Melvin Felix The new slice.

What’s more shocking than Michael White’s new pizzeria Nicoletta getting zero stars from The Times? How about 2 Bros. Pizza breaking the dollar barrier?

This week, the celebrated dollar-slice joint unveiled a larger, cheesier “supreme” slice at its 36 St. Marks Place location, where the owners of the original location a few doors down previously experimented with cut-rate Neapolitan pies. The new slice, which goes for a whopping $1.50 after tax, still has the straight-out-of-the-oven taste that draws in the late-night crowds (others, like New York magazine’s Adam Platt, aren’t such big fans.)

If that extra 50 cents is going to break the bank, relax: you can still get the dollar slice at the original location at 32 St. Marks.

“I want to smoke food, cure food, and be in a place where I can do whatever I want,” said chef Will Horowitz, whose new eclectic barbecue joint Ducks Eatery will officially open early next month.

Judging by the limited menu (the restaurant is still in soft opening mode) and smoky, spicy cocktails, Mr. Horowitz is indeed having fun. A spicy beef jerky is made with squid sauce; cherrystone clams are served with smoked ham, kaffir granita, currants, and cilantro; crispy pig ears come in a lettuce wrap. The spicy trail mix includes bacon and Cocoa Krispies.

The star of the show, of course, is the smoked brisket with apricot and fish sauce.

Mr. Horowitz plans to continue changing up the menu, and mentioned goat feet curry soup and yakamein, a New Orleans noodle soup.
Read more…

And now, Sandy Berger continues to document the smells and sounds of the IHOP underneath her window. The restaurant installed a ventilator unit to dial down the bacon odors, but with noise levels up, Ms. Berger’s battle continues.

Wednesday, July 25, 2012
An inspector came to my apartment and told me that since a violation had already been given they couldn’t serve another one until Sept. 10 when IHOP is due in “court” (he didn’t say which court, but did say that those making the complaints could not be present). This is just not right! We shouldn’t have to rely on the Department of Environmental Protection to describe the schizoid life we’re leading between smells and noise (in some cases, both at the same time); we should have the right to speak for ourselves without having to sue a major corporation.

Saturday, July 28
During a meeting of the ad hoc committee that’s been waging a war to regain our pre-IHOP quality of life, we visited each other’s apartments to understand how we each were affected. The people on the first two floors seem to be bothered by the noise more than smells. They can’t see the eyesore that has become the landscape for the upper floors, which seem to be affected by smells more than noise. The middle floors win the trifecta: they get them all, up close and personal. Read more…

Photos: Melvin Felix

“I can’t imagine anyone my age wanting to sit in a Pinkberry,” said Ilias Iliopoulos, 34, whose gelateria Fresco opened on Second Avenue yesterday, around the corner from the fro-yo chain’s St. Marks location.

Mr. Iliopoulos, who owned a chain-operated gelateria in Greece for five years, said his first independent venture is meant to be reminiscent of a Greek shack, or “paragka.”

“There’s nothing wrong with Pinkberry and 16 Handles,” he added, “but they cater to a younger demographic because they’re very colorful and very bright. I wanted to create an environment where you can actually get a gelato but you wouldn’t mind hanging out there as well.” Read more…

On Monday The Local heard a rumor that a sushi restaurant would take over the long-vacant storefront next-door to Whole Earth Bakery. That turned out to be partly true. Gary Auslander, the broker who handled the deal, said that a “very exclusive” 15-seat Japanese restaurant would be moving in. Like another newcomer, Bugs, it will indeed serve sushi, among other things. Mr. Auslander added that it won’t be competing with Sushi Lounge a few doors away, rather, it will be “more like Momofuku.” The owners of the restaurant, who will appear at this month’s Community Board 3 meeting, are bringing over a well-regarded chef from Japan, according to the broker.

Vanessa Yurkevich Sho Boo at Bugs.

Vanessa Yurkevich

Sho Boo grew up in Osaka, Japan, a daughter of Korean immigrants. When she was young her mother opened a small ramen shop in their hometown and that’s when she took an interest in cooking. “I would help her out at the shop,” she said, “and I learned from her. “

In Japan, sushi chefs were rarely women. So when Ms. Boo came to the United States 11 years ago she was surprised to find opportunity: for 10 years she worked as a sushi chef, training at Sushi Yasuda in Midtown and Jewel Bako in the East Village. Today she’ll return to her love of cooking, as she opens a shop of her own called Bugs on East 12th Street.

