NEIGHBORLY PAIRINGS
When Beet, a new Thai restaurant on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, opened without a wine or liquor license, the nearby Prospect Wine Shop created a Thai-food-friendly wine list—filled with moderately sweet Rieslings, dry unoaked whites, fruity reds, and other spice-compatible wines—for people to purchase on the way to the restaurant.
“It was a challenge: which of our wines went well with Thai,” said manager Amy Louise Pommier. “We found a list that fits the restaurant and fits the neighborhood and fits the food.”

Such collaborations are bringing new meaning to the timeless, essential, affair between alcohol and food, as restaurants
get some help in designing wine lists, creating cocktails, and hosting wine dinners. This spring, Blanc & Rouge on
Washington Street in DUMBO will arrange tastings of desserts and dessert wines with neighboring Almondine. “First of all, for us, it’s fun,” said owner Josh Cohen. “And dessert wine as a category isn’t as popular or understood as dry wines or table wines. So it helps build relationships.”

Customers don’t seem to mind either. In Carroll Gardens, wine shop Smith & Vine and Patois Restaurant recently announced a series of wine seminars that include a five-course luncheon. For $55 (plus tax and tip), each Saturday meal includes a guided sampling of 10 wines from the world’s major wine regions. The response has been so strong that Smith & Vine also launched a series of in-home wine and cooking seminars in collaboration with Mychefdirect.com, a private chef and catering company.

For Earth Day, LeNell’s Wine and Spirit Boutique in Red Hook encourages customers to sample organic wines that are also served at nearby restaurant 360, and to book a table there. For another promo, owner LeNell Smothers offered free dessert wines to everyone who ordered dessert at nearby Schnack, which has provided ribs for instore
bourbon tastings. (LeNell’s has the largest bourbon selection in New York). Nearby Added Value urban farm, which works with youth to grow produce in raised beds, has provided vegetables to accompany wine tastings, while El Huipil, a Mexican restaurant around the corner, cooked the food to accompany a tequila tasting and patrons were encouraged to bring their liquor receipt to get a discount at dinner. Says Smothers, “We do it as a neighborly thing.”

ALISON’S EGGS
It all started because Alison Cohen couldn’t get good eggs. Spring through fall, she shops at the Grand Army Plaza
Greenmarket, but doesn’t trek there in winter when it shrinks to only a few stands. She missed the eggs. Unlike peaches and corn, local eggs are available year-round. They just weren’t easy to get to. Sure, she could buy organic eggs in her neighborhood, but they weren’t of much quality. She preferred eggs laid the day before by pastured chickens, eggs with deep orange yolks and thick shells. She wondered if her favorite Greenmarket egg farmer might deliver to her neighborhood if she placed a large enough order. Her daughter attends PS 29, across the street from their home. Through the school’s wellness committee, Alison met other food-conscious parents and her egg co-op was born, er, laid. Fifty families, even the principal, paid in advance. The farmer, Nestor Tello, a former Brooklynite,
agreed to deliver 50 dozen eggs to her stoop every other Monday morning. On the way to drop off kids, parents collect their eggs, which most agree are the best they’ve ever tasted. Says Cohen, “We sit on the stoop and people stop and chat. It's a small town in the middle of the big city. That's why we live in Brooklyn.” In June when school lets out and the harvest season begins, the parents will still get Nestor’s eggs—at the market.

BORO’S FRESHEST
It’s spring. Do you know where your farmers market is?
Greenpoint-McCarren Park
Lorimer & Driggs
Saturdays, yearround
Williamsburg
Havemeyer & Broadway
Thursdays, Jul–Nov
Bedford-Stuyvesant
Fulton-Stuyvesant & Utica
Saturdays, Jul–Nov
Fort Greene Park
Washington-DeKalb
& Willoughby
Saturdays, yearround
Borough Hall
Court & Montague
Tuesdays & Saturdays, yearround;
Thursdays, Apr–Dec
Grand Army Plaza
NW entrance Prospect Park
Saturdays, yearround
Windsor Terrace
Prospect Park,
W. 15 St.
Wednesdays, May–Nov
Cortelyou
Argyle-Beverly & Courtelyou
(at PS 139 schoolyard)
Saturdays, Jun–Nov
Borough Park
14th Ave., 49 & 50 St.
Thursdays, Jul–Nov
Sunset Park
4th Ave., 59 & 60 St.
Saturdays, Jul–Nov

