Category: : USA :
Mama’s Too Will Expand Downtown Next Week
When Frank Tuttolomondo opened the pizzeria Mama’s Too! in 2017, it was like the side project of his family’s nearby pizzeria, Mama’s, which had been serving workaday slices to Upper West Side neighbors for decades. At the new shop, Tuttolomondo could do his own thing: “I’ve been doing this 20 years, and I’ve been eating at pizzerias all my life,” he says. But at the time, he’d also been frequenting pizza forums, talking with dough-hydration geeks, and messing around in the oven. He developed a style that was like a mixtape of everything he loved about pizza: for his round pies, the robust flavors of Neapolitan, minus the soupy middle, combined with the structure of a New York slice. And for the squares, he married the frico crust of Detroit style with the light airiness of Roman pizza.
Quickly, Mama’s Too! attracted local attention, and pizza hounds took notice. But business really took off after a 2018 review from New York Times critic Pete Wells, who deemed the shop “part of a great reawakening of slice culture.” It’s been packed ever since, with crowds piling into the small space every day. So Tuttolomondo is expanding downtown to a much larger West Village space that will open on March 9.
The new shop is like a director’s cut of Mama’s Too, unbound by any size constraints. Uptown, destination-worthy sandwiches (like a top-tier eggplant parm) are Wednesday and Saturday specials. Here, they’ll serve different sandwiches daily (keep an eye out for the panelle). There’s a gelato station and, of course, both round and square pizza by the slice, topped with sautéed spinach and garlic; poached pear and garlic confit; and fennel sausage with roasted peppers. There are even tables this time (seating approximately 30), plus wine and beer.
At 3,000 square feet, Mama’s Too! Two is sprawling compared to the cramped original. The kitchen has several Magic Chef electric ovens, including two just for reheating pizza; a Hobart spiral mixer that Tuttolomondo says makes a world of difference; and plenty of counter space for kneading dough and, most importantly, keeping the orders flowing. The hope is that, in addition to expanding the shop’s ambition, he can cut down on delays for customers. “Any great establishment you go to, there’s a wait. Katz’s, I waited an hour on line, and that’s just cutting meat and putting it in bread,” Tuttolomondo says. “It is what it is, but we want to eliminate that aspect here and just really have a comfortable, fun, no-stress order experience, unlike what you have uptown.”
When it opens, it will form the final corner in what I’ve decided to call the Downtown Slice Triangle: It’s around the block from L’Industrie and a 20-minute walk from Lucia’s Soho location, which is a good amount of time to work up an appetite for more pizza. If you’ve been to the Mama’s Too! uptown, you’ll know what to expect. Here, it will just be … more pleasant? “We really want to hone on the customer experience here,” says Tuttolomondo, “and just make it just the best one.”
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How Butter Became the Main Character
On Super Bowl Sunday, as Usher strode onto the halftime stage in a bejeweled tank top for more than 123 million viewers, all eyes inside the New York City bistro Libertine were on a different celebrity: It stood about 14 inches tall, was the same shade of pale yellow as a baby chick, and every few minutes, an expediter would spin around to dig a spoon into its soft sides. It was a mound of lightly salted butter imported from Normandy and by 8:30 p.m., 27 orders had gone out. That was on “a very slow night,” one server reported. A few minutes later, the 28th order landed on a two-top. A pair of men fell silent, locked eyes, and each swiped a curl onto a hunk of baguette. One appeared to moan as he took a bite.
When the restaurant opened last summer, it became clear almost immediately to chef Max Mackinnon that the pile of room-temperature, wood-churned Rodolphe Le Meunier butter, displayed in the center of the open kitchen, had become an object of great intrigue. It wouldn’t look out of place in Paris or Copenhagen, but in the West Village, an oversize mountain of butter felt almost cartoonishly opulent. Diners had questions, about its provenance — and whether they could pose with it for a selfie.
While butter has always been a fixation for a certain type of detail-obsessed chef, it has — traditionally — been largely taken for granted by diners. Its dietary benefits and drawbacks fall in and out of favor, and the most attention paid to it at the American table tends to be when a pat is too cold to spread across bread. But the enthusiasm for Libertine’s butter is part of a growing national interest across all sorts of dining establishments: Butter is no longer a supporting player. It has become a star, and it isn’t going to move out of the spotlight anytime soon.
