Contemporary Authors

• Dinner at the Long Table - 2016 Ten Speed Press, New York, NY

• Amazon -

  In 1999, ANDREW TARLOW opened his first restaurant, Diner, which serves locally sourced, New American food inside a refurbished 1927 dining car in the industrial neighborhood of South Williamsburg, in Brooklyn. Marlow & Sons, a restaurant, oyster bar, and general store soon followed next door, functioning as a cafe by day and a raw bar and restaurant by night. Other culinary ventures include Marlow & Daughters, a butcher shop specializing in locally sourced grass-fed meat; and Roman's in Fort Greene, an Italian-inspired restaurant. In 2012, Andrew and his partners opened the Wythe Hotel and its ground floor restaurant Reynard in a turn-of-the-century factory building in Williamsburg. He most recently opened Achilles Heel, a riverside watering hole in Greenpoint. He is publisher of Diner Journal, an independent magazine featuring original art, literature, and recipes. Tarlow grew up in New York and began his career as a painter and a bartender at the Odeon. He now lives in Fort Greene with his wife, designer Kate Huling, and their four children.

  You can learn more about Andrew and Diner Journal at http://www.dinerjournal.com/.

• Dinner at the Long Table Web site - http://www.dinneratthelongtable.com/new-page/

  ANDREW TARLOW, Author
  In 1999, Andrew opened his first restaurant, Diner, which serves locally-sourced, New American food inside a refurbished 1927 dining car in the industrial neighborhood of South Williamsburg. Marlow & Sons, a restaurant, oyster bar, and general store, soon followed next door, functioning as a cafe by day and a raw bar and restaurant by night. Other culinary ventures include Marlow & Daughters, a butcher shop specializing in locally sourced grass-fed meat; and Roman's in Fort Greene, an Italian-inspired restaurant with a three course menu that changes daily. In 2012, Andrew and his partners opened the Wythe Hotel and its ground floor restaurant Reynard in a turn-of-the-century factory building in Williamsburg. He most recently opened Achilles Heel, a riverside watering hole featuring natural wine in Greenpoint. He is publisher of Diner Journal, an independent magazine featuring original art, literature, and recipes. Tarlow grew up in New York and began his career as a painter and a bartender at the Odeon. He now lives in Fort Greene with his wife, designer Kate Huling, and their four children.

• Edible Brooklyn - http://www.ediblebrooklyn.com/2013/andrew-tarlows-accidental-empire/

  How Andrew Tarlow Defined the Brooklyn Food Scene
  By Gabrielle Langholtz and Raquel Pelzel May 29, 2013

  This article appears in Summer 2013: Issue No. 30 of Edible Brooklyn.
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  The man who defined the Brooklyn food scene—and then redefined it—is at it again.
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  NEW YORK - July 14: For Pulse - Duck dish at REYNARD'S at Wythe Hotel, 80 Wythe Ave. in Brooklyn on July 14, 2012. (Photo by Gabi Porter)
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  EB_AndrewTarlow_AchillesHeel_Adrian Gaut_001
  EB_AndrewTarlow_Portrait_VickyWasik_001

  There isn’t much that makes Andrew Tarlow sweat. Case in point: it’s just before dinner at Marlow & Sons, one of his trailblazing restaurants in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge, and the green sidewalk tables are already hopping when the boiler stops boiling. Tarlow sits at a dark wood table just around the crook of the dining room’s entrance. He runs his finger around the rim of his espresso. He texts. He laughs at the German tourists who keep taking wrong turns into the kitchen when trying to find the bathroom. One look at him and you’d never guess he was the accidental mastermind behind Brooklyn Food As You Know It—or that there’s no hot water when the restaurant is expecting their annual “surprise” visit from the health inspector. He shakes off the timing with a shrug and a slight smile. Unflappable. Unruffled. The important thing to Tarlow is not necessarily the plight at hand—it’s the big picture, and if you eat in Brooklyn, he’s shaped your world, even if you’ve never heard his name.

  For those who have a hard time fathoming a Williamsburg without housemade mayo, in-house butchery and European tourists waiting in line for a two-top, it’s time for a history lesson. In ye olde days of the 1990s, the bulbs shined bright and “local cheese” meant plastic-wrapped squares from the bodega. Andrew Tarlow changed all that. His rule-breaking restaurants redefined the BK food scene many times over—first with Williamsburg icon Diner, then its adjacent outpost Marlow & Sons, then the groundbreaking ingredient boutique Marlow & Daughters, then Fort Greene’s Italian destination Roman’s, last year’s uber-chic Reynard in the Wythe Hotel and, just this spring, a cocktail bar called Achilles Heel on the Greenpoint waterfront.

  He’s changed the course of New York dining time and again, but 19 years ago when Tarlow decided to take a chance on Williamsburg, he didn’t start out with a game plan, let alone visions of an epicurean empire. He was just some kid from Long Island, a painter making a buck as a bartender at the Odeon who’d moved to Williamsburg in search of cheap rent.

  Like other young artists drawn to north Brooklyn by quasi-legal warehouse spaces that always came with abundant natural light but sometimes lacked kitchens, Tarlow lived in a massive, under-furnished, 6,000-square-foot improvised Williamsburg loft. Despite the community of artists moving in after being priced out of Soho, Chelsea, and the near end of the L train, there were few places to hang out, like the ornate bar Teddy’s on Berry Street or Small Little Things or the Alt Café. Destination cocktail bars mixing up housemade bitters with rare Czechoslovakian liqueur or coffeehouses offering single-origin macchiato and latte-art smackdowns were as common as lions in McCarren Park. On Wiliamsburg’s south side there were no gathering places where artists and musicians could come together for a coffee, steak or slice of cake. Instead there were forbidding walks under the Williamsburg bridge and long, dark blocks bereft of commerce. Tarlow just wanted a neighborhood clubhouse.

  He traces his interest in hospitality to a life-changing yearlong adventure in Africa. After studying painting at the University of Arizona, he spent 11 months traveling, solo, from Egypt south along the spine of Africa to more than a dozen countries, where strangers offered him food, lodging and friendship. “I lived off the kindness of others,” he says.

  He never forgot it, and in 1994 the idea of fostering community in the wilds of WIlliamsburg propelled him and an Odeon co-worker named Mark Firth to dream up a scrappy spot named Diner—a little restaurant that would soon see lines out the door and become the Brooklyn dining archetype.

  Diner, or rather the space that would become Diner, was a ramshackle shell of an actual dining car that first kicked off at the tail shimmy of the ’20s, then opened for a hot second as Stacey’s in the mid-1990s. Tarlow and Firth put about $80,000 into Diner (“probably the same amount that I put into my [current] computer system,” Tarlow observed recently), did all of the carpentry and renovating themselves and opened on New Year’s Eve 1998.

  Ironically, Tarlow admits that his original concept was simply a place, with the food almost an afterthought—in the beginning, mashed potatoes or fries came with every dish. But as luck had it, the head cook he hired—a young woman named Caroline Fidanza who lived in the neighborhood and agreed that the artist types in South Williamsburg needed a place to meet and eat—happened to hail from SoHo’s longtime locavore temple, Savoy, and baked farm-driven sensibilities into the conceptual cake.

  That December 31st they opened with no heat and no gas, but Fidanza carried cassoulet for 25 from blocks away. Tarlow still cites it as one of the best nights and meals of his life.

  Fidanza’s localist ethos became the key component of Diner’s menu, even if Tarlow and Firth hadn’t planned it that way. Sometimes Fidanza didn’t map it all out either: busy Friday nights sometimes found the cupboards bare on Saturday morning, necessitating an urgent run to McCarren Park’s Saturday Greenmarket and yielding an ever-changing menu filled with a bumper crop of market-driven specials. Tarlow and Firth could have insisted on simpler sourcing and inexpensive ingredients but they let the forward-thinking Fidanza have her way, and she geeked out big time when it came to buying directly from small farmers.

  Sure, in 1998 other chefs were shopping at the Greenmarket. But unlike Union Square Café, Jean Georges or even Fidanza’s alma mater, Savoy, Diner’s crew obsessed over ingredients and then served them without any trappings of fine dining. Indeed Diner felt very much like a diner. The short menu listed pedestrian fare like burgers and fries, a green salad, chocolate cake. Tattooed servers brought it all out on plain plates and slapped it down on your paper-covered table, all to a cranked-up punk-rock soundtrack. The approach even applied to water: back when tap was for second-class citizens, each table at Diner proudly bore bottles of New York’s finest.

  While locavore restaurants over in Manhattan had to meet high rent and haute expectations, Tarlow, Fidanza and staff threw out the rulebook and did as they pleased, never knowing they were writing a new rulebook, one that scores of restaurants in Brooklyn—and quite a few in Manhattan—would be turning to a decade later.

