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Daniel Rose Looks to Lutèce, Fuku Fingers Hit the East Village, and More Intel

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Ligaya Mishan discovers a great curry pop-up, plus more restaurant news and gossip.

[The dining room at Marta.  Great place for breakfast/brunch. Way easier to get a table then compared to dinner, and the breakfast dishes are terrific.]
[The dining room at Marta. Great place for breakfast/brunch. Way easier to get a table then compared to dinner, and the breakfast dishes are terrific.]
Daniel Krieger

— Chef Daniel Rose and Stephen Starr are getting ready to open two French restaurants in a new hotel down in Soho, one of which will be a version of Paris's Chez La Vieille Adrienne. Now the chef tells Grub Street that they want the other restaurant to be "like a Lutèce reboot, with classic French food." Rose also notes: 'I've never been to Lutèce, so keep that in mind, but when I talk to Alain Sailhac or André Soltner, there's this kind of nostalgia for very delicious, very carefully prepared, generous French food that hasn't gone gimmick. And it's not like Disneyland, it's not the movie version."

—  FukuSanity Update: Fuku + in Midtown has served chicken fingers under a pile of Mission Chinese herbs and spices for a few weeks.  But now, the original outpost of David Chang's hit fried chicken sandwich stand in the East Village is also serving Fuku Fingers. The downtown version is served without spices, but with a tub of bright green JD sauce on the side. Will diners abandon the sandwiches entirely now that Fuku Fingers are on the menu downtown? Will Fuku fanatics cram them into the sandwiches to form a fried chicken Megatron? Will the East Village outpost ever get a Sichuan pork flatbread like its Midtown sister? Only time will tell.

— Ligaya Mishan is a big fan of Asian Spice Curry, a nighttime-only pop-up at Mama's Eatery on Mulberry Street: "The curries on the succinct, single-minded menu are priced at $6 or $7, each a small world. Some are curry soups, with cloudy rust-red broths that suggest cream of velvet, thick with coconut and riled by fish paste. In one bowl, they’re topped with fat coils of shrimp, spongy fish cake and squid; in another, string beans and okra that snap against the teeth."

Wildair is one of the year's big critical hits, but the restaurant had a bit of a slow start. Co-owner/chef Fabian von Hauske tells Andrew Friedman: "When we opened Wildair, I promise you there were days when we had four people. Some days where we had to invite our friends and family just to fill up the space. So yeah, for me it’s crazy that on Saturday night we did 100 people. Absolutely. And I’m the kind of person who’s, like, we just need to keep doing something because this is going to stop eventually."

— TruffleWatch 2015: The white stuff has arrived at Bouley, Sessanta, Caravaggio,Carbone, Casa Lever, and The Nomad.

Zach Neil, one of the owners of Will Ferrell-themed LES bar Stay Classy, explains his business plan: "[If] we’re going to spend all the money that we have, at least we should do something we think is really funny and ridiculous so that we never feel like we got screwed or wasted our time."

A "Pizza Rat Boulevard" sign briefly appeared at the corner of Franklin and India streets in Greenpoint yesterday, but it's gone now.

For the 30th anniversary of Martin Scorsese's After Hours, Decider tracks down the bars and restaurants in the movie. The River Diner was replaced by a check cashing place, and the Terminal Bar building is now a condo.

The Taxi and Limousine Commission agreed to test out a new form of payment technology that could replace Taxi TV. If it's a hit, you may never have to see that Del Frisco's commercial ever again.

— Andrew Carmellini looks into his crystal ball:

Mets fans at McFadden's Pub went absolutely nuts when their team beat the Dodgers last night.

— And finally, here's how to make schnitzel like Eduard Frauneder of Edi & the Wolf:

Fuku

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