Jean-Georges Vongerichten's new development company, Culinary Concepts by Jean-Georges, has teamed up with Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide to open Spice Market spin-offs later this year in new W hotel properties going up in Atlanta, Istanbul, and Doha, Qatar. The Qatar property will also get Market by Jean-Georges, a long distance hybrid of Market (Paris) and Mercer Kitchen (NYC). • Culinary Concepts is also partnering with The Phoenician (Scottsdale, AZ) to open J & G Steakhouse in October 2008. • The May launch of Braeburn (117 Perry St.) marks the first plunge as chef/owner for Brian Bistrong, recently of The Harrison. Fresh veggies from Bistrong's Connecticut home garden find their way into his polished new American fare. • Scott Conant (formerly of Alto and L'Impero) has resurfaced as chef/owner at Scarpetta (355 W. 14th St.), opening this month. Look for Conant's signature soul-stirring modern Italian fare served in a simple 70 seat interior. • Anita Lo (Annisa and Rickshaw Dumpling Bar) launched the 120 seat Bar Q (at 308-310 Bleecker St.) last month, where the game is Asian barbecue and a sashimi-inspired raw bar. • Akhtar Nawab, last seen at E.U., teamed up with Noel Cruz (front-of-the-house vet from Craft and Craftbar) to open Elettaria in February at 33 W. Eighth St. As one would expect from a restaurant whose name is Latin for green cardamom, the Asian-leaning menu is full of spice. • This summer Upper West Side Shake Shack devotees can skip the subway ride downtown for its delectable burgers. Danny Meyer's Union Square Hospitality Group is opening a branch at 366 Columbus Ave. • Also expanding to the Upper West Side is Cesare Casella (Maremma), who's opening a still-unnamed shop/cafe at 285 Amsterdam Ave. in the fall. • Geoffrey Zakarian of Town and Country signed on to oversee all f&b at The Water Club, A Signature Hotel By Borgata, opening this summer (Atlantic City). Also new to the property will be a Japanese pub, Izakaya, by exec chef Michael Schulson (Pantry Raid star and former chef at NYC's Buddakan). • Joël Antunes of Joël (Atlanta) has been recruited to command the stoves at The Plaza's Oak Room and Oak Bar, slated to reopen this summer. Back in Atlanta, his right-hand man in the kitchen, Cyrille Holota, assumes the top toque. • In other Plaza news, Didier Virot (formerly of FR.OG and the recently shuttered Aix) is the hotel's exec chef in charge of in-room dining, the historic Palm Court and Rose Club, along with a new Champagne Bar in the lobby, all of which reopened in March. • Brace yourself for haute flexitarian at Broadway East, which opened in March (171 E. Broadway). Lee Gross, former personal chef to Gwyneth Paltrow and top toque at M Café de Chaya (L.A.), is exec chef, and Pure Food & Wine alum Elena Balletta is doing sweets. Owners architect/developer Ron Castellano and architect Joël Barkley are behind the sleek interior. • Grace and Jack Lamb, who own the fashionable East Village trio Jewel Bako, Degustation, and Jack's Luxury Oyster Bar, expanded their playlist to include the cozy Harvest Supper in New Canaan, CT (15 Elm St.), where Michael Campbell (a Hearth vet) is chef. "We're calling it New England market cuisine," says Grace Lamb of the rustic small plates menu. • Luc Dimnet returns to the fold as exec chef at Brasserie, where he rode the ranges from 2000 to 2005 (at press time he still owned Buffet de la Gare in Hastings-on-Hudson). He replaced Franklin Becker, who's opening his own place. • Brooklyn News: Michele Pravda and Patrick Watson (Smith & Vine, Stinky Bklyn) increase their Smith St. holdings with The JakeWalk (282 Smith St.), where a heady cocktail and wine menu is fortified by cheese, cured meats, and American caviar. Jakewalk is a Prohibition-era term for the high-stepping gait caused from imbibing toxic moonshine. On this project they have partnered with longtime Smith & Vine staffers Ari Form and Matt DeVriendt.
