Gotham Gal

Hudson Clearwater

This particular restaurant, Hudson Clearwater, has been a little bit under the radar.  It isn't the easiest to find.  Located at 447 Hudson which is a non-descript building with grey curtains and no entrance.  You need to walk around the corner and enter through a gate and then you find yourself thrilled that you found the place. 

In the back, where you enter, is a beautiful garden.  A set of stairs walk up to the restaurant where there is a bar and a bunch of seats and an open kitchen and below that is another seating area.  The place was hopping the other night and not an empty seat in the house. 

They have a range of cocktails to start.  I am generally not a cocktail girl but tonight I was game.  I went with an Antique Kir which is made of pisco, elderflower liquer, sparkling chardonnay, blueberries and a lemon twist.  The taste reminded me of the upscale Polynesian restaurants I used to go to in Georgetown during high school, where they wouldn't card me, and we would eat pupu platters and drink yummy cocktails.  Actually, quite delicious and refreshing.  Mine is the tall yellow one.  The others are a Lolita and I believe a Sazerac.

I had the special appetizer that night.  A mixed green salad served with grilled calamari.  Quite flavorful, a little heavy handed on the vinegarette but just tasty. 

I tasted my friends lemon-cured duck leg with pickled jalpenos and mustard greens.  This was outrageous.  Delicious. 

Also tasted the brook trout ratatouille tart.  Interesting savory tart.  Quite good and a beautiful presentation.

For dinner I had the duck.  A crispy sliced duck breast served with marinated rainbow chard and tarragon roasted potatoes.  I am not a huge fan of tarragon but the duck was perfect. 

Others had the Striped bass with an almond lime pesto.

And pea risotto with asparagus and bok choy.  The color alone is a reason to try.  All good.

On the side we had roasted cherry tomatoes and a goat cheese sabayon.

Marinated asparagus with a farmers cheese. 

The desserts were amazing.  Dark chocolate and cherry ganache with a streusel crumble and fresh fruit.  Wow. 

The lemon bar with a graham crust, fig compote and lemon creme fraiche made me wonder who the hell the pastry chef was.  Amazing.

The chef is Wes Long.  The food is delicious.  The vibe is great.  The service is a tad slow but regardless I am looking forward to my next visit. 

Lisa Stone, Blogher, Woman Entrepreneur

Of course I knew about Blogher, how could I not?  I have been watching them grow over the past six years.  It is surprising that it took this long before I finally got to sit down with Lisa Stone, one of the founders, last week for the first time as our one degree of separation is pretty small. 

Lisa was raised in Missoula, Montana that had a population of about 40,000 when she was growing up.    Like many communities, the population has grown and Missoula is much different now.  As Lisa put it, the biggest export out of Montana is probably the youth.  She left herself and shocked her family by getting into Wellesley College one of the most prestigious womens colleges in the country. 

While she was in college, she went to visit her sister at Stanford University and realized that she was much more suited to the West coast.  After graduating, she moved to the Bay area and has yet to leave except for a short hiatus.  She got a job at a management consulting company working in fuel futures.  Learning about fuel and the areas of Europe that she was focused on lit an interest in her to become a journalist. 

She left consulting and found herself at the Oakland Tribune.  At the Tribune she wrote and broke a series of articles about the FAA's lack of being prepared for an emergency.  This got on CNN's radar and they recruited Lisa to come work for them.  She was four months pregnant and Mark Carter hired her at CNN.  Carter was the chief strategist for CNN at that point and is now the Executive Director of the Committee of Concerned Journalists.  Lisa was at CNN when the Time Warner merger happened and everything changed.

Lisa was 30 years old, had been married eight years and had a one year old.  She left CNN and her marriage and went online.  She bartered her skills to work at Webtv so she could learn.  Lisa ended up at Woman.com where she launched a variety of sites from fun to serious.  Then Woman.com was bought by iVillage.com  The whole woman's space was trying to find their place and roll-ups were happening in all verticals.  I lived through that era too. 

