The Times recently did a piece on Crazy Legs’ cooking webcast.

Frank Bruni reviews Gabrielle Hamilton’s new memoir:

After much anticipation, the inevitable memoir has arrived. “Blood, Bones and Butter” traces nearly all of Hamilton’s life and career, from an unmoored childhood through her triumph at Prune, which didn’t end the search for a sense of place and peace that is the overarching theme of this autobiography, as of so many others. It’s a story of hungers specific and vague, conquered and unappeasable, and what it lacks in urgency (and even, on occasion, forthrightness) it makes up for in the shimmer of Hamilton’s best writing.

Recalling her mother’s penchant for heavy eyeliner, she flashes back to “the smell of the sulfur every morning as she lit a match to warm the tip of her black wax pencil.” Hamilton invokes the “voluptuous blanket of summer night humidity,” captures the tantalizing promise of delicate ravioli by observing that “you could see the herbs and the ricotta through the dough, like a woman behind a shower curtain,” and compares breast feeding to being cannibalized, “not in huge monster-gore chunks, but like a legion of soft, benign caterpillars makes lace of a leaf.”

The description of the ravioli is great. I’ve never been to Hamilton’s restaurant, Prune, but it sounds tempting.

The wife and I took a ride up to Port Chester this afternoon to check out the Mario Batali-Joe Bastianich food jernt, the Tarry Market.

Nice place. Not cheap, but no surprise there, right?

Then we stopped in for a bite next door at the Tarry Lodge:

Artichokes with mint.

Pizza with Guanciale, black truffles and a fried egg. Ka-Boom.

Dig this long, engaging profile of April Bloomfield in the New Yorker.

[Photo Credit: The Lunch Break Chronicles]

Frank Bruni on eating in the City of Angels:

Sure, New York also has a bit of everything, or rather a lot of everything. But its crowdedness and competitiveness make it the Everest to L.A.’s Kilimanjaro: you practically need a Sherpa to tackle New York effectively, and you just might lose a digit or limb. L.A. is more reasonably scaled, with the newest, hottest restaurants less likely to book up a solid month in advance. When a friend and I dropped in — at the height of lunch hour, no less — to one of the four branches of Umami Burger, the cult favorite of the city’s ground-beef set, we were seated immediately, in comfy chairs at a big table that could have accommodated four. In contrast, almost any mealtime visit to any location of New York’s Shake Shack involves a significant stretch of time — 20 minutes isn’t exceptional — on a serpentine line. That’s for counter service. At Umami, someone actually waits on you.

The Umami story demonstrates the enterprise and speed with which L.A.’s restaurateurs are tackling trends. When Adam Fleischman, its principal owner, opened the first Umami in Mid-Wilshire in January 2009, he was entering an arena brimming with competitors, each with fanatical adherents. There was Father’s Office, with its unyielding commandment that arugula and caramelized onions should dress every patty. There was 8 oz. Burger Bar, which permitted free will. And there was of course In-N-Out, less restaurant than fast-food franchise but perhaps the earliest architect of the bridge between McDonald’s and self-regarding gourmands.

Fleischman had a hook that sagely took into account the self-consciously erudite posturing of so many food enthusiasts today. ‘‘I wanted to do something with umami,’’ he says, referring to the so-called fifth taste (after sweet, salty, sour and bitter), which is vaguely described as ‘‘savoriness’’ and until recent years wasn’t universally accepted as an actual, definable trait. So each of the burgers at Umami is constructed with an emphasis on ingredients thought to be catalysts for umami. The caramelized onions on the signature burger are seasoned with star anise ‘‘because it’s an umami booster,’’ Fleischman says. The burger is also dressed with sautéed shiitake mushrooms, Parmesan cheese and oven-dried tomatoes, all thought to be umami bombs.

We Love L.A.!

[Photo Credit: Alex Eats World, Signature L.A. Direct]

A friend just got me “Ad Hoc at Home,” by Thomas Keller.

I’m stoaked.

[Photo Credit: Jun-Blog]

Two cool NYC food cats:

I’ve had these at Ssam and one cold day this winter I’m a try ’em at home.

Dig the recipe. I love that he uses cilantro stems. Why not, right? And the mint really makes it sing.

Deconstruction fun.

By Marina Ekroos.

Peace to Saveur for the link.

Master Class in Session…

Dig this New York Magazine profile on April Bloomfield, the chef behind The Spotted Pig and The Breslin:

Bloomfield had planned to be a policewoman in Birmingham, England, until she didn’t get her application in on time. Thanks to that bit of tardiness, she instead decided to follow her two sisters into cooking, working her way up the line in restaurants around London. She worked for Ruth Rogers and the late Rose Gray at London’s River Café and later spent a summer with Alice Waters at Berkeley’s Chez Panisse. But when fellow Brit and River Café alumnus Jamie Oliver recommended her to Friedman, she was still a relative unknown. Her debut at the Spotted Pig drew a lot of attention—not just because of the involvement of Batali and several high-profile investors (Bono and Jay-Z), but because Bloomfield was running a new kind of restaurant that brought together several foodie threads: serious snout-to-tail cooking with a religious adherence to fresh/local/seasonal ingredients, served in a casual atmosphere with a tone of clubby downtown cool. As Anthony Bourdain puts it: “She pretty much wrote the all-time book on how to come from someplace else and make New York love you.”

Bloomfield’s cookbook, A Girl and Her Pig, comes out in 2012, but beyond that and a few odd interviews and TV appearances, she keeps her head in her pots. She’s in the kitchen at the Pig on some nights, the Breslin on most others, and getting the new John Dory Oyster Bar (also in the Ace) ready for opening in early November. She also maintains a food-exchange program with father of head-to-tail eating Fergus Anderson of St. John—they switch spots on occasion to keep up with each other’s shore.

“She’s never worked the room, she’s never played the game,” says Bourdain, “and yet everybody knows who she is—she’s one of the only high-profile chefs who’s almost never on TV, she rarely gives interviews, and every time I walk into the Breslin or the Spotted Pig, I look back there and she’s standing behind the line, actually cooking.”

I haven’t been to The Breslin yet. Sounds like a treat, though.