Ivy Esquero

In a move reminiscent of the great Hostess Shutdown of 2012, Entenmann's Bakery announced today it will shut down its 53-year-old Bay Shore plant, leaving 178 of its 265 on-site workers out of a job. The company, which has roots in Brooklyn and eastern Long Island, is known for packaging its products in distinctive white boxes with a see-through "window," a packaging design it invented in 1959. Entenmann's products include — but are by no means limited to — brownies, cherry cheese danishes, doughnut-hole-like Pop 'Ems, iced chocolate cakes, coffee cakes, lemon loaf, and pound cake.

For decades, Entenmann's baked goods have an unwavering presence in grocery and convenience stores, and for a long time were a basic fact of thousands of kids' brown-bagged lunches throughout the city and the surrounding areas. Entenmann's cookies, cakes, and various glazed things were fixtures of office break rooms, birthday parties, AA meetings, auto repair waiting rooms, post-funeral gatherings, treehouse tribunals, and pretty much any other kind of gathering imaginable. The brand's various "outlet stores" that once dotted the highways of Long Island in greater numbers were packed with so much bakery overstock that it was dangerous to go to early in the morning, for fear that someone's granny might elbow you in the eye socket while the two of you fought over the last box of Apple Danish Twist.

The company has been owned by Bimbo Bakeries USA, a division of the Mexican Grupo Bimbo. An executive making the announcement today said the company's immense, 53-year-old Bay Shore facility "cannot operate efficiently on a cost competitive basis with the other bakeries in our system." Production is now expected to shift elsewhere: "We are committed to ensuring that there will be no change in the quality, freshness or availability in the Entenmann's products consumers have come to know and love," the executive said. After restructuring, the Bay Shore bakery will become a distribution center, and remaining workers will also focus on research and marketing.

Entenmann's closing Bay Shore bakery, cutting 178 jobs [Newsday]

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Filed Under: pop 'ems for life, doughnuts, entenmann's, long island

"I have stage 3 melanoma, which puts me at a 48% chance of survival over the next 5 years. However, I have the ability to speed read very technical material, so I went to the library at Duke and read over 800 papers on melanoma, which doctors just don’t have the time to read. I found one very promising study that suggests chloro quinine, combined with the deprivation of a certain amino acid, has shrunk tumors in mice to almost nothing."

Seeking to redefine the term ‘on the rocks,’ the entertainment products brand SPARQ has proposed some fanciful alternatives to boring ice cubes. Whiskey Rocks, cubed pieces of “non-porous, odorless, tasteless, and food safe” soapstone, just need a stint in the freezer before being plopped in a drink for chilling duties (and, alternatively, can be heated in the microwave and dropped into a hot drink to keep it warmer longer), while Whiskey Cubes and Wine Pearls, made from polished stainless steel, do the same thing in a slightly flashier way. True, it’s all a good bit pricier than plain old ice cubes, but just think of the cocktail chatter.

Images: SPARQ

While New Yorkers are still enduring the last gasps of the Endless Winter of 2014, Gothamist has spotted the first ramp dish of the season. The onion-y harbingers of spring will be on the menu at Tarallucci E Vino tonight, served grilled over pork belly, parsnip puree, and mushrooms as an appetizer. The only slight buzzkill is that these ramps come from South Carolina. [Gothamist]
[Photo]

Montreal based A’shop crew is an artist-run production company that creates graffiti murals, street art, and other public art displays. Most of their work is heavily influenced by graffiti but has also found inspiration elsewhere like their 2011 piece titled Notre-Dame-de-Grâce (top) that borrows from the art nouveau style of Alphonse Mucha. You can see more of their work on Facebook and over on the website. (via Oddity Central)