“Bugs tend to gather, especially around a bright light and this restaurant is the bright light that everyone would gather around,” said Ms. Boo. Read more…

Edna Ishayik 265-267 Bowery.

A beer hall bound for 265-276 Bowery has become involved in a dust-up that could hurt its chances of snagging a liquor license.

Last Wednesday, Vanessa Solomon was working in her loft apartment on the second floor of the building between Stanton and Houston Streets when a cloud of brown dust came up from the storefront space where the Paulaner Brauhaus plans to open. Her floors, bed, clothes, and papers were covered in dust, she said. She and her live-in partner, Timothy Davis, spent the rest of the day scrambling to find a clean place for their five school-aged children to sleep that night.

“It looked like Pompeii,” Mr. Davis told The Local.

It was only the latest disruption for Ms. Solomon, who, after 17 years in the loft, had already started looking for a new home in Brooklyn. A week before the dust plume struck, her landlord, Craig Murray, called to tell her that her month-to-month lease would end on Sept. 1 due to construction. “The same day,” said Mr. Davis, “demolition started downstairs without any notice to us and without any precautions although Tony Morali, the architect, had promised repeatedly that he would first put in a dust barrier and soundproofing.”

After dust began coming up from the first floor, Paulaner project representatives sent a cleaning service. But that was nothing compared to the carpet of brown powder that rose up July 25.

According to Rudolf Tauscher, an operator of the beer hall, that incident occurred during pre-construction safety checks, after ceiling panels were removed to reveal an “unsafe condition”: cracked wooden planks and beams. “We were trying to establish what needed to be corrected when dust went upward and when a hostile tenant informed the DOB,” he said. Read more…

Melvin Felix

The Local spoke to Jeremiah Clancy today as he took down the photos of patrons’ mothers that decorate Mama’s Food Shop. He said his own mother happened to be in town, which made the closing of the restaurant bitter-sweet.

“It’s all in the lawyers’ hands at this point,” said Mr. Clancy. “I’m cleaning out the space today and tomorrow, the keys will be handed to my lawyer, he’ll send them to [the landlord’s] lawyer and he’ll take possession.”

Elaborating on a statement that he sent to the The Local earlier today, Mr. Clancy pointed to some specific reasons that he decided to call it quits well before the expiration of his lease in October of 2013. During the time that he owned the restaurant, he said, “my property tax went up something ridiculous – like 380 percent.”

In 2007, shortly after he took over the business, he was hit with a back rent and property tax bill of approximately $30,000, he said: “We had to get legal teams involved and come to a good place, and basically ever since then the landlord has been kind of squeezing me with water bills, gas bills, electric bills.” Read more…

Melvin Felix

Mama’s Food Shop, a cheap-eats joint that had been a mainstay of the ever evolving and increasingly upscale East Village dining scene, closed last night after more than 15 years in business. Its proprietor, Jeremiah Clancy, sent The Local a statement addressed to patrons, supporters, and fans that cited “increasing rents and property taxes, and the constant expenses that arise when maintaining an older building.” He wrote, “I now join the ranks of Kate’s Joint, Zaitzeff, Life Café, and Lakeside Lounge; all business that have folded in a neighborhood going through a period of flux,” and went on to complain: “We live in a city where the Health Department has far too much power, the cost of the permits, inspections, and maintenance are so high it is impossible for a Mom & Pop operation to keep up with.”

The move comes just a few months after the shuttering of the restaurant’s short-lived Williamsburg outpost. At that time, Mr. Clancy, who took over for longtime owner Michael Rosenfeld in 2007, said he was open to finding an investor for the East Village location.

In 1999, The Times’ “$25 and Under” critic Eric Asimov, in a $10-and-under roundup, wrote that “this little self-serve restaurant with just a few tables, offers homey American dishes that are the equivalent of white picket fences and shady elm trees.” The menu and the business model – which called for customers to order a meat and a side (or three) at the front counter – never changed much, and the place never did score a liquor license. Brunch was eventually added and the restaurant got a boost from an appearance on Guy Fieri’s “Diners, Drive-ins and Dives,” but it apparently wasn’t enough.

Here’s Mr. Clancy explaining his decision to call it quits. Read more…

Sarah Darville The vacant space at 130 St. Marks Place.