  “It was fun and chaotic. No, not chaotic. Exciting,” says Fidanza, who cooked at Diner for more than a decade before leaving in 2009 to sell sandwiches and barely-sweet sweets at the tiny shop Saltie on Metropolitan (she still contributes to Tarlow’s print quarterly, Diner Journal). “None of us had any sense that people would come to the restaurant,” recalls Fidanza. Tarlow and Firth “were two guys who lived down the street. They were just serving their friends and neighbors dinner.”

  But Diner was liberating—eating there felt like you were participating in something bigger than just dinner. The buzz and hum were palpable. Even Manhattanites soon crossed the river for a seat at the upstart eatery. “It’s hard to imagine being so naïve,” admits Tarlow. “But we never thought the New York Times would come. None of that even existed.”

  Though they all thought they would just work and hang out at Diner, much to their surprise, the restaurant became a success, and quite a big one at that. “It turned out that the neighborhood was ready. People just jumped all over it,” says Fidanza. And it wasn’t only the neighborhood—it was the city at large that took notice of the coupling of lusty, conscience-driven food with an indie attitude.

  The rest would have been history, but for Tarlow and Firth, it was just the beginning. In 2004, the young men went west—that is, about 20 feet west—to add a annex an adjacent spinoff called Marlow & Sons. The new venue basically began as a waiting room where eaters could shop for Fidanza’s favorite ingredients until their booth opened up at Diner, but the place—named for an amalgam of Firth’s first name, Tarlow’s last, and the fact that they had each had newborn sons—soon got tables too, all with little regard for convention.

  It became a restaurant—a dinner-after-dark hangout deservedly famous for sparkling oysters and a signature chicken cooked under a foil-wrapped brick—but its foyer remained a tiny, tightly curated market, long before that was a thing. Unbothered by being bipolar, Marlow’s entryway offered an enlightened update on the general store, selling pickles, local milk, small-batch chocolates, food-art quarterlies and turnips by the bunch. But its biggest contribution to the culinary canon came after Tarlow placed an online ad.

  “I was working at Murray’s Cheese in the West Village and just looking for something new to do. And like so many adventures in New York City, [mine began] with an ad on Craigslist,” recalls Tom Mylan, now Brooklyn’s celebrity butcher and co-owner of the Meat Hook. Tarlow, who has a unique knack for spotting good eggs (of the human kind), hired 28-year-old Mylan in 2005 to be the specialty food buyer and manager at Marlow & Sons.

  That meant getting the goods for both the kitchen and the front shop—like foraged ramps, farmstead cheese, bottles of kombucha and early-edition Liddabit confections. But when Mylan was coolhunting at the inaugural New Amsterdam Market in lower Manhattan in 2007, a chance encounter would set him on a different path: He met Jessica and Joshua Applestone, two ex-vegetarians-turned-ethical-butchers who had recently founded Fleisher’s in the Hudson Valley and sought city customers for local, pastured meats.

  At the time, Diner alone was going through about 300 pounds of ground beef a week to make their signature burger; the restaurant was rare in its appetite for grassfed ground. Chefs shelling out big bucks for grassfed typically wanted prime cuts like tenderloins and chops, which left hundreds of pounds of meat per carcass that was bound for ground and couldn’t fetch much of a price per pound.

  But for Mylan, buying good ground was just the beginning. As he got to know the Applestones, he quickly saw that good butchery combined craft, sustainability, economy and badassery, and soon committed to buying not cuts, like every other restaurant in America, but whole sides of beef, which he would have to learn to carve up himself, in-house. This was a revolutionary concept. Mylan went upstate to apprentice under the Applestones, sleeping on their couch for a month, and soon devised the business’s cutting-edge butchery program.

  Going whole hog, Mylan didn’t just displace rock stars as Brooklyn’s most macho icons and inspire scores of city restaurants to butcher in-house, he also blazed a trail to Tarlow’s next business, again just a stone’s throw from Diner: Marlow & Daughters, New York’s first shop to not only offer solely sustainably raised meats and game but to butcher it all on premise and in full sight of the shopper. Perhaps the only thing in greater demand than the meat itself was a slot as a cleaver-wielding apprentice.

  Mylan’s carnivorous career path reveals a key to Tarlow’s success: willingness to let his staff experiment. By supporting, or at least allowing, their down-the-rabbit-hole quests, he fosters innovation and ultimately capitalizes on their inspiration.

  “He might be stubborn at times,” says Mylan, “but [Tarlow] actually understands that while a single vision can be great, without creative people and their input, [you’ll] always be less than the sum of the parts.”

  Fidanza adds that Tarlow is capable of recognizing not only talented people, but those who truly want to be part of the organization. And if the fit isn’t right in their current position, Tarlow will find a way to give that person what he or she needs to be successful. “There is a lot of trust there,” she says.

  The model was magic, as became evident in 2009 when Saveur magazine printed a seminal issue entitled “Twelve restaurants that matter.” Marlow didn’t just make the cut, alongside national tastemakers like Manresa in California and Joel Robuchon in Vegas—the little BK restaurant landed on the cover.

  Sure, not everything Tarlow and Firth touch turned to gold. Their two Mexican concepts, both called Bonita, trailed behind the other restaurants, but in 2009, when the lease to the Williamsburg branch was lost, Tarlow transformed the Fort Greene Bonita into Roman’s, where a chef who’d come up under Fidanza helmed the stoves. Today the daily changing menu still draws crowds for fresh fare like ricotta-botarga crostini, lasagna alla bolognese, chicken al diavolo and pine nut ice cream, washed down with a daily bitter cocktail.

  While their menus famously offered farm fare with urban sensibilities, Firth was drawn to a rural experience. He bought a place up in Western Mass and in 2010 moved there full time, trading his farm-to-table restaurants in Brooklyn for one in Great Barrington: Bell & Anchor. He raises the meats himself.

  Back in Brooklyn, Tarlow is still burning the candle at both ends. To a new acquaintance, he can come across as aloof, disengaged. He is quiet. But the impression is belied by his close involvement with his managers and chefs, bartenders and waitstaff. Tarlow is not afraid of collaborating and he is not afraid to let go.

  He talks a lot about negotiating work and family life. (“Do I answer 20 e-mails, or ride my bike home? I ride my bike home,” Tarlow says.) Tarlow’s four kids range from age one to 12, and his wife, Kate Huling, designs leather goods made from the hides of the steers and pigs whose meat is commandeered for the restaurants; her grocery-friendly totes and spare evening clutches are showcased at Marlow and she is working on shearling coats made from sheep hides for next winter. They live in a Fort Greene brownstone with a serious wood-fired oven out back, but Tarlow’s still very much a man of Williamsburg.

  His true religion isn’t only about local lettuce and lamb. It’s always been about believing in Brooklyn and building something new in a place people said it would never work. It was true of Diner and true of both Marlows. But even more than those, it was true of Reynard, the restaurant he opened last year at the Wythe Hotel a block from the waterfront. If Diner came to represent New Brooklyn, the Wythe defines the new, new Brooklyn.

  It’s a destination that’s been 15 years in the making. And though Diner drew people from beyond the neighborhood (and a 2007 commercial for the Edge SUV featured Marlow & Daughters as the hip driver’s destination), the Wythe attracts eaters from across the Atlantic. For while the kitchen is cut from the same cloth as his other, farm-driven concepts, the scene here is a world away.

  Masterminded by Australian hotelier Peter Lawrence and DUMBO developer Jed Walentas, the 70-room, $32 million Wythe Hotel juts out from Wythe Avenue like a middle finger pointed at “the city.” A line of pretty people await their turn on the rooftop bar. Posh rooms OD on Etsy charm, from artisan shampoo and craft wallpaper to locally batched bottles of booze in the minibar. And down in the dining room, the tony in-house restaurant gives guests a reason to never even cross the river. The refined plates–beef carpacio with tarragon, rabbit with fennel and almonds–are the work of Sean Rembold, the chef who became Tarlow’s top toque after Fidanza’s departure in 2009 for Saltie. Compared to those dizzy days of debuting Diner, Tarlow’s brand has come a long way indeed.

  With the Wythe, Tarlow’s vision of creating a community clubhouse for the Williamsburg arts scene has come true (although the prices cater more to art dealers than to undiscovered makers, who are more likely to be reciting the specials). “I liked the idea of inviting people to a house,” says Tarlow. “It was something I had been thinking about for a long time—to extend this idea of hospitality.”

  But it isn’t all hospitality: you could say he is the epitome of the old axiom not to put your eggs in one basket. This man has always carried lots of baskets, all half-full. He says that he likes his concepts to happen organically, depending on what opportunities present themselves. And he’s still as obsessed with making stuff as he is with making spaces.