The “cookie dunking experience” has received a boost with the arrival of The Dipr, a spoon specially designed to grip a sandwich cookie, thereby facilitating a clean and efficient dunking process. Thank inventor Robert Haleluk’s love affair with the Oreo cookie—and his frustration with inadvertently dropping Oreos in milk and then having to fish them out—for this hilariously ingenious device. The Dipr works by gripping the soft center of any sandwich cookie and holding the cookie firmly enough to submerge, retrieve, and eat. Well, why not? We’re all for preserving cherished rituals.Images: The Dipr

requested by @igor_ebooks

Iron Chef victor and Next Food Network Star cast member Viet Pham, who's the chef-owner of Forage in Salt Lake City, was in town earlier this week, reportedly for brainy San Francisco chef Joshua Skenes's bachelor party. Somehow the gang ended up in front of strip club Scores in Chelsea, where a guy punched him in the face around 3 a.m., breaking his glasses. The perp is still at large, and this is precisely why forager-chefs shouldn't go to strip clubs: They may be great at finding things like mushrooms and fiddleheads, but they're perhaps less accustomed to dealing with what happens when trouble finds them. [DNAinfo]

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Filed Under: crime, chefs, joshua skenes, scores, viet pham

Deepti Nair and Harikrishnan Panicker (known collectively as Hari & Deepti) are an artist couple who create paper cut light boxes. Each diorama is made from layers of cut watercolor paper placed inside a shadow box and is lit from behind with flexible LED light strips. The small visual narratives depicted in each work often play off aspects of light including stars, flames, fireflies, and planets. The couple shares about their work:

Paper is brutal in its simplicity as a medium. It demands the attention of the artist while it provides the softness they need to mold it in to something beautiful. It is playful, light, colorless and colorful. It is minimal and intricate. It reflects light, creates depth and illusions in a way that it takes the artist through a journey with limitless possibilities.

What amazes us about the paper cut light boxes is the dichotomy of the piece in its lit and unlit state, the contrast is so stark that it has this mystical effect on the viewers.

Hari & Deepti are originally from India but now live and work in Denver. Their work most recently appeared at SCOPE New York through Black Book Gallery. (via Hi-Fructose, My Modern Met)

“We designed an airport that is intimately connected to its surroundings. By subtly incorporating regional patterns and textures at all scales, Terminal 2 resonates with a sense of place and serves as a spectacular symbol for India and Mumbai.”

We’ll forgive the venerable New York architectural firm SOM (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill) for blowing their own horn. Their recently completed airport terminal in Mumbai is an undeniable jaw-dropper, owing mainly to the series of 30 concrete columns that ‘mushroom’ upward to support a perforated concrete ceiling—an homage to the region’s architectural traditions and to India’s national bird, the peacock.

The four-story Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport will serve 40 million visitors annually, all of whom will enter the teeming city of Mumbia via SOM’s breathtaking new display of architectural ornamentation. From a country wholly besotted with decoration, we can’t imagine a more fitting welcome.

Images: Dezeen

I knew it! [x]

Cinnabon-branded Cream of Wheat and Cinnabon-tinged novelty vodka exist, and while we're waiting for the company to solidify its next batch of co-branded world cinna-domination plans, it's conveniently put these Air Wick stank bombs on the market. You just pull the pin, or whatever it is one does to deploy air fresheners, and voilà — your whole house is thoroughly Cinna-bombed. The company, which is positioning its namesake product as the next pumpkin spice, says the Air Wick has got that "irresistible smell of freshly baked dough, one-of-a-kind cinnamon and cream cheese frosting that makes Cinnabon cinnamon rolls so unforgettable." Let's be honest, though: Does cream-cheese frosting really smell like anything? [Laughing Squid, Earlier]

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Filed Under: frosting, cinnabon, cinnabon air freshener, cinnabon vodka, pinnacle vodka

We shouldn’t be surprised by the pure honesty of Jens Risom’s holiday home on Block Island. Vanity and self-importance have never been a trademark of the great Danish designer’s work, even as his Risom Lounge Chairs for Knoll remain amongst the most lusted-after furniture icons of the Mid-Century era. What is surprising, though, is that his lovely shingled seaside house is a prefabricated model, customized by Risom nearly half a century ago in his quest to build a summer house on a modest budget—$20,700, to be exact.

