Love Bites: Fourteen Tales of Restaurant Romance Gone Awry
By Cooper Freemont
Published: February 12, 2011
Food may be sensual, but when people speak of going out to dinner for
Valentine's Day, Street Life's advice on the matter is simple: Don't do it.
The National Restaurant Association estimates 70 million lovebirds will be
out there this year, cramming into every available seat, paying too much
for subpar prix fixe menus, and getting all schmoopy with each other in public.
Not exactly our idea of a superlative dining experience, to say nothing of
setting the mood. (Though, if you disagree, by all means check out the
Valentine's Playbook.) But worse than the crowds, the so-so food, and the PDA,
what happens when diners' sweet feelings turn sour in public? It never ends
well, that's for sure. Don't believe us? Check out these true stories of
restaurant-related love gone bad, all from the very workers who lived them.
Robicelli's Joins Forces With Joe the Art of Coffee
By Eric Isaac
Published: February 10, 2011
Starting the week of February 21st, husband-and-wife pastry chefs Allison and
Matt Robicelli will begin selling their coveted cupcakes at Joe's Union Square,
Chelsea, and Morningside Heights locations. Robicelli's also tells us they'll be
upping delivery to the cafes and markets where they're sold (see the list here)
from two days a week to three, meaning most likely twelve flavors a week from
their roster of dozens, rather than eight. Not bad for a cupcake shop with no actual
shop.
Profile
Good coffee, latte, and Amy Sedaris’s cupcakes, plus disheveled, groggy-eyed celebrities.
Is that Philip Seymour Hoffman over there in the Adidas flip-flops?
A Weirder Tennessee
By Scott Green
Published: Jan 30, 2011
My first encounter with Tennessee Williams - who would have turned 100 in March, had it not been
for a plastic bottle cap and the fact that he was Tennessee Williams - had an appropriately tacky,
back-alley vibe to it. I was a high-school senior in a poorly organized yet ambitious summer-drama
program, and at the time, Williams was little more to me than a reading assignment. I’d yawned
through The Glass Menagerie in junior-year English and only knew Blanche DuBois via The Simpsons’
“A Streetcar Named Marge” episode.
Now, The Red Devil Battery Sign, apart from being wildly age-inappropriate for high school, is not
what an innocent bystander would call “good.” It begins with the Tennessee-standard nympho-neurotic
heroine and a worldly, scuffed-up Christ figure—but ah, what a Christ figure! He’s (maraca roll, please)
a brain-damaged mariachi named King Del Rey.
Recent Pub & Club Openings
By Jena Booth
Published: Feb 15, 2011
61 Local: The 2,000-square-foot space has local beer, wine, and kombucha on tap, plus a
curds-focused food menu from Murray's Cheese alum Chris Munsey.
Fatty Johnson's: Zak Pelaccio’s short-term replacement for Cabrito is a blank slate appropriate
to the cast of local guest bartenders.
Rum House: The guys behind Tribeca mixology haven Ward III have revived midtown’s newest old
watering hole.
Weather Up Tribeca: This new incarnation of the Prospect Heights boîte is three times the size of
the original, with nooks designed for spreading “a little bit of really nice caviar on a French fry.”
The Drink: Follow the blinking red beacon to this warm, rustic, and aromatic Williamsburg punch mecca.