  Having spawned the butchery revolution, Tarlow’s latest in-house obsession is another staple: baking real bread. What began as an experiment in the wood-fired oven at Roman’s quickly outgrew its incubator, so Tarlow took over the old Hot Bread Kitchen space in Long Island City and has a full-time baker making all of the bread for all of his properties, using grains from Farmer Ground Flour, and turning out serious loaves like rye sourdough the size of an August watermelon. Tarlow says a permanent wood hearth for baking is next on his list; for now, his baker does an untraditional day bake (much like the venerable Tartine in San Francisco), so his restaurants have “fresh bread for dinner, and make toast for breakfast.”

  An organic thinker, Tarlow’s ideas have always evolved in response to unexpected opportunity. So when his search for a location to open a bakery instead turned up a Greenpoint waterfront space perfectly suited for a bar, he changed course completely and set to ordering highballs instead of flour scales. His 12-year-old son, a devotee of Greek myths, proposed its name: Achilles Heel.

  He built it. And if it turns out anything like his other places, we’ll all come. See you there.

• New York Times - http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/24/fashion/andrew-tarlow-and-the-new-wythe-hotel.html

  Brooklyn Breeds a New Hotelier

  By BOB MORRISMAY 23, 2012
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  WELL-SOURCED: Andrew Tarlow, the owner of restaurants like Diner and Marlow & Sons, opens the Wythe Hotel. Credit Michael Nagle for The New York Times

  ANDREW TARLOW doesn’t like to think of himself as a founding father of all things precious in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It sounds too stodgy, too grand and old-school to him.

  “Besides, I don’t even have a beard,” he said.

  And yet, much of the artisanal, ethically sourced food and fashion coming out of this outer-borough vortex of self-conscious consumerism can be pinned on (or attributed to, if you’re a Manhattan-centric cynic) him. His South Williamsburg restaurants and storefront shops — Diner, Marlow & Sons and Marlow & Daughters — all push the idea that food and clothing should come from sustainably minded noble folk.

  And now there’s the new Wythe Hotel a mile north, to further his cause.

  “We have relationships with everyone from our sheep farmers to our coffee roasters,” Mr. Tarlow was saying the other day as he looked in on his three traditionally-styled businesses, all next to one another. “Everything is well sourced and thought out.”

  You can say that again. At his Marlow & Daughters grocery, “hand-gathered” eggs, “house-churned butter” and pickled ramps line the shelves with homemade dog food. The side of cow being trimmed on an old-fashioned counter by hip young butchers is “grass fed and finished.” The slaughtered pig being delivered by truck out on the street, where Hasidic Jews pass by, comes from a celebrated organic pig farmer.
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  “He’s in Virginia, further than any of our other sources,” Mr. Tarlow said.

  Steps away, in front of Diner, the high-end meta-dive he opened in 1999, when people thought he was foolish to do such a thing in his neighborhood, Mr. Tarlow popped some watercress into his mouth from a crate delivered from an idealistic upstate farmer. Of course it was sustainable: organic, in season and adamantly local.

  Even the clothes that Mr. Tarlow sells, designed by Kate Huling, his wife, are ethical. The wool is from the same sheep used for his dairy and meats. The beef at the butcher counter and on menus comes from the same cows that provide the hides for rugs.

  “I know it can seem like a parody,” said Mr. Tarlow, who is lean, 41, and almost confrontationally laid back in demeanor. “But I’m not supersensitive about what I do.”

  Who has time for that with four young children, four restaurants, two shops, a literary magazine (Diner Journal) and a big new hotel to oversee?

  In partnership with Jed Walentas, whose father, David, made Dumbo’s real estate go boom, Mr. Tarlow built and designed the 8-story, 72-room Wythe Hotel with his taste and ethos.

  “Everything in here is about a healthier way to live,” he said after cycling to the hotel on a well-sourced orange bike with cork handlebar covers, sauntering through kitchens in a custom blue suit (no socks under his loafers) and greeting earnest-looking cooks and waiters. “Not just the food, but everything. It’s about making choices to sustain a better life.”

  Mr. Tarlow grew up in Hewlett, an affluent Long Island suburb that he found uninspiring. His father and uncle ran a tailored shirtmaking businesses with shops in Brooklyn and on Long Island. After studying painting at the University of Arizona, he moved to New York, where he got a job in 1994 as a bartender at the Odeon and admired the way the restaurant’s owner, Lynn Wagenknecht, created a neighborhood gathering place for artists. It inspired his vision for the once-desolate streets of Williamsburg.

  “I don’t want to come off as too earnest,” he said as he ate fire-roasted flatbread with green-garlic ricotta and house-cured ham at a corner table at Reynard’s, his hotel’s restaurant. “But for me, a restaurant and hotel are all about expanding circles of community.”

  To that end, in addition to the restaurant’s welcoming barnlike space and a convivial upstairs bar with great views, the Wythe Hotel has budget rooms with bunk beds for out-of-town musicians, friends and farmers. There’s locally made wallpaper on the walls, handmade ice cream in the minibars and artisanal Brooklyn-made soaps in the bathrooms, with room prices starting at a nonhostile (but not hostel-level) $179.

  One thing there won’t be? Room service.

  “It’s a statement,” Mr. Tarlow said as he continued to eat and the late-afternoon light faded on revamped warehouses outside. “I don’t want my kitchen serving our food to people in their rooms watching TV. It’s important for me to bring people together.”

  Television in the room, in fact, was the reason Mr. Tarlow pulled his children out of the hotel, where they had been having sleepovers with him during the hotel’s opening week. “They wouldn’t turn it off and come down to dinner,” he said.

  The four-children scenario doesn’t faze him.

  “I always wanted a large family,” he said. “But when we had the fourth child, people started to look at us like we were in a cult or something.”

  Especially when they notice they don’t have any strollers because, as Mr. Tarlow explained, he and his wife like to have the children as close to them as possible.

  “But for the record, we do have a Volvo station wagon,” he said.

  The large restaurant was filling up with a mix of prosperous looking customers mixing alongside those who seemed to be putting some effort into looking the opposite. The beard count was high as were gingham shirts and thrift-store dresses. There were even some clogs. It was time for Mr. Tarlow to finish his slow-roasted duck entree and take on the duty of hosting, seating guests, many of whom he knows by name.

  “How long will the wait be?” one asked.

  “About an hour,” he said.

  Who would have thought it on a Williamsburg weeknight?

  Mr. Tarlow, for one. “I always had faith in this neighborhood,” he said.

  Call him the founding brother.

• Eater New York - http://ny.eater.com/2015/12/15/10232846/andrew-tarlow-brooklyn-tipping

  Brooklyn Kingpin Andrew Tarlow Will End Tipping at All His Restaurants
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  The restaurateur will raise prices by about 20 percent at his establishments; he'll also increase cook pay to $15/hour over the next few years
  by Ryan Sutton Dec 15, 2015, 3:33pm EST

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  Daniel Krieger

  The anti-gratuity revolution continues. Andrew Tarlow, whose establishments like Diner nd Marlow & Sons were largely responsible for creating the hyper-local and artisanal everything ethos that defines contemporary Brooklyn dining, will follow in the footsteps of Danny Meyer by eliminating tipping and adopting the European-style service-included model at all of his restaurants by the end of 2016. The changeover will help bridge the longstanding gap between waiters, who make more because they can collect tips, and cooks, who often earn less because they cannot.

  "We've been talking about it for quite a few years internally," Tarlow said during a phone interview on Monday. "Having Danny out in front of it has been a huge impetus for us to take the plunge." Going tip-less is widely considered a bigger risk at casual venues because value-conscious diners might be scared off by the higher a la carte prices. Tarlow's venues do not serve tasting menus and mains rarely cost more than $35.

  Eleven Madison Park and Huertas have both announced plans to end tipping in recent weeks, but Tarlow is the first restaurateur since Meyer to pledge a no tipping policy at all of his establishments. New York restaurants have increasingly looked to eliminating gratuities as a way to cope with the rising cost of labor in New York. The tipped minimum for servers and bartenders goes up by $2.50 to $7.00 per hour in January. By switching those employees to a higher hourly rate and raising prices, restaurants can sidestep that increase and use the funds that would have otherwise counted as tips to raise the wages of cooks and other back-of-the-house employees.

  Roman's, Tarlow's Italian restaurant in Fort Greene, will be the first to switch over, with the no-tipping policy beginning on January 18. "It's the smallest of my restaurants so it seems to be the best test case," Tarlow says. Prices will rise by about 20 percent and diners won't see any supplemental charges aside from sales tax. There will not be a gratuity line on the guest check. Tarlow even designed a "gratuity free" establishment icon that he said other restaurants are welcome to use if they make the jump to tip free dining as well.

