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— One of Michael White's top team members, Gordon Finn, is now the executive chef at Quality Italian in Midtown. Finn will overhaul the menu soon, but the kitchen will keep serving a few of the most popular items. Finn left Altamarea group in January. He was the chef de cuisine at Alto several years ago, and he recently worked as the executive chef at Altamarea's Upper East Side establishment Ristorante Morini.
— The sliver of a space next to the Orpheum Theater that was home to Stage Restaurant for three decades is now on the market. Landlord Icon Realty is asking for $15,000 per month for a restaurant or retail tenant. Stage was forced to shutter because of a gas leak in the building last spring. After a court battle with the landlord, owner Roman Diakun announced that it was closed for good earlier this month. EV Grieve hears that Stage apparently had four years left on its lease. The tiny dining room is still perfectly intact behind the metal gate.
— Jean-Georges Vongerichten is expanding to the west coast for the first time in his 25-year career as chef/restaurateur. Vongerichten will open an as-yet-unnamed farm-to-table restaurant inside the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills in about a year and a half.
— Jared Sippel, the chef who moved from Colorado to New York to open the perpetually delayed restaurant inside Brooklyn Fare Manhattan, is gearing up to open his new West 24th Street project, Italienne. The Northern Italian restaurant will have a tavern room in the front and a more formal dining area in the back. It's slated to open this spring. The restaurant inside Brooklyn Fare Manhattan never opened, but rumor has it that this will actually be the new iteration of Cesar Ramirez's Chef's Table.
— An update on Yuca Bar, the East Village Latin restaurant that closed on Sunday night after a fire broke out in the building: The tables and chairs were cleared out of the space this week, and workers removed bags of garbage from the dining room yesterday. Eater has reached out to the management, but the Yuca Bar team has not offered any information about a return date.
— The team behind Burmese street food operation Rangoon Noodle Lab will be doing a pop-up dinner at Humboldt & Jackson on Saturday from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m.
— Three employees of recently-shuttered Bedford Avenue coffee shop El Beit are reopening the space as a new establishment called Cafe Beit. A sign outside the shop explains that it's "100 percent barista owned, DIY constructed, serving locally roasted coffee." Cafe Beit is slated to open later this month.
— Here is a weird and funny commercial for Bushwick's Bootleg Bar:
— An anonymous New York sommelier tells CNBC a few choice stories about Wall Street traders acting like idiots at the dinner table. Here's one: "The guy hosting got wasted. I mean really wasted. So much so that he didn't remember eating the last half of his tasting menu and demanded to be served again. No matter how much I or the people at his table tried to explain to him that it'd already been served. He didn't believe it. So we served it again. Everyone else at the table was horrified."
— Fitzcarraldo veteran Vinicius Campos is the new executive chef at Wassail on the Lower East Side. He replaces Joseph Buenconsejo, who left the restaurant in January.
— The Orchard Street space that housed Lost Weekend is now on the market for $9,000.
— After his fried chicken stand in Chelsea Market tanked, Questlove channeled his love of food into private culinary salons. Guests at a recent party included Marcus Samueslson, Al Roker, Wylie Dufresne, Danny Bowien, Bill Telepan, Jessica Koslow, and Angela Dimayuga. Anthony Bourdain says Questlove is "a fully made member of the chef mafia."
— And finally, here's how the sandwich makers at Ends Meats in Sunset Park put together the shop's mighty muffaletta: