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) Alex Stupak on New Projects: Leiti Hsu chats with Empellon's Alex Stupak and Stephen Torres of ImbibeandInspire.com about their history together and guest chef series the Push Project. Here's Stupak on how he has to approach new projects:
I had it in my head that, to open a restaurant, I probably had the cooking and the kitchen stuff down. That stuff will come, but what I probably don't have is the financial and operational models and all this stuff, and I became obsessed with trying to present them to people. What I learned was that you're better off, if you're pitching something to someone, you're better off displaying your passion?Finding a hole in the marketplace is not a good reason for opening a restaurant, it has to be based on passion and it has to be something that you believe, no matter what, has to exist.[Photo: Krieger]
2) Wine If You Want To: Claire Paparazzo, former wine director of Blue Hill New York, talks to Jen Tullock of "The Morning After" about independently developing, filming, and pitching her wine travel show "Wine If You Want To." Here's Paparazzo on the staying power of wine:
Wine is looked on as being elitist, and it is so not. It is something that is friendly and can bridge the gap?This is something that unifies you. Wine is emotional. The wine that you're drinking right now, you're going to taste something down the road very similar to this, and you will have an emotional connection to the moment that we are experiencing right now.
3) Jimmy Tu of Ridgewood's Bun-ker: HRN Founder Patrick Martins talks to Jimmy Tu, chef and owner of the Ridgewood Vietnamese spot Bun-ker, about the freeing benefits of being located in a primarily industrial area bordering Bushwick:
We're using a lot of that [space] to our advantage. Because there are no residents out there, we fixed up the backyard, we're gonna build up the rooftop so we can have live music. We can do whatever we want because there's nobody around there.
4) Short Stack Cookbooks: On this week's episode of "The Food Seen," Michael Harlan-Turkell chats with Brooklyn-based publisher Nick Fauchald about Short Stack Editions, his series of small-format cookbooks. Here's Fauchald on why he chooses to focus on single-subject cookbooks:
Because that's how we cook most of the time. Most of the time we find something at the market or we think of the favorite ingredient we want to use and we go from there. We're not choosing what to make for dinner based on someone's name or a country, usually. There was a time, probably, when people got into exotic cuisines and people were cooking a lot more based on that—I'd say in the 80s and the 90s—but now we're an ingredient-driven food culture.
5) NYC Bartending with Philip Ward: Philip Ward, owner of mezcal and tequila cocktail bar Mayahuel, explains how he went from server to building the bar program at Death and Co. Here's Ward on discovering a whole new world of bartending in NYC:
I remember when I got hired at Flatiron, Julie Reiner, my boss and the owner there, asked me, would you ever want to bartend? And I said no, because to me, at that time, bartending was serving vodka tonics and Miller Lites to douchebags in Pittsburgh, and it wasn't worth the social interaction, so I had no desire to actually bartend. Then I remember the first shift I was working at Flatiron barbacking, I'm like, what are these people doing? They're putting like five things in that drink, you know, it's really weird. And then I tasted one and I was like, holy, this is unbelievable. I've never tasted anything like this.
— Peter Henry
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