Greg Howard A candle burns in a makeshift alcove where Grace Farrell died Feb. 20.

Twelve days ago, the frozen body of my childhood friend Grace Farrell was found on a few sheets of cardboard in an alcove at St. Brigid’s Catholic Church on Avenue B in the East Village. It was a tragic end to a sad and troubled life.

Mary Grace Farrell came into my life when she was barely seven years old and I was 16. I grew up in Saint Vincent’s, a children’s home run by the Daughters of Charity in Drogheda, Ireland, and it was there that Grace spent three relatively happy years.

Grace was a beautiful and engaging child with a bright, sunny disposition. She was warm and affectionate and full of fun. She smiled often and loved to laugh, deeply. In many respects she was a normal child, though her early years were anything but.

Being born to a young, unmarried couple in 1970’s Ireland would make for a difficult life. Grace’s mother, realizing this, faced a Solomon’s choice of sorts. She could keep her baby and face that lonely and uncertain road together or she could give her up for adoption in the hope of a better chance. She bravely chose the latter path.
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Richard G. Jones Ballaro, 77 Second Avenue.

When many of us hear “Palermo,” we think “Mafia,” or possibly “the guy who cuts my hair.” To Giusto Priola, Palermo, on Sicily’s northern coast, conjures up almondola, a chewy cookie made of boiled almonds, sugar and egg white, or the soft, pulpy pizza dough known as sfingione. Giusto was born in Misilmera, a little town 15 minutes outside of Palermo, and is now the master of a mini-empire of Second Ave Italian restaurants — Cacio e Pepe at 182 (between 11th and 12th); Cacio e Vino at 80 (between Fourth and Fifth); and Ballaro, across the street at 77.

Giusto is a warm-blooded fellow with close-cropped black hair on a rather round head. He left Italy 14 years ago to work for a friend in the commissary of the Pier 59 studio, where he made pastry for photographers and models. In 2004, he opened Cacio e Pepe, a Roman-style restaurant where the signature dish, a simple and traditional Roman pasta, is served in a hollow carved into a giant block of pecorino. He began to slip a few Sicilian specialties into the menu, like tuna with agua dolce. Giusto says that his customers asked him where he was from. When he told them, they said he had to open up a new place. “They invited me to open a Sicilian restaurant,” says Giusto with a sparkle in his eye. “This was my dream.” Thus was born Cacio e Vino, which serves classic Sicilian dishes like arancina —rice balls mixed with ground beef, peas, ham and bechamel — as well as pizza and schiacciate, a kind of stuffed pizza.
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Ian DuncanMembers of the Village Lions take refreshment.

Just in case it has escaped your attention, we are deep into rugby’s Six Nations tournament, an annual contest fought out by England, France, Ireland, Italy, Scotland and Wales. No fancy ads, no halftime shows, just 30 burly, unhelmeted Europeans butting heads every weekend until March 19.

Even though the sport’s popularity with Americans has grown steadily in the last few years, for me – an Englishman new to the neighborhood – finding somewhere to watch the games took some sleuthing. The time difference with Europe, where the games take place at a more hangover-friendly hour in the afternoon, only makes things more difficult.

Luckily, on Google, I turned up Bret Costain, president of the Village Lions rugby club, and found that I wouldn’t have to go far. His friend and clubmate, Peter Cavanaugh, shows the games in full-HD, of course, on a screen above the smooth, pale wood bar at Dorian Gray, a saloon on East Fourth Street between Avenues A and B, which he opened on New Year’s Eve.

On Saturday, at the ungodly hour of 9:30 a.m., the earliest I’ve been up on a weekend since coming to New York, I walked through deserted East Village streets to join members of the club and Mr. Cavanaugh as Wales routed Scotland 24-6 in its first victory after eight straight losses. Read more…

Gregory Howard For some couples, Valentine’s Day provides a chance for them to demonstrate their affection through therapy and counseling sessions.

This Feb. 14, while most of America translates love into flowers, you might consider giving your loved one a different sort of gift — a trip to a therapist.