  The minimum rate of pay for Tarlow's cooks and other back-of-the-house employees will rise to $15 per hour over the next few years, an important number as that's the minimum wage that fast food workers in the city will earn by 2018. The average pay for restaurant cooks in the city is currently $13.29 per hour, or about $28,000 per year.

  Front-of-the-house employees, including waiters, will earn $15 per hour, but they'll also benefit from a weekly revenue share program that should allow them to earn as much as they did under a tipping system. Sanitation workers like janitors will see an immediately $2 raise in their hourly pay.

  Tarlow says he's a bit worried about "sticker shock," but mentioned that most restaurants will be raising their prices anyway when the minimum wage increases in 2016. He also suggests that his tip-free restaurants might even be busier going forward. "Diners want to spend money where the people who work there are being taken care of. They want to know their kitchen employees are being well paid."

• GQ - http://www.gq.com/story/talking-shop-with-andrew-tarlow-of-marlow-sons-and-the-wythe-hotel

  Talking Shop with Andrew Tarlow of Marlow Sons and the Wythe Hotel
  By Leslie Pariseau
  May 2, 2012
  style-blogs-the-gq-eye-andrew-tarlow-635.jpg

  For years, Cracker Barrels cornered the market on the restaurant-as-retail shop concept. Then came Andrew Tarlow, who opened Marlow Sons and Diner in the sleepy, industrial neighborhood of Williamsburg, before the Brooklyn artisanal food and dry-goods store boom. Charmingly tarnished and sylvan, Marlow Sons stock leather goods and local apples, staff willowy hipsters, and curate menus of whole animal offerings right down to cowhide bags. GQ met up with Tarlow on a Friday afternoon in Williamsburg at his latest project with Brooklyn developer Two Trees, the Wythe Hotel, where his restaurant fans will find his sleekest restaurant yet, Reynards , and its upstairs bar, Ides. Soft spoken, slightly tousled, and eloquently spare, Tarlow appeared sockless in a casually cut gray wool suit (of mysterious origins) to talk shop.

  Andrew Tarlow: You’re not going to ask me who makes my suit, are you?

  GQ: Now I have to. Who makes your suit?

  Andrew Tarlow: They’re custom, but I’m not going to tell you who makes them. Because maybe he wouldn’t make them anymore.

  GQ: Really? You don’t think he’d want you to pimp him out? Well, it looks good. Tell me about this project.

  Andrew Tarlow: We handle all the food and beverage inside of this hotel. We thought about it from the ground up, and about, how do we—as people who care about food, and hospitality and our guests—think about those things inside a place where people sleep? Even just in this short period of time—we saw people this morning, who were hanging out at the bar last night, come over and say good morning and have a cup of coffee. That sort of constant. It’s like having people sleeping at our house.

  GQ: Do you have a room set aside for you?

  Andrew Tarlow: I’m staying at Room 308 for the next three nights. 308 has a door connected to the room next to it that has bunk beds in it, so my kids are sleeping there. My son and his friend have their own room with bunk beds for the night.

  GQ: Sleepover! That sounds like fun. What kind of people do you think you’ll attract to the hotel?

  Andrew Tarlow: I would assume people who care about food and are inside this sort of food community. Certainly the art and the music communities as well—the convergence of all those things. The nice thing about that, especially in the food capacity, is that it transcends age. It doesn’t have to be everyone our age, or older than us. When you think about it in those terms, it could be anybody, ideally.

  GQ: What is your connection with the arts and music community?

  Andrew Tarlow: I know we’re doing the Frieze Art Fair, and we have the Food Book Fair coming up. We publish a food journal called Diner Journal, so we’ll be a speaker there. We have a partnership with Vice and Brooklyn Brewery and Brooklyn Bowl and a ton of bands coming through. We have a band room set aside on the sixth floor where the bar is. We have two rooms—one has four bunk beds and one has six, it’s sort of seen as a tour bus in the sky. A lot of bands from Brooklyn Bowl have already booked and certainly all of the other venues in the neighborhood have reached out to us.

  GQ: Do you think they’ll sleep in bunk beds?

  Andrew Tarlow: I don’t know. That or they’ll have to sleep on the floor, or maybe they won’t sleep.

  GQ: Do you have other partnerships in the Brooklyn food community?

  Andrew Tarlow: We’re working on a chocolate bar with Mast Brothers. We’ve been talking about making our own beer for the hotel and using Brooklyn Brewery Radius on tap as a jumping-off point. We’ve got Brooklyn Radius bottle conditioned for all the rooms right now.

  GQ: Speaking of rooms, what’s room service like?
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  Andrew Tarlow: We’re not doing room service. The notion is that I see the restaurant as being the focal point and the meeting point of the hotel for traveling guests and certainly the local people in the community who live around here. So the notion is that we really want those two worlds to collide and be together and use this big grand bar and this place as the centerpiece for that. It’s not very interesting having people eating hamburgers alone in their rooms while watching TV. The idea is that people come to a table and gather around in a communal space and whether you know everyone you should feel like you will get to know everyone.

  GQ: You have a strong aesthetic which has trickled down into the rest of the Brooklyn. You were one of the first to do this sort of place in Williamsburg. How is the Wythe different? Did you draw from anything specific for inspiration?

  Andrew Tarlow: I didn’t draw from anything specifically. There were some basic features that influenced it. That this is such a big, grand room had a huge input into the design. We also wanted to make it feel somewhat found so that floor could have actually been here. so that it had a sense of place, like "Oh, this is New York." We’re not trying to transport you to Thailand or something. We exposed all the brick and all the wood on the ceilings. It all existed. When we took down a big piece of the building, we resalvaged a lot of the wood.

  The farm room is seen again as a place were people gather so it feels like a café where we can sit and talk and not feel like, "We have to have dinner." It’s where lunch can turn into drinks, can turn into dinner, can turn into coffee in the morning. Whenever I create a space we try to think about how we attract people to that room, especially our staff. They spend forty to sixty hours a week there and how do you build a room that people want to congregate in? How do you attract that? You do it by making it beautiful, obviously, and if i can get the staff to want to be there, I almost feel confident that I can get the rest.

  GQ: What’s the story behind Reynard’s, the restaurant’s name?

  Andrew Tarlow: Reynard’s is an old French/German character from the Middle Ages. Reynard was a fox who was a mischievous creature, and he got into all kinds of trouble with his friends—other animals. We wanted to play with the idea of something that was French and a little something else.

  GQ: What about the name of the bar, Ides?

  Andrew Tarlow: Well, the real reason comes from my daughter’s real name, which is Ides. She was born in the middle of this past March. But I also like the idea of the ides—you know the old saying, "beware the ides of March." Maybe you should beware the Ides.

  GQ: Let’s talk about your style. Do you have an everyday uniform?

  Andrew Tarlow: Yes and no. I have pants that my wife [Kate Huling] designed that I wear a lot, and I will change my everyday uniform every three to six months.

  GQ: What is it now?

  Andrew Tarlow: Today it’s this suit. I’ve worn it two days in a row. But lately, in this past month I’ve been wearing more construction-like clothes, not quite a T-shirt, but certainly not pressed and button-down things. In terms of clothing, I have to think about it. Do I want to present myself as a business-y guy, or a more casual guy? But do I really want to be someone who looks like they shop at J.Crew? There is a lot of thought. I usually try to find something that’s right and run with that until it gets old or until I see it other places.

  GQ: What are the pants like that your wife designed?

  Andrew Tarlow: She designed a pair of pants that we worked on together. They’re just cut really well. I have three in blue, one in white, and one in tan. I have a brushed cotton and a regular cotton version. We sell them at Marlow Goods. We’ve been working on a clothing line. We started with leather goods and moved into sweaters and home accessories like rugs—things made from the wool of sheep. We’ve been working on a woman’s sailor pant, men’s pants, a men’s shirt, and woman’s shirt. And my wife is working on a shoe. It’s only at this moment, one of everything. We start small and take the time to figure it out, work out of the details, and connect all the dots. One of the reasons we haven’t done the cotton pant here in New York is because the cotton is actually grown in Texas organically, sent to Japan to a mill, and then back to New York to be made.

  GQ: Those sound like some pants. Are there any shirts in particular that you love?

  Andrew Tarlow: Most of my shirts are custom. My father used to be in the custom shirt business, and I have quite a few of his shirts that he doesn’t wear anymore. My uncle is still in that business and makes those shirts for me.

  GQ: Do you have accessories you wear every day?

  Andrew Tarlow: Shoes. I have a beautiful bicycle, a Rivendell. It’s from a custom bike shop in California. I switch out the handlebars in the winter, so I’ll switch it back to drop bars soon. This [Marlow Goods] leather briefcase is probably my biggest accessory. They’re all made from the animals we use.

