The Last Meal 2011 Recap
As the year draws to a close, we all have a tendency to look back and reflect on what happened in 2011. For Studiofeast, it was a great year filled with events where we had the privilege of bringing people together with food. You can surf this site to see the things that ensued in 2011–through prose, video, and photo–but a less visible reflection of our year comes in the form of the responses to that question on our invite form, “You’re about to die, what’s your last meal?”
Studiofeast Sunday #1 Recap
For the past few years we’ve been doing events that have become more and more ambitious in scale, concept, and execution. This has been a good thing, as we’ve been able to push ourselves to create some really great dining experiences for our guests. These events have been our way of continuing to explore the culinary & social gray area between a high concept restaurant and dinner at your best friend’s house.
Studiofeast on Food[ography]
Check it! Here’s the Food[ography] segment I was featured in on the Cooking Channel. This episode’s focus was sugar and I made a Sweet Corn Financier, with Passionfruit Pop Rocks and Powdered Caramel. For more info, visit the Food[ography] website. Enjoy.
The Future of Food: A Video Interview on PSFK
I sat down with the fine folks at PSFK to talk a bit about this thing of ours and to give my take on the future of dining experiences. Check out the video here:
We have new dinner events in the works that will be a bit more intimate than what you’ve seen in the past, those announcements should be coming soon for the Fall.
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Video Excerpt: Google+ Hangout Cooking Class
Last Sunday was our first cooking class on Google+ Hangout–it was great. We had a handful of friends, old and new, in the hangout while Soo and I demoed the Marrows dish from our recent Doppelganger Dinner. Here’s a short clip of the plating where her meat version met my mirror image vegetarian version. More of these to come, Circle me up on G+ to stay in the loop.
Grandpa’s War Shu Duck
My Grandpa Tong used to own Stanley’s Place, one of the first Chinese restaurants in downtown Detroit in the 50s. At one point, he had 100 employees which included 16 line cooks, 6 people solely dedicated to taking phone take-out orders, and 1 person who did nothing but make rice in a jacuzzi sized rice maker. The whole family worked there and it’s been a big inspiration to why/how I cook for people.
After a visit home to Michigan, where I had the pleasure of cooking for him, he laid down some knowledge and explains his recipe for one of the restaurant’s most popular dishes: War Shu Duck.
War Shu Duck is a whole duck that’s skinned and deboned, then the meat is minced and combined with ground pork (“you can use Cantonese roast pork too” he says). The skin is then used as a wrapper to surround the ground meat and covered in an egg wash with corn starch and sugar. You deep fry the whole thing and cover it with duck jus. Grandpa recalls that Detroit Mayor Coleman Young would call in advance to order 4 of them at a time for take out. From what I gather, it was the Momofuku Pork Bun of its time.
I’m dying to try this thing out and will report back with results. Hopefully it lives up to Grandpa’s standards, or at least Mayor Bloomberg’s.
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Here’s a Yelp listing for the spin-off sister restaurant to my Stanley’s Place, cleverly named “Stanley’s Other Place.” My grandpa’s original restaurant was sold in the 70s and converted into a church, but the Other Place lives on.
Time Lapse: Doppelganger
A time lapse of our Doppelganger Dinner on July 17th, 2011
Hacking the Dinner Party @ ITP
I recently had the pleasure of teaching a session at NYU’s ITP Camp entitled, “Hacking the Dinner Party,” which was an introduction to Sous Vide and Activa.
The Epic Tale of Eat Retreat
How do I even begin to describe this? It’s been just over a week since I returned from my weekend in Sonoma County, CA at the Eat Retreat. I’ve recovered from the post-event serotonin dive, I’m rested and life is getting back to normal. Physically, I’m left with a mild sunburn, a jar of Harold McGee’s Yogurt starter, some lovely Guanciale from my camp buddy Julie, and an SD card full of photos.
Mentally, I’m left with a challenge: how do I “get back?” Not “get back” as in “get invited again” or simply taking another trip to the wine country, but how do I get back to that incredibly high creative buzz that I felt all weekend. How do I sustain that level of intensity everyday? How do I recreate the scenario of being in such close quarters with people with such outsized passions and creative output?
“I Scream,” at Eyebeam NYC
This past Saturday at the Eyebeam Art + Technology center, I was invited by Stefani Bardin and Brooke Singer to present at their Counter Kitchen event series. The Counter Kitchen brings in guests to deconstruct items that are in the mass marketplace and often have chemical ingredients of questionable nature.