“Couples therapy is a safe space for couples to engage, slow down and gain insight on their challenges and resources,” said Jean Malpas, a licensed marriage and family therapist and faculty member at the Ackerman Institute for the Family on the Upper East Side. “It’s a place to rediscover the wonderful aspects of one’s relationship, things that might otherwise get lost under the noise of the conflict.”

While many consider counseling to be the residue of conflict, it does not have to be used only as a tool of intervention. There are also plenty of people in healthy relationships who have decided to use counseling as a method of developing more successful communication.

“It’s a far-reaching concept, and it certainly includes nonverbal cues,” said Gertraud Stadler, Postdoctoral Research Scientist and a founder of the Columbia Couples Lab, a research center where members of couples and their interactions are studied, especially under stressful conditions. The lab also collaborates with the New York University Couples Lab.

Manner of phrasing — pronunciation, rhythm and tone — are all quiet cues that sometimes go unrecognized. Attempts to communicate can get “lost in translation,” Mr. Malpas said, propagating an unintentionally destructive cycle of reactivity and hurt.
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Stephen Morgan

Stephen Morgan

Mark Riffee The city’s expanded smoking ban applies to city parks, including Tompkins Square Park where these smokers were lighting up.

When City Council members voted the other day for Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s latest anti-smoking bill there was urgent debate for and against the legislation, which bans cigarette smoking in all New York City parks, certain public “plazas” (Times Square, for instance), and on all of its public beaches. Some Councilmen considered the bill to be a vital public health measure. Others, like Manhattan’s Robert Jackson, warned that such laws move us toward “a totalitarian society.”

But no worries. If Mr. Bloomberg signs the bill as expected, East Villagers will be able to enjoy the sanctuary of Tompkins Square Park this summer – safe in the knowledge that they can sit on a bench and talk for hours on cell phones, bang on bongos until sundown, or practice their scales on a tuneless guitar while others are trying to read – without even a wisp of silent smoke to poison their cacophonous idylls.

And if smokers do wish to smoke, they may leave the park, as if it were an unusually large restaurant, and indulge themselves on the periphery. In time, the subsequent clotting and befouling of the sidewalks around the park might understandably irritate pedestrians, thus leading to a new ban. Eventually, smokers may be forced to take their chances and light up in the middle of the road.

It is undeniable that smoking is harmful to one’s health and there is ample evidence that smokers can indeed quit. Well, at least some of them can. Perhaps even most. But certainly not all. Certain stubborn souls just can’t, or won’t, shake the habit. Then there are schizophrenics, the bipolar types, the deeply depressed, and others to whom cigarettes are a crucial crutch.
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Vivienne Gucwa

On a recent Saturday night, I put my ugliest sweater on over my most sequined top and went out to a new bar in Alphabet City.

This bar was so hip it did not even have a name on its door or façade. Inside there were chandeliers. The wallpaper choice was a velvet fleur-de-lis pattern. There was a large portrait of a pink cocktail that was lit from behind. The bouncers were thin, glamorous, and female. I pointed to the cocktail portrait and asked for one, on ice.

While I waited to give my credit card to one of the two young, pouty Frenchmen behind the bar I admired the postage stamp picture of myself on the corners of the plastic square I was about to hand over. I’ve had the same credit card picture since I was 15 years old. In this portrait, I had just gotten my braces off and my smile seems wide enough to stretch across all eight digits of my account number. It’s quite adorable, and I get a lot of compliments on it, but the bartenders, who looked scarcely older than I was in the photograph appeared to take little notice.

Oh, well, I thought.  It was probably too dark for them to realize what they were missing. I took my drink and descended a wooden set of steps in search of the dance floor.
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C.C. Glenn Still reeling from the Jets’ playoff loss, the author considers some Super Bowl viewing options.