  GQ: I’m still so curious about your suit.

  Andrew Tarlow: That’s the next interview.

  Favorite places to shop: Brooklyn Tailors (the mysterious source of his fine suit)

  Listening to: Beach House

  Reading: Dirt, by David R. Montgomery

  Hotels: "My wife and I usually rent houses because we travel with our four young children."

• Bon Appétit - http://www.bonappetit.com/people/out-of-the-kitchen/article/andrew-tarlow-interview

  Q&A with Andrew Tarlow, the Restaurateur Who Invented Brooklyn (Sorta)
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  January 4, 2014By Sam Dean

  Welcome to Out of the Kitchen, our ongoing exploration of the web of social relationships that build and sustain restaurants. Our focus here in the first quarter of 2014: Andrew Tarlow, who in 1998 opened the first of his restaurants that helped transform Brooklyn into a world-class dining destination. A few weeks ago, in the late afternoon lull before the dinner rush, I sat down with him at his newest, biggest restaurant, Reynard, at the Wythe Hotel, to find out what it's like to run a growing restaurant empire.

  In just the past couple of years, you've opened a new bar, a standalone bakery, and Reynard, a hotel restaurant that's bigger than all your previous places combined. How has expanding changed your day-to-day relationship with the restaurants?

  I can't be here from four to midnight, and really work a table, and be in it. The inception of this business is actually serving people, and taking care of them, and being a part of a dining experience. It's seeing you here tonight and then seeing you here next week with your grandma who's visiting from out of town, and hearing all the stories. Because how awesome is that? All of that is totally fulfilling work, and I don't get to do it anymore. It's a bummer.

  It's pretty easy to see how much Williamsburg, Brooklyn, has changed since you opened Diner 15 years ago, but what kind of effect does that have on running and opening restaurants?

  The big difference is 15 years ago there were like four places that a young cook could go, or had to go, or wanted to go—they had to go to Le Bernardin, they had to go to Gramercy [Tavern], they had to get that name on the résumé before deciding like, "Oh, I don't really want to do that anymore."

  We would have never gotten a cook right out of cooking school to come work at Diner—ever. In the beginning, everyone lived around the corner from us and had reached a point where they could say, I don't need to commute, I could just do it here.

  That's obviously totally changed. But they also can't afford to live here anymore, which is tricky.

  Do you still live in the neighborhood?

  I moved to Fort Greene a few years ago, but I lived on the same block as Diner and Marlow for, like, 15 years. It gave me sort of a unique relationship to those two businesses.

  "Any employee—chef, dishwasher, server, whatever—can ask and see all the numbers for any of the restaurants."

  Like you were basically living in them.

  Yeah, like I was always coming home and stopping in, it was always the last thing I saw before going to bed, which is good and bad. It definitely facilitated running it in, I don't want to say a more lax way, but it was like, I have the keys if you need me.

  Do you try to keep that neighborhood restaurant vibe as you scale up to a much bigger place like Reynard?

  We're trying to figure that out. There's no employee that works at all of the restaurants; I'm the only one who sees them all. And I don't have an assistant. I probably need an assistant.

  Do you have any kind of management style, or philosophy?

  I keep it interesting by making it so no one understands what I'm saying. This way if it's right it's right, and if it's wrong, I can say, "You're wrong, you didn't read it right." That's a management tool: Don't be clear.

  Any other pro tips?

  This is what we really do, our numbers are available to all the staff. Any employee—chef, dishwasher, server, whatever—can ask and see all the numbers for any of the restaurants. But nobody ever takes me up on it.

  Haha, so that doesn't seem to do much.

  Well, all the managers, front- and back-of-house, sit in a numbers meeting once a month, or once a quarter, or even weekly if it gets hectic, and we look at the food-costs numbers, and talk through issues about pricing, or anything like that. We work in a creative way, we have a conversation. It takes a lot of time and effort. And as the businesses have grown, it's actually proven to be…well, a big chunk of time scheduled out, right?

  So the chefs all track this stuff, too?

  And the sous chefs. Part of what we're doing is actually teaching someone the business side of it. We had a young chef who had just moved up to being a sous, and she came to the Diner numbers meeting, and walked out of there in tears. She was like, "How is this possible?" You make so much money and you end up with nothing, it just seems so psycho. It's mind-blowing to work so hard for so little return, you know?

  Do those small margins come from choices like butchering your own grass-fed beef, or having a real coffee program, or is it just the way the business works?

  That's sort of how we got to the open-book management idea. Ideally, I'd have all the staff reading those numbers and knowing it, because we have to be so much better at all other aspects of our business in order to succeed at buying the most high-end ingredients that we can. We're buying the most expensive things, right? Like pick a restaurant, we're probably buying more expensive chicken than Per Se, arguably; we don't skimp on that ever, and I'm probably charging the least.

  So then how do you figure out how to make money off that? One is you have to reset your ideas about what your expectations are for profit. You're going to lower that, pretty quickly. But then equally, maybe no one's gonna get rich off of it, but it has to be sustainable for everyone who works here.

  So the local, grass-fed, organic meat stuff didn't start out as a branding thing, or a business idea?

  With the grass-fed beef, at a certain point it felt like, Wow, I can't really sell hamburgers like this. If we're charging you $15 for a plate of food that's actually hurting you, and it's hurting the world and the environment, and the thing that I gain from this is money that I am then going to go use, and obviously I'm slanting this story in my own way, but I'm going to use the money to do what? I didn't want to work 16 hour days thinking about how to nurture people, and take care of them, and welcome them into our home, and then serve them poison.

  Did you start Diner with that kind of ethos? Or did it develop as time went on?

  Caroline [Fidanza__,__ Diner's chef for its first ten years] came from Savoy, where they were doing all local produce from the farmers' market, and without her, we probably would have either just been a fun place to hang out that just had touristy bad food, and maybe it never would have gone any further. But having her food come out of the kitchen day one with that level of intensity, even though we weren't like four-star serious, proved to be successful.

  So even though you didn't come in with that, it eventually spread to the whole business, and your whole way of doing things.

  Yeah, I was trying to find meaning in my work, you know? And trying to make sure that the end result wasn't really about making money. I've proven that over and over again. Endlessly.

• Signature - http://www.signature-reads.com/2016/09/brooklyns-andrew-tarlow-on-cooking-and-eating-local/

  Brooklyn’s Andrew Tarlow on Cooking and Eating Local
  By Susan H. Gordon
  September 29, 2016
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  Andrew Tarlow / Image © Adrian Gaut

  In January 1999, on a dilapidated corner on the south side of Williamsburg, Brooklyn — that industrial-working class neighborhood that would morph into shorthand for the borough’s creative pulse — a small restaurant named Diner opened.
  Buy The Book
  Dinner at the Long Table

  by Andrew Tarlow with Anna Dunn
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  Diner is the love child of Andrew Tarlow (bartender at Tribeca’s Odeon) and his roommate Mark Firth (bartender at Balthazar a few blocks to the north). They took over a 1920s Pullman dining car nestled on a lot beneath the hulking iron-clad Williamsburg Bridge, linking Brooklyn and Manhattan’s Lower East Side. With close-up views of the towers that were then World Trade Center One and Two and sounds of traffic and subway trains clamoring over the bridge, patrons came to eat affordable, inventively simple dishes that expressed the natural flavors of their ingredients: vegetables, fish, and meat all sourced from nearby farmers. Driving the restaurant’s crew was a desire to share honest, ethical food with anyone who walked into this convivial gathering spot.

  Everything changed quickly. There was September 11. The bridge was revamped, stretching deeper into both Manhattan and Brooklyn. The city became more crowded, and more connected to the outside world. And Tarlow’s passion project quietly began to grow into a Brooklyn empire of restaurants, celebrated for their fresh, creative takes on French, American, and Italian cuisines and complemented by a butcher shop, a bakery, and the monthly, creative food magazine Diner Journal — a welcoming, inclusive atmosphere suffused throughout them all. In 2016’s very different Brooklyn, Tarlow can be thought of as the borough’s most influential restaurateur.

  His debut cookbook, Dinner at the Long Table, celebrates the passion of those early days (for “our beloved customers who have supported us since the time when we served mashed potatoes with every entree at the Diner”) — thoughtfully mixed with the wisdom gained by a success done right — with recipes for dishes that do not appear in any of his restaurants. Taking the love one step further, the book is an accumulation of the foods Tarlow and his wife, Kate Huling, make at home: time-demanding or labor-intensive feats like rich meaty ragu; hours-long, olive-oil-drizzled ribollita; and days-long cassoulet made with days-long duck confit.

  “It is also in the effort of challenging ourselves, in risking total failure that we show our guests how very much we love and care about them,” writes Huling in the book’s history-rich introduction.

