Five Things You Missed on Heritage Radio This Week

1) Radio Cuozzo

Restaurant Industry PR veteran Shari Bayer, host of All in the Industry, spoke with New York Post restaurant critic Steve Cuozzo about his pet peeves, and the problem with reviewing moving targets:

All restaurant reviewers typically focus on what's new.  For every critic- how new is too new? Can you reasonably write about a new restaurant after 3 weeks?  A month? 6 months? Restaurant reviews are unlike any other form of criticism because the product is never the same.  Every restaurant meal is a different product and a different experience.  When you go to a restaurant you're not really buying a meal, you're buying a memory

2) Breaking Down Catfish in Greenpoint

Darin Bresnitz of Snacky Tunes checks in with Adam Geringer-Dunn and Vincent Milburn of Greenpoint Fish and Lobster Co. to talk about how the business has been going, and how splitting their space between full-service food and raw sales has worked out for them as a small but growing fish shop. Space limitations don't just limit how many they can serve on a busy brunch day though:

With that [30-pound catfish], the head and the frame was too big even to stick in our pot.  We had to chop it up and stick it in to make fish stock, but normally we'll take the collars of everything.  The catfish collar wasn't really that great, I've been getting these amazing blue catfish from some guy in the Chesapeake that my cousin knows and they are an invasive species, so there's not restriction on them, they're just pulling them out of the water constantly, and it's delicious, it doesn't have that muddy flavor that the Mississippi catfish have.

3) Thomas Chen of Tuome

Leiti Hsu of Word of Mouth spoke to accountant-turned-chef and veteran of Eleven Madison Park and Commerce about his three month-old East Village spot Tuome.  The chef has an enviable 100% ownership stake in the spot, and it's evident in how he planned out the spot that he came from a financial background:

Going into any restaurant is certainly a big risk, especially when I'm the only owner, going into a smaller restaurant obviously there's less risk involved, because of the lower amount of costs I need to open the restaurant.

4) George Hock of Barchetta

Joe Campanale talks contstructing a focused Italian wine list with George Hock, Wine Director and General Manager of the newly-opened Barchetta, the new Dave Pasternak project that features a Sicilian-focused wine list.  Here's Hock on the regionality of Italian wines:

All of Italy is esoteric if you think about it- every region and town has its own grapes meant to go with its own food.

5) The World of Cheese Importing and Distribution

This week's Cutting The Curd featured Eataly Cheesemonger Greg Blais and Anne Saxelby speaking with two bigwigs of the cheese importing world, Debra Dickerson of Tomales Bay Foods and Adam Moskowitz of Larkin Cold Storage, a multifaceted warehouse operation based in Long Island City that juggles warehousing, importing and distribution for some of the most popular cheeses in the country. Here's Moskowitz on the difficulty of tracking down hard to find cheeses while keeping a cold chain intact:

You're acting as an importer, you're plotting, planning, you're allocating for yourself...You can have a dialogue with the maker, you can have a dialogue with the importer, but you still need the supply chain to get the product from point A to point B...it's a herculean task, who wants to buy a bunch of trucks?  Who wants to manager that?