As the 2011 NFL season comes to a close with a Super Bowl clash between the Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers, there’s a detached air in New York City. There are no more random battle cries of J-E-T-S. Rex Ryan’s personal league-wide vendetta is a thing of the past. Green jerseys lay balled up in the back of closets or the bottom of dumpsters, stained with beers and tears. There’s a game left, but for us –– that is, Jets fans in the East Village and other parts of New York City –– the season’s over. We’re tired. We’re confused.

For the first time since August, we have nowhere to turn. Since the football season began in August, many of us have gravitated toward the Jets, with their scrappy play. For New York City transplants, the gradual adoption of the Jets meant defecting not only from the Giants (the other “New York” team that plays in New Jersey) but also hopping fickly from less fortunate childhood teams in other states and cities.

Throughout the team’s improbable playoff run, it felt like every New Yorker was a New York fan, every bar was a Jets bar.
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Meredith Hoffman Writer Laurie Kamens gets make-up advice.

It felt unnatural. I arched my foot backwards, gracefully pointing my toes, pushed out my chest, and forced a cheesy grin. Posing as a pin-up model was proving harder work than the smiling, curly-headed girls of the 1940’s and 50’s made it look.

“If it feels comfortable, you’re doing it wrong,” Bettina May said as we started mugging for the camera.

A professional pin-up model and burlesque dancer, Ms. May has been teaching her Pin-Up Class for the past five years, giving contemporary women a tutorial in vintage make up and hair, complete with a personalized photo shoot at the end.

Bettina May removes curlers.

Popularized by movie stars such as Marilyn Monroe, Bettie Page, and Rita Hayworth, the classic pin-up look, defined by Ms. May as, “red lips, black eyeliner and a big smile,” is now an iconic image of feminine beauty and sex appeal.

Held at Beauty Bar on 14th Street, the class I attended was intimate, six women including myself. A perfect setting, the converted beauty parlor is decorated with swiveling chairs and display cases holding dusty hairbrushes and expired beauty products. As we settled into the vinyl salon chairs, Buddy Holly playing softly in the background, Ms. May asked why we had signed up for the class and what we hoped to take away from it.

There was Kim, 47, a mother of two, who became interested in pin-up culture through themed events she helped organize. Her enthusiasm reached so far that she brought along a friend, Marcela, 36. Also recommended by a friend was Margaret, 27. Swing dancing since high school, she was looking for a vintage hair and make up style to match her dance moves.

Hailing from Texas, Lorraine, 30, was a one-time hairstylist who was looking to fill a gap in her professional knowledge, as well as make a personal connection; “I’ve recently been looking at pictures of my grandmother and I kind of resemble her,” she said. “I remembered seeing some of her outfits in my dad’s closet. I just want to start presenting myself in a glamorous way.”

Then there was Amy who, though 37, looked as if she was in her early 20’s with a pixie haircut and a bubbly personality to match. After a long-standing fascination with vintage glamour, she was excited to resemble the pin-up girls she had plastered on the walls of her apartment. Read more…

Meredith Hoffman Porchetta, 110 East Seventh Street.

The supreme realization, or maybe the reductio ad absurdum, of the East Village nano-scale restaurant is the place which serves only one item, and has no room to do anything other than order that one thing. In this regard, I would say that the echt East Village establishment is Porchetta, a shoebox at 110 East Seventh Street, between First and A. It is at least theoretically possible to eat something there other than porchetta – a roast pork sandwich – though it’s hard to see why you would; and you can squeeze onto a stool at the counter, though you’re liable to get trampled by the foot traffic if you do.

What is porchetta that one should make so much of it? Sara Jenkins, the founder, owner and master chef, explains that, in classic form, porchetta is a whole, slow-roasted pig stuffed with herbs and innards, and then encased in its own belly to produce a rich outer layer of crispy fat. Porchetta is street food, and served only in the form of a sandwich consisting of a thick slab of pork and its surrounding fat.
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Vivienne Gucwa

When I walked into Mars Bar for the first time I immediately noticed the smell. It was more of a stench, the same odor that permeates my yoga studio after a crowded Bikram class. The second thing I noticed was the man next to me at the bar, who pulled out a deli-bought sub from a paper bag. After a few bites, he ordered a Budweiser from the bartender. Mars Bar does not serve food. Even so, the bartender was remarkably nonchalant about the customer who was halfway through his dinner.

