Five Things You Missed on Heritage Radio This Week

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) Bret Macris of Rose Water Restaurant: HRN Founder Patrick Martins talks to Bret Macris, executive chef of Rose Water in Park Slope, about his activism. Here's Macris on how his life serving food locally drove him to cook for distressed neighborhoods after Hurricane Sandy:

We feed people, that's what we do. I don't know how to restore electricity to a neighborhood, but I can cook, and I have the resources and the means to get a lot of food to a lot of people. That's what we've been doing for many many years. So I got together, emailed anybody who I thought could help or would help. I had farmers come; Guy Jones in particular from Blooming Hills farm, donated a ton of food. He just said, whatever you want. I'd say, whatever you can give me. And the next day he'd show up with ten to twelves cases of just everything.

2) Ivan Orkin on Coming Back to NY: Joe Campanale, host of "In The Drink," talks to Ivan Orkin and his Ivan Ramen NYC team, including GM Bill Reed and chef Mike Bergemann about returning to New York. He talks about making people feel happy through his ramen:

I'm a chef so I like to send people home feeling good. A lot of time when you eat junky food you just kinda cram into your mouth, and then for the rest of the day you're burping, and you're feeling bloated. But I try to think about my food in a way that makes people feel uplifted. After some of my best meals, five hours later, I have a big shit-eating grin on my face and I realize, 'wow, I'm still smiling about that lunch I had or that dinner I had,' and thats my fantasy about how I want people to feel. I want their whole mood uplifted because they had some great food.

3) Team Tørst's Flux Capacitor: Brian Ewing and Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø join hosts Mary Izett and Chris Cuzme on "Fuhmentaboudit!" to talk about how things have been going at their Greenpoint beer bar Tørst. The duo also discuss their high-tech 21-line draft system that ensures consistent pours of unique beers:

The "Flux Capacitor" is in Jeppe and my opinion, the best draft system that exists today. Basically the gist behind it is that besides looking super cool with all these fancy red lights and everything, every line is individually regulated. But it goes a step further: every line has the potential to change to five different gas blends. So you can go full-on CO2. You can go full on nitro. You can go three different blends in between...with the ultimate goal being that you can pour virtually anything, but also pour virtually anything so that it's consistent from the first glass that you pour to the very last. It also allows us to pour beers at controlled gas so we can pour beers at the right temperature.

4) Fossil Farms Stepping Up Their Game: HRN Executive Director Erin Fairbanks chats with Ben and Dan Del Coro of Fossil Farms, New York-based distributiors of exotic and wild game meats. Here is Dan, the brother in charge of regional sales, on the recent requests he has handling from New York chefs:

This time of year, it really is all about game, and I'm seeing a lot of movement on both bison and wild boar. I feel like the clientele in Brooklyn in particular are really knowledgeable. I think chefs are starting to listen to that. Just as they came to us and virtually asked us for these game meats, I think customers are starting to pull that demand through the chefs and they're really looking for different things. And with both bison and wild boar being so closely linked to the domesticated pigs and cattle that they're used to, it's still approachable but different enough to be special.

5) Big City Fish Share: Matt Gove talks to HRN about the logistics of organizing a Community Supported Fishery that keeps local fishers feeding NYC's locavores. The group works with a fishery in Amagansett, Long Island, selling shares for weekly and bi-weekly pickups of processed fish all summer long in Carroll Gardens:

Some CSFs have had their fishermen come to the drop points, which would be a big deal for our fishermen because they are almost all the way out in Montauk, but some CSFs have done that. Getting people on boats...I'm not so sure, that's a really big step as far as safety and all that stuff, but we'd like to get there because we want that face-to-face connection between the fisher and the customer.

— Peter Henry

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