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The East Village got a new Filipino spot earlier this month, and now Larry Reutens, a former executive chef at Alias on the Lower East Side, is paying homage to a neighboring island, his native Singapore. Mr. Reutens arrived in New York in 2004 with plans to continue his career in finance, but he ended up going to culinary school while awaiting a work permit and decided to stick with cooking. He scored a gig in the kitchen at Aquavit, moved on to be sous chef of the defunct Tasting Room, and now, at Masak – his first solo venture – he’ll bring Asian ingredients into the New American sphere. Read more…

It’s happening. It’s finally happening. After much teasing, the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck has announced, via Twitter, that it will open its shop at 125 East 7th Street this Saturday at noon.

Vladi Radojicic Ilhan Ersahin, the owner of Nublu, plays the keyboards at the club’s temporary space on First Avenue alongside Shawn Pelton on drums and Tina Kristina on bass.

The owner of Nublu, the hip club on Avenue C that was shuttered for being within 200 feet of a Jehovah’s Witnesses Kingdom Hall, told The Local today that a return to his Avenue C location was not imminent, and that it was possible he might have to look for a new space outside of the East Village.

Ilhan Ersahin, who opened the club in 2002, said that he thought it was unfair that he lost his liquor license after years of being in business across the street from the house of worship.

“How can they come nine years later and then say I made a mistake?” said Mr. Ersahin, 45. “It can’t be just up to me to investigate whether a place is 100 percent a house of worship.” Read more…

The eagle-eyed EV Grieve noticed construction plans for a 7-Eleven convenience store inside the window of 351 Bowery – another sign of the onetime hardscrabble strip’s increasingly “suburban feel.” Gothamist confirmed that the store is expected to open on October 5.

Suzanne Rozdeba Stella Hu, owner of Stella Nail & Spa on First Avenue, and Dick Lam, 72, building owner who lives in building.

Around 5 a.m. Sunday, Dick Lam heard a tree fall in front of the building at 209 First Avenue that he owns, and where he has lived for 23 years. “I was asleep and my son and my grandson heard the tree bang,” he said. (Mr. Lam’s relatives, who live in Battery Park City, had sought shelter in his apartment.) “There was a thud. They didn’t know whether something had hit the building, or what happened. They came running down, opened the door, and it was this.” Mr. Lam looked down at a tree that had taken down the awning of Stella Nail & Spa, on the ground floor. “Luckily, it just pulled the awning out.” Read more…

Stephen Rex Brown Jim Power works on a new mosaic for the soon-to-open Tompkins Square Bagels.

The Local spent some quality time with Jim Power yesterday, and the  Mosaic Man let us in on a few of his upcoming projects. Mr. Power is in the process of designing mosaics for Porchetta, the new Tompkins Square Bagels coming to Avenue A, and the soon-to-reopen Exit 9.

The neighborhood’s beloved public artist was as humble as ever.

“I’m doing the city a favor with all this stuff,” Mr. Power said while taking a break from work in his basement studio. “I’m making this neighborhood one of the biggest landmarks in the world.”

That might sound arrogant, if it wasn’t for the fact that many people agree with him — including his customers. Read more…

Courtesy of Lola No relation to The Local.

Last week, James Cruickshank, the owner of Whitmans on East Ninth Street, threw a party relaunching Lola, the apparel company he runs with elementary-school buddy Emmett Shine. The duo started the line in their late teens (both are now 27) but recently put it on hiatus so that Mr. Cruickshank could devote time to opening his restaurant, and so that Mr. Shine could focus on Gin Lane Media, the branding and design company he runs, along with Lola, out of 263 Bowery.

“Every single day we received e-mails from people around the world asking us when we were going to relaunch,” said Mr. Shine. Read more…

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The barbecue and Southern-grub restaurant that Curtis Brown, a former chef at Bubby’s, is opening with Dov Charney as a backer is set to open for dinner service on Monday of next week, with brunch service launching that Saturday and Sunday. The Local stopped by The Cardinal just moments ago and found artist Sam Meyerson painting the North Carolina flag, a nod to Mr. Brown’s home state. As indicated on the menu below, sandwich and salad service will run from 4 p.m. till 6 p.m. The full dinner menu will be served from 6 p.m. till midnight on weekdays, until 1 a.m. on Saturdays, and till 11 p.m. on Sundays. The bi-level space is still coming together, but the above slideshow should give you a sense of what’s in store. Read more…

Two of Frederick Twomey’s neighborhood spots have closed. Zagat reports that the First Avenue location of Bar Carrera, with its tasty cucumber sangria, is a goner (the West Houston Street location remains open) while Grub Street, following intel from EV Grieve and Neighborhoodr, discovers that Veloce Pizzeria is relocating to midtown. Bar Veloce remains open.