It was 2001 and Lisa became a Neiman Fellow at Harvard where they had yet to have an internet journalist accepted into the program.   She spent the first six months of the program at MIT watching games and the second half at Harvard analyzing business models to leverage this new tech world. 

Once the year ended she returned to the Bay area.  Lisa started working in social media took a job with Law.com where she developed a sponsored network that got really high cpm's.  On the side she was blogging for the LATimes so she could keep honing her journalism skills.  People kept asking her at this point, it was 2004/5, where do all the woman blog?  So in 2005, Lisa and her two partners who she met through the internet world, Elisa Camahort Page and Jory Des Jardins, launched Blogher. 

I love the story of how the name came to be.  Lisa was working for Jennifer Collins at Law.com.  She told Jennifer what she was going to create a site dedicated to a community of women that would be a place where women could publish/blog.  They were struggling with the name.  Sheblogs?  Jennifer, in one second, said Blogher.  And so Blogher was born. 

In 2011, Blogher is the fifth largest women's network.  They get 12-26 unique visitors a month depending on which analytic site you believe (Nielsen of Comscore).  My gut is that is it somewhere in between.  They are creating a new way for women to write and get paid for their influence and words.  The verticals are wide from Green to Food to New Media to Money, Sports and Style.  Blogher puts on conferences too. 

I loved talking with Lisa.  We could have talked about women and business for hours on end.  It is always great to meet other women who are trying to change the world for women entrepreneurs.  If you haven't checked out Blogher, get on line and take a look.  A growing community where women speak their minds on a daily basis. 

A night of culture in the Hamptons

Last night before we went to a party in Napeague, on the fogged-in beach, Fred and I made our way to three different art openings.  There are so many artists that live on the east end of Long Island.  An interesting group of people at the openings.  It is such a mixture of people from all over out here, particularly in the summer, and the art world is just one small piece. 

We began at the Drawing Room.  A great space where we have seen many exhibits.  Simple white walls with big windows so natural light is abundant in two rooms.  I really liked this exhibit and might have to buy a piece.  The artist is Laurie Lambrecht.  She took photos of Roy Lichtenstein in his studio.  I have always had a huge love for Lichtenstien's work.  When I was on my junior year abroad in London, I went to see an exhibit of his work at the Tate.  I was blown away.  That exhibit opened my eyes to the world of modern art and in turn my love for art. Here is my favorite piece in the exhibit.

This is another piece of Lichtenstein working on a piece.

Then we walked over to the Eric Firestone gallery to see a group show called Domestic Goods curated by Ryan Wallace.  A real mix of artists from the East End.  Matt Satz, who we have collected over the years, has a piece in this exhibit.  I particularly liked this Globe from the artist Chris Duncan.

We still had a little time to kill so we drove over to The Fireplace Project on Fireplace Springs Road.  I have always loved this small barn.  We saw a great exhibit of Eric Freemans work there a few years back.  This particular exhibit did not rock my world.  Out there, graphic and sexual.  Different strokes.  This sculpture kind of summed up the exhibit for me.

Off to the party, a nice kick off to begin the summer.  I am a little flipped out by how incredibly crowded it is out here this year.  I will be holing up for the most of the summer at my house, cooking, relaxing and staying away from the crowds. 

 

The Hundred-Foot Journey

I had lunch with a friend about a week ago and she handed me the debut novel called  The Hundred-Foot Journey by Richard C. Morais.  She loved it so much that she brought me a copy and said I had to read it.  Needless to say, I was totally intrigued. 

I picked up the book on Tuesday night after hunkering down for the evening.  I closed my eyes after I read the last page and closed the book.  What a wonderful book. 