The establishment has been tirelessly documented as a quintessential New York City dive bar — a remnant of an East Village before the Bowery accommodated luxury hotels. Its graffiti-adorned walls, scrawled with disparaging phrases like “Die, Yuppie Scum,” take aim at the shiny high rises and condominiums popping up at an alarming rate.

Now, as Mars Bar prepares to close its doors for at least the next two years – and perhaps longer – it seems like an appropriate time to take a step back and assess the East Village’s best dive bars before they close for good.
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Chaz Kangas.

Passing by the corner of Second Avenue and Fifth Street on a Monday night has become quite a different experience in the three months since Sin Sin closed. The former home of Freestyle Mondays, the vibrant, laidback epicenter of one of the country’s longest lasting hip hop scenes, now sits in silence with the tinted windows whispering to passersby about parties past. Sometimes I’ll even stop in front of the windows and peer inside for a brief moment of nostalgia. When I do this for more than 10 seconds, a local resident will approach and say something to the effect of “that place is closed, the party is over.” While it’s hard to deny the first half of that sentence, the latter portion couldn’t be more wrong.

For many involved in the East Village hip hop scene, “Freestyle Mondays” is the center of our musical solar system, and it would take more than an eviction notice to eclipse such a brightly shining community. When it was announced that Sin Sin would be closing last October, there was tremendous interest from different venues offering to inherit the event and keep things continuing as usual. Eventually, hosts iLLspokiNN and Mariella chose Bar 13, (13th and University) as Freestyle Mondays’ new home. Since then, even amid the numerous snowstorms, the loyalists have returned.

But this move doesn’t mean a complete migration of hip hop from the East Village. Brown Bag Thursdays, a bi-weekly rap showcase at Voodoo Lounge (First Avenue and Second Street), is currently in its second year and is becoming something of a landmark for rap enthusiasts to visit.

Organized by local favorite rhyme collective the Brown Bag All Stars, the event has become one of the area’s premiere hip hop attractions, pairing local acts back-to-back with independent rap artists from all over the continent. This international appeal has resulted in events such as last December’s benefit for the family of Minneapolis rapper Michael ‘Eyedea’ Larsen who died suddenly in October. It’s this outreach and togetherness that exemplifies what makes the scene so special as Brown Bag Thursdays joins long-running hip hop open mic End of the Weak (Sunday nights at Club Pyramid on Avenue A) as another staple in keeping the underground rap scene in the East Village alive. In a genre with an ever-changing sound, perhaps it’s fitting that the walls surrounding it change too.

Chaz Kangas writes about the hip hop music scene at his blog.

Suzanne Rozdeba The East River Park is the focal point of an unrealized plan for a unbroken protected greenway on Manhattan’s east side. Below: The park, renamed for former Mayor John V. Lindsay in 2001, is also a hub for runners and cyclists.

Before the construction of the East River (later FDR) Drive and the public housing along the east side of the street, Avenue D’s relationship with the East River was much more direct than we see now. When the area was still dominated by an active industrial waterfront, almost every east-west street in the neighborhood flowed directly into the river. Today, only a couple of those streets give access to the waterfront and the FDR must be traversed first.

Indeed, a quick look at some historical photographs and maps shows that the water was physically much closer to Avenue D than it is today. For instance, if you stood on the corner of 13th Street on Avenue D in the 1930’s, you could look directly at the water lapping up against the dock, while today that view is dominated by a power plant. Meanwhile, a walk from the corner of East Sixth street and Avenue D would deliver you to the water’s edge after approximately 900 feet, and the equivalent walk today is about 350 feet longer.