Around the country, tureens of butter — of noble pedigree or stippled and topped with luxury ingredients — have become the new norm. Once a week, chef Brad Cecchi and his team at the East Sacramento restaurant Canon have been slow-cooking five pounds of cheddar with local butter for three hours, until the cheese fat melds with the rest of the dairy. Later, cooks season the butter with kombu, dehydrated garlic, nutritional yeast, and dried shiitake mushrooms, and top it with tater-tot scraps and chives. Its texture is like a Cheez-It chopped salad. “People know that it’s a sinful kind of thing,” says Cecchi. Recently, he says, a visitor from France turned to him after demolishing an order and said, “That was a filthy, dirty, delicious mess.”
We’re butter-maxing, in part, because it feels good to regress. “It’s like why everyone’s putting a fancy baked potato on their menu — kitschiness is coming back,” says the chef Donald Hawk, who renders down guinea-hen skin and whips it with fresh butter to serve with honeycomb and a white Sonoran wheat pretzel at Valentine in Phoenix.
At MaMou, in New Orleans, a pretzel batard comes nestled next to a crystal dish of tempered, cold-smoked Plugrà, whipped with piment d’Espelette and coated in a mossy dusting of blitzed herbs. “One of my employees actually jokes that she wants to be enveloped in the butter after death,” says executive chef Tom Branighan. Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, guests at Stanton Social Prime can order a disk of soft butter topped with tiny crudités and flaky salt, served within a smoke-filled cloche that’s lifted tableside. It costs $18.
“Even bread is good on its own,” says Alex Wilmot, an owner of Gigi’s in Los Angeles, where the cultured butter topped with caviar costs $32. “But people like indulgence — they were cooped up in their home for so long, they want a show.”
Does butter’s appeal really need to be explained? Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this development is that it took so long for people to admit they wanted butter to become a main-character ingredient. It’s a food that can be spread across a board and topped with flaky salt, and doing so on camera will make all of the thumbs that follow you tap the little heart icon. If bread is about humility and labor — you only have to look at it to know that someone spent days turning modest ingredients into a loaf — butter is excess incarnate.
Photo: Hugo Yu
That wasn’t always the case. Experts are iffy on its exact origin story, though “It was an important foodstuff because it’s shelf stable and gives the consumer calories incredibly quickly,” according to food historian K.C. Hysmith. Around the Middle Ages, it became a social signal, especially in Europe where cows were not indigenous, says Hysmith. In the 15th century, the Catholic church introduced a tax for wealthy acolytes who wished to recuse themselves from the butter ban imposed during lent, and butter became linked to wealth.
Butter arrived in America in 1607, and eventually made its way to state fairs, where sculptors turned it into expansive advertisements for local agriculture. Many centuries later — after Dan Barber introduced “single-udder butter” (a tasting dish of butters, each from a different cow), but before Butter Dawg picked up steam on TikTok by subsisting of a diet mostly comprised of full sticks — recipe developer Justine Doiron introduced the U.S. to the butter board. About a year and a half ago, she posted a tutorial of a Joshua McFadden recipe in which she swooshed room temperature butter over the surface of a toast-shaped cutting board, so guests could dip bread directly into it. She topped the butter with salt, lemon zest, red onion, and edible flowers. “It’s way more affordable than a charcuterie board, and it still comes out like a showstopper,” wrote Doiron in her accompanying blog post. Indeed, it all but paralyzed certain corners of the internet; it was as festive as a birthday cake but exponentially more executable. “I can’t wait to spend $16 on this at a restaurant in 6 months🥰 ,” wrote one commenter.
In a world where pigs in a blanket can cost $28 and $45 martinis exist, $10 for some cheddar butter with tater-tot crumbles is practically a steal. For diners on a budget, aggressively festooned butter is a low-stakes way to live it up. “I have a finite number of dollars I can spend when I go out,” says Jo LaRocca, an urban grower who lives in New Orleans, and who ordered the Espelette butter at MaMou with her partner to celebrate her 50th birthday. “So I want it to be good.” And what’s better than butter?
At Quality Bistro in midtown Manhattan, chef Craig Koketsu says that the popularity of his $38 butter service has exploded in the past couple of years. In 2021, the restaurant — which has about 50 tables — sold an average of 13 orders each night; now, the figure is around 30. The pre-dinner butter comes out atop a silver tray on a gueridon, with a selection of jambon cuit, cornichon, leeks vinaigrette, various dips, and country bread.