Miniscule by today’s standards—a mere 700 sq feet—and sitting on an idyllic parcel of land, the house’s storybook A-frame profile, utilitarian kitchen and wood-burnished warmth are reminders of how Risom’s design sensibilities have never strayed from the things that matter, his focus ever tuned to an object’s (or a house’s) sense of purpose. The son of an architect, Risom, now 97, knew the pitfalls of designing buildings. “Architecture, to me, is the most beautiful of the arts. I always knew that I wanted to design, but only if I could create products over which I had total control.” We can only imagine how much the architectural world has missed by not ceding control to him.

Images: Dwell

This is your friendly neighborhood reminder that one lucky reader can skip the grocery store for 365 days by winning a year of Plated.

With Plated, you get all the ingredients that you need to cook a delicious 30-minute meal delivered right to your doorstep. That means you can cook beef bibimbab or wild mushroom risotto without having to wait in a line at the grocery store.

To make sure you don't make any excuses, we are throwing in $500 to Williams Sonoma so you have the right cookware you need to whip up these awesome meals.

Want to avoid lines at the grocery store and start cooking delicious meals? You should probably enter now. >>

A restaurant in Tokyo called Firebird just started selling this enormous maguro nose-sugi don, or "rice bowl with too much raw tuna on it," for 800 yen, or $7.75. There's rice under there somewhere, but nobody seems to be sure how much, or where it is, exactly. In any event, a side salad and miso soup come with. [RocketNews 24]

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Filed Under: toro toro toro, firebird, sashimi, tuna

Bill Gates is a technocrat. A very, very rich technocrat. His charity work will probably save millions of lives. But, as a new interview with him reveals, he's really not much of a progressive at all.

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It all seems very sci-fi: Freshwater culled from melting icebergs is channeled into massive hydroponic greenhouses, which grow all manner of vegetables, fruit, and herbs. But the entire apparatus, which was devised by French architecture students, is propellerless and made to drift with the currents, making it ideal for swinging by coastal towns to deliver its local, pesticide-free picks. Soon, it may be real.

"We had what seemed to us a massive resource on one hand, and a massive lack — no local produce — on the other," Meriem Chabani, one of the designers, tellsFast Company.

Iceberg harvesting is a lemonade-from-lemons approach to melting icebergs. It goes into bottled water and even more boutique applications, like glacial vodka. More importantly, the Arctic Harvester would get Greenlanders much-needed local produce. Arable land comprises about, oh, zero percent of the island.

So now the Arctic Harvester has moved into the fundraising stage. We inquired about what crops might eventually be produced, and about future plans. Mikå Mered, CEO and executive research director of Polarisk Analytics, wrote in response:

The Arctic Harvester has been designed to operate in Western Greenlandic waters so, given that Greenland is the world's 4th largest vegetables importer per capita, the food we see growing inside the Harvester would match Greenland's needs. One may thus consider growing lettuce, leafy greens, cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, carrots, potatoes. They all do grow well in a hydroponic environment. Likewise, fruits such as strawberries, raspberries and even exotic ones like small papayas would also grow well. Going further, the Arctic Harvester's inner space is also conceived to allow for organic fish breeding. Cold-water fish like salmon would be effective, so might be tilapia. Detailed studied will be necessary at this point to determine which fish exactly would be bred in the Arctic Harvester.

Check out more on the project here.

This Giant Floating Farm Uses Melting Icebergs to Bring Local Food to Greenland [Co.Exist]

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Filed Under: food security, arctic harvester, farms, food supply, polarisk analytics

If minimalism, esthetically-speaking, is the search for a state of grace, it’s fair to say that industrial designer Pablo Pardo can stop searching. Founder of the San Francisco-based lighting company, Pablo, the Venezuelan-born Pardo is a prolific industrial designer, whose early familial influences of art and engineering are winningly expressed in the range of reductive lighting designs produced by the Pablo brand. Propelled by an “essence of an idea” design credo, the Pablo company’s approach to lighting design marries the advantages of contemporary energy-efficient illumination with Modernist “less is more” design principles—elegantly illustrated in a number of visually transcendent suspension and task lights.

