There will be no cooking tonight. Therefore…

The rain has begun in the Bronx.

Can you be a slut for a restaurant? Course you can. And that’s just what I am for L’Artusi, the Italian restaurant in the village. It’s run by chef Gabe Thompson and his wife, Katherine, who does the desserts. They are s0me kind of talented pair, boy.

All of the food is tasty. I’ve mentioned the crispy potatoes and the spaghetti with green chilies before.

The olive oil cake alone is reason to make the trip. And so is this salad with tomatoes and watermelon over a slab of pancetta. The saltiness of the pork is balanced by the sweetness of the watermelon, the acid from the tomatoes, and there is an extra kick from little cubes of pickled watermelon rinds. It’s the kind of dish that makes you wish summer would last indefinitely.

 Oh, and the service is warm, the wait staff knowledgeable and friendly. Again, can’t recommend this jernt enough. And if you like it, dig Dell’Anima, also in the west village, owned by the same good folks.

Represent.

‘Tis the season.

At the famrer’s market this morning.

Devils on Horseback at The Spotted Pig. That’s a prune wrapped in bacon. May sound off-putting but believe me, it’s delicious.

Salsa Verde with Avocado from the outstanding food blog, The Year in Food.

If you can deal with the scene (which isn’t always easy), you should stop by the Spotted Pig for a burger.

Oh, and the fried pig’s ear might sound unappetizing to some but it is delicious like you wouldn’t believe.

Sometimes the simplest thing on the menu is the most intriguing.

My wife and I celebrated our fifth anniversary at Manzo recently. It was our first time at Eataly and we drove ourselves into a ravenous state walking around the market for 30 minutes before our meal. The menu – a fantastic menu for me – swirled before my eyes as every choice seemed better than the one next to it.

I skimmed right past something called ‘tajarin al sugo d’arrosto.’ It was a pasta, though beyond that I had no idea, and I was busy reading menu items which contained words I understood. I got to the end and started to think about my order when I noticed that the last page of the menu contained a glossary of terms.

Tajarin al sugo d’arrosto is a simple dish, ribbons of egg-flour pasta in a light sauce made from the juices of the roast meats. Manzo being a meat place, they have a lot of that juice to go around.

It occurred to me that I rarely order something with such a bare menu description. But the idea of it wormed into my brain and I couldn’t shake it. I asked the waiter to give me his take, ala Alex Belth, and he was a brilliant salesman. He gave me the Indiana Jones “you’ve-chosen-wisely” vibe which made me proud for an instant before I realized I was such an easy mark.

We ordered a lot of incredible dishes, but a week later, I’m still thinking about the tajarin. Still wishing there was one more chunk of bread to wipe in the sauce.

Here’s an attempt to reverse-engineer the recipe, though they have used a different pasta from the one I’m pining for.

The good folks at Saveur offer a gallery of pesto recipes.

Hey, it’s that time of year, isn’t it?

[Photo Credit: Zumaorganic.com]

I won’t abide lousy service in a restaurant, never mind smugness. My wife thinks I’m nuts, even though she’s the same way with clerks in retail stores. I don’t just want a waiter to be attentive, I want them to be warm and knowledgeable.  Earlier this summer, we went a trendy restaurant near Columbia and I asked the waiter what he’d recommend. He pointed at the menu and said, “Well, it’s all really good,  you can’t go wrong.”

Right, then.

On that note, check out this recent GQ column by Alan Richman:

I should long ago have paid attention to this disastrous decline in service. Casualness in restaurants does not automatically make customers feel more relaxed. It often has the opposite effect. Remember how tense my friends became when we received no attention at M. Wells.

I appreciate an atmosphere lacking formality. I love Momofuku Ssäm Bar in Manhattan and Schwa in Chicago, both unpretentious and unfussy—but also attentive. They employ people who know how to take orders, fill glasses, clear plates, drop checks. Neither neglects customers. These days, too many new restaurants do. Their motto might as well be Too Cool to Care.