Inside the restaurant’s dining room on a recent Friday, it was almost impossible to make one’s way to the bathroom, due to the procession of servers moving through the restaurant with the giant butter crock, its yellow contents whittled to a pointy tip. It brought to mind an account I’d read of the Feast of the Pheasant, a particularly lavish banquet thrown by the Court of Burgundy in 1454, at which each display of grandiosity was meant to convey a different, clear message. “A naked woman with long, flowing hair leaned against one of the large supporting columns in the hall, guarded by a live chained lion; she symbolized the city of Constantinople,” wrote historian Edmund A. Bowles. In a complex tableau representing Christendom and its challengers, there sat a castle made of pastry containing 28 musicians.
Tableside at Quality Bistro, as various servers transferred towering mounds of butter to marble slabs and spread them to and fro, topping each one with fleur de sel, Espelette, black pepper, and minced shallot before retreating, iPhones emerged to capture the opulence. There was no question what message the butter service meant to convey.
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The Musical Nomads
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SuperCon – Sports Cards / Pokemon / Comic Books – Queens, NY – Sat/March 2nd
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Khruangbin’s Laura Lee Pays Attention to Restaurant Soundtracks
During the day, Laura Lee is getting ready to release a new record with her band, Khruangbin, and to spend the rest of the year on tour. (The band, whose sound our friends at Vulture have called “funky, jumpy tendrils of guitar, mixed with hazy washes of surf rock,” will play a few nights at the Bowery Ballroom later this month ahead of the full tour.) But Lee is also on a mission to try every Michelin-starred restaurant in the city: “Music and food are so similar,” she says. “Chefs can make the same dish over and over and you can play the same song over and over, but it’s never the same.” She, however, is quick to point out that she is not keeping a ranking of her own: “I don’t think you can really judge art as being ‘better’ or ‘worse’ — the restaurants just speak to me.” This week, it meant a return trip to Clover Hill in Brooklyn Heights, in between rehearsals, workouts, and egg breakfasts with her baby daughter.
Wednesday, February 21
I am a coffee person. Specifically, I am a Chemex person. I get my beans from JB Peel. I have not found a better bean. Sometimes with a little bit of oat milk, and sometimes black. Today it’s a splash of oat.
I have a very time-consuming job. Being a musician is not just playing shows — there’s a lot of other work involved. Right now I’m in tour prep, so I need to practice. I have interviews, meetings, and rehearsals. I also work out every day, and I now have to fit that into my workday because I’m a mom, and I only have so many hours without my kid. That’s my window to take care of everything. Because of that, my midweek eating is very functional. Eggs are my favorite food. If I had to pick one food to survive on forever, it would be an egg. I think it’s the perfect food.
I used to live full time upstate, and I went in search of the perfect egg. There are a lot of beautiful farms in the Hudson Valley, especially in Germantown, which is where I found my favorite egg. I tried, I don’t know, 25, 30 eggs. Anyway, they’re from a lovely couple who have a very small operation, relatively speaking. I think they must have 30, 40 chickens, and I can text them and go by to pick up eggs whenever I want. I eat eggs every day, and most of the time I boil them for exactly seven and a half minutes. That’s what works for these particular eggs. For me, it’s a medium egg. It’s not fully runny, and It’s not totally gelatinous yet.
As soon as my daughter’s child care comes, I go to a pretty high-intensity training workout. It’s like boot camp. I really like a good ass whooping in general — I’m kind of a “go big” person. If I’m going to work out for an hour, then I’m going to sweat out everything I have. Otherwise, what’s the point? Then I had an interview block for two hours during the day because our new album, A La Sala, is coming out. And then I practice for a few hours and have a big management call and a production call for our tour.
I have a smoothie for lunch with blueberries, spinach, banana, and chocolate collagen. Dinner is where I actually have time to enjoy cooking and food. My lunches, on the other hand, tend to be smoothies. I make sure I get my fruit, my iron, all my nutrients, my protein. I use a brand of protein formula that has two bazillion superfoods in it. It’s almost like having a multivitamin for lunch. My smoothie lunch guarantees me that five days a week I’m doing the thing that I should be doing for my body and not just eating everything that I want to eat. It’s not the most delicious thing in the world, but it gets me through my day.