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Despite blog chatter about tables arriving in the dining room, Tom Birchard, owner of Veselka, tells us that the Bowery outpost of his Second Avenue fixture won’t open for about four to six weeks. Veselka Bowery is currently staffing up via Craigslist, but one position in particular remains to be filled: “We’re having a really hard time finding an executive chef,” said Mr. Birchard.

As The Local has noted, Malgosia Sibilska has been making the restaurant’s borscht for about 30 years. Mr. Birchard described the rest of the kitchen staff as “a really good team of Polish and Ukrainian ladies.” The new restaurant, however, will offer “more upscale, refined, creative dishes,” and so Mr. Birchard is looking for “a chef that has gotten around and done stages with the more accomplished chefs like Daniel Boulud or Jean-Georges Vongerichten, but also has a love and appreciation for Eastern European peasant food, or comfort food.” Read more…

Stephen Rex Brown Signs outside of the shuttered Nublu.

Presenting DocuDrama, in which The Local has a look at documents that dramatize goings-on in the neighborhood. Today, a look at Nublu’s fight to reopen at its Avenue C location.

One of the East Village’s last bastions of avant garde music has been forced to leave its home on Avenue C after an anonymous tipster alerted State Liquor Authority investigators to its proximity to a Kingdom Hall belonging to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Now, Nublu is hosting shows in the basement of Lucky Cheng’s while the owner of the business, Ilhan Ersahin, struggles to find a loophole in liquor laws so that he can return to his original location.

“Really honestly and truthfully, I had no idea that the building across the street was a house of worship until six months ago when I received this letter,” Mr. Ersahin wrote in a letter to the liquor authority in May. (You can see the full letter as well as other documents below.) “I just don’t think it’s fair to blame me for all of this and after nine years in good, willing business.” Read more…

Meghan Keneally A mural at the forthcoming shop.

Last time the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck updated its blog, the East Seventh Street store was due to open in mid-August. Well, it’s mid-August, and there is still no sign of the Choinkwich. What gives? Yesterday, owner Doug Quint explained in a blog post that final electrical upgrades were set to start this week, and “could take up to two weeks- but hopefully less.” In the meantime, he has a request: “Please, I do ask you refrain from tweets and Facebook posts asking when we’re going to open. After two months and thousands of such messages, it’s really just becoming overwhelming.” So relax already, and maybe head up to the Cape this Friday to catch the truck’s pop-up event there.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR. Photos: Lauren Carol Smith

After closing for renovations in March, the venerable Sidewalk Café reopened its bar yesterday. Tomorrow, its dining room reopens with the spiffy new look that you see here. Helah Kehati, who officially joined the family business in March, can be credited with some of the changes. Her father Amnon Kehati opened the “anti-folk” music fixture in 1985, the year after she was born. “I’ve been pushing him and begging him to revamp it for the last two or three years,” she said today. “I wanted a space that was cleaned up and caught up with the times. It was my dad who made the decision that if we’re going to do this, it has to be done the right way.”

That meant a complete gut renovation that might leave appreciators of shabby chic bristling. But Ms. Kehati is resolved. “I’ve seen drastic changes in the neighborhood,” she said. “The faces are different, for better or worse. You’re getting a lot of college students, younger crowds, higher rents. We’re not trying to change what we’re good at — we’re just trying to evolve with our neighborhood.” Read more…

Elizabeth Vulaj The old East Village location

Back in April, Mara Levi touched off quite a bit of commenter chatter when she claimed that a lack of parking (caused by a newly installed bike lane) contributed to the closure of her East Sixth Street restaurant, Mara’s Homemade. In May, Ms. Levi opened a new location of the restaurant in Syosset, Long Island. So how’s life with a parking lot? Quite good, Ms. Levi said yesterday. In fact, she said she would probably not return to the East Village.

“You can’t do lunch, and it’s very expensive,” she explained. “I was paying Madison Avenue prices and not having the accessibility of that many people.” She said she had been offered a “much better location where I could do lunch” on the Upper East Side, at one third of the rent of her small East Village storefront. (Ms. Levi said she was not opposed to returning to the city: “If an opportunity comes along, we would consider it.”)

