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He gave a lot of practical reasoned advice. For example he said that 'organic' is a meaningless marketing term that has been sapped of any meaning it might have ever had. However, 'local' was a word he could understand. Get a map and draw a circle and you can understand what qualifies as locally grown. He said that if you wanted strawberries out of season, buy a bunch in season and freeze them. That advice gave me bad high school flashbacks of being pressed into the you-pick strawberry fields every March to fill the freezer with the tail end of the Florida strawberry crop.
There were a lot of other chefs and food personalities and the easiest way to catch them was at their book signings. For example, the Giada De Laurentiis signing was entirely full, so we snagged Tyler Florence's book since he was signing right next to her and had a much shorter line. Twofer.


Ironically, we were so busy running around to events that we had a hard time slicing out time to actually eat. We just happened to stumble on some great places in the Meatpacking District including Asian seafood place cum nightclub Sea, replica French brasserie Pastis, and BLT Burger, master chef Laurent Tourondel's foray into cheap eats.



And speaking of meatpacking (and I would make some sort of Chelsea joke here but I'm bigger than that), right next to our hotel was one of the last remaining real meatpacking plants left in the increasingly inaccurately named neighborhood. But this was a rather upscale butcher. They receive already slaughter meat and then dry age and trim it for the high end New York steak places like craftsteak up the street. I was tempted to smuggle one out in the butcher coat they made us wear.



All-in-all we had a blast and would do it again in a heartbeat. You can check out more pictures in the Flickr set which includes the model shoot we stumbled on in the middle of Ninth Avenue.
1 comment:
But that's the beauty part of New York; it's so easy to stumble on some really neat places to eat. I'm especially fond of the places in Little Italy that have people in the street cajoling you to come inside. No matter which one I allow to talk me into it, I'm not disappointed.
--Claude (wondering why I keep getting turned into garbage characters lately)
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