IT IS YOUR MOTHER’S REVOLUTION
Has the capital of the food revolution relocated to Brooklyn? That other counter-culture enclave, Berkeley, California, has long been home to ecology-minded advocates re-imagining our food system. In 1971, Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse there, a little café that launched the big philosophy of ingredients-over-technique and inspired a generation of chefs whose menus read like farmers market shopping lists, or rather, lists of what they found for sale when they arrived at the farmers markets with open minds, baskets, and wallets. Arguably no other restaurant has had as great an impact on New American fare and its celebration of seasonal fresh foods from small local farms. That same year in Berkeley, Frances Moore Lappe published Diet for a Small Planet, which set out to prove, using bar graphs and tofu recipes, that we can eliminate world hunger by eating all the food we grow, rather than feeding much of it to animals raised for meat; that is, by going vegetarian. Which you did. Admit it.

Today, Brooklyn is challenging Berkeley for its status as food fight headquarters, and not just because we boast
a burgeoning community of farmers markets, community gardens, innovative chefs and culinary cognoscenti, but also because Alice Waters’s daughter Fanny, and Frances Moore Lappé’s daughter Anna both call the boro home.

Fanny arrived fresh from Yale, where she helped bring about the Yale Sustainable Food Project, which transformed the dining hall (fatefully named “Berkeley”) into a local-foods temple. And Anna is also following in her mother’s food-revolution footsteps; this spring she releases her new book Grub: ideas for an urban organic kitchen, coauthored
with Bryant Terry. Like Diet for a Small Planet, Grub is part food-system-alarm-bell, complete with academic charts, and part cookbook, replete with vegetarian recipes. But this book’s style is decidedly Brooklyn. As examples of the Grub way, Anna cites the Park Slope Food Coop, Red Hook’s Added Value Farm, Fort Greene’s Ici restaurant, and Crown Heights’s West Indian fare, as well as local farmers markets and CSAs. The recipes are sorted into
party themes, and each includes a suggested soundtrack curated by food-conscious DJs. Best of all, for their portrait, the authors strut their Brooklyn stuff in the Clinton-Washington subway station. Berkeley, thanks for the memories.
PS—Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl also cut her foodwriting teeth in hippie Berkeley way back when. Hey Ruth, send us your first born!

350 CHEESES AND 300 PARKING SPACES
“We’re looking forward to becoming a shopping destination in this very unique and interesting part of the city,” says Fairway co-owner Harold Glickberg, whose grandfather, Nathan Glickberg, opened the original 74th Street Fairway fruit and vegetable market in 1940.

This spring the highest-volume food stores in Manhattan (now two locations there) and on Long Island (one) are setting up shop in Brooklyn, opening in a landmark pre-Civil War Red Hook coffee warehouse with iron shutters, original beams and massive supporting columns (480-500 Van Brunt Street). Why expand into Brooklyn? “Where else in New York can I find 52,000 square feet?,” says Harold, with an implied “Fuggedaboutit!” But space for 30 kinds of olives and 350 kinds of cheese ain’t the only reason he’s boroughbound. Harold spies a business opportunity that he almost makes sound like charity work. “Brooklyn is really underserved as far as food goes. It has no good food stores. All those small neighborhood stores have high prices and limited selections. We’re thrilled to bring superior quality fresh foods to the residents of Brooklyn, and thrilled to be part of the resurgence of Red Hook, a neighborhood with so much history and possibility.”

Not everyone is thrilled. The store has parking space for 300 cars, and in keeping with much of once-industrial
Brooklyn’s retrofitting, the complex includes 45 loft apartments. Back when Red Hook was NYC's main harbor, traffic here was dangeous, and its quiet streets are about to bustle again. Says Arnaud, owner of Red Hook restaurant 360, "Nobody's looking forward to truck traffic. But I'm excited to buy decent food in my own neighborhood."

He's not alone. Brooklynites boro-wide eagerly anticipate transferring from the G train to the 77 bus for Perigord chocolates, preserved lemons, housemade tofu, and prawn chips from Hamburg. And it’s not just Brooklynites. “We’re pretty sure we’ll get a lot of shoppers from lower Manhattan,” predicts Harold. Which brings a whole new meaning to the phrase, “bridge-and-tunnel crowd.”