  After the intro come the recipes, encouraging guides into flavor combinations that once read here suddenly seem obvious: Beets Roasted Until the End of Time (then done up with oregano, fennel seeds, dates, pistachios, and oranges); Saffron Artichokes (mint is in there, too); Bluefish with an Almond-Based Sauce; and Sourdough Pancakes with Cheddar and Apple (inspired by Moby Dick). "Even it’s not organic, you should know who’s raising your food."TWEET THIS QUOTE

  There’s simplicity as well: Fried Toast with Tomato (country bread, ripe heirloom tomatoes, and a surprise umami kick from marinated white anchovies); Broccoli Rabe, Olives, Citrus (tangerines, of course); and A Pitcher of Mezcal & Bitters. How to properly cook dried beans (you have to wake them up); how to dress feta cheese, the ancient grain freekeh, or grilled squid; and a prosciutto and marrowbone brodo, or broth, rich enough for any winter night. And finally lists of reminders for living right: feel free to add herbs at will, drink Chartreuse, take care of strangers, and the carcass of any 5-dollar fish will do.

  We spoke with Andrew Tarlow by phone about what his restaurants’ kind of love is all about.
  saffron artichokes-large

  Andrew Tarlow’s Saffron Artichokes from Dinner at the Long Table

  SIGNATURE: You and Diner were at the forefront of a kind of Brooklyn restaurant that many now take for granted. What were those early days like?

  ANDREW TARLOW: They were exciting, they were creative, they were hard work. There was a lot to do. It was like having a startup and creating a new identity and creating a culture and creating a group of people around us who wanted to succeed and to do the things we wanted to do. At the time we really wanted to create a place where community could come together and find solace in eating and drinking together and to find a place where that could all happen. We were trying to source food from farms, and that evolved to the meat program [at Marlow & Daughters]. We were very interested in the farm-to-table movement and what that meant and that we needed to make a commitment to the health of our planet, and of our guests, and we really wanted to be at the center of that.

  SIG: Your book does a great job of showing your restaurants’ ways of tying food to personality and reflection. I’m thinking of your Agro and Dolce section, for example, and of the headnotes that include reminders to “enjoy the dramatic tension,” and “let the cassoulet sit on the counter for 10 minutes while you test your resolve.” It’s so homey and personal, and I wonder: what was it like to build restaurants out of that?

  AT: I don’t know if I would know another way to work. I think it is what we do. I think when we think about either making dinner at home or at the restaurants we think, How do we take care of the people who are here? It’s not about me showing off, it’s about making people feel comfortable. If you go somewhere and they’re trying to be fancy, it’s uncomfortable, and we don’t want that. We’re trying to talk about it from the other perspective, what it means to take care of people. It’s obviously personal: I think about how to take care of my staff, how to allow them to grow. Is this good for them? Is it good for our guests as well? I think when you look at things through that lens, you end up with conversations that become homey and personal.

  SIG: “Never Buy Food from Strangers.” Can you talk about this?

  AT: That’s something that Guy Jones [of Blooming Hill Farm in Upstate New York] taught us way back when. It really struck me as a statement: we eat food all the time from places that we have no idea who raised those animals or who grew those vegetables. Even if it’s not organic, you should know who’s raising your food. It also creates a loop so that the food can’t come from too far away, can’t come from a stranger. Once you do that so many things happen automatically. You buy locally, you start to have a relationship with the people who grow your food and with the health of the planet that the food is grown on, with who takes care of the animals and what they’re raised on, and how that is sourced.

  We are trying to create a loop where we are a middle ground between our guests and our employees and our customers: you can really get a sense of a mission or a value or an ethos that we are thinking through in all the businesses that we own. All the staff believes in this culture and the importance of what we’re talking about in terms of not buying food [you don’t know the origins of], and they understand that all this food has a source, someone grows it and it’s your responsibility to support them and to pay for it and to know them. We’re trying to sell the highest common denominator, we’re trying to take care of each other and trying to take care of each other with hospitality and food.

  Some of this “No Food From Strangers” has been extended to our wine, and we’ve been very involved in the natural wines and that comes from the idea of: Who grows the grapes? Who makes the wine? We don’t want a brand, we want the person making it. Do we make time to go to the origin, do we make time to meet the winemakers when they come to New York? We don’t want to buy food from strangers, we don’t want to buy wine from strangers. I think one of the things that really sets us apart as a business is that, but equally that we’re willing to pay for it, we’re willing to pay higher labor costs, we’re willing to pay higher food costs, and prove that a business can succeed while being sustainable. There are very few restaurants at our levels of cost that are purchasing in the way that we are. And I can tell you why: it’s that it’s not very profitable. It’s not the most profitable model for sure.

  SIG: So let’s talk about your wine lists, too. You offer bottles from natural and small producers. How do they complement the food and ethos of your restaurants?

  AT: I think obviously the wine and grapes are a big part of what we do. We think wine is a big part of eating, and that things like the acidity in wine are a good baseline for the food we serve. Our wine list is very important to us. I send our wine buyers and managers to France and Italy, which is an important component of that for sure. Sometimes we go to Croatia for Reynard which [like Marlow & Sons and Achilles Heel] is mostly French, while Roman’s is Italian. Diner is a little more eclectic, we’ve opened ourselves up to American producers who are doing more what we’re looking for. Sometimes Germany makes it in too, we’re not rigid. But we try to stay focused on our point of view: it’s an aesthetic choice; we don’t really want to have wines from all over the map.

  SIG: You refer to bluefish as an undervalued fish, and pay homage to all the people who cook and eat it. Can you talk about the types of customers you see your restaurants and book as reaching out to?

  AT: The truth is that it came out of our own economy in the beginning and equally what was local, and bluefish and mackerel being local fish. When we opened Diner, people didn’t eat those fish, they were seen as being not worth it or too strongly flavored, or something. But it was affordable and it was fresh. Why would I buy something from the Pacific NW that is three days old and costs a lot more money? I think a lot of people want to show what they can do and what they can buy. I think a lot of these things resonate with the current fishing crisis, the shortage of fish in our country and the world; it’s one of the reasons we’ve gone to being more meat-based restaurants. It’s probably the most sustainable food product: we can actually purchase the animals from within a 150 miles radius. They’re from the Northeast and raised on 100 percent grass and that land is never tilled. They’re quite big and can feed a lot of people for an extended period of time. And again, there’s cheaper meat out there to buy and with more fat content and that could be considered more luxurious.

  SIG: What about your restaurants’ editorial side as expressed by Diner Journal?

  AT: I think with that, we really wanted to have a voice inside the food world that wasn’t other food magazines and food TV shows; we really wanted to have a voice inside of this [sustainable] storyline. I don’t think we had an exact idea, I think one of the things we’re trying to do is meander and find that voice over time, and our opinions change and I also think we never would have found Don’t Buy Food From Strangers if we hadn’t started Journal. It allowed us to spend time with [Jones] and talk to him, it allows us to redefine what we want to talk about and what we’re thinking about. One thing I want to say is that I don’t want to just use the Journal as propaganda for the food side, it’s meant to meander; it’s been about the arts, and things that my staff is doing and what others are working on in my community, so it’s not always about food. It’s a backdrop about food, but also [about art].

  SIG: Do you have a favorite Diner Journal right now?

  AT: The specific journal that I think speaks to me is the last one. It’s a love letter from [writer and cook] Millicent Souris; it’s called Dear Island. It’s fun and unique and shot by a single photographer [Julia Gillard], so that it only has one voice; in that way it’s pretty special. It does talk about taking care of people and the need to take care of them and the process of living on an island and taking care of everything, and how that needs to be sustainable for the planet and sustainable for ourselves, who are eating from it.