For dinner, I order fish from Mermaid’s Garden, a fishmonger that a friend recommended. It’s the first time we’re trying it. I’m new to living in the city, and I don’t have my fish guy yet. This is a really good start. It’s a beautiful king salmon. I have no complaints so far, but I want to try what else they have.
My partner’s usually in charge of the protein. He’s a nerd about it, much more of a scientist in the kitchen than I am. He likes all the gadgets for temperature reading and making sure everything is perfectly cooked. I wing it, which bodes well for salads and salad dressings. Tonight, it’s a lemony, garlicky kale salad from the New York Times that’s one of my staples. I have it at least once every two weeks. I really like garlic, so I let my garlic steep for a lot longer than it says. This recipe taught me how to prepare kale in a salad. You shred it, like you would collard greens, and you roll it up and cut it. It’s a small labor of love, but it’s worth it.
Before bed, I have some Rishi tea and watch Curb Your Enthusiasm. I’m watching the new season and it kind of made me want to rewatch all of it. That’s been my routine lately: It’s the end of the day, and I’m going to watch Larry David.
Thursday, February 22
I do my normal thing: Chemex coffee and a seven-and-a-half-minute egg. I have a giant Yeti thermos for my coffee, and another for my water. I have multiple bottles that I’m carrying around with me. I usually put my smoothie in a giant mason jar, so I can kind of take everything with me on the go. There’s a lot of running errands, running to Home Depot and that kind of thing — we just moved and decided to give our place a small facelift, so it takes up a lot of time.
Tonight, we’re going to see Mitski play. Before the show, we head to Balaboosta which feels like a reliable neighborhood spot for me, even though it’s not in my neighborhood. We order hummus, fried olives, and a salad. And Einat, the chef, does a play on a soup dumpling that’s Yemenite style. She uses hilbeh, a fenugreek thing. It’s a very specific thing that people love or hate, and I love it. It’s slightly bitter and it’s delicious. It’s really a two-bite adventure, but who doesn’t love a one bite? Get it all in one. And then I have halva crème brûlée for dessert.
Mitski puts on a dynamic, stunning, healing performance. I’m going out on tour soon and I haven’t played in 18 months, and I’m terrified. Sometimes you don’t know if you’re enough, and it’s nice to see other performers do what they do. I always just feel better after I see live music. I’ve seen her at a festival, but I’ve never seen her at a venue show, so I’ve never seen Mitski fans and I mean — they’re just so awesome. I love them.
Friday, February 23
Start the morning with my Chemex coffee. I actually have less time than normal, so I eat breakfast with my daughter. She is 9 months old. Her favorite meal is a spinach omelet with cottage cheese on the side. She loves it. Last week I was like, You know what? I’m going to try it. It’s good — especially the cottage cheese. When I was a kid, and we were low on cash, my mom would make baked potatoes and put cottage cheese with salt and pepper on top. Now, we get the really nice full-fat, organic, delicious kind, and it’s great.
Enrique Olvera’s Tu Casa Mi Casa is one of the only cookbooks that I have with me in the sort of limbo period until we are fully unpacked from our move. He has a chicken soup that is so simple and pretty quick. It’s like an hour, maybe an hour and a half tops, but a lot of it’s inactive because you’re just waiting. You use a whole chicken and chayote squash, which is really easy to get in Brooklyn, which is great. It’s a light, delicious broth. I like all chicken soups, but some are heartier than others. Mexican caldo tends to be very delicate. I grew up eating Mexican food because my family’s part Mexican. To me, cilantro, white onion, serrano, and lime as an accoutrement to a soup or to anything: It’s the ultimate addition. It’s crunchy and heartwarming. I sit down to eat with my partner, and we both relax a bit. Friday nights have become our favorite night in.
I watch some more Curb before bed. I’m in season eight now, and so I’m almost caught up to the current season. I’m going to have to figure out something else to watch when this is over.
