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Food News
CurryBox, a subdivision of New Delhi Indian Restaurant (4004 Chestnut St.), is open for business in West Philly. Brothers Kyle, Josh and Rick Singh created CurryBox as an easy way to get Indian boxed lunches delivered to your home, place of work, or location of your choosing. Place an order by 10 a.m. and choose one of the available delivery times. Orders for the next day can be placed beginning at 3 p.m.
It works like this: Choose two entrees and two sides for $8. Samosas and rice are included. You have the option of adding chicken for $1, but most entrees are vegetarian and many are vegan, all of which are labeled as such on the website.
The service is available Tuesday through Friday. Orders are done online and payment is cash or credit. CurryBox is available in University City only right now, but the group plans to operate in Center City by this coming fall.
Melissa Torre, owner/chief bacon cookie baker at Cookie Confidential (517 S. Fifth St.), has launched her latest creation, Undercover Cupcakes — multiple layers of cake and frosting served in both glass jars (spoon-feed your way out, return the jar and get rewarded with a treat) and in funky little Push Pop-like contraptions. "I really like my cupcakes, but I’m not a decorator," Torre tells Meal Ticket, so she came up with her own way to eat the tasty treats. She's whipping up flavors like maple bacon, chocolate-covered banana, Neapolitan, buttermilk blueberry and ginger snap (infused with Art in the Age's SNAP liqueur).
Chip Roman's Mica (8609 Germantown Ave.), which opened as a BYO in March and earned a solid nod from our Adam Erace along the way, has finally secured its liquor license. They're doing beer and cocktails, but wine's the real sell up in Chestnut Hill — bottle prices on the internationally inflected list range between $32 and $110, but most hover in the modest $40ish range; glasses go from $8 to $12. If you still want to tote along your own, note that Mica's running a $25 corkage fee.
Photo: Neal Santos
Back in February, we told you about the "New German Cooking" chef Jeremy Nolen was putting down Thursday through Sunday at Brauhaus Schmitz (718 South St.). The Teutonic beer hall has just rolled out a new menu with a dedicated section of "Spezialitäten," or chef’s specialties, that's available every day. Think grilled pork chop with Optimator onion jam, bacon-wrapped quails and (mmm) spaetzle with calf’s liver and egg.
Gotta note, the new menu is quite nice visually, too. It's clean, spacious, well-organized, with an appealing "To Share" section of cheese, meat, fish and pickle boards, improved explanation of the wursts and little icons denoting vegetarian and gluten-free choices that look like point-earning snacks from Bubble Bobble. Grab it here in PDF form.
Photo: Drew Lazor
If you were in Old City yesterday, you might've come across the social experiment set up by Honest Tea at Fifth and Market — the drink brand put out a bunch of unguarded teas with a cash box, and requested one dollar from passers-by if they wanted to walk with a bottle. Knowing Philly, we were a bit cynical about how this would turn out, but the results are pretty surprising — in addition to not getting booted by the PPA, Philly's Honest Tea station reported an impressive 96 percent honesty rate. Tell me you saw that one coming! Expecting a press release from Nutter about this any minute now.
Check out the the ratings for the 11 other cities honesty-tested after the jump. Spoiler: If you're like us, you'll be pleased to learn that the cheapo d-bags in New York and Los Angeles are in last and second-to-last place.
10 Arts (Ritz-Carlton, 10 S. Broad St.) has teamed up with Philabundance to introduce new permanent-fixture lunch and dinner tasting menus that benefit hungry people in the Delaware Valley. The three-course lunch tasting runs $22 a head and includes a Victory beer; the five-course dinner tasting, meanwhile, is $59, with a wine pairing option that bumps it up to $95. (Both tastings feature local meat, fish and produce, in keeping with Eric Ripert and Jennifer Carroll's cooking philosophies.) One dollar from each tasting ordered goes directly to Philabundance. If this doesn't sound like a lot to you, remember that the non-profit's access to wholesale food distribution, in addition to its cache of donated foodstuffs, means that they can provide an individual with a full, healthy meal for as little as 50 cents.
The Philabundance fundraiser officially launches this evening, and Ripert is in town to see it off. (He's also cooking a super-classy Perrier-Jouët dinner with Carroll tonight.) Check out the current lunch and dinner tasting menus after the jump; courses will switch up in accordance with availability and seasonality.
Demetri Pappas, who along with partner Peter Leontaras just acquired Xochitl (408 S. Second St.) from Steve Cook and Michael Solomonov, tells Meal Ticket he has no grand plans to overhaul the four-year-old Headhouse Square Mexi restaurant — but there are some tweaks in store. (Cook and Solo gave it a makeover in early 2010.) While the restaurant's staff (including GM Sergio Ruiz and chef Lucio Palazzo) has been retained, Pappas (former chef/owner of Bryn Mawr's Cafe Fresko) says he does have plans to launch a new bar menu themed around Mexican street food; he's working with Ruiz on a slew of new cocktails. He also mentions that a physical overhaul of the restaurant's downstairs lounge — a real hidden gem — is also on the to-do list. Last but not least, especially at this heavily trafficked Headhouse locale, Pappas (his cousins, George and Vasiliki Tsiouris, own Opa) plans on applying for an outdoor seating license.
Photo: Felicia D'Ambrosio
Center City's Rotisseur (105 S. 21st St.), which opened as a dinner-only operation in late May, is officially rolling out lunch service today. Owners Aaron Matzin and Dean Kitagawa start serving at 11:30 a.m. and roll straight through to 10 p.m., and they've added some menu items to mark the occasion — peep their new apple/chicken salad and their chicken banh mi, layered with rotisserie bird, house pickles and spicy mayo on a Sarcone's long roll.
Photo: Drew Lazor
UPDATE: Both Holly and Drew won first-place honors!
Our very own Drew Lazor has been nominated in the 2011 AltWeekly Awards! He’s quite modest (he shuffles his feet and says "d'oh" when complimented), so I said I'd be honored to write it up. Three of Drew’s stories have been nominated in the "Food Writing" category of the awards, overseen by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN). (CP staff writer Holly Otterbein was also nominated in the "Arts Feature" category.) Needless to say, we’re psyched for Drew and wish him the best of luck. (Winners will be announced later this month.) Here are the three stories CP submitted for consideration:
Minette Men: Along for a ride to the James Beard House with Bistrot La Minette's Peter Woolsey. [30dec10]
Just in time for our annual Stage 5 heatwave, Downingtown's Victory Brewing has entered the frozen dessert fracas, offering three ice cream varieties inspired by Victory beers to the double-scoop-loving public. They've served these ice creams in their brewpub for close to a decade, but this is the first time they've been available in take-home pints and quarts. The flavors — Triple Monkey (banana ice cream with peanuts and caramel, made with the wort from Golden Monkey); Hopped Up Devil (cayenne/cinnamon ice cream with choco coffee beans, made with Hop Devil wort) and Storm King Crunch (malted milk ball-studded chocolate ice cream made with Storm King Stout wort) — are available for purchase at the brewery's retail shop, in addition to cases and six-packs of the non-alcoholic root beer owner Bill Covaleski has been making since '97.
Photo: Courtesy of Victory Brewing
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