This book is about food, family and life.  It begins in India and grabs our senses.  We follow the family moving from India to London and then to a small village in the French Alps.  They have always been in the restaurant business.  They open up a restaurant in the French Alps across the street from a Michelin rated restaurant who is aghast at having an Indian restaurant across the street yet the son is an incredible cook.  Like a perfect ear, he has the perfect palate.  Tensions arise but in the end this Michelin rated chef helps this young man from India rise to the top of the food chain in Paris.

It is a wonderful journey through food and culture.  What I also loved is how the author wove real life stories through the novel.  Stories that actually happened in the food world in Paris.

A beautiful book.  If you love food, it is a must read. 

Entrepreneurial Class at CUNY

I was thrilled to be able to judge the final presentations at the Entrepreneurial Journalism class at CUNY that is headed up by the one and only Jeff Jarvis.  Not only was it an impressive group of people but I got to do it with my husband, Fred.  First time we got to do something like this together.  Of course, we had to agree on everything....only kidding. 

Six of the presentations were entrepreneurial platforms and hopefully disruptive businesses and the other three were more journalistic content using the web as a platform.  I will give a quick run down of what we saw. 

Pique.  This was a site geared towards the celebrities and their fashion.  Think if you were sitting on your couch with some friends watching the Oscars and you could start to comment on the clothes, bring in feeds, talk to friends elsewhere, pull items you liked and put them in a box to find out later where to get them.  I liked this business.   A little bit like Pinterest meets People magazine.

Silly Parents.  There are local communities for parents to share information.  Silly Parents would duplicate that in other areas giving information from what to do, where school is good, etc.  Didn't love this business and felt alot of what he was trying to provide was already been done on a variety of other sites.

Instablatt   Live photos of breaking news by eyewitnesses that is curated from journalists on the ground.  Think of live twitter feeds, on your computer or handheld with photos as they are happening by an elite group of journalists who are crowd sourcing.  It wasn't that flushed out but I thought there was something there.

Gelotone  Personalized music news about your favorites bands including a discovery platform.  Think of Spin magazine but better on line.  Opportunities down the line to follow your favorite theater actor, etc.

Gourmeet   Love the name.  A place where you can offer to share a home cooked meal at home and people would sign up to attend and pay a small fee.  Think Meetup for home cooked diners.  I could see this working with young chefs or pop-ups. 

Linktamer  Personal curation of your news feed.  This is being done in many places so they would really have to come up with something so special that they would beat out the rest in this race.

Beyond Brussels  Writing and aggregating information for the European community about what is happening in Brussels in regards to the EU as much of that coverage has been cut out of the newsworlds budget. 

Cimmaron  A media site that highlights innovative alternative positive news in the third world.  I really like the concept.  One of the reasons I read Monocle is that I want to know what is happening in areas around the globe that I might not get a newsfeed about on a daily basis.  We rarely see the bright spots coming out of third world countries and perhaps if we saw more of that we would find more people investing in these areas. 

Talk Cameroon   Internet news for Cameroon on the political landscape and economy.  A country of people who need to get out from underneath a dictator as journalists are being beaten and living under death threats.  How to change that from outside the country and make that information available to the world. 

Some of these businesses might have very long legs others may not.  Regardless, each presentation was well done and thought out.  Impressive group and glad to know they have Jeff Jarvis looking out for them. The added bonus is that they are all trying to make their dreams come true in NYC.  BTW, they all used Prezi for their presentations. 

 

Torrisi

The first time I went to Torrisi, I was hooked.  I have been back several times but only for lunch.  I finally went for dinner this past weekend.  Keep in mind no reservations but well worth waiting. 

The whole concept of the restaurant is brilliant.  Small and intimate and what they serve that day is what they serve.  I have always been a fan of that.  Everyone in the restaurant is eating the same thing and there is no doubt that each dish is prepared to perfection because there are not a variety of options.  I also love the lace curtains on the windows that is reminiscent of the old school Italian restaurants in NYC from years ago but what is inside is a very modern take on old style Italian cooking.  Clever. 

