New York City

We tried, but we just couldn’t figure out The Marrow. After three different visits, we still couldn’t manage to crack the code on how to have an excellent meal here, even though we know deep down that it’s possible. Somewhere in that large, mysterious menu lies a key combination of dishes that will unlock Chef Harold Dieterle’s genius and reward the diner with the perfect experience, like a victorious Nicholas Cage in some movie that involves the Mayan calendar and a fighter jet. But despite our best efforts we still don’t know what that combination is. It seems simple enough, right? All you need to do is order the right stuff and you’ll end up having a great dinner? That’s the case with a lot of restaurants. But it’s not that simple. Not here. The Marrow is a challenge, and it’s one that many people lose. Just read most of the reviews. It’s a mixed bag to say the least. There are a few things that give The Marrow this unique ability to confuse people, but then main culprit is the menu. The offerings are split into two sections that read like a family tree with two branches. One side lists a whole bunch of Italian things that represent the chef’s Italian heritage from his mother’s side, and the other is a list of dishes reflecting his father’s German lineage. Between the two, there are about 30 different items on the menu at any given time, and many of them change from month to month. So basically, there are innumerable dinner permutations. Order blindly or take your waiter’s suggestions, and we’d say you’ll probably hit one incredible dish and three mediocre ones each time you visit. But this is a restaurant from the same guy that gave us Kin Shop and Perilla. There have to be at least three or four back-to-back home runs somewhere in that vast menu. But how to find them? Like I said, we’re not exactly sure. We ate a lot of stuff here, and the menu really is tough to decipher. It would be easier if we could tell you that one side tends to be better than the other, like “stick to the German stuff and you’ll walk away happy,” but that’s not the case. There are hits and misses on both sides. We can tell you is that the duck schnitzel is incredible. You want that in the mix no matter what. Same goes for the ginger stout cake. But from there, a meal at The Marrow is a high-stakes adventure. We liked the crab and tomato pasta a lot…but the giant roasted mushroom impressed us less than we hoped it would. The sea urchin and bone marrow is certainly rich, it’s just not all that satisfying. And the pretzel rolls are awesome, but the arctic char isn’t. After a while it starts to feel like Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom, except (probably) nobody’s heart is getting ripped out. You must choose, but choose wisely. Food Rundown The Bone MarrowLet’s kick this off with the dish this place is named for. Two shanks are served to you topped with sea urchin and a lemon aioli. It’s a tasty dish, but not any more so than most marrow dishes out there. The uni adds less flavor than you wish it would. Housemade SpaghettiniThis one from the Italian side of the menu is most definitely one of the highlights. It’s a nice light pasta with peekytoe crab and tomato sauce. Make it part of your meal. Fiddlehead Fern GnudiA spring menu item, as evidenced by the fiddlehead ferns. The more we eat those things, the more we realize we dislike them. Here with the gundi they came out slimy and generally unappetizing. Lightly Cured Arctic CharThis cured char has some German in it, or at least it’s from that side of the menu. We found it to be a little bland. Pan-Fried Duck SchnitzelThe star of The Marrow. This big schnitzel-ized duck breast is delicious, and it comes on a bed of spaetzle which is also delicious. A must order. Roasted Whole Hen Of The Woods MushroomThis giant roasted mushroom

Metropolitan Diary: A brief moment with a lost shoe on the subway gave a young man a chance to re-enact a fairy tale.

Fireworks still won't be on the East River, an already-injured puppy escaped in Jersey, and Patrick Stewart's infinite abilities do not extend to bird-nursing. Also, don't forget to follow Gothamist on Twitter and like us on Facebook. You can also get the top stories mailed to you—sign up here. [ more › ]

