What’s Your Favorite New York Outing?

Welcome to the latest edition of Food52 Founder Amanda Hesser’s weekly newsletter, Hey There, It’s Amanda, packed with food, travel, and shopping tips, Food52 doings, and other matters that catch her eye. Get inspired—sign up here for her emails.

There’s a lot to cover this week, so let’s jump in!

I have to confess that I usually cringe at the Super Bowl recipes that flood in this time of year because they often seem so dopey—cheesy, bacon-y, blahbity-blahs. But I thought our Test Kitchen crew came up with a fantastic menu of foods you’d want to eat with friends, with or without a football game:

1. New Orleans-inspired Super Boil, a seafood boil, by César

2. Batched Sazeracs, by Noah

3. “Beignet-bouche” a pile of powdered sugar-coated beignets, by Nea

And because we’re household nuts, we doled out advice for how to clean up after a party.

How to Tackle Cleaning Up After Your Big Game Watch Party

Read Article

Pableaux Johnson,a photographer and food writer in New Orleans, died last week at 59. He wasn’t on any food shows. He wasn’t an influencer. But the online outpouring over his death was profuse, because so many people across the industry loved Pableaux. He was a great friend and a great community builder who brought people together over humble dinners of red beans & rice both in New Orleans and when he was on the road. At his dinners, Kim Severson in the Times, wrote, “No phones were allowed, and the menu never varied from red beans and rice and cornbread, with whiskey for dessert. The table was set with a roll of paper towels and a pile of spoons. Guests could bring something to drink but never food.”

Here is his recipe for Red Beans & Rice.

We set up our first Dansk booth at Shoppe Object, the premier home trade show in New York City, so that we can start selling Dansk through smaller shops. We took orders from stores all over the country, and we will not stop until there are butter warmers and silver onion-shaped candle holders in every state!

This month’s ceramics drop from Good Connection, a studio based in Brooklyn, has landed. I’m fond of the appetizer plates (which I’d use as dessert plates, too).

Bird, Jen Mankins’s cultish Brooklyn clothing store, shut down a few years ago, leaving hordes of Rachel Comey jumpsuit fans paralyzed until Toast opened this past fall on Atlantic Avenue. Last week, I got an email that Mankins has re-emerged with an interior design firm: Jen Mankins Interiors. I love a reinvention.

After years of racing between work, schools, and our apartment, my husband Tad and I made a resolution to reacquaint ourselves with New York City. Each month, we’ll take turns arranging an urban outing. Tad was up first. We took a tour of Grand Central Terminal, which is so well designed to move you quickly through it that even though I’d been there a million times before, it was the first time I paused to see details like the stone work above. Highly recommend. The pressure is on for my outing plan—please send recs if you have any really good and surprising ones!

I also highly recommend that you make your way to Librae Bakery, so that you can taste the black lime babka and behold the gold disco croissant.

Amanda

P.S. It’s not every day that you see a lamb trotting around a home show in NYC.