If there’s a desk lamp that does more with less than Pablo Pardo’s LIM360—a single strip of gently bent aluminum, outfitted with high-output LEDs, USB port, and 360-degree arm rotation—we can’t think of one offhand. The exceedingly simplified profile of this high-performance task lamp is a study in form and functional efficiency, and a lesson in treading lightly, comprised of 97% recyclable materials. And, not incidentally, LIM360 makes an undeniably artful visual statement.

LIM 360 >Minimalism at its whimsical best is embodied in Pixo, an enchanting task light with a slender profile and equally modest footprint that invokes a vaguely human form. A swiveling head that allows for upward, downward and sideways illumination, and wildly maneuverable arm make Pixo, a collaboration between Pablo Padro and his brother Fernando, every bit as impressive for its efficiency, ecological sensitivity and visual panache as LIM360. Is it any wonder that Pixo was a 2012 Red Dot Award winner?

Pixo >

Does an architect always view the world through the lens of a built structure? It may be safe to assume some do—like Italian architect and illustrator Federico Babina, who has conceived of a series of illustrations in which iconic two-dimensional works by famous artists morph into 3-dimensional works of architecture. Paintings and drawings by artists from Warhol to Richard Serra, Lichtenstein to Damien Hirst, get reconstructed, so to speak, as buildings in Babina’s Archist project. While some aesthetic devices—from Mondrian and Serra, for instance—lend themselves more convincingly to architecture than others—Lichtenstein and Rothko fare less well—we suspect all the artists chosen for Babina’s project would find themselves amused, even intrigued, by the possibilities.Images: Dezeen

I can’t remember where I was, precisely, when I finally had my fill of what passes for dessert these days in most trendy new restaurants around this food-mad town. Maybe it was at a tasting room out in the wilds of Long Island City or Greenpoint, where the only evidence of something sweet to eat (after an otherwise enjoyable $100 dinner of pork neck and carefully articulated winter root vegetables) was a tiny spoonful of carrot parfait. I could have been at an expense account joint in midtown, where the ancient pageantry of rolling dessert carts and 15-minute soufflés was replaced, long ago, by a bland procession of overpriced chocolate sundaes and stale, prefabricated layer cakes. Or maybe I was standing in the rain at 6:30 a.m. to get a taste of Dominique Ansel’s fabled (and, yes, sort of delicious) internet sensation, the Cronut. Not that it really matters. The city may be awash, as I've written before, in a happy tidal wave of artisanal bakeries, ice cream parlors, and New Age doughnut shops, but the grim reality is that for lovers of the old-fashioned, sit-down restaurant dessert, this is the Dark Age.

Not so long ago, new kitchens of the highest rank were defined, in large part, by their ability to produce a glamorous crescendo of sweets at the end of every meal. Too often, these days, restaurant meals end with pre-made puddings (or panna cottas, watery rice puddings, and the ever-durable chocolate pot du crème) and scoop after scoop of of antically flavored ice cream (olive oil, sea salt, etc.). Instead of delicate wisps of, say, îles flottantes, we critics debate the latest gourmet version of carrot cake, or an endless, mind-numbing procession of fried beignets, churros, and gourmet doughnut holes, all of which taste fine, thank you, but also pretty much the same. 

Sure there are highly trained pastry chefs hanging on at old line establishments such as Angela Pinkerton at Eleven Madison Park or Elwyn Boyles at Per Se. But upscale, white-tablecloth restaurants open less and less frequently in this comfort-food addled era, and the old lions who used to dominate the pastry field are mostly gone. Jean-Georges Vongerichten's talented maestro Johnny Iuzzini abandoned his post in 2011. Jacques Torres, who rose to fame constructing elaborate desserts at Le Cirque, is busy expanding his chocolate empire. Michael Laiskonis left Le Bernardin several years ago to teach at culinary school. And Alex Stupak, who made his name with cutting-edge dessert work at wd~50 (and, before that, Alinea in Chicago), now focuses his considerable talents in the more bankable realm of high-end tacos.