A glimpse inside one of the damaged Metro-North trains. (Photo via @KarenLeeWFSB) As Metro-North crews work to repair the twisted rails and investigators continue to probe Friday’s derailment/collision, the MTA is warning that commute woes could continue well into the coming week. The accident has snarled traffic throughout the Northeast Corridor, and it serves to underscore how fragile the region’s transportation is and how disjoined coordination across entities can be. The MTA and Connecticut’s Department of Transportation have put in place a plan for the 30,000 customers impacted by the 31-mile outage near the east end of the New Haven Line. On Monday morning, a shuttle train will run between New Haven and Bridgeport with express buses providing service to Stamford where trains to the city will be running. Local buses will operate to and from Bridgeport, Fairfield Metro, Fairfield and Westport, but no buses will serve Southport or Greens Farms. All in all, 120 buses from CT Transit, MTA Bus and other local companies will provide service. It won’t be enough. The MTA has a full list of service changes and advisories posted on its website but offers up some bullet points, a few more obvious than others, as well. Travel times will be significantly longer than normal and trains will be significantly crowded. New Haven Line Customers east of South Norwalk are encouraged to seek alternative ways to get to and from work or stagger their work schedule. If possible, customers are advised to use the Harlem Line as an alternative. New Haven Line rail tickets will be cross-honored. ConnDOT will cross-honor New Haven Line pre-paid rail tickets (as a temporary Bus/Rail uniticket) on I-95 Corridor Bus Service. Metro-North will cross-honor Amtrak tickets. Speaking of Amtrak, let’s how the nation’s rail carrier is handling it. On their alert page, they warn that service is suspended between New York and New Haven with limited service from New Haven to Boston. “There is no estimate on service restoration,” Amtrak warns. Their solution is to foist every alternative planning onto Metro-North’s shoulders. “Starting Monday, Metro-North Railroad will offer alternate transportation for passengers traveling between New Haven, Conn., and Grand Central Terminal via a train-bus-train connection,” Amtrak’s website advises. “Amtrak passengers using this option will need to arrange for transportation between Grand Central and New York Penn Station.” In Connecticut, the state is offering more free parking for commuters impacted by the service outages. As Chris O’Leary noted, this is likely to lead to more traffic and delays as buses are held up by drivers fighting for parking spots. It’s a transit armageddon, and I can’t even begin to imagine what I-95 will resemble come the morning. Meanwhile, the alternate routes are a bloody mess. Cap’n Transit has been retweeting choice complaints in his Twitter timeline, and Northeast Corridor riders are finally experiencing the ineptitude of bus companies. There are complaints about routes to Manhattan that go through surface streets in the Bronx and routes to New Haven from Port Authority via New Jersey. Lines are hours long, and the bus companies offering extra service or even acknowledging the problems. So we’re in a bad situation with no overall coordination. Two tracks are out of service due to scheduled track work while another set were heavily damaged by Friday’s collision, and no one has picked up the slack. Considering how many people are dependent upon this route for work, for life, for anything, this response is an indictment of the way we as a society view transit even in the most transit-accessible parts of the country.

Thats it! She’s dead! Good God almighty, she is dead!

How pissed would you be if you went to the fucking Billboards Music Awards Show and some guy named Miguel decapitated you and your friend?

Initially I had hoped to cover the Manhattan Cocktail Classic's kickoff gala at the New York Public Library by imbibing every single cocktail the event had to offer. "Oh no, you cannot do that," our editor told us as he sipped an oversized, frigid-looking gin martini. "There are more than 150 cocktails. You will die." What if I just took a sip of each one? "Mmmp," he said, the liquor engulfing his upper lip. "Die." [ more › ]

Certain cooks slavishly copy ­conventional wisdom during the course of their careers, while others go out of their way, perhaps too slavishly, to try to redefine it. Then there are those chefs, like Andrew Carmellini, who manage to negotiate the endlessly changing fashions of their day in an effortless, perfectly timed way. Carmellini was Daniel Boulud’s chief lieutenant during the last days of haute cuisine, and when that blew up, he opened the excellent upmarket Italian restaurant A Voce. When New Yorkers began clamoring for simpler, more comforting food during the recession, he turned out meatball sliders and rustic bowls of pasta at his popular Tribeca establishment Locanda Verde. Shortly after that, as the great locavore tsunami hit town, he and his partners Josh Pickard and Luke Ostrom opened the Dutch in Soho, where it’s possible to dine on platters of chicken-fried quail without having to make the slog out to Williamsburg or Bushwick. So it’s no surprise that Carmellini’s latest venture—a big, spangled, category-killing brasserie called Lafayette—is almost perfectly timed to catch the wave of French-food nostalgia that has been building, these last several months, all over city. Like other trendy, recently opened brasseries (Le Philosophe, Calliope, Montmartre), this one offers plates of fresh oysters, newfangled versions of duck au poivre, and twirls of skinny golden frites in soft paper cones. Unlike the others, there’s also a Balthazar-like boulangerie up front, where you can purchase fresh-baked croissants and pointy baguettes and ogle trays of overpriced pastries displayed under glass. The tall, airy room on Lafayette Street features Continental-style picture windows and spacious coffee-colored banquets, and it’s easily the prettiest, most workable space that Carmellini and his team have occupied since they began hatching restaurant ideas over a decade ago. In my experience, the food at ­Carmellini’s­ restaurants gets better with age, but at Lafayette my tasters and I found several decent things to eat right off the bat. The former Craft chef Damon Wise has been recruited to run the kitchen, and he and his cooks produce slabs of grainy, wine-­colored country pâté studded with pistachios ($16), and a cool, properly smooth foie gras terrine garnished with sweetened rhubarb. The small-plate toast dishes popularized by Jean-Georges at ABC Kitchen are called tartines here, and you can get them piled with spoonfuls of opulent duck-liver mousse ($8) or Selles-sur-Cher goat cheese, decked with tomatoes and slivers of fresh radish. My classic beef tartare ($18) was a much better deal than the mealy Hawaiian prawns ($19 with sauce verte), but if you’re in the mood for serious feed, begin your dinner with the lardon-rich salad frisée, which is served on a plate the size of a small hubcap. “I think they’ve captured that real French-brasserie feeling,” said an actual Parisian at my table, as she ate the generously portioned, Côte d’Azur-quality seafood salad ($19) and soft slices of boudin noir, which the kitchen plates, tastefully, with a scattering of green garden peas. She was very complimentary about the pastas, too, which include flower-shaped “Fleur de Soleil” noodles ($18), made in-house and dressed with specks of pancetta and more garden peas; tangles of Provençal-style squid-ink fettuccine bombed with shellfish and bits of smoky chorizo; and chewy shell-shaped coquilles macaroni smothered in veal ragout. Various exotic pasta specials also tend to pop up on the menu throughout the week (if they have the lobster ravioli, order it), although the dish we all liked best in the Les Pâtes section was the perfectly al dente risotto, folded with mushrooms, fresh asparagus, and a creamy Parmesan sauce. The entrées are the most prosaic part of the menu at Lafayette, although if you’ve fattened up on the pastas, y

