Two Top New York Culinary Schools Join Forces
By the end of this year, the International Culinary Center (ICC), formerly known as the French Culinary Institute, will be closing its doors in Manhattan, New York. ICC has entered into a licensing agreement with the Institute of Culinary Education (ICE), which has locations in Manhattan as well as Los Angeles. ICC plans to reopen as soon as New York City enters Phase 4 of its reopening plans, allowing enrolled students to complete classes until the end of the year. At that point, the two culinary schools will effectively become one as part of the agreement. Many notable New York City chefs have graduated from ICC, including Blue Hill’s Dan Barber, David Chang, Angie Mar, and Christina Tosi. Chefs Jacques Pepin, André Soltner, Alain Sailhac, and Jacques Torres have also been longtime instructors at ICC. Rick Smilow, president and CEO of ICE, hopes that ICC’s instructors will continue to teach as part of the combined school’s programming. Smilow says he “expects to bring aspects of their expertise, unique offerings, and heritage to ICE.”
The Sioux Chef Opens Indigenous Food Lab
The Oglala Lakota chef Sean Sherman began his Indigenous catering and education company, the Sioux Chef, in 2014. The Sioux Chef has since won two James Beard Foundation awards for his leadership and a cookbook. Over the next few months, Sherman and his partner Dana Thompson will open the Indigenous Food Lab in Minnesota as part of their nonprofit organization, North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NATIFS). The Indigenous Food Lab will feature a restaurant, a training kitchen, and an education center, as the NATIFS furthers its mission of Indigenous food education.
Sherman and his team will invite Indigenous communities from around North America to use the lab to both learn about, share, and serve dishes from North American regional food systems. The restaurant will be open to the public, abiding by social distancing guidelines during the pandemic. The restaurant will only serve pre-colonial food, so there will be no dairy, wheat flour, refined sugar, beef, pork, or chicken on the menu. Instead, the restaurant, training kitchen, and education center will feature traditional Indigenous North American foods like wild rice, corn, beans, bison, and foraged mushrooms, which will be sourced from local Indigenous farmers.
Japanese Milk Bread Takes Hold On U.S. Menus
Similar to an American pullman loaf of bread, Japanese milk bread has a softer, creamier texture from a unique method of cooking the flour in the dough. Milk bread is usually made with the tangzhong method, similar to a making a roux, in which water, milk, and flour are mixed into a slurry and heated in a saucepan until thick. This pre-cooking gelatinizes some of the starch in the flour, and when the slurry is added to the dough, it creates a creamier, fluffier, softer texture in the finished loaf. Japanese milk bread also gets a rich texture and some sweetness from additions of butter and sugar. In Japan, this type of bread is used in everything from egg salad sandwiches to katsu sandos (breaded and fried pork cutlet sandwiches). It’s as common as sliced white sandwich bread in the U.S. Now, Japanese milk bread is showing up on more and more U.S. restaurant menus. According to research from Datassential, the bread can be found on 400% more U.S. restaurant menus than 4 years ago.
College Student Collects More Than 6,000 Northeast Restaurant Takeout Menus
Noah Sheidlower, a sophomore at Columbia University, has collected over 6,000 takeout menus from restaurants in the northeast U.S. and Canada. Begun when he was 12 years old, Sheidlower’s collection got its start when his father handed him a menu from a Queens, New York empanada restaurant. “I really didn’t know what I was getting myself into,” Sheidlower says. Stored in plastic bins, cardboard boxes, and plastic bags, the menu collection once had an organizational system, which has since fallen by the wayside due to the collection’s sheer size. Growing up near Queens gave Sheidlower plenty of opportunities to explore the borough’s diverse culinary scene in search of good food and menus. He even published a Queens food guide based on his explorations. Family trips throughout the Northeast U.S. and Canada also allowed the menu hobbyist to compare local specialties across regions. While college studies now take most of Sheidlower’s time and attention, his menu collection could be an invaluable resource for a culinary library, such as the ones at the New York Public Library and the University of Toronto.
Celebrity Chefs Teach Online Cooking Classes For Restaurant Relief Fund
As people cook at home more instead of eating in restaurants, Airbnb has launched a series of Online Experiences featuring chefs such as David Chang, Edward Lee, Claudette Zepeda, and Rōze Traore. The virtual cooking classes take place throughout the summer, and each class costs $75–100. Proceeds from most of the classes support chef Edward Lee’s LEE Initiative Restaurant Reboot Relief Program. Proceeds from the class taught by chef Rōze Traore, who is a two-time open heart surgery survivor, will help fund Harboring Hearts, a nonprofit that provides emergency financial support and food delivery to heart surgery patients and their caregivers. The chefs will host all four cooking classes on Zoom with a cap of 10 participants, and participants will be able to interact with the chefs while receiving feedback via Zoom. More Online Cooking Experiences classes are planned, including chefs Roberto Ruiz, Jun Lee, Nicola Dinato, Soo Ahn, Paolo Gramaglia, Cristina Bowman and more.