You can’t blame Stupak for pulling the rip cord on his pastry career. In today’s post-recessionary dining economy, dessert chefs tend to be viewed by your average restaurateur starting out in Cobble Hill (or even the West Village or midtown) as a luxury. More and more of the restaurants I review don’t even employ full-time dessert cooks, which is why their menus are flooded with pre-made pies, cakes, and puddings that can be put together ahead of time and whisked out to diners as quickly as possible. As in the realm of savory cooking, the most interesting, innovative work tends to be done in small out-of-the-way tasting rooms, where set omakase-style menus conclude with one or two meager dessert “tastes” per sitting.

Tastes change, of course. The great gourmet-dessert apocalypse has also coincided with the rise of a generation of no-frills cooks (and eaters), who prefer a midnight tub of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream to a well-fashioned éclair any day. David Chang famously avoided dessert at his restaurants altogether, until Christina Tosi came up with the genius idea of making ice cream out of sugary, leftover cereal milk. Danny Bowien doesn't employ full-time pastry chefs at his celebrated Mission restaurants, and neither did Mario Carbone and Rich Torrisi until they turned their modest Italian sandwich deli into a high-priced tasting room, and opened their retro red-sauce palace, Carbone, where the most talked-about item on the dessert list is a decorative $15 slice of, you guessed it, carrot cake

Not that this dyspeptic critic is averse to the occasional large bite of $15 carrot cake. I’m not even averse to a taste of the occasional Cronut. Even my most militant pastry-snob friends concede that Dominique Ansel’s famous mash-up dessert is a brilliant marketing tool, and a canny gateway to his other, more classic pastry treats.  

In fact, I look forward to sampling Ansel's latest invention, which, in case you haven’t heard, is a shot-glass-sized cylinder made out of a chocolate-chip cookie, filled with the finest organic milk. When my daughters saw the enticing Instagram images on their phones, they could barely contain their glee. They want to go stand in line when the new wonder goes on sale this Friday. If the line’s too long, they want me to pull strings to get them a taste. Have patience girls, I tell them. Pirate versions of Ansel’s chocolate-cookie shots will be all over town in a week or two. And a few months after that, there's a decent chance they'll be coming to a swank restaurant near you.

Related: Chefs Chew Over New York’s Changing Dessert Landscape

Read more posts by Adam Platt

Filed Under: not so sweet, adam platt, new york, restaurants

Austin, TX — Strip away the pretension of the panels, and SXSW is pure leisure time. This rowdy crew swapped contraband wine bottles through the end of the night at one of this week's high budget parties, commanding the room, Google lanyards swinging. Now just think: soon every bar will look just like this.

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The Winter That's Never Gonna Freakin' End™ is taking a hefty toll on the nation's school systems, with a large number of counties that have had winter weather this season using all of their allotted snow days pretty quickly. Now that it's March and the snow and ice start to wane as spring approaches keep right on going like it's goddamn January, school boards just about everywhere have to tackle the problem of how to make up the days they've missed.

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The boom in low-cost airlines around the world continues, and now travelers have more options than ever when searching for flights. The in-flight service tends to be very similar once you are on board, especially now that traditional airlines have also started charging extra for almost everything. But the airfare strategies for low-cost airlines are quite different when trying to get the lowest fare possible.

You may be familiar with the recent research that states that the cheapest time to buy airline tickets is from 3 to 7 weeks out, but that actually doesn’t apply to low-cost carriers. Unlike their traditional counterparts, the low-cost airlines don’t start with high prices and then lower them a month or two out, only to raise them again as the flight draws near.

Which “low-cost airlines” are we talking about?