Well-run restaurants recognize that thoughtful service enhances an evening out, and that a bit of formality might be required in order to reach that goal. Customers these days tend to confuse discipline and manners with arrogance. Perhaps they are remembering the excess stuffiness of decades past. That hardly exists any longer. Arrogance today is exhibited by inconsiderate servers who do almost nothing for customers other than slap plates down in front of them and expect a generous tip. Arrogance is a restaurant believing it can prosper without looking after its customers.

I will tell you what else is extraordinarily self-defeating: We empower popular restaurants, and M. Wells is very much one of them. All we care about is accessibility, getting through the door. Such restaurants are rarely held accountable, no matter how uncaring they might be. I doubt that the people who operate these sought-after spots ask themselves if they are treating their customers properly. They are not obliged to do so.

M. Wells gets the Gas Face.

Smitten Kitchen offers up another sure shot: tomato salad withe crushed croutons.

When you visit my mom–who now lives in Vermont–this is what you get.

Because that’s how she rolls.

Sure, why the hell not?

Because Smitten Kitchen’s got it going on.

Over at Food 52, Amanda Hesser demonstrates two ways to peel a tomato. Kitchen skills, one time for your face.

[Photo Credit: Foodrepublik.com]

My mother is Belgian so we grew up with tarts. Sure, she made a pie on occasion, and cookies too. But tarts were the thing.

Dig this blog, Taste Food. It’s really wonderful.

David Lebovitz takes Manhattan.

Another sure shot from Nicole Franzen.

We’ve talked about this tomato sauce before, but since the folks at Food 52 brought it up recently, why not mention it again?

There is a long profile on Danny Meyer in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine:

New York is a city of rooms. Most of them are tiny, dark, lonely and the wrong temperature. Meyer makes rooms that are exquisite — overlooking, in the case of the Modern, the greatest sculptures of the 20th century — and intimate. You feel at home. His goal, he told me, is for customers to make his restaurants their clubhouses.

Meyer’s track record is near perfect: one closing (Tabla, a 283-seat Indian place that lasted for 12 years), 25 openings and counting. And for most of his career he has expanded without repeating himself. He has created new restaurants as though they were each his first and only — the singularity of a place always as important as the food. His looseness and precision are qualities more reminiscent of an athlete or an artist. Whatever Meyer is engaged in — jaywalking, French-speaking, grease-inhaling — receives his complete attention.

Some of this is hereditary. Meyer’s father, Morton, owned hotels and had a gift for hospitality. As Meyer told me, “My dad gave me the gene to enjoy cooking, and to enjoy consuming good food and wine.”

…It has taken Meyer 26 years to go from the owner-manager of a single place to C.E.O. of a company — Union Square Hospitality Group — that employs 2,200 people and oversees the operations of all his restaurants. His mother calls the company “his business family.” Its core is a tight-knit group of five general partners whom Meyer has known for an aggregate of 102 years. Together they oversee three places that are in the Zagat Guide’s Top 5 (Gramercy Tavern, Eleven Madison Park, Union Square Cafe), plus the Modern, Maialino, Blue Smoke, the two cafes at the Museum of Modern Art, the newly opened restaurant at the Whitney, a jazz club, a handful of seasonal stands including one at Citi Field and a catering and events company. Meyer is on the board of Open Table, the Internet restaurant reservations service that not only allows him to materialize midlunch for a full-body hug but also tracks the eating habits of his 3,500 or so fine-dining customers each day. (Shake Shack feeds more than 12,000 daily.) This has all taken decades. And Meyer might have remained an incrementalist were it not for Shake Shack, which began as a hot-dog cart that he told the staff of Eleven Madison to set up in the park across the street in 2001. The cart was such a sensation that he expanded the menu to include burgers and milkshakes and opened an actual 400-square-foot shack in the park in 2004. Eleven Madison owned Shake Shack from 2004 to 2009, when it became its own company — but the mobbed burger stand provided the capital required to hire the Swiss chef Daniel Humm away from a restaurant in San Francisco, reduce the seats in his new dining room, double his staff and establish a venue so elevated in its pursuits that it’s less a restaurant than a graduate program in taste. Four stars from The Times ultimately followed.

I know some people in the restaurant business in New York and they all speak highly of Meyer. He’s the Mariano Rivera of the industry.

Serious Eats picks their favorite recent sandwich finds in New York.

Food 52 offers their take on fried green tomatoes.