Heritage Radio is the food-focused internet radio station that broadcasts from a studio attached to Roberta's in Bushwick. Every week, many of the big players in the food world host and appear on shows, and oftentimes they reveal interesting tidbits about their work. Here's a guide to five notable pieces of programming from the last week:
1) Michael Lomonaco on A Chef's Story: Dorothy Cann Hamilton invites chef Michael Lomonaco into the studio to talk about embracing creativity while giving up a career in acting to go into food. Lomonaco cooked at Le Cirque and the 21 Club before working as executive chef at Windows on the World at the World Trade Center and now Porter House NY. On embracing the spirit of the industry after September 11:
This is my city, this is where I live and work. So, more than anything, I rededicated myself not only to what I do for me, but to do what my friends and colleagues were doing on that day — working in a restaurant, serving the public. Working in hospitality — some people don't like that word — but hospitality is making people feel welcome and doing the things they like done for them. So what I rededicated myself to was working in the industry— to which they dedicated their lives, I dedicate my life.
2) Chef Fredrik Berselius of Aska on Foraging: Chef Berselius visits Helen Hollyman of U Look Hungry to explain the transition from his short-lived pop-up Frej to his acclaimed restaurant Aska. Listen to Berselius talk about his childhood in Sweden picking wild berries and mushrooms, and hear about how he uses his current home as a source:
I like being outdoors. I like going out and picking things for the restaurant, whatever I can find?I'm not afraid to say that there have been?I mean, we look in New York, we look in upstate New York, we look in the city, there have been parks where we have looked for things. There are a lot of things growing in New York, and all over the place, you have no idea how much food you step on every day when you walk to work.
3) Rooftop Farming with Ben Flanner: This HRN special segment gives listeners an update on the late-winter farming chores and spoils coming from the rooftop farms of the Brooklyn Grange. Ben Flanner, head farmer of Brooklyn Grange's 2.5-acre pasture spread across two roofs in Brooklyn and Queens, talks about jump-starting onions in the greenhouse:Luckily [onions] can handle a mild frost. Our greenhouse is not quite perfect, it's not heated with a lot of energy, so if it does happen to fall below 32 degrees, a plant such as an onion actually won't die, which is good.
4) Saucy's Kristen Taylor on the Food Seen: Former BBC and Al Jazeera writer Kristen Taylor talks with Michael Harlan Turkell about putting together Saucy, her quarterly design and story-heavy magazine that focuses on how food brings people together and keeps them apart. On the most recent issue,"The Handbook of Food Poisoning," which covers potentially poisonous pufferfish, cyanide-bearing apricot pits, and other deadly foods:A lot of it is resistance?There are so many beautiful food magazines that are recipe driven, and Saucy isn't that. I wanted to start with the ways in which we couldn't eat together, because of a lack of knowledge that we have. Everybody thought that it was going to be a thrill-seeking issue, you know, what's the scariest most exotic thing you can eat, but that always trends one way but you can't come back from that. But this is something that I hope people will read and pass around and share and keep, it's meant to be collectable?.We're always changing in the ways we can eat?it's hard to say what the common denominator is these days.
5) Jessica B. Harris on Living and Eating in 1970s Greenwich Village: On "My Welcome Table," culinary historian Jessica B. Harris takes listeners on a nostalgic tour of her Greenwich Village haunts long gone, describing how, as a student, she "reveled in the Village's restaurants, and sampled from what seemed to be a world of cuisines in that era when arugula was still rare and strange and menus needed to make notes to describe sangria." Harris describes a Macdougal Street favorite: [T]he ultimate in Italian coffeehouses has to be Cafe Reggio. With its tiny round wooden-marble tables, with its ice cream parlor look, its pastries all on display and large espresso machine, the absence of a kitchen, and moderate prices. The customers, along with the help and the owners, are all Italian, and they all speak the mother tongue and all feel as much at home as well they should?So despite the laws of economics, some coffee shops find a way to survive.· All Coverage of Heritage Radio Network [~ENY~]
— Peter Henry
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