Dinner at the Long Table
263.29 (July 18, 2016): p205.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/

* Dinner at the Long Table

Andrew Tarlow and Anna Dunn. Ten Speed, $40 (336p) ISBN 978-1-60774-846-5

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

With nine outer-borough eateries and shops in his portfolio, Tarlow, more than anyone, has been responsible for defining Brooklyn's artisanal food scene. But perhaps a more pertinent credit on his resume is that, along with Dunn, he runs the arty food magazine Diner Journal. For never has a cookbook felt more like a literary journal than in this debut effort by the publisher-restaurateurs. Tarlow and Dunn begin with a 10-page poem and photo work entitled "Eat Sunshine" ("bathe in olive oil/take care of strangers"). Next, there are recipes and instructions for creating 17 different feasts or informal dinners. As in a collection of short stories, each piece has a gripping title ("The Tomato and the Sea," "A Clam for Twelve"), poetic turns, and romantic notions. The "Ragu at the End of Winter" is a three-day affair beginning with a Friday trip to the butcher, a Saturday of browning and simmering, then a Sunday noon pasta course followed by a platter of veal shanks, coppa, ribs, meatballs, sausages and oxtail. A wedding anniversary dinner begins with bouillabaisse condensed to three little words--"Stock. Nuance. Scum."--and joined by a saffron rouille, olive tapenade, a plate of squid and "fruit as an illusion," small bowls of poached pears. Photographs, by the Canadian duo Michael Graydon and Nikole Herriott, are not so much instructional as atmospheric. Are we in Williamsburg or Toronto, Marseilles or Rome? This long table has a leg in each. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Dinner at the Long Table." Publishers Weekly, 18 July 2016, p. 205. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA459287584&it=r&asid=29e4c7c0705edf30bddb0bfd155c6e42. Accessed 26 Mar. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A459287584

• Eat Drink Films
  https://eatdrinkfilms.com/2016/10/05/dinner-at-the-long-table/
  Word count: 2138

  DINNER AT THE LONG TABLE

  Recipes from the new book by Andrew Tarlow and Anna Dunn

  dinner-at-the-long-table-final-cover-to-printer-1-jpg

  Andrew Tarlow has grown a restaurant empire on the simple idea that a meal can somehow be beautiful and ambitious, while also being unfussy and inviting. From the acclaimed owner of Brooklyn’s Diner, Marlow & Sons, Marlow & Daughters, Reynard, The Ides, Achilles Heel, She Wolf Bakery, Marlow Goods, Roman’s, and the Wythe Hotel comes this debut cookbook capturing a year’s worth of dishes meant to be shared among friends.

  Personal and accessible, Dinner at the Long Table brings Tarlow’s keen eye for combining design and taste to a collection of seventeen expansive, inspiring and surprising menus— perfect to celebrate birthdays, mark the coming and going of seasons, or usher in a new year.

  It’s food that puts romance and exuberance into eating and cooking, and that recognizes the beauty in the preparation of a meal. It’s earnest, bohemian, honest, playful and always bursting with flavor. In short, the food you most want to eat: A leisurely ragu, followed by fruit and biscotti; paella with tomato toasts, and a Catalan custard; fried calamari sandwiches and panzanella; or a lamb tajine with spiced couscous, pickled carrots and apricots in honey.
  Dinner at the Long Table is an invitation into the generous, radiant world that Andrew has created, full of delicious and direct food, friends old and new — and a celebration of a messy, beautiful and rich life. Written with Anna Dunn, the editor in chief of Diner Journal, the cookbook is punctuated with personal anecdotes and photography evoking the simple yet innate human practice of preparing and enjoying food together.

  Dinner at the Long Table includes family-style meals that have become a tradition in his home. Written with ANNA DUNN, the editor in chief of the company’s quarterly magazine Diner Journal, the cookbook is organized by occasion and punctuated with personal anecdotes and photography. Much more than just a beautiful cookbook, Dinner at the Long Table is a thematic exploration into cooking, inspiration, and creativity, with a focus on the simple yet innate human practice of preparing and enjoying food together.

  _author-andrew-tarlow_credit-adrian-gaut

  “Andrew Tarlow’s remarkable success as a restaurateur stems from his fundamental love of cooking – and then sharing what he loves with others. Dinner at the Long Table gives that same gift to home cooks. These are winning recipes, each infused with the warmth and joy that make Andrew Tarlow’s soulful restaurants so compelling and memorable.”-Danny Meyer
  Eggplant Gratin

  (page 189)

  eggplant-gratin

  Ingredients:

  4 large purple eggplants

  Kosher salt

  Olive oil

  2 small bunches rosemary

  1 small bunch thyme

  4 or 5 cloves garlic, unpeeled

  3 bay leaves

  Juice of 1 lemon

  2 pounds green beans, trimmed

  2 cups cherry tomatoes

  1 teaspoon dried oregano

  1 bunch basil, leaves picked

  Freshly ground black pepper

  ½ cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano

  2 cups ricotta cheese, at room temperature

  2 cups toasted bread crumbs

  1 red chile, such as cayenne or red jalapeño, sliced

  1 bunch marjoram, leaves picked

  1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar

  Cut the eggplant in half lengthwise. Score the cut sides of the eggplant and sprinkle with salt. Let drain in a colander in the sink for an hour. Preheat the oven to 350°F. In a skillet, cook the eggplant sliced side down in a glug of oil until brown, about 8 minutes, then transfer to a baking sheet.

  Scatter the rosemary, thyme, garlic, and bay leaf among the eggplant halves and bake until the eggplant is cooked through, about 30 minutes. Let cool to room temperature, then scoop the eggplant out of its skin. It’s all right if some is mushy and some is firm, hopefully all of it is oily. Discard the rosemary, thyme, garlic, and bay leaves. Season with salt and lemon juice. Turn on your oven’s broiler.

  Meanwhile, char the green beans, dry, on a grill or under a broiler until quite black on the outside. If you do it fast and hard, the beans should keep some of their texture, though the outside may have ashy skin. Run a knife through the beans so they’re more or less cut in half, widthwise. Set the green beans aside. Blister the tomatoes in a dry sauté pan under the broiler, then add oil, season with salt and pepper, and cook just until the tomatoes pop, about 5 minutes.

  Combine the eggplant, string beans, tomatoes, dried oregano, and basil in a large bowl. Season with salt, pepper, and a bit more oil and fold in the Parmigiano-Reggiano. Taste the eggplant mixture; it should be well seasoned.

  To assemble the gratin, spoon the eggplant mixture into a large baking pan or individual gratin dishes. Dollop spoonfuls of ricotta cheese on top and then sprinkle bread crumbs over the whole thing. Bake just until warm and the bread crumbs look good and crusty, about 30 minutes. Sprinkle the sliced chile, picked marjoram, and black pepper over the top. Drizzle with the balsamic vinegar and olive oil to finish. Serve hot, warm, or at room temperature.

  =====================

  “Andrew’s restaurants are great and I assume these recipes are from there and not some other bad restaurant I don’t enjoy. That would be very odd. I say – purchase this cookbook and quit reading my dumb quote.” -Aziz Ansari
  Roasted Leg of Lamb & Potatoes Dressed down with Zest

  (page 47)

  roasted-leg-of-lamb

  If you can roast this lamb on a string over an open flame, then make sure you leave the bone in. For conventional ovens, ask your butcher for two legs of lamb, de-boned. You’ll want all the potatoes to be about the same size. Medium to large fingerling potatoes are perfect for this roast.

  Ingredients:

  2 boneless legs of lamb

  Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper

  12 anchovy fillets

  12 cloves garlic, peeled

  ¼ cup rosemary, minced

  5 pounds fingerling potatoes, scrubbed and unpeeled

  1 lemon

  Season the lamb legs inside and out with salt and pepper. With a large mortar and pestle, pound the anchovies, garlic, and rosemary into a paste. Rub the paste all over the lamb, really massaging it in. Roll up the lamb and secure it with kitchen twine; finally, a chance to practice your knot-tying skills. Cover and refrigerate overnight.

  Two hours before dinner, remove the lamb legs from the refrigerator. Preheat the oven to 425°F. Place the potatoes in the bottom of a large roasting pan. Pour the olive oil over the potatoes and season well with salt and pepper. Place the lamb legs on top of the potatoes. Roast for 20 minutes, then lower the heat to 350°F. Continue to roast until the internal temperature is 135°F, 45 to 60 minutes. Remove from the oven, transfer to a platter and let rest for 30 minutes.

  After the lamb has rested, pour any juices that have collected on the platter into the roasting pan with the potatoes. Toss to coat the potatoes in the juices, then taste one. If they need more salt, add some now. If they seem dry, add oil and toss to coat. Zest the lemon over the potatoes, then cut the lemon in half and squeeze one half over the potatoes. Toss the potatoes until they are well dressed. Carve the roast into thin slices and serve with the potatoes on the side.

  ==============================

  “I hate to think that my gluttony (which per se is a sin) causes a cascade of other sins such as environmental problems and animal suffering. Tarlow’s food corals my gluttony leaving it just at what it is: a love of eating well.” -Isabella Rossellini
  Yellow Tart

  (page 56)

  Lemon custard tart feels a little like eating sunshine when you’re longing for the summer, conceptual sunshine. Neale Holaday, the pastry chef at Marlow & Sons and Diner, wrote this recipe for us.

  yellow tart.jpg Ingredients:

  16 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature

  1 ⁄2 cup sugar

  1 egg

  2 3 ⁄4 cups all-purpose flour

  1 ⁄4 teaspoon baking powder

  1 ⁄4 teaspoon kosher salt

  1 sheet silver-strength gelatin

  12 egg yolks

  2 cups sugar

  1 scant cup freshly squeezed lemon juice 1 tablespoon lemon zest

  1 ⁄2 teaspoon kosher salt

  18 tablespoons unsalted butter, cubed

  Silver-strength gelatin acts just like powdered gelatin but dissolves more evenly. If you can’t find it sheeted, powdered is fine. A tablespoon powdered gelatin will equal 3 sheets gelatin.