The starters are a mixture of antipasti's for the table to share.  This is a warm mozzarella made with a cream base and a little olive oil over the top.  On the side is garlic bread.  I admit that I did not touch the garlic bread but asked for some bread with nothing on it.  Truth is the mozzarella was so delicious that it was perfect by itself. 

This is a warm seafood salad.  I really liked this too.  A mixture of seafood in a warm vinaigrette served over lettuce.  Wonderful.

A few people didn't want to try this but to me this particular dish is what is so interested about the new breed of chefs.  April Bloomfield starting doing this and for that matter so did Mario Batali.  Taking pieces of meat that are generally not used, which make them inexpensive, and creating delicious dishes.  Lamb Tongue Gyro is the name of this dish.  Thinly sliced tongue with a touch of spicy yogurt and roasted vegetables.  A modern twist on the gyro. 

These crispy spring onions were fantastic.  Small spring onions covered in panko and then deep fried with a smoky sour cream to dip them into.  Wow.

This was a treat.  Small radishes with a sauce on the side for dipping.  The sauce was a thick consistency with shaved fish roe.  Quite delicious and the radishes must have been pulled from the ground that morning.  Even the green tops were good. 

Classic italian restaurants always serve a pasta course.  Tonight was ricotta gnocchi with sauteed ramps.  These might have been the lightest melt in your mouth gnocchi I have had in a very long time.  Buttery, soft, flavorful, just a small incredible explosion in your mouth. 

For dinner, there were three options.  Everyone orders their own main course but we decided to split everything.  This was the fish.  Poached black sea bass with pickles green tomatoes, olives and roasted sliced potatoes.

Deviled chicken.  A spicy paprika chicken breast pounded and pan fried over polenta topped with greens.  Very nice.  I love chicken. 

The special that evening was a short rib for two.  Roasted, taken off the bone and then sliced and served over the bone.  Really good and different as short ribs are usually braised. 

Always nice to have a palate cleanser.  Grapefruit ice. 

I liked the idea of a cookie plate for dessert.  Small cannolis filled with cream. Tiny cream puffs and the filling had a hint of bourbon. Rainbow cookies were beautiful with a pistachio flavor. Tiny tarts with a sunchoke savory tastiy filling.  My favorite was the sugar cookie topped with celery salt.  So clever. The mixture of savory salt and sugar just worked.

A great night.  I can hardly wait to go back.

 

Even the art world is on the Women theme

Harris Lieberman is a gallery in Chelsea having just moved from west of Soho.  The people behind the gallery are friends of mine.  Two super smart married people with two children who love the art and their knowledge of this space is pretty incredible.  I have pushed them to twitter and tumblr, something that is not so matter of fact in the art world.  My other advice has been to post the actual prices on line.  I hope that the art world moves that way.  I want to be able to search the net and discover art and know how much it costs.  Perhaps that would give me more of an impetous to get in touch with the gallery. 

Currently Harris Lieberman is a raw space on the ground floor of 508 West 26th street.  The show up is a painting show where the work is all by women artists.  Perhaps even the art world is on the women theme these days.  Women are shaking it up everywhere.  Harris Lieberman does not represent all these women but through other galleries and people they were able to curate this show.

These are my favorites.  Cecily Brown, This is a Land of Pure Delight, 2011

Rebecca Morris, 2009

Keltie Ferris, 2011

Kristin Baker, Global Creep, Flat Seep, I Heart S.P., Turner-in, 2011

The show is up until June 4th.

Smorgasburg, the ever expanding Brooklyn Flea

I was fortunate enough to sit next to John Butler who is the brains and man behind Brownstoner at an event we both judged for ITP.  Not only did he start Brownstoner, John teamed up with Eric Demby and they are co-founders of the Brooklyn Flea.  An umbrella of the weekly market places around Brooklyn and they just added another addition to their every growing empire called Smorgasburg (nice play on the word).  As Brooklyn continues to be the coolest borough in New York they have curated a variety of communal low-key events for people to congregate at while eating and making a few purchases at every weekend.  They have also helped the economies of many food vendors by giving them a further weekly reach into the mouths of people.  A win win for everyone including Brooklyn. It is a re-do of the town square.