The trend that started with Southwest Airlines in the United States has now spread completely around the world. There are now close to 100 airlines (not counting the scores that have come and gone) that fit into this category, including:

North America

• Southwest, JetBlue, Spirit, WestJet

Europe

• Ryanair, easyJet, Vueling, Wizz Air

Asia/Pacific

• Air Asia, Tigerair, Jetstar

And there are many more all over the world, each of them using the same fare strategy.

The short version: Buy as soon as possible because fares only go up

For the absolute cheapest airline tickets on a low-cost carrier, you’ll want to book as early as possible. Most of these airlines put tickets on sale anywhere from 6 to 11 months in advance, and if you are ready to purchase shortly after they are available, you’ll lock in the lowest fare.

In fact, many of these very-early fares can be ridiculously cheap, with fares in the past starting as low as €1 or £1 in Europe (plus taxes and fees). Those aren’t as common these days, but you can still get incredibly cheap flights if you are prepared to lock in and pay for a non-refundable ticket close to a year in advance. The problem for most of us, is that we are never sure enough about an exact flight that early.

How low-cost fares actually work

Once you know how they set and move (raise) their prices, it’s easier to figure out the best strategies for getting the lowest possible fare without booking close to a year in advance. With few exceptions, this is how they work:

Imagine a flight with a total of 100 seats

• First 20 seats sold: Lowest overall price
• Next 20 seats sold: Price goes up by 25%
• Next 20 seats sold: Price goes up by 25% more
• Next 20 seats sold: Price goes up by 25% more
• Last 20 seats sold: Price goes up to maximum

Now, the number of seats in each tier, the number of tiers, and the amount the fare rises to in each next tier is different for each airline, based on an algorithm that is projected to yield the highest total income for the entire flight. But this general pattern is the same for virtually every low-cost airline, so you need to use a strategy based on this.

How to get the best fare without booking insanely early

Since very few of us are willing or able to buy an airline ticket 6 to 11 months in advance, we are usually stuck with a screen-full of options that are more expensive than we’d hoped. Still, as long as you know how it works, you can save money.

Once you know how the prices on the screen all relate to each other, it becomes quite easy to figure out when you should buy or if you can still wait and get the same fare. The patterns are very predictable so you can be confident that you are buying at just the right time.

Step 1: Determine how often the airline flies that route

It’s usually best to start on a meta-search site like kayak.com or momondo.com, although a few low-cost carriers don’t appear on those sites so you should also check whichbudget.com if you are not sure of the low-cost options for that route. Once you’ve determined which low-cost airline likely offers the cheapest tickets, it’s usually easiest to go directly to its own official website for the most flexibility.

• How many flights per day on that route?
• How many flights per week on that route?

Most low-cost airlines have several flights per day on each route that they cover, and the busiest routes might have as many as 12 flights per day. In these cases it’s easy to figure out how many tickets have been purchased for each one just by looking at the current price. But if a route only goes once per day, you’ll have to scan the current prices for the whole week to figure out how soon you should buy.

For popular routes with multiple flights per day

Example: Southwest Airlines from Los Angeles to Las Vegas

Notice on the chart below that Southwest has 11 flights every day from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. They also have 5 tiers of prices (ignore everything but the far-right column): $63, $90, $106, $127, and $146. If you’d have searched flights on this day when they went on sale 6 months ago, they ALL would have been $63.

Just to show you, below is a shot of Southwest Airline’s flights on the same route if you are booking a few months out. They’ve evidently raised the base far from $63 to $66, but you can see that EVERY flight starts out at the same price.

It’s easy to notice which flight times are more popular than others. The top chart is for Friday flights, when tens of thousands of Californians are planning on descending on Vegas for the weekend. The early-morning and late-evening flights are usually the last to fill up, and the flights with the most convenient daytime departure times go first.

Looking at the set of prices, we would expect both of those $106 flights to jump up to the $127 price level soon because the flights just before and just after are already at that level. The $127 flight at 11:10am is probably going to be the next one to jump to $146 when a few more seats are sold, so that’s another one to buy soon if you think it’s a fair price.