  Preheat the oven to 325°F. To make the tart shell, cream the butter and sugar together in a bowl with an electric mixer until light and fluffy, about 5 minutes. Add the egg and beat until fully combined. Fold in the flour, baking powder, and salt until a dough forms. Turn the dough out onto the counter and form into a ball. Roll the dough between 2 pieces of parchment paper until it’s about ¼ inch thick. Transfer the dough to a 9-inch tart shell. Trim any overhang with a sharp knife and prick the bottom with a fork. Bake until golden brown, 10 to 15 minutes. Let cool while you make the custard.

  To make the custard, soak the gelatin in cold water for 5 to 10 minutes to bloom. Prepare an ice bath by filling a large bowl with ice and cold water and set aside. In another bowl, whisk together the egg yolks, sugar, lemon juice, lemon zest, and salt. Transfer the egg yolk mixture to a pot and cook over low heat, whisking constantly, until the mixture thickens and coats the back of a spoon, 3 to 5 minutes. Cut the heat immediately. Wring the gelatin of any excess water and whisk it into the egg yolk mixture along with the butter until the gelatin dissolves and the butter melts. Strain the custard through a fine-mesh sieve into a bowl and set the bowl in the ice bath. Stir constantly until the custard cools, then pour into the prepared tart shell. Refrigerate overnight or for at least 1 hour before serving.

  Recipes reprinted with permission from Dinner at the Long Table by Andrew Tarlow & Anna Dunn, copyright © 2016. Photography by Michael Graydon & Nikole Herriott. Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Random House LLC

  ============

  Andrew Tarlow will be making appearances in the San Francisco and New York to launch his new book.

  long-table-at-penroseThursday, October 6: A Special Menu and Book Signing at Oakland’s Penrose featuring a menu styled after the Brooklyn-based chefs’ recipes.
  Details: Reservations start at 5:30 p.m. at Penrose (3311 Grand Ave., Oakland); dining options start at $31. Learn more here.

  Friday, October 7: Book signing and conversation at Omnivore Books on Food in San Francisco from 6:30-7:30. Free admission. Details here.

  Upcoming New York appearances:

  Oct 15, 10:30am-1pm – Anna Dunn and Andrew Tarlow sign books at the Union Square Greenmarket- Free

  Dec 7, 7pm – Anna Dunn and Andrew Tarlow in Conversation. 92d Street Y. Details and tickets

  We urge you to purchase Dinner at the Long Table at your local independent bookstore but it is also available online from Indiebound and Amazon.

  You can request an autographed copy from Omninvore Books on Food in San Francisco.

  ANDREW TARLOW -In 1999, Andrew opened his first restaurant, Diner, which serves locally-sourced, New American food inside a refurbished 1927 dining car in the industrial neighborhood of South Williamsburg. Marlow & Sons, a restaurant, oyster bar, and general store, soon followed next door, functioning as a cafe by day and a raw bar and restaurant by night. Other culinary ventures include Marlow & Daughters, a butcher shop specializing in locally sourced grass-fed meat; and Roman’s in Fort Greene, an Italian-inspired restaurant with a three course menu that changes daily. In 2012, Andrew and his partners opened the Wythe Hotel and its ground floor restaurant Reynard in a turn-of-the-century factory building in Williamsburg. He most recently opened Achilles Heel, a riverside watering hole featuring natural wine in Greenpoint. He is publisher of Diner Journal, an independent magazine featuring original art, literature, and recipes. Tarlow grew up in New York and began his career as a painter and a bartender at the Odeon. He now lives in Fort Greene with his wife, designer Kate Huling, and their four children.

• Eat Your Books
  https://www.eatyourbooks.com/blog/2016/10/2/dinner-at-the-long-table---andrew-tarlow--anna-dunn
  Word count: 885

  Dinner at the Long Table - Andrew Tarlow & Anna Dunn
  October 2, 2016 by Jenny | 4 Comments

  In Dinner at the Long Table, rambling poetry-like prose, story-telling and delicious food gather together and produce a book that will blow your cookbook-loving minds. Andrew Tarlow, is a rock-star chef in Brooklyn with six restaurants, a hotel, a bar and a bakery, that comprise his empire.

  The authors deliver a year's worth of menus in this title that range from the simple, yet stunning, Carrot Cues, with Pistachio & Parsley to an elaborate Rabbit & Chorizo Paella. Beautiful full page photographs fill the book and menus are quaintly named - such as Cold Night Cassoulet or I Love, You Love, We All Love Bluefish. This cookbook is fun, elegant, quirky, sophisiticated and simply beautiful.

  I have compiled a list of recipes to make which is not limited to the following examples: The Sweet Corn Arancini sounds wonderful but as this recipe calls for 12 ears of corn (for corn milk) - this dish will have to be put on hold as corn is dwindling here in Colorado. The Hasselback Apple Cake looks comforting while presenting like a showstopper dessert. Olive & Rosemary Focaccia will be made sometime this winter to warm the house with its aroma. The Yellow Tart will bring sunshine to a day dampened by skies of gray. There are such a varied range of recipes that there is something for every level cook.

  I appreciate that Tarlow's pastry chef gives options for items we might not be able to procure - such as silver-strength gelatin in The Yellow Tart (recipe below). Best of all, It is refreshing to see a chef admit to having anxiety over a dish - and Tarlow's nemesis is aioli which is why he aptly titled that recipe "I Almost Always Fail".

  I made the Drunken Sailor Chocolate Cake because I love rum and I love sailors, not necessarily in that order. Seriously, I made it because it looked wonderful and I had everything on hand to whip it up. Fast, easy and totally decadent -- it will be my go-to dessert that is sure to impress. My son had to have a piece immediately and as usual his declaration was "this is the best cake you have ever made".

  Dinner at the Long Table will be one of the best books of 2016. I have no doubt. Special thanks to the authors and Ten Speed Press for allowing us to share The Yellow Tart recipe. We all could use a little sunshine in our kitchens and lives.

  The Yellow Tart

  Lemon custard tart feels a little like eating sunshine when you're longing for the summer, conceptual sunshine. Neale Holaday, the pastry chef at Marlow & Sons and Diner, wrote this recipe for us.

  16 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
  1⁄2 cup sugar
  1 egg
  2 3⁄4 cups all-purpose flour
  1⁄4 teaspoon baking powder
  1⁄4 teaspoon kosher salt
  1 sheet silver-strength gelatin
  12 egg yolks
  2 cups sugar
  1 scant cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
  1 tablespoon lemon zest
  1⁄2 teaspoon kosher salt
  18 tablespoons unsalted butter, cubed

  Silver-strength gelatin acts just like powdered gelatin but dissolves more evenly. If you can't find it sheeted, powdered is fine. A tablespoon powdered gelatin will equal 3 sheets gelatin.

  Preheat the oven to 325°F. To make the tart shell, cream the butter and sugar together in a bowl with an electric mixer until light and fluffy, about 5 minutes. Add the egg and beat until fully combined. Fold in the flour, baking powder, and salt until a dough forms. Turn the dough out onto the counter and form into a ball. Roll the dough between 2 pieces of parchment paper until it's about ¼ inch thick. Transfer the dough to a 9-inch tart shell. Trim any overhang with a sharp knife and prick the bottom with a fork. Bake until golden brown, 10 to 15 minutes. Let cool while you make the custard.

  To make the custard, soak the gelatin in cold water for 5 to 10 minutes to bloom. Prepare an ice bath by filling a large bowl with ice and cold water and set aside. In another bowl, whisk together the egg yolks, sugar, lemon juice, lemon zest, and salt. Transfer the egg yolk mixture to a pot and cook over low heat, whisking constantly, until the mixture thickens and coats the back of a spoon, 3 to 5 minutes. Cut the heat immediately. Wring the gelatin of any excess water and whisk it into the egg yolk mixture along with the butter until the gelatin dissolves and the butter melts. Strain the custard through a fine-mesh sieve into a bowl and set the bowl in the ice bath. Stir constantly until the custard cools, then pour into the prepared tart shell. Refrigerate overnight or for at least 1 hour before serving.

  Reprinted with permission from Dinner at the Long Tableby Andrew Tarlow & Anna Dunn, copyright © 2016. Photography by Michael Graydon & Nikole Herriott. Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Random House LLC.

  Photograph of the Drunken Sailor Cake which was tested for this review - Jenny Hartin who is neither a sailor, nor a drunk as of this writing.