Meanwhile, the Nassau County resident is enjoying the perks of suburbia. Read more…

Noah Fecks

Last week The Times introduced us to an East Village couple that found hipness upstate. On the flip side of that coin is Shane Covey, a man from New Hartford, N.Y., who, last week, opened Upstate in the East Village. The restaurant’s woodwork, including 150-year-old hemlock, is from a barn in Mr. Covey’s hometown, and breweries represented on the draft beer list include Ithaca Beer Company and Keegan Ales of Kingston.

Despite the out-of-town allegiance, Mr. Covey’s first instinct was to call the restaurant Local, and offer a menu of exclusively local, sustainable food. “I was thinking, man, it’s going to be tough to do that 100 percent,” he said. “I do it probably 85 percent if not more, but you’re going to get someone who comes and asks, ‘Where did the tomato come from?’ and I’m going to be like, “I don’t know— I got it at the bodega next door!” (Mr. Covey also gets his wines from down the block, at Tinto Fino.) Read more…

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR. Photos: Noah Fecks.

The closing of Elvie’s Turo-Turo a couple of years ago left East Villagers starved for Filipino food, but earlier this summer Sa Aming Nayon opened across from where Elvie’s once stood, and now Maharlika, the brunch pop-up that was first at Resto Leon and then briefly at 5 Ninth, has found permanent residence at 111 First Avenue. Noel Cruz, a partner in the operation along with Nicole Ponseca, Enzo Lim, and chef Miguel Trinidad (all have family ties to the Philippines except for the chef, who is Dominican but has traveled the country extensively) tells us that dinner and brunch service quietly started a week ago. In the next weeks, lunch will also be added and the menu, below, will expand to include a mix of “really approachable things and really deep-rooted traditional items.” Read more…

Two late-night dining institutions are getting ready to unveil their new incarnations: Fork in the Road reports that Sidewalk Cafe, which closed for renovations in March, will reopen by mid-August with “reclaimed barn wood from upstate New York,” “housemade” potato chips, and other flourishes. Meanwhile EV Grieve notices that the long in-the-works second location of Veselka, on the Bowery, has put out chairs and is now hiring.

Rachel Citron The 7th Precinct has been targeting bar owners for serving drinks to minors.

The police crackdown on bars in the Lower East Side resulted in a dramatic increase in charges of underage drinking against business owners, data provided by the State Liquor Authority shows.

During a three-month stretch of intense enforcement early this year, the S.L.A., which acts on recommendations from the police, handed down 39 charges of underage drinking in the neighborhood, compared to 31 charges issued during all of 2009 and 2010.

Lauren Carol Smith View full graphic

Bar owners in the three zip codes that, taken together, include the East Village and Lower East Side faced 230 charges of serving minors from 2007 to 2011, resulting in $1,034,800 in fines. The data shows that large numbers of charges come during intense periods of enforcement, and bars in the Lower East Side in particular have faced an unprecedented and disproportionate amount of scrutiny this year.

Each offense results in fines of up to $10,000, and repeat offenders risk being shut down permanently. Some of the more high-profile watering holes caught in the dragnet include Mason Dixon (which eventually closed altogether) and Welcome to the Johnson’s.

The increase in enforcement came as the 7th Precinct resurrected its cabaret unit, which focuses on the Lower East Side’s booming nightlife scene, as well as the arrival of Capt. David Miller at the precinct last year. An officer with Community Affairs in the 7th Precinct would not comment on enforcement of sale of alcohol to minors.

In 2009, the East Village’s 9th Precinct disbanded its own cabaret unit, though at a recent community meeting Deputy Inspector Kenneth Lehr said underage drinking remained a priority.

Many bar owners say that they are being unfairly punished for an issue beyond their control.

Read more…

Marit Molin Sherwin Zabala stands in front of the construction that he says is hurting his Downtown Floor Supplies store on Lafayette Street.

Three business owners at the corner of Lafayette and Bleecker Streets say that construction on a new subway passage is warding off customers, leading to their revenue plummeting by as much as 50 percent. Workers for the Metropolitan Transit Authority have been busy since 2009, building a passageway between the uptown 6 train at Bleecker Street and the Broadway-Lafayette station. Unfortunately for the businesses at the entrance to the downtown 6 train, the latest phase of work, which according to an M.T.A. spokesman started four weeks ago, requires a construction zone that occupies parking spaces in the area and forms a barrier in front of the three store entrances. Read more…