Vegas Culinary Union Files Lawsuit Demanding Better Employee Protections
Both the Culinary Workers Union Local 226 and the Bartenders Union Local 165 have filed a lawsuit against hospitality companies MGM Resorts and Caesars Entertainment. The lawsuit alleges that several restaurants, including The Signature at MGM Grand, Sadelle’s Cafe at the Bellagio, and Guy Fieri’s Vegas Kitchen & Bar at Harrah’s Las Vegas, did not provide adequate rules and procedures to address the spread of COVID-19. “This lawsuit … is the just the beginning of the culinary union’s legal efforts to make sure workers are fully protected,” said Geoconda Argüello-Kline, the Culinary Union’s secretary-treasurer. Multiple workers have come forward with statements regarding the incident. “I did everything to follow social distancing,” said Jonathon Munoz, food server at Guy Fieri’s Vegas Kitchen & Bar. “We follow the strict protocol for three months. And now I come to work with a company that breaks protocol within a week…I feel the company doesn’t care about my wife or my kids.” At The Signature at MGM Grand, bellman Sixto Zermeno says he tested positive for COVID-19 on June 11 and attempted to “warn the Signature and its parent company MGM Resorts, but was not contacted for two days, even as co-workers with whom he had worked, including one who later tested positive for COVID-10, continued to work.”
States Roll Back Restaurant Reopenings As COVID-19 Cases Rise
States including Washington, Florida, California and Texas are rolling back their restaurant reopening dates as the United States sees a second surge in coronavirus cases. According to Johns Hopkins data, the country’s seven day average of coronavirus cases increased by 42% the last week of June. That’s roughly 38,200 cases within the week. As the numbers were released showing a sharp spike in cases, Washington State Gov. Jay Inslee postponed the planned reopening of the state’s restaurants and bars on Saturday. California Gov. Gavin Newsom followed suit and ordered the state to close its bars last Sunday. As case numbers climb up in states throughout the nation, more and more states have rolled back reopening restaurants for inside dining, limited them once again to takeout, delivery, and in some cases limited outdoor dining. The sudden backpedaling has made it even harder for restaurants that ordered food and rehired workers in preparation for reopening on the weekend. .
Ghost Kitchens May Be Here To Stay
In a San Francisco parking lot, an unmarked trailer powered by a generator churns out meals for six different “restaurants,” including WokTalk, Burger Bytes, Fork and Ladle, Umami, American Eclectic Burger, and Wings & Things. The restaurants are run by Reef Technology, and its trailer’s parking space is only one of 1.3 million parking spaces that Reef manages in 4,500 locations throughout the United States and Canada. At least 70 of those parking spaces are occupied by Reef’s delivery-only kitchens or “ghost kitchens” that prepare food for customers who order online only.
Run by a culinary team that includes former executives from Potbelly and Jamba Juice, Reef’s virtual restaurants are part of a growing trend. Other ghost kitchen companies include Zuul, Kitchen United, Deliveroo, Panda Selected, and CloudKitchens, which is run by Uber founder Travis Kalanick. CloudKitchens leases kitchen space and delivery-only service to chefs and small-business owners who couldn’t otherwise afford the expense of opening a brick-and-mortar restaurant. Uber Eats, working with both Reef and CloudKitchens, now delivers meals from 7,000 different virtual restaurants. According to journalist Matt Newburg, an 11,000 square foot CloudKitchens commissary in Los Angeles houses 27 kitchens that prepare meals for 115 delivery-only restaurants. Even the national chain Ruby Tuesday, announced it is leasing kitchen space to third-party restaurant brands to prepare delivery-only meals. .
David Chang’s Momofuku Restaurants Issue Coronavirus Safety Guide
Momofuku released its COVID-19 guide to health and safety for its employees, guests and restaurants, hoping other hospitality businesses may also find it useful. Among the various rules in the guide, guests must wear masks into any Momofuku restaurant and have their temperature checked upon entry. If a guest’s temperature is above 100.4°F, they will be asked to leave. The procedures were created with the intent to share them across the foodservice industry. “Our goal is to not only implement these procedures into our restaurants to keep our teams and guests safe,” says the introduction, “but also to make them available and accessible to anyone who might find them useful for their own businesses.”
World’s Best Restaurant Repositions Itself With The Moon And Stars
Last year, the French Riviera restaurant Mirazur was named the world’s #1 restaurant by World’s 50 Best Restaurants, which has been ranking top tables since 2002. During lockdown, chef Mauro Colagreco did some soul searching and decided to completely remake Mirazur’s menu based on biodynamic farming, an agricultural method similar to organic farming with the addition of planting and harvesting calendars based on the phases of the moon and its gravitational pull. Mirazur reopened June 12, and Colagreco now serves leaves and salad greens on “leaf days,” when the “energy” and flavor are most concentrated in the leaf of the plant. The same is true for fruit days, flower days and root days, an approach meant to serve the highest quality, most flavorful food available.
Colagreco sources ingredients from five organic and biodynamic gardens in the Menton area with a total area of about 12 acres. The chef’s move to sourcing biodynamic ingredients is part of Mirazur’s recent sustainability efforts, which include a commitment earlier this year to go completely plastic-free. While the award-winning chef knew he could reopen Mirazur as it was before the pandemic, he found such deep peace among the plants in his gardens during lockdown that he wanted to share that experience of peace with his guests. “Our goal is not to be the best restaurant in the world,” says Colagreco, “but to provoke emotions in our diners and to cook with passion.”
