Karen Resta

Since 1904, Ferdinando’s Focacceria Has Kept Sicilian Cuisine Alive in Brooklyn
By Karen Resta| October 23, 2019
Here, Sicilian-American tradition stays alive where three gentrifying neighborhoods meet.

Ian Purkayastha is a wild foods expert, sourcer and forager and the founder of Long Island City’s Regalis Foods, one of the most respected and well-known wild food purveyors in the country.
His wild foods obsession began at 15, while mushroom foraging with his uncle in Arkansas. I chatted with Purkayastha to find out more about his penchant for wild and rare foods.
Tell us about the challenges and boons of selling truffles for a living.
Foraging with my uncle is what prompted me to start sell...

Americans really love hummus, and our love is growing in leaps and bounds: 20 years ago sales of ready-made hummus were at $5 million annually. Today, sales hit $725 million per year. We love hummus in infinite variation—as a dip, in a sandwich, or even as a snack bought at the airport before a flight.This love is so strong that we decided to take a look at the oldest hummus recipe in the world.
Nawal Nasrallah, an award-winning researcher, food writer and author of “Delights from the Garden ...

It’s not that I don’t like avocado toast and three-foot high milkshakes topped with every kind of cookie and candy known to man—I do. But I’ve become hooked on FX network’s series “Trust”—the story of John Paul Getty III’s kidnapping in 1973—and it’s making me want to take a seat at a long elegant table set with fine linen, candelabra, and fresh flowers, ready to dine on rare and magnificent foods after ever-so-politely using my finger bowl.

There’s something else about the cuisine of NOLA that makes it stand above the crowd: the fact that the entire “cuisine” is recognizable—not just a dish or two, which is more commonplace—as being native to a city in the United States. We talked to Liz Williams, founder of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum in New Orleans, native New Orleanian and author of the award-winning book “New Orleans–A Food Biography” about this exceptional cuisine.

"C'mon in, take your clothes off, have a drink, what can I bring you to eat?”
When’s the last time you heard that? If you’re one of the growing crowd who love dining naked (in public), there’s a good chance you’ve had the opportunity to hear it more in the past few years than ever before. Dining in the buff—an experience reserved for nudist colonies, special at-home dinners, or even just standing over the sink alone while eating a ripe mango—is going mainstream.

It’s not just “business as usual” this Easter for some innovative chefs. Instead of accepting that the holiday should be celebrated with the same old Easter egg—you know, the one supposedly from a chicken that’s carried around and dropped off by a rabbit—they’ve decided to change all that. The new Easter egg is the dragon egg.

Atlanta is sophisticated. The best of the South is here in terms of food, drink, chefs, and hospitality, but Atlanta also remembers its heritage, even when it comes to booze. You don’t have to look far to meet someone whose Pappy has a still somewhere in the back of the house that’s been passed down through generations. But in today’s world, moonshine isn’t just staying down on the farm, it’s moved right into the city.

Food has always been used in times of trouble as a way to heal, but can the act of sharing a meal bring liberals and conservatives together for conversations leading to better cooperation?

As with all things Southern, there’s more to breakfast than meets the eye. We’ve taken a look beyond the icons of sausage biscuit, red-eye gravy, and grits to find other breakfasts Southerners enjoy. Each one of these breakfasts has a historic and cultural meaning, and each is found in the wide variety of foodways that live side-by-side in the South. Some of these breakfasts are rich and sophisticated, others are born of hunger and need. And a few, perhaps, are just plain quirky.

Tea in Paris? Mais oui! The tea houses of Paris take many shapes but each has its own particularly Parisian charm. Here’s our list of top five places for tea in Paris where imbibing becomes a chic, affordable luxury.

Salt & Bone in Astoria revives the ancient tradition of cooking with smoke.

If you love Irish ale, Italian pasta, Dutch-inspired ice cream, giant celebrity-face cookies, Japanese tea ceremonies, Korean honey butter chips, Venezuelan arepas, omakase sushi, chic cakes, avocado toast, plant-based menus, rum bars, jerk chicken and callaloo, you can enjoy them all on East 7th Street. Here, our guide to a one-block staycation.

Paris has been central to the art of perfume-making since Catherine de Medici first exported perfumes from Italy to France in the 1500s. With the assistance of Louis XV, who loved perfume so much his court was called “la cour parfumée,” and Madame de Pompadour, who spent over 500 livres ($63,500) annually on scents and who used scent not only for herself but also on her fans and the furniture in her apartments, Paris became the place to be for Europe’s top parfumiers.
In today’s Paris, you ca...

Marco Maccione is a little out of breath when he answers the phone. With good reason: He’s in the middle of managing the packing and moving of all the parts of his family’s well-known NYC fine dining restaurant. Sirio Macchioni’s Le Cirque has been an important part of the city’s uptown restaurant scene for 43 years now, opening first in 1974 at The Mayfair Hotel on East 65th Street; then at The Palace Hotel in 1997; then at The Bloomberg Tower on East 58th Street in 2006.