The Last Great Restauranteur Drew Nieporent.

Drew Nieporent is one of the one of the last great restauranteurs. His kind is not seen that often anymore , sort of being a culinary dinosaur of sorts. Yet he was and still is a strong presence on the Manhattan restaurant scene for four decades. As long as there's a trendy eatery to oversee, he's there.

He was the subject of a fascinating interview and article in yesterday's New York Times Food section written by Alan Richman .Drew Nieporent is an interesting throwback to the Sixties when larger than life hosts/owners greeted and seated customers. Mind you, this is the era before celebrity chefs like Bobby Flay and Mario Batale ruled the roost.  The era brought such stars as Sirio Maccioni  of Le Cirque, Joe Baum,of both the Twelve Caesars and The Four Seasons and Georges Lang of the famed Cafe Des Artistes. They shone more than than their cooks did , as . Nieporent does now with his own. His father is to thank for this love. The elder Neiporent worked for the New York State Liquor Authority where there were endless invitations to eat free from restaurant  owners looking for easy ways to maneuver through bureaucratic channels. As a child, Nieporent dined at the fancy San Marino where his mother properly taught to twirl spaghetti on a spoon and ate egg  rolls and sweet and sour pork at China Song., right next to the Ed Sullivan Theater. He ate there the night the Beatles first appeared on Ed Sullivan's show.

It was inevitable that . Nieporent went into the hospitality industry, graduating from Cornell School of Hotel Administration and worked on the cruise ships, Vistafjord and Sagafjord during his summer vacations.His first jobs were at the prestigious Le Perigord, Le Regence, La Grenouille and La Reserve. He also worked as assistant restaurant director at  the famed Maxwell's Plum, owned by one of the greatest restauranteurs, Warner Leroy.   Later he would hire the now famous David Bouley, who was then a little known chef from San Francisco. He was also responsible for bringing eateries to the then industrial wasteland, Tribeca. This was back in 1983 when no one really ventured south of Broadway. He'd have to  find customers who called saying they were lost on their way to the restaurant, scared to even venture into the dark deserted streets. .He Is credited with inventing the 
inexpensive prix fixe dinner for $16.00 at Montrachet. He is also partners with Robert Di Niro and is currently a partner in five (! ) restaurants right now (he's owned over forty for forty years)that include the trendy Nobu and Tribeca Grill.

Drew Nieporent is ne of the last of his  breed, yet he is as influential now as he was back forty years ago. He is responsible for what Manhattan eats and the food trends that touch our lives. He is the heartbeat behind the city's dining scene

Women In The Kitchen

With this being International Women's Day . it's time we celebrate the impact of women on food and nutrition. After all it's not our dads anf grandads that fed us but our mothers and grandmothers. Yet there seems to be more male chefs than female chefs, while it seems there are more waitresses than waiters. What gives?

Since the earliest of our days, it's been the females that have been providing food, whether from the earliest hunter-gatherers to the first "home chefs" roasting meat on  wood spits over a fire. It's the women who ground the wheat  to make the bread that fed the family. They made sure children had the best nutrition for the time, as they tended to gardens. Our sisters from antiquity probably introduced fruits and vegetables to their families diets, expanding both their husbands and childrens' palates. Some of these recipes exist today in the form of matzoh and pita, roasted lamb and dumplings . The home chefs  that lived during the Roman and Greek empires and the Han Dynasty realized the importance of meals being eaten together too, and how it would strengthen family ties.They passed down themselves and their stories in dishes that the next generation of both girls and boys are making today with electric stoves and all sorts of modern gadgets .Believe it or not we're all eating some form of the Paleo diets thanks to our early female ancestors.

You would think that with women ruling the kitchen , they'd be ruling the culinary world. Not so much, even in this day and age.The cookbooks, were written by women, with the first real one penned by Isabella Beeton in the 1860's but a woman owning a restaurant was unheard of , unless she ran it with her parents  husband, or children.It was a man who gave us the famed Gilded Age eatery Delmonico's in lower Manhattan.it was the great chef Auguste Escoffier , a Frenchman who was the world's first celebrity chef. It took a century later for the first female, chef, Julia Child who captivated American home chefs and foodies in the 1960's./. She also laid the groundwork for the celebrity chef culture that came thirty years later in the 1990s. Still, there seems to be an imbalance with the number of male chefs to female chefs today.   The only successful female chef  now is Lidia Bastianich who has her TV show , restaurants,products and cookbooks. She's on the same par as Bobby Flay, and Gordon Ramsey but she' really the only one. There's an imbalance lower down the culinary ladder too.. Most of the fast food managers are men, Assistant managers are women, but it seems that this is the highest they can go. The first tier workers are usually female also. Could it be that boys would rather work in the Apple stores as opposed to  a Wendy's or McDonald's? Or that girls are just pointed to kitchens.?

Today is the Internatioal Women's Day. We have fed and nurtured the world for millennia. Yet in some sectors of the food industry  we're still treated like underlings. It has to change- and we have to change it.

A Mix On The Grill

It's grilling time and that means dumping a load of different meats and cuts over charcoal or wood chips. This is the time to enjoy a variety of flavors and textures, fire roasted to perfection. A mixed grill is easy to create and wonderful to serve , especially for weekend cookouts.

Sam Sifton explored this and wrote about it in today's New York Times Food section. A good mixed grill is an international favorite. The Brazilians have churrasco, a marriage of chicken and beef along wit hearts and gizzards. Their neighbors , the Argentines tie livers and kidneys together roast them over flames, douse the whole mix with chimichurri sauce  and call it asado., The Italians do something similar with olive oil rubbed chicken ,then serve it with grilled beef and pork. The ultimate meat lovers , the English add some veggies to theirs, namely tomatoes and mushrooms to lamb and dry brined pork called gammon. We Yanks have our own version, namely the all American cookout. Ours is a mix of different cuts and meats, sometimes turned into  potluck thanks to guests bringing everything from salads to cornbread. Most times we  just haphazardly drop any meat on the grill and hope for the best. At best it works out to a yummy array of outdoor favorites, at worst it looks  like a Paleo nightmare.

Is there a method to this grilling madness?Yes, according to both celebrity chef Bobby Flay and  Chef Adam Lang who went from haute cuisine to grilling in his new restaurant , Daisy May's BBQ. start with any kind of sausage.They are a great intro as to what will come and also foolproof. Nothing can go wrong with  them. The next meat is chicken, It usually takes the longest of all the meats to thoroughly cook up. Cook it on one side and at the same time cook up burgers and steaks or even grill corn.The next issue is the barbecue sauce. It really is a condiment instead of a marinade. Unfortunately, many home grillers don't realize this and slather the sugar laden sauce on everything. This is wrong. Commercial  sauce has a lot of sugar in it which turns into carbon when it reacts to high heat.Add a good amount of water to any barbecue sauce before slathering it on to reduce charring and burning. Mr. Sifton includes   a recipe for a barbecue sauce that only has a 1/4 cup of brown sugar which is not that sweet, considering there is also apple cider vinegar and ketchup.a mixed grill should have veggies too, to cut all that protein. Try the standard corn, first blanched in milk infused water and then grilled along with a grilled Caesar salad. This last gives a bitterness that only sweetens the taste of the meat.

Fire up the grill and then thrown on your favorite cuts.Enjoy the variety of smoky , fire roasted flavors from beef, pork and poultry. This is want summer eating is all about.