The difference, of course, is due both to FDR Drive and the East River Park (renamed John V. Lindsay Park in 2001). What the neighborhood lost in direct access to the water, it gained in additional open space. In fact, it gained Manhattan’s biggest open space south of 59th Street. The park, which is almost 60 acres in size and stretches from East 12th Street to Montgomery Street, owes its origins to the FDR Drive and Robert Moses, the man behind almost every piece of serious infrastructure conceived and/or constructed between the Great Depression and the city’s financial crisis of the 1970’s.
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Suzanne Rozdeba Hung-Ry, 55 Bond Street.

In the course of my first lunch at Hung-Ry, a neo-noodle restaurant at 55 Bond Street, I used my chopsticks to tweezer from my bowl a rather odd black wedge-shaped object, walked it over to the chef, Michael Hodgkins, who was standing behind the counter and said, “What’s this?”

“That’s the gizzard,” Mike explained. “It filters the soil which gets into the chicken’s system and gives it a. . .” He searched for the word.

“Soily?”

“Earthy flavor.” A lot of people, Mike added, regard a gizzard with deep suspicion. I had, too. But by the time I had reached the bottom of my duck breast noodle soup, I was hunting everywhere for those cushy, earthy bits of innard.

When I say that Hung-Ry practices neo-noodle cuisine, I mean that Mike has adapted the Chinese convention of broth, noodle and meat for a different world, and a different palate. Mike’s own training is French — he says that he worked for people who worked for Alain Ducasse, which I suppose is something like jamming with someone who once jammed with Bono — and he has infused into this ancient and rather tired staple a thrilling intensity of flavor and a commitment to fresh and exotic products. The duck breast in my soup had been exquisitely grilled and layered atop a bed of thick noodles which Chen, the noodle-man, had just finished stretching and twisting and yanking and then chopping. The broth was so redolent of distilled essence of duck that I couldn’t bear to order a dessert for fear of dispersing the flavor.
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Courtesy David Amram David Amram will celebrate his 80th birthday with a fundraiser at the Bowery Poetry Club Jan. 30.

The rapidly altering Bowery landscape might prove disorienting to someone who first performed at the fabled Five Spot jazz club in 1956, then located on the Bowery at Fifth Street. For David Amram this isn’t the case, as he prepares to celebrate his 80th birthday at a fund raiser for The Community-Word Project on Jan. 30 at The Bowery Poetry Club. A long-time downtown resident, Mr. Amram has continued to create music, perform and remain vital over the past half century. He explains that “It’s important for young artists to see it’s possible to lead a creative life in the arts.’

Internationally known as a composer, multi-instrumentalist, conductor and author, Mr. Amram has composed more than one hundred orchestral and chamber music works, along with film scores such as those for “Splendor in the Grass” and “The Manchurian Candidate.” He has collaborated with a vast legion of performers including Charles Mingus, Willie Nelson, Dizzy Gillespie, Langston Hughes, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Nina Simone, and scores of others. In 1966, Leonard Bernstein chose him as the first guest composer-in-residence of The New York Philharmonic.
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Meredith Hoffman Paul’s Da Burger Joint, 131 Second Avenue.

Here’s a test: You come back to your office with your lunch, peel the silver-foil rim off the cardboard lid, and behold a very large hamburger slathered in a layer of sauteed mushrooms and onions so vast that it carpets the container; the combination of grease and a plasma of melted American cheese has rendered the bottom bun so soggy that the whole mass can be held only with great care, and the assistance of many napkins. The test: Do you think “Gross!” Or do you think “Yes!”?

If you fall in the first camp, there is no good reason to go to Paul’s Da Burger Joint at 131 Second Avenue, between Saint Marks Place and Seventh Street. You probably should stop reading this article right here. Only the hard-core carnivores still with me? Okay, let’s proceed.

In days of yore, the East Village was full of joints — pizza joints, burger joints, beer joints. Today the neighborhood is given over to the Danish open-faced sandwich and the Japanese pork butt — which I, for one, am happy to celebrate. But a place without neighborhood joints is hardly a neighborhood