NEW
YORK CITY—Alain
Ducasse is bringing the A-team
back. Didier Elena,
the opening chef of ADNY, is now helming Adour
Alain Ducasse at the St.
Regis after a five year
hiatus at Les Crayères
in Reims, France. Sommelier André
Compeyre, another ADNY veteran,
will also serve as assistant manager of the wine-centric restaurant.
The menu will remain more affordable than it was in the heady Ducasse
days at the Essex House.
And, unlike ADNY, they say they’ll turn the tables. • No food
mainstay is overlooked in TLC’s new six part series Best
Food Ever, which premiered in
May. Featuring everything from barbecue to double-stacked sandwiches,
the show, narrated by John Goodman, highlights the country’s top 10
food destinations in a specific category, introducing the chefs
behind the legendary dishes.
• Speaking of television, The
Emeril Lagasse Show made its
debut on Ion in April, featuring a dash of show biz interviews and a
sprinkle of music, served with a dish or two, like pierogies cooked
with his buddy Martha Stewart.
• Gordon Ramsay’s MasterChef will be premiering on Fox on July 27. He’s bringing some big names along to help with the judging, including restaurateur/winemaker Joe Bastianich and chef Graham Elliot Bowles, the mastermind behind Chicago’s first “bistronomic” restaurant, Graham Elliot. The new series takes amateur chefs—many of whom simply cook as a hobby—and attempts to turn one of them into a culinary master. • With the opening of Luke’s Lobster (242 E. 81st St.) on the Upper East Side in May, a new neighborhood began to get a taste of what East Villagers have been going crazy over since last October, when the first was established. The tiny lobster roll shack, helmed by former banker Luke Holden and former food writer Ben Conniff, moved into the old Etats-Unis space, serving lobster, shrimp, and crab rolls with shellfish from Conniff’s family’s seafood business in Portland, ME. “You could say that Luke and I are the chefs at both locations,” he says, “but we mostly just make sandwiches, so ‘chef’ is a bit of a stretch.