New deluxe hotels are sprouting like porcini in Beantown and bringing with them fab new eats. Loudly applauded French chef Guy Martin is opening his first American venture, a sister property to his casual Parisian hit Sensing, in The Regent Boston at Battery Wharf (slated to open later this year). Exec chef Gérard Barbin will migrate over from Martin's Le Grand Véfour (Paris). • Mandarin Oriental Boston, opening in July, will have French-born Mandarin Oriental vet Nicolas Boutin running kitchens at its signature venue Asana. Although the name comes from a Sanskrit word associated with yoga, the menu isn't vegetarian but rather locatarian with Asian leanings. Additionally, the property will have two ventures by Frank McClelland, who's moving L'Espalier from its original Gloucester St. location and opening another Sel de la Terre. • Local talent is getting in on the action too. At the new Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel, exec chef Toby T. Hill (formerly of Spire Restaurant & Bar) and consulting chef Michael Schlow (Radius, Via Matta, Great Bay, and Alta Strada) are doing the regional American dance at 606 Congress, which opened in March. • Lydia Shire (Locke-Ober) captivates diners at Scampo (Italian for "escape"), opened in March in The Liberty Hotel (the Charles Street jail in a previous life). Partner is area nightclub impresario Patrick Lyons, who also runs the property's Alibi Bar. The Scampo kitchen is doing Alibi's eats. Also new on the Shire front is Clara's Cupcake Cafe (named for her granddaughter), which opened downstairs from Blue Sky, her new place in York Beach, ME, last month. • In February Michael Leviton opened Per se phone, a casual sibling to his swanky Lumiére (Newton), in The Achilles Project, a new retail/restaurant development in Boston's up-and-coming Fort Point Channel neighborhood. Chef de cuisine Jeff Pond hails from Tomasso Trattoria (Southborough, MA), and gm Derek Wilson floats over from Rowes Wharf Restaurant (Boston). • Rene Michelena, formerly of Saint and Domani, is exec chef at an adjoining duet opened in February in the financial district: upscale Central 37 (21 Broad St.) and Mkt (130 Water St.), a grown-up lounge with a sharing menu. Both are developed and operated by The Cronin Group and managing partner Tim Collins. • Richard Garcia quit the stoves at Havana Blue and Lotus Asian Grill (St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands) to be chef at Legal Seafood's LTK. • At press time we heard that Rachel Klein jumped ship at Om (Cambridge) to be chef of the undergoing-major-renovations Aura at the Sea port Hotel, where she'll take the menu in a Mediterranean direction (think Turkish spices and merguez sausage). • This spring, construction kicked off for Sofra (Cambridge), a new bakery/Middle Eastern cafe/organic wine shop owned by Oleana chef/owner Ana Sortun, her business partner Gary Griffin, and Oleana pastry chef Maura Kilpatrick. "In Arabic and Turkish, Sofra means preparations that go on the table," says Sortun. "It's also a type of small kilim that goes on your lap when you eat." Look for flatbread sandwiches, lots of homemade crackers and cookies, and a hummus and mezze bar next month.
Jason Merrill left Jackson House Inn & Restaurant (Woodstock, VT) and is now at Hanover Inn (Hanover, NH), stepping in for Mike Grey as exec chef/f&b overseer. The entire property is being renovated along green/renewable lines, which means the kitchen is now stocked with local sustainable goodies. Meantime, Jackson House's new exec chef is Robb Taylor, who worked at Elixir Restaurant & Lounge (White River Junction, VT), Home Hill Inn (Plainfield, NH), and Radius (Boston). • Speaking of Home Hill Inn, it was closed for all of 2007 but reopened under new management last month. • Farther north in Portland, Maine, Harding Lee Smith (chef/owner of Portland's Front Room Restaurant) is doing wood-fired fish, pizza, and meats at The Grill Room, which opened in April at 82 Exchange St.
Chef Jay Swift, who made his name at Rainwater and South City Kitchen, is putting a seasonal spin on Southern comfort food at 4th & Swift (621 N. Ave.) to open this month. This is Swift's first time as chef/owner. Pastry chef is Kathryn King (formerly of Aria), and her desserts are a refined take on classic "bake shop" sweets. • Todd Hogan (chef/owner of the closed Wildberries) has stepped in as exec chef/partner of Trilogy. He replaces former exec chef Michael O'Ryan.
