Your mid-week Lower East Side food roundup:
- Eater is keeping its eyes gazed on Mission Chinese Food’s Instagram feed for signs of the restaurant’s opening on East Broadway. Last night, there were some new clues as “a dream team of Momofuku master David Chang, Noma’s Rene Redzepi, and Danny Bowien (Mission Chinese’s celebrity chef) assembled and continued to tinker with the pizza oven left behind by former tenant Rosette.” They whipped up a tofu pizza, apparently.
- In the Times, Florence Fabricant reported that Tijuana Picnic in the former Laugh Lounge space on Essex Street would open today. But Eater noted that the opening has been delayed while the operators wait for city inspections to take place. Huy Chi Le, Jon Neidich and Jean-Marc Houmard (of Acme and Indochine) are behind the project. The menu, the Times says, “features mash-ups like duck wings with Asian spices, shrimp tempura tacos with fermented black beans, pork neck marinated in coconut milk and five-spice churros with yuzu and dulce de leche.”
- Bowery Meat Company opens tomorrow at 9 East 1st St., in the space that formerly housed the Veselka Bowery. The team behind the restaurant runs Lure Fish Bar, among other establishments. You can see the preview menu here.
- Ryan Sutton experiences 80s-style excess at Dirty French, “a fatty restaurant wrapped around a farce of svelte downtown diners.”
- The Village Voice is impressed by the food being turned out by the new chef at Skal.
- “The Fries of New York,” an exhibition featuring various french fry purveyors across the city will be held at 168 Bowery. Naturally it’s sponsored by a ketchup manufacturer.