On the other hand, if you see 4 flights in a row at the same price, and any of them would work for you, then you can probably wait longer to book. None of them will go down in price, but they’ll probably jump up to the next price level one at a time, so you can see when the last one or two are still available at the lower fare.

For less popular routes with only one flight per day

Example: easyJet from London to Reykjavik

This is an example of a chart on a less popular route, which you can see goes once per day, six days per week. The cheapest fare on the page is for a Wednesday, while the most expensive fares are the ones on Fridays, Sundays, and Mondays. These prices aren’t just higher because they are around the weekend, it’s because they already have the most seats sold at lower prices.

Easyjet uses many more pricing tiers on these flights, but they still jump up only when a certain number of seats have been sold at the lower price. The strategy here is to look at the fares for the days just before and after the one you are interested in. The greater the difference in fares, the better chance that the lower one is close to jumping up to the next price tier.

Looking at the 3rd week on the chart, you can see that all the flights are close to the same price. You can probably wait awhile longer before they’ll become as expensive as the week before (which also happens to be the week just before Easter this year). But you can see in the first week on the grid there is a difference of £52 between the Monday flight and the Tuesday flight. If I am able to go on Tuesday then I’d buy that ticket right away because the price could go up at any minute.

The bottom line on getting the lowest fare possible

Once you know how low-cost airlines set and raise their fares, it’s easier to determine when you should buy to lock in the lowest possible price.

• Low-cost airlines start with their lowest prices and raise them as seats are sold
• Check the fares on the flights just before and just after the one you prefer
• If the difference in price is small, you can probably wait
• If the flights just before and after have much higher prices, buy now because yours will go up soon.

Photo credit: terraplanner on Flickr

The post Low-cost airlines: How to get the cheapest fare possible appeared first on Price of Travel.

The Italian pasta giant has distanced itself from the anti-gay remarks made by its chairman with copious apologies and extensive community outreach, not to mention the launch of some kind of futuristic 3-D pasta-printing gizmo and the opening of Academia Barilla, a casual lunch spot in midtown serving fresh pastas. Executives say the cafeteria-style dining room is Barilla's bid to open the "Italian version of Chipotle," which doesn't mean that they'll be serving penne-à-la-vodka-stuffed burritos, though the kids would love that. The three-month-old restaurant is already eyeing locations in Herald Square and Bryant Park. [WSJ, Related]

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: al dente, barilla, pasta

[Photograph: Robyn Lee]

In the past few years, "everything" has grown from a bagel topping to a spice blend all its own, and we're pleased as punch about the whole development. At Lock Yard, a new craft beer and sausage bar in Bay Ridge, everything spice gets put to noble use in a great bar snack: fried pickles.

Everything Fried Pickles ($5) come four or five to an order, long salty spears that retain some snap. They're coated in a thin, craggly batter that mostly serves to adhere the mix of salt, sesame, garlic, poppy, and onion to the pickles. Bite past that substantial crunch and you'll hit a shot of pickle juice. Does it need anything else? Cream cheese, of course, provided for dipping on the side.

About the author: Max Falkowitz is the New York editor and ice cream maker in residence at Serious Eats. You can follow him on Twitter at @maxfalkowitz.

Actor Kristian Nairn, who plays Bran Stark's hulking protector, Hodor, in Game of Thrones, has never made a secret of his sexuality. He's been looking for an opening to publicly announce he's gay, and now he's finally found one.

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Those ducks hanging in the windows of Chinatown restaurants may look questionable, but after years of fining restaurants to no avail, the DOH actually conducted a study on the safety of the meat several years ago. It determined that the way the ducks are cooked is, as one former inspector put it, "pretty much foolproof," and now allows restaurants to keep them hanging for four hours after cooking. Restaurants do, however, have to navigate some bureaucracy to prove they're doing it right. [Open City]