We started our day this past Saturday at Smorgasburg.  The first of this event.  Located in Williamsburg, on the waterfront, which is absolutely beautiful.  The good news for this area which is continuing to transform is that there will be a ferry service to the mainland (per se) starting this week.  For all those living the life in Brooklyn but have to make their way into Manhattan daily to work, this is a life changer.  The population has grown tremendously but the transportation has not made that leap.  This will be huge. 

After circling the event we did try a few things.  There are some areas that got seriously log-jammed and it would be worth making a shift next weekend on where each vendor resides.  Putting the high traffic savory booths next to some of the product driven booths will make for better flow and probably more purchases. 

Here is the sausage stand.  I would love to get one of these grills for my house.  Serious line here.

I love that Kickstarter has a booth.

What's a food fair without Porchetta?

Thrilled to see Hot Bread Kitchen there.

Of course elated to see Ricks Picks too.  The schtickle is a big win at this event.

Nice area for sitting. 

Lobster roll and Maine root beer from the Red Hook Lobster truck.  Really good.  Nice toasted hot dog bun.

I am a huge fan of the frozen banana dipped in chocolate.  Remember them as a kid on Catalina Island in California.  We had one dipped in chocolate and covered with sea salt and crushed almonds.  Yum.

Worth getting out there on a Saturday or any of the weekly events that the Brooklyn Flea puts on. 

 

 

Emily McKhann, The Motherhood, Woman Entrepreneur

I met Emily a few years back and every time I see her, we seem to talk forever.  She is charming, engaging, interesting and super smart.  I wanted to piece together how she got to the launching of the Motherhood.  We finally got together this past week for breakfast.  Definitely not enough time to talk but that always seems the case when we get going. 

Emily grew up in Baltimore.  A middle child between two older brothers and two younger brothers.  An interesting spot as someone pointed out to her once that she is actually a single child because being the only girl in the family is an interesting dynamic when there are four other boys.  She grew up traveling.  Her family eked out every day they could to explore and live in different places.  They would leave the minute school ended and return the day before.  Her Grandparents were in the foreign service and so that desire to see the world continued for her parents.  That exploration definitely made an impact on Emily.

Emily went to Kenyon College.  She spent ther junior year in Tel Aviv working for the embassy where she arrived about a week before the 1982 Lebanon war.  Bombs were literally bursting in the air but she stayed put and finished her year making it an incredible experience to say the least. 

After graduating from college, she moved to Japan for a year.  Her honors professor told her about a program that had just been launched called the Mombusho fellows, now called the Jet Program.  You are hired by the Japanese Department of Education which is located in Tokyo.  Taking English for eight years was part of the Japanese curriculum and although the kids could read and write English beautifully they couldn't speak it.  This program was designed to bring in American college graduates for a year to help pivot the program so that the Japanese students would be able to converse in English.  Emily was sent to islands in Japan that had never seen an American before or anyone outside their community.  The program has changed over the years but this was the original one and she was there in 1983/1984. 

She returned to the states and was hired by a PR firm located in DC.  She lived there a few years and then was moved to Dallas where she opened up their offices.  Eight years of corporate PR.  What came out of this job were a variety of relationships.  She struck up a friendship with the CEO of Frito Lay who was involved in the Dallas International Group.  The idea was to make Dallas a more international city.  This was in the early 90's.  Emily became part of that group which was an entrepreneurial experience.  She was involved by being the executive director of this economic development platform.

Dinkins was made the mayor of NYC and they were looking for someone to head up the International initiative in NYC too.  Her name came up as the perfect person to becoming the acting Commissioner for the United Nations and Consulate Corp.