Saturday, February 24
It’s Saturday morning and I’m up at 7. I love my weekends. They look different than they ever have because they’re family days — they’re no longer about going out late and being able to sleep in. They’re much more wholesome — I love ’em. We make shakshuka pretty much every Saturday. My partner’s from Israel, so it’s his love language. I used to experience it as just tomato sauce and eggs. As somebody who ate huevos rancheros growing up, it just felt like Italian tomato sauce. Now, I’ve had it so many ways and I love it. I prefer it rustic and chunky.
We use Angel pita, which a lot of restaurants serve. It’s a bakery out of New Jersey that now sells at Whole Foods, so you can really get it anywhere and it’s perfect. We make tahini and Israeli salad, with lots of herbs chopped very finely. We serve it as a plate with shakshuka on one side, tahini in the middle, and then the salad on the other side. The tahini is like extra salad dressing and an extra sauce. We also have some Israeli pickles and peppers that come canned. It’s like a perfect meal.
For dinner, my partner and I go to Clover Hill. It was supposed to be a chance to celebrate our move in to the house today. It didn’t happen exactly as we planned, timing-wise, but we still keep our reservation. In my Michelin-star journey, it’s been my favorite. We went for the first time in November or December. I was still living upstate and we made a special trip to go to Clover Hill.
My bandmate DJ actually sent me a gift certificate. He’s not into Michelin-starred restaurants at all, but somehow it came up on his radar and he was like, “It’s one of the only Black-owned Michelin-starred restaurants in New York. You should try it.” I was thinking about that meal for weeks, like, I would wake up and think about it. I think it’s like music. You hear a song that you love and you wake up in the morning and you just want to listen to it. And it’s not accessible to me to be able to go eat at Clover Hill very often, but it was so special. So we decided to go back, celebrate, and it did not disappoint.
It’s really cozy. I’d say music selection at Michelin-starred restaurants is awful in general. It is not what they do. Maybe it’s overlooked and they don’t have somebody that realizes that it’s so important in creating an ambiance. A lot of these types of restaurants have a more sterile atmosphere, and I can appreciate that, because the emphasis is on the food. But at Clover Hill, there’s Outkast playing and it makes sense. It doesn’t feel out of place. Why can’t you listen to Outkast and eat caviar?
Right now the menu is very seafood-focused. What’s so special about this tasting menu is that every bite feels important. There wasn’t a single filler piece of food. It’s like an album, and there are no skips.
Sunday, February 25
Wake up still thinking about last night’s meal, and feeling a headache to accompany the martini, wine, and amaro we drank. It’s Chemex and oat milk time right at 7 a.m. We make huevos à la Mexicana, which is made with onions, tomato, and jalapeño or serrano. It’s like the colors of the Mexican flag with eggs. If I were to have whatever I wanted for breakfast every day and I wasn’t dead set on honoring the egg, that’s what I would have. I also make refried beans. My grandma always taught me to save my bacon fat, so I have a big old jar of bacon fat in my fridge and it makes my beans so good. So I make pinto beans with that and smash them and have them with the huevos and corn tortillas, and it’s delicious. We spend the morning organizing and packing for our move and have leftover chicken soup for lunch.
We head to Home Depot, daughter in tow. It’s a very adventurous, productive, fun day. And then at night we made chicken thighs. They are insane. I’m obsessed with these chicken thighs. They’re in Nancy Silverton’s Mozza at Home cookbook. It’s called Staff Meal Chicken Thighs. Sal, who is one of her cooks, makes them for the staff of her restaurant. The secret is that you have to take them out 24 hours before at least, and you put them in the fridge just on paper towels so it dries out the skin. The skin is so crispy, and you cook it over a bed of onions and garlic and lemon and herbs. They are insane. I’m obsessed with them. On my flight recently to Mexico, I packed three in a ziplock bag with a paper towel and I looked like such a barbarian on the airplane, eating chicken thighs with my hands. It’s so animalistic, but I don’t care.
I make Caesar salad to go with the chicken thighs. I’m very passionate about Caesar salad and I don’t know why restaurants can’t seem to get it right, but it is so awesome when it’s done correctly. Tonight, I make it correctly, according to myself. It is so decadent and delicious, and I look forward to it every time I make it.
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Where to Eat in March
Welcome to Grub Street’s rundown of restaurant recommendations that aims to answer the endlessly recurring question: Where should we go? These are the spots that our food team thinks everyone should visit, for any reason (a new chef, the arrival of an exciting dish, or maybe there’s an opening that’s flown too far under the radar). This month: Miss Ada’s long-awaited follow-up, the heftiest shawarma wrap in the city, and French-creole island fare in East Williamsburg.