Landlocked seafood lovers had reason to celebrate in March when the Portland, OR–based McCormick & Schmick's opened an outpost of its popular seafood restaurant just outside of downtown Milkwaukee. Exec chef is a local talent, Dan Smith, formerly of Envoy Restaurant. • The Bartolotta empire, which owns Milwaukee's Ristorante Bartolotta and Bacchus, among others, got a little bigger when it nabbed the Grain Exchange Room, an historic property long used as a special events facility. After a gentle makeover, the 500 seat space reopens this month as Bartolotta Catering & Events at The Grain Exchange Room. Exec chef Carlos Deleon and chef de cuisine Zach Espinosa are both protégés of Adam Siegel, who helms Bartolotta's Lake Park Bistro.
Make way for another steakhouse! Karl Hasz, founder/principal of both San Francisco–based Hasz Construction and Hasz Design Studio (responsible for the buildouts at such places as Bacar in San Francisco and Cyrus in Healdsburg), has partnered with Adam Jeb, former gm of PlumpJack Group, to open a steakhouse in the South of Market district (One Yerba Buena Lane) in January 2009. Its name and chef are still being worked out. • Owners of Salt House and Town Hall, brothers Steven and Mitchell Rosenthal and Doug Washington, opened Anchor & Hope, a gussied-up oyster bar and fishhouse at 83 Minna St. last month. Helming the stoves is Sarah Schafer, most recently at Frisson. • Speaking of Frisson, owners Andrew McCormack and Joe Hargrave temporarily shut down shop in March for a retooling and promise a new interior, name, and menu by exec chef/partner Sean O'Brien (formerly of Myth) this summer. • Daniel Holzman left his co-exec chef post at SPQR; Nate Appleman is now solo exec chef (and co-owner) at both SPQR and A16. In related news, the SPQR/A16 team (Appleman, Shelley Lindgren, and Victoria Libin) are homing in on the burgeoning Dogpatch neighborhood for their next project come fall, a yet-to-be-named 6,000-square-foot restaurant inspired by the foods of Italy's Le Marche region. • Luce, opened in February in the InterContinental Hotel San Francisco, has a knock-out wine list to complement the seafood-heavy Italian menu by Dominique Crenn, who decamps from L.A.'s Adobe. • Having pulled the plug on his self-named San Francisco eatery in February, Scott Howard is now exec chef at Left Bank in Larkspur, where he nudged the menu in a more seasonal direction. Howard is working with chef/owner Roland Passot and corp chef Joël Guillon to bring similar changes to the other Left Banks. In early 2009 look for the first San Francisco Left Bank restaurant in the up-and-coming Presidio. • Before Howard departed Fork (San Anselmo) a while ago, he worked with co-owners Charles Low and Oliver Knill to leave a good crew in place. But hard luck saw that no one filled the top toque position for long. This seems to have changed with the hiring of exec chef Nathan R. Lockwood (he steps in for Jon Kosorek), recently of San Francisco's Acquerello Restaurant.
Gossip hounds, listen up! There's another scintillating chapter in the much publicized shake-up at Lumière and Feenie's that started last year when chef/partner Rob Feenie split with owners David and Manjy Sidoo. In March, culinary luminary Daniel Boulud and his NYC–based The Dinex Group agreed to a partnership with the Sidoos to oversee the two side-by-side restaurants, with the old Feenie's space expanding into part of Lumière to become DB Bistro Moderne Vancouver, an offshoot of Boulud's casual NYC spot. "Lumière has a wonderful legacy, and my team and I will do our best to perpetuate that," says Boulud, who, ironically, wrote the foreword to Feenie's second cookbook, Lumière Light. Both restaurants, closed for renovations, will relaunch this summer. Dale MacKay, chef de cuisine at Lumière, is sticking around, but DB will be run by a yet-to-be-determined Boulud disciple. Meanwhile, Feenie has landed on his feet as "concept architect" for Cactus Restaurants, which runs the Cactus Club Cafe, a chain of 17 casual restaurants in Western Canada. • Boulud isn't the only hotshot to descend on Vancouver. Replacing David Hawksworth at West is Warren Geraghty, most recently exec chef at Marco Pierre White's Michelin-starred L'Escargot (London). • Jack Evrensel (owner of West, CinCin, and Blue Water Café & Raw Bar in Vancouver and Araxi in Whistler) and CinCin pastry chef Thierry Busset are teaming up to launch Thierry, a world-class pastry and chocolate shop. Pencil in a winter opening.
