We here at Edible Manhattan and Edible Brooklyn were lucky enough to spend the summer solstice out at the beautiful Hamptons beaches with our sister publication Edible East End. (The maritime photo above is handiwork of Skip, the owner of the Lobster Inn, a fine old waterfront seafood shack in Southhampton with bar stools built for two and an excellent bisque. It’s where we stopped for lunch to catch a bit of the World Cup Brazil brawl en route.)
The occasion was our quarterly pow-wow, aka our Edible planning session. Beyond potential theme issues and things we’d like to see on our cover, our chatter was mainly about three big events we’ve got coming up.
The first is our next Edible trivia night, which is at Brooklyn Brewery on July 8th and features yours truly as host, questions from local alcohol experts, sausage sandwiches from the Meat Hook and the chance to win a few special reserve beers from brewmaster Garrett Oliver none of your friends will have ever tasted.
(We’re supposed to keep the theme on potables but we had this awesome idea to try a few show and tell type questions — ID this heirloom squash breed! Who grew this tomato? — to stump a few of you in the crowd. What do you think?)
The second is our annual Good Beer at BAM event. Which is two floors of craft brews plus food from local artisans and chefs to go with. You really only have to read who else’ll be there to get excited about this one:
This year will have beers from Brooklyn Brewery, Stella Artois, American Beer Distributors, Southampton Publick House, Fire Island Beer Company, Peak Organic, Kelso of Brooklyn, Palm, Brooklyn Brew Shop, Sixpoint Craft Ales, Sierra Nevada, Flying Dog, Blue Point Brewing Company, Ommegang, Heartland Brewery, Abita and Magic Hat. And food by Esca, Sammy’s Roumanian Steak House, Sigmund’s Pretzels, Luke’s Lobster, Northern Spy, Jimmy’s 43, Gramercy Tavern, Fette Sau, Cafe Glechik, Lucy’s Whey, Organic Valley, Back Forty, Orwasher’s, Co., The Good Fork, Umi Nom, Brooklyn Greenmarkets and Whole Foods Market.
And the third, and the one we’re really excited about, is Eat Drink Local Week, which rides the tail end of September right into October. The whole point of the thing is to get you guys to start thinking locally, and like last year, dozens of local farm-to-table restaurants will be participating with special dishes and drinks, and a portion of money raised during the week benefits GrowNYC, the amazing city organization behind the Greenmarkets, community gardens, city recycling and generally transforming New York neighborhoods block by block.
But we’ve got a bunch more planned, including a kick-ass heirloom veggie auction at Sotheby’s on September 23 (where local farmers each grew some amazing rarely seen varietal of squash or chile and will put it up for sale) to start things off, events at Botanic Gardens and the New School and on and on. (The list thus far is here.)
But for EDL we also want to encourage you to cook at home, right? So for starters each day of the ten-day fest will honor one locally created ingredient — we will break the list soon, right here, but don’t be surprised to see butter beans or lamb necks or goat milk — that restaurants will feature and you should try to find and cook at home.
And we’ll also be putting out a proposition to cooks (which we’ll take ourselves) to do as much on our local eating list as they can before the end of EDL, from pickling or planting to jam making or fishing. Better still, we hope to be able to find someplace to share the bounty of all this EDL work together, so stay tuned for details on the world’s best-tasting party potluck as summer unfolds, and in the meantime, be sure to come by and drink a beer with us in July!
