Autumn Swedes
The restaurant's full game menu will be available both in its warm, inviting, more casual upstairs cafe and in its dramatic and high-ceilinged bottom-floor atrium, which is the dining room proper. Prix fixe menus ($19.99 for lunch, $25 for dinner), meanwhile, will be available in the cafe. It gets even a little more complicated than that, though, so native Swedes should pay particularly close attention, and perhaps even read the following passage back to themselves several times, mouthing the words aloud as they go: There's also a dining room prix fixe for $29, and a pretheater menu will be available for $39. One assumes that lingonberries will somehow figure into your Aquavit game evening. The restaurant's located at 13 W. 54th St., just west of 5th Ave. The phone number's 307-7311.
It's one of autumn's small pleasures, at least as far as we're concerned: the "Pan de Muertos" prepared?consistent with Mexican tradition?in honor of autumn's Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, by Roe Di Bona, co-owner of Chelsea's fine Rocking Horse Cafe Mexicano.
Last year's version of the bread? We still remember it?an oblong golden loaf as long as your arm and as sweet and heavy as a babka, decorated with marzipan Day of the Dead skulls and crossbones and bound in shroud-like gauze and twine. In fact, so fondly and well do we remember the stuff, we wouldn't mind if the restaurant flowed us another free loaf this year?dig?
Di Bona's 6-by-18-inch gauze-wrapped "spirit breads" cost $26. All orders must be received by Oct. 26 for Oct. 28 delivery. Call 463-9511. The Rocking Horse Cafe Mexicano is located at 182 8th Ave. (19th St.).
Oct. 20, at Lincoln Center's Kaplan Penthouse, Beverly Sills hosts "Art Culinaire," the third annual "Dinner With Celebrity Chefs," a significantly highbrow event meant to benefit Lincoln Center. Participating chefs?who are donating their services?include: Picholine's Terrance Brennan, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Rocco DiSpirito, Jean-Louis Palladin and Douglas Rodriguez. Tickets for the evening cost $1500 per person, and $15,000 per table. For information and reservations, call Lincoln Center's Special Events Office at 875-5460; see if they'll fax you a copy of the stunning menu, which moves from strength to strength, Rodriguez's mind-boggling first course yielding to Eric Ripert's impressive second to Palladin's stupefyingly intricate third...and so on.
Oh, boy! It's a Chili Pepper Fiesta, on Saturday, Oct. 2, from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m., at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden!
That's eight hours of: celebrating chili pepper, cooking with chili pepper, eating chili pepper, listening to chili pepper-themed music, digging chili pepper crafts, watching chili pepper puppet shows, pimping chili pepper, dramatizing Bolingbroke's famous "Chili Pepper Benediction" from the funeral scene of Shakespeare's King John, rubbing chili pepper against your ass while you sing the Chilean national anthem and enjoying chili peppers from behind, sexually.
And more: Sunday, Oct. 24, the aforementioned Rob and Bob will lead the first course in a three-session "Intro to Cheese" primer. The succeeding two courses will occur on 11/4 and 11/11; each session is devoted to one of the major cheese groupings?which is really just a stentorian manner by which to signify goat, sheep and cow. Tasting, serving, storing, pairing and other important cheese-related skills will be elucidated. Call, again, New School Culinary at 229-5690.
Finally, Saturday, Oct. 30, Bob (feels like we know the man already) leads a (and Christ, he does get around town, doesn't he?) "Culinary Wonders of Soho" tour. The publicity material promises that Bob will show you "fresh mozzarella being made," and let you "watch the city's finest bread being baked." You'll also "tour the city's best gourmet stores."
Once more, call 229-5690.
C3, that fine little restaurant tucked into the bottom floor of the Washington Square Hotel on Waverly Pl., is, on the evening of Oct. 13?that's a Wednesday?hosting an event called "Georgia O'Keefe's Garden?A Fall Harvest Celebration." The restaurant's presenting the event with the help of culinary historian Alexandra Leaf, and it works as follows: Chef John McGrath will prepare a four-course Southwestern-influenced dinner (ancho-rubbed venison loin's in there, as is, um, a lobster tamale), with matching wines; you'll eat the food and drink the wine; then, either after you're done eating or while you're eating (but presumably not while she's eating) Leaf will discuss the manners in which O'Keefe's garden influenced her art and life. The event will occur at 7 p.m., and will cost $70. C3's located at 103 Waverly Pl., which is right on the MacDougal St. corner. Phone: 254-1200.
Maison Louis Jadot, that outfit that makes and sells those good, inexpensive bistro wines?their Beaujolais is ubiquitous in liquor stores each autumn?is teaming up with a number of New York restaurants to serve customers publicity-generating flights of the firm's Beaujolais and Maconnais wines. Jadot's wines?and this offer?aren't especially worth going out of your way for. But if you should find yourself ordering food in such favored restaurants of ours as the Duane Park Cafe, Les Halles, Marion's Continental or Markt, you might order a flight and learn something about...about honest, inexpensive wine.
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