase. Would I stand for three hours in line for a cronut ever again? No. Was it an adventure? Yes. Did we have fun? Yes. Was it fun for all the reasons I expected. Not exactly.

At about 6:30 this morning, Bob and I both woke up and couldn’t fall back to sleep. We’ve been talking about queuing up for cronuts for a while. For the uninitiated, a cronut is a cross between a croissant and a donut, introduced back in May of this year by Pastry Chef Dominique Ansel at his SoHo bakery. Since the first deep-fried buzz began to hit the food blogs, people began camping out on the bakery’s doorstep to be among the first lucky 150 to 250 people to snag a cronut or two before the day’s supply runs out. (Ansel makes them only once a day, and there is a two-cronut limit per customer.)

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