Talk about no rest for the weary. While most Community Board 3 committees are taking the month off, the SLA and DCA Licensing committee will meet on August 20 to consider 45 different businesses seeking approval for new or modified licenses to sell alcohol.

Some of the highlights include a liquor license renewal of UCB East, which has a complaint history, according to the board. The new owners of Lakeside Lounge — soon to be Blackburn — are scheduled to appear before the committee, as expected.

A new business is bound for 130 St. Marks Place; an employee at Whole Earth Bakery next-door told The Local that rumor has it that it will be a sushi joint. (Take this with a grain of salt, Sushi Lounge is only a few doors away at Avenue A). The space had been vacant for close to a year.

And as usual, Nevada Smiths is once again scheduled to appear for approval of a full liquor license. The new location of the soccer bar has appeared on the agenda for months, only to be scratched at the last minute. Here’s the rest of what’s on tap for the Aug. 20 meeting. Read more…

Daniel Maurer

We interrupt your morning for an important announcement: Churreria, the sleek sliver of a Spanish cafe just below Houston Street on Mulberry, is now offering its free-churro deal all day long. Normally the deal would’ve wrapped up right around this time of day, but you can now score two authentic Spanish-style fried dough sticks (skinny, crisp, and lightly dusted with sugar instead of that cinnamon silliness) with every purchase of a cortado or any other coffee drink, any time the place is open (9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, and till 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday).

As if that isn’t exciting enough, Churreria has also started serving wine and beer. Check out the lineup here.

De nada.

Melvin Felix

A late-night standby for cheap, heaping helpings of Latin grub has closed its doors in the face of a rent hike, according to an employee.

La Isla, on 14th Street, stopped serving cuchifritos, empanadas, rotisserie chicken and other Caribbean staples this week, and will officially give up its space between Avenues A and B on Monday. Yesterday, it was empty but for a refrigerator, a steam table and a small plant by the front window, which an employee said had been there since La Isla opened a almost decade ago.

The employee, who wished to remain anonymous, said the restaurant’s management had decided not to renew the ten-year lease at 542 East 14th Street because its landlord had asked for an additional $3,000 per month, plus additional property tax payments; the one-two punch would’ve meant paying almost $15,000 per month instead of the previous $8,000. Read more…

Sandy Berger The ventilator unit.

After neighbors complained for weeks about the “constant roar” and “inescapable blare” of IHOP’s new ventilator unit, the restaurant on East 14th Street was issued a noise violation on Monday, the Department of Environmental Protection said.

The noise from the ventilator, which was installed after complaints about an unbearable smell of bacon, had caused neighbors to file at least four complaints with the DEP. On Monday, the restaurant was smacked with $560 in fines, said Ted Timbers, a spokesperson for the agency.

But neighbors will have to keep complaining before they can get their peace and quiet: Mr. Timbers said the DEP can’t serve IHOP with an order to cease and desist until it has been issued three separate violations, and the Environmental Control Board won’t make a ruling about the first one until Sept. 10.

Mary Beth Powers, a neighbor of the pancake house, felt the city wasn’t doing enough. “Factory restaurants like IHOP don’t belong directly beneath people’s homes,” she said. “The city is so worried about our health that they want to ban mega-sodas and cigarettes (ideas that have merit); I wish they would extend that concern to making sure that commercial establishments located in heavily populated neighborhoods don’t make those areas uninhabitable.”

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this post referred to the ventilation unit as a “smog-hog.” That reference has been deleted since the term is a brand name and Smog Hog says that it did not manufacture the unit in question.

Daniel Maurer

Death & Co., the perennially packed cocktail lounge on East Sixth Street, has sold its first book for what an agent in the deal confirms is over $250,000.

The as-yet untitled book will gather over 500 recipes, according to agent Jonah Straus, who said a handful of publishers were interested in it before Aaron Wehner at Ten Speed Press pre-empted an auction with a six-figure offer. (Ten Speed published the People’s Pops cookbook last month.)

Nick Fauchald, a former Food & Wine editor who founded Tasting Table, will share writing duties with David Kaplan, an owner of the bar that Mr. Fauchald said is hugely influential in the cocktail world. “When I’m researching a cocktail trend or a bunch of recipes for something and you start tracing the recipes back to their origin, more often than not it ends up at Death & Co.,” he said, citing a recent trip to a prestigious bar in Amsterdam where the barkeep surprised him with drinks from the lounge’s stable. Read more…

Courtesy Alphabet City Brewing Jason Yarusi with half-barrel kegs in Garretsville.