All interesting jobs but it was time to go out on her own.  Emily launched the McKhann Group and many of her past clients came to her.  Her first hire was Cooper Munroe who eventually becomes her partners in The Motherhood. 

Emily's best friend was a woman name Erin Kramp.  Erin introduced Emily to her husband Andy.  Such a good friend that both of them were dating someone else and she told each of them that they should not be dating those people but should meet each other.  Emily gets married and is going through infertility hell and then Erin gets cancer.  She took a step back as life had just changed.  She and Erin wrote a book together called Living with the End in Mind.  They were on Oprah and the book was a huge success but in the end she lost her best friend.  She realized that life is too short and she needed to do something meaningful.  To start, she decided to start focusing on herself by taking half an hour a day just to do her own thing guilt free  It wasn't easy but it was very instructive.  Losing her friend was life changing.  Her thoughts were as a woman we take care of everyone else and it was time to take a step back and look at the bigger scheme. 

Cooper and Emily started a blog called Been There.  They were one of the first women bloggers.  It was 2004.  Funny enough Emily remembers reading my blog and finding me because I was one of the only women blogging too.  They were loving Been There and then in 2005 their platform became something else because of Katrina.  They were both so upset about what was happening in New Orleans they reached out to their readers and asked them to help people by sending packages to temporary addresses, speaking to other women on the ground who needed certain things.  Their site became viral.  Mothers connecting to Mothers around an epic tragedy.  A group in Chicago contacted them and had so many items show up in their front lawn to bring down to Louisiana that they had to hire an 18-wheeler to bring the goods down and FEMA actually gave them a special compensation for their costs.  Beauty salons that were destroyed were sent old equipment from beauty salons that had just renovated, hundreds of Macs were sent and more.  Bush got on air and said that efforts were stalled but they weren't in Emily's world. 

What they were seeing is that the Internet was changing the way that people connect to each other.  The web creates a one on one connection with individuals around niche events or even large events.  Originally Emily and Cooper wanted to write an interactive book to be the platform launching a chapter a month and they still might but it was the Motherhood where they then channeled their energies.  The Motherhood is where community comes first and this particular community is around women. 

Emily has a serious amount of energy and bravado.  She has found a place where she can seriously make a difference. Emily has shown us that one of the beautiful things about being an entrepreneur, a mother and woman is that life is ever evolving and keep your eyes open to that evolution. She took lemons and made lemonade. The Motherhood is a place where life chats happen around serious conversations that women want to dive into and share with others from kids with allergies to recipes to jobs to ideas.  Look for the Motherhood to be bigger and bolder in the months go come. 

Midnight In Paris

I rarely write anything on movies but I can't help myself on this one.  Midnight in Paris is Woody Allen's latest film.  Over the past few years I have not really enjoyed his films but this one was like a return to the old Woody Allen.  It was obvious from the line last night waiting to get in to the film that I was not the only other New Yorker excited about this. 

He took Paris, instead of NYC, as the location.  As he has had a love affair with NYC through film for many years he has now done the same thing with Paris.  But the best part is Owen WIlson.  He has embodied Woody Allen.  Woody used to play himself as the title role in his films but this time has used Owen Wilson to be him.  He is fantastic.  You are watching Woody Allen of the past being recreated through Owen Wilson. 

Over the course of the film, Owen Wilson, who is a writer, returns to Paris in the 20's after the clock strikes midnight.  He meets and converses with all the significant writers and artists of those times.  Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Dali, etc.  During the day, he is living in the present with his fiance and her parents wondering if this is making him happy.  Embrace the day not the past is the theme here as well as do something that makes you happy. 

We walked out of the movie smiling and wandered over to a french bistro, Jean Claude on Sullivan street, for dinner.  Had to stay in the moment. 

Looking forward to spending some time in Paris this summer!