Danny Meyer's beloved Tabla closed a few months ago after twelve years in business. And although I wish the Library had more Tabla menus than the small handful from 2007, I am pleased that one of them includes Chef Floyd Cardoz's Unleavened Bread Bar menu, created for Passover week.
I'm not sure when restaurants began to offer meals catering to the Passover crowd; most kosher restaurants close for the duration of the holiday because a thorough cleaning of any leavened bread product (biur chametz) is a serious chore, and add to that the requirement to use different pots, pans, plates, etc. and you've got a lot of work on your hands, especially for a restaurant.
Non-kosher restaurants don't have those restrictions, so they can offer seders and Passover meals to anyone interested. In New York this year, there are quite a few seders taking place: Savoy in SoHo, Capsouto Freres in Tribeca, JoeDoe in the East Village, Sammy's Roumanian on the Lower East Side, and Julian Medina's Toloache, Yerba Buena, and Yerba Buena Perry. And Joan Nathan writes about others joining the trend in the Times this week.
I'll be contacting the above restaurants to add their menus to our Passover collection, and if anyone is attending a seder, or simply dining, at a Passover-friendly restaurant this week, please let me know.
But does the entire restaurant sing Chad Gadya after dinner?
ReplyDeleteHi!
ReplyDeleteI saw that you were the project curator for What's on the Menu? at the New York Public Library. I think that is amazing. I was looking into signing up to help transcribe, but I also wanted to ask how you got into a career like yours. When I was younger I wanted to be a curator and now I am a pastry cook, but to combine the two somehow was something I searched for and could never find. Now here you are kind of doing just that. It's really great. I'd love to chat with you about doing something similar. I know this is completely random, but if you wouldn't mind emailing me back...
I'd love to hear from you.
Emily