The owners of Alphabet City Brewing Company breathed a sigh of relief last week as Governor Cuomo signed into law a tax credit – supported by State Senator Daniel Squadron – for New York’s craft breweries.

“We’re small enough that anything like that affects our margins drastically,” Jeffrey Simón told the Local. Small, yes, but growing: Mr. Simón and his business partner and former roommate, Jason Yarusi, are currently expanding their brewing operation and planning an East Village beer garden.

The duo started the company in their third-floor apartment on Seventh Street and Avenue A. During those home-brewing days of searching for the perfect recipe, they could often be seen crisscrossing Tompkins Square Park and carting sacks of hops or malt, or test tubes full of yeast.

“Pushing a keg in a cart through Tompkins will get you attention,” said Mr. Simón. Read more…

Sarah Darville Radouane Eljaouhari beside his new clay tandoori oven.

When Radouane Eljaouhari moved into his new location on East Sixth Street, he told contractors clearing out a shuttered Indian restaurant to not completely gut the kitchen. Now, what was once a lark for Mr. Eljaouhari and his chefs at the new location of his Moroccan restaurant Zerza has turned into a permanent cross-cultural twist.

Instead of a traditional Moroccan grill, meat dishes are cooked in a clay tandoori oven leftover from Angon on the Sixth, which closed in 2010. (Another Indian restaurant briefly occupied the space after Angon).

The clay oven gets twice as hot as the Moroccan grill, and “makes the meat cook without burning it,” Mr. Eljaouhari said. “It’s juicy, and that’s not the case with the grill, where it touches the flame sometimes. So this is a treat.” Read more…

Joel Zimmer Lakeside’s photo booth.

When it was reported that Lakeside Lounge would close at the end of April, New York Music Daily wrote, “the bar that defined oldschool East Village cool will be replaced by a gentrifier whiskey joint, no doubt with $19 artisanal cocktails and hedge fund nebbishes trying to pick up on sorostitutes when their boyfriends are puking in the bathroom – or out of it.”

Not so fast?

A liquor license application questionnaire submitted to Community Board 3 indicates that the space on the corner of Avenue B and 10th Street is being taken over by one of Lakeside’s partners, Laura McCarthy, who is also an owner in Bowery Electric, HiFi, and Niagara – all rock’n’roll spots that aren’t exactly known for catering to “hedge-fund nebbishes.” As if that trifecta doesn’t make for enough cred, Ms. McCarthy also opened Brownies, the rock club on Avenue A that was widely mourned when it was transformed into HiFi. Read more…

No word on when Long Island’s Yogurt Crazy will open on Third Avenue, or when the gelato joint on Second Avenue will start scooping (though we did notice it just got a new awning), but here’s some good news if you’re scouring for something cold and comforting.

Only U, the neighborhood’s latest frozen yogurt spot, opened yesterday at 159 First Avenue. According to owner Jason Chen, a Brooklyn resident who, until recently, owned a Chinese restaurant in the Bronx, the yogurt flavors will vary each week, though classics such as vanilla and chocolate will always be ready to serve.

This afternoon, the do-it-yourself stations were dispensing banana, sweet coconut, cheesecake and red velvet; there were more than 20 topping choices, including honeydew, kiwi, blueberries, Gummi Bears and low-fat granola.

The frozen treats go for 49 cents an ounce.

Only U, 159 First Avenue (East 10th Street), 212-254-8886.

Paul Defiglia The line at Momofuku today at around 6 p.m.

Paul Defiglia Yep, it goes around the corner.

Nothing is more appetizing in 95-degree weather than…a hot bowl of ramen noodles? Fans are lining up in droves outside of Momofuku Noodle Bar for a taste of guest chef Ivan Orkin’s cooking. These photos were taken at 6 p.m., a half-hour after the event was scheduled to begin. So much for “walk-in” only.

Update | 7 p.m. A Momofuku employee is now telling people that the list for Mr. Orkin’s ramen has been closed and those not on it won’t get a taste. He said the restaurant sold three times as much ramen as it had expected to during the first hour.