Genatsvale Georgian Bakery (Brighton Beach)
The other day, I had what must be the heftiest shawarma wrap in the city. It was so big, my friend kept insisting I put it on a scale, but it only cost $10 — a steal in these days of towering sandwich prices. This shawarma (here spelled shaurma) is made Georgian-style, with pork and chicken that’s nicely charred and seasoned with a blend of spices kept secret. “We use different kinds of Georgian seasonings, just like they do in Tbilisi,” says the owner, Linieta Nanava. Chopped hot peppers are optional, but they’re really not, and the addition of mayo and ketchup gives the wrap a fast-food appeal, like a Crunchwrap gone to the Caucasus. — Chris Crowley
Little Grenjai (Bedford-Stuyvesant)
This Thai restaurant has had many lives — ranging from a ghost kitchen operating out of Downtown Brooklyn to, most recently, a takeout window selling Thai burgers cooked on an electric grill while the owners waited for the restaurant’s gas to be turned on. In January, at last, Little Grenjai opened up its shoe-box-size dining room for full service, and it’s turned a fairly sleepy corner on Gates into a destination. For dinner, start with paper-thin crab rangoon and the crispy rice salad; finish with the charred cabbage stir-fry and, if you can handle the heat, the drunken noodles. Or go for lunch, when seating is first-come, first-served and the only time the restaurant’s signature krapow smash burger is available. — Edward Hart
Radio Star (Greenpoint)
It’s not just for love of WNYC that I warmed to Radio Star, the recently opened all-day café on Greenpoint’s Transmitter Park, where for decades WNYC’s towers beamed from. Its own transmissions reach from farther afield. Sara Conklin, who also runs nearby Glasserie, keeps a similar Mediterranean focus here, and the charming, sunny space, kitted out with décor from the ’40s, had the feel of a coffee shop in some battered but resilient former SSR. Breakfast starts at 8, with saffron-cream-cheese pastry; lunch at 11; and dinner at 4, which I cobbled together from pork cheeks in a swath of labne, a budding plate of charred broccoli rabe, and a selection of spreads and spreadables that come in mini “condiment jars,” like baby food for savory adults. Slightly out of time, perfect for a quiet burble or a solo semi-doze, gazing into the middle distance as you get through too few pages of the giant book that’s been hogging your tote bag. Just like the radio! — Matthew Schneier
Theodora (Fort Greene)
First, the bad news: Fort Greene, a neighborhood that loves its restaurants, has been waiting months for this Miss Ada follow-up to open. So, by 5:30 — an hour when even the buzziest Manhattan wine bars can still feel desolate — this room, whitewashed and filled with the pleasant smell of wood smoke, is already three-quarters full. Now the good news: The food, which is ostensibly Mediterranean but liberally pulls inspiration and ingredients from across the world, is pretty much all delicious. Sturdy slices of dry-aged yellowtail, plucked from the aging locker up front, are fanned out across turmeric-spiked coconut milk, while a special of striped-bass ceviche is perfumed with charred bits of pineapple and basil leaves. Bread? There is plenty, like a twisty round of kubaneh to dip in a trio of spreads (or the leftover coconut milk from the fish). Skewers of cubed swordfish belly are sufficiently smoky from the charcoal grill and placed atop a mild-spiced labneh, and it’s a wise move to finish things off with a small sundae of peanut-butter-esque tahini ice cream, covered in caramel and pierced with jagged-looking bits of crispy phyllo. — Alan Sytsma
Maloya (East Williamsburg)
On an industrial block of Flushing Avenue lies a portal to a tiny tropical refuge called Maloya. The turquoise room is dedicated to the creole culture of Reunion Island, a tiny French department in the Indian Ocean. Dimly lit, with paintings of lush valleys and a wall-size mural of the prized Victoria pineapple, you can almost sense the beach outside. Stop by for a ti punch and the assiette creole, a mixed order of canapés that allows you to sample cheesy samosas alongside lima-bean fritters, or a comforting entrée like lamb stewed with an aromatic masala. At the bar, peruse the selection of lesser-known rums from Reunion Island, Mauritius, and Fiji. — Tammie Teclemariam