Five Things You Missed on Heritage Radio This Week

1) Rogue Magic Bar's Head Magician and Owner
Eating Disorder welcomed Rogue, the proprietor of Queen's only magic and drinks bar, Rogue Magic Bar, within Panda Asian Bistro. The America's Got Talent star talks about the concept of the place:
We do close-up magic in the bar and around the restaurant, and the second floor is actually a theater...It's Halloween/Magic themed so we have gargoyles, owls, webs throughout the whole place, very very dimly lit, black-lit, like I said a lot of magic and smoke...specialty drinks that actually my fiancé created, some magical stuff that actually change color, go on fire, smoke up, they levitate the drinks, which is really wild.

2) Talia Baiocchi of PUNCH
Sari Kamin and Jessie Kiefer of The Morning After spoke with the Editor in Chief of PUNCH and author of Sherry: The Wine World’s Best-Kept Secret, Talia Baiocchi.  The NYU journalism student and former Eater writer shared her backstory of coming up in the spirits industry, why she chose Sherry as the subject of her first book.  On receiving nasty comments and criticism about her writing online:
There’s a lot of that.  The wine world is a funny place…I’m actually glad that that all happened, because I kind of grew up on Eater and I didn’t have all the answers and I made a lot of mistakes, and I was being honest about what my opinion was, and it was really hard—there are people who are incredibly intense about details and facts, and this is so important and something I respect so deeply about the wine world, but if someone has a different opinion, someone else in wine, it is somehow an attack on them as a person.  People align themselves in wine with certain things and it becomes a part of their identity, so when you say something that is at odds with that, it’s almost like attacking them as a person.

3) The Cheese Grotto
Chef Emily Peterson of Sharp & Hot spoke with cheese industry veteran and educator Jessica Sennett about her Kickstarter campaign for the Cheese Grotto, a device for optimally storing cheeses in homes and restaurants.  Here’s Sennett on the humidor system she has developed:
Essentially, we’re taking those basic ideas of airflow and humidity and we’ve designed this product that will extend the shelf life of your cheese in the fridge or outside of the fridge in the environment that will have the temperature of 40-50 degrees…you can actually age certain types and styles of cheese in your fridge.

4) Team Root & Bone
On Snacky Tunes this week, Greg Bresnitz interviewed the duo behind Root & Bone, Jeff McInnes and Janine Booth. Here’s Booth with her thoughts on the differences between cooking for crowds in Miami and New York:
New Yorkers definitely know their food, everyone’s a critic, everyone knows exactly what they want out of something, and so in that sense, we have tough critics, but at the same time, everyone’s been really enjoying what we’ve been putting out.

5) David Waltuck of élan
Leiti Hsu of Word of Mouth spoke with chef David Waltuck, formerly of Chanterelle, about the roots and goings on of his new spot élan. Waltuck, who sounds surprisingly like Dustin Hoffman, who has featured artists as guest designers for his menu and features Chuck Close’s face on a 16-foot tapestry facing the bar at élan, once hired an all-female staff of dancers based near Chanterelle:
One of the things that was sort of a specialty of our Chanterelle was to hire an eclectic group of servers…[women] before there were female servers in basically any high-end restaurant, I believe Four Seasons was ahead of us.