Eastwood's Israeli Scotch egg. It’s unlikely that modern Israeli cooking will ever bump New Nordic or Asian Hipster from their positions atop the list of Zeitgeist-y New York cuisines. But recently, a new wave of Israeli food has made inroads, beginning, as these things often do, with oversubscribed pop-ups: The Kubbeh Project occupied Zucker Bakery for three weeks in March, celebrating Iraqi-Jewish dumpling soups, and then Michael Solomonov, the foie-gras-kebab-grilling chef of Philadelphia’s Zahav, had to add a second seating (at 1 a.m.!) for his Momofuku Ssäm Bar binge. In further hipster-foodie news, two Israeli-expat stands landed at the Brooklyn Flea (Plantí’s artful hummus plates, NYShuk’s hand-rolled couscous). This year has also seen the arrival of Tel Aviv baker Uri Scheft, whose eclectic output at Union Square’s Breads Bakery (18 E. 16th St., nr. Union Sq. W.; 212-633-2253) ranges from everything-seeded challah to chocolate-coated alfajores, the Argentine cookie that’s like the cupcake of Israel, and the debut of basil-tinged “crazy baba” at Zizi Limona (129 Havemeyer St., nr. S. 1st St., Williamsburg; 347-763-1463), a free-spirited Brooklyn restaurant where chef Nir Mesika stocks his larder with not only date honey and za’atar but curry power and fish sauce. This sort of no-boundaries fusion is to be expected from a melting-pot nation like Israel, whose citizens hail from every corner of the globe—not unlike New York, which provides fertile ground for even more crossover cooking. And so we have the tomatillo-sauced “green shakshuka” at Jack’s Wife Freda (224 Lafayette St., nr. Spring St.; 212-510-8550); Taboonette’s (30 E. 13th St., nr. University Pl.; 212-510-7881) pita pockets subversively stuffed with pulled pork; and corn empanadas at Balaboosta (214 Mulberry St., nr. Spring St.; 212-966-7366), whose chef-owner Einat Admony promises her next modern Israeli restaurant, Bar Bolonat (611 Hudson St., at 12th St.; no phone yet), will be even more irreverent. There may be no better symbol of the new wave, though, than the Israeli Scotch egg at the Lower East Side bar Eastwood (200 Clinton St., at E. Broadway; 917-284-4514), where partner Sivan Harlap conceived of the snack as a clever hybrid of her Israeli heritage and her husband’s Scottish one. Coated in falafel, not sausage, and served with tahini, it’s immigrant food at its culture-bridging best. *This article originally appeared in the May 27, 2013 issue of New York Magazine. Read more posts by Robin Raisfeld and Rob PatroniteFiled Under: trendlet, balaboosta, bar bolonat, breads bakery, brooklyn flea, eastwood, jacks wife freda, taboonette, zizi limona

For a follow-up to their Italian-farmhouse-style Rucola, partners Henry Rich and Julian Brizzi plan to open a Ligurian-inspired restaurant early next month on the premises of the 3rd Ward workspace and education center in East Williamsburg. This will mean that members no longer have to leave the compound for sustenance between classes on bike mechanics and cheese-making, and also that locals can drop by for pour-over Stumptown coffee and breakfast pastries, chilled fava-and-mint soup, and ramps with smoked-almond pesto (pictured). Fitzcarraldo takes its design cues from the Werner Herzog film (scene: a crumbling opera house in an overgrown jungle outpost), and although an exact opening date has yet to be determined, the venue will make its official debut on June 1 at the center’s anniversary barbecue. For this open-to-the-public event, chef Vinny Campos will be roasting lamb in a caja china, grilling Brooklyn Cured sausages, and spiking shaved ice with Fernet and Coke. 195 Morgan Ave., nr. Stagg St., East Williamsburg; 718-233-2566 *This article originally appeared in the May 27, 2013 issue of New York Magazine. Read more posts by Robin Raisfeld and Rob PatroniteFiled Under: openings, fitzcarraldo, henry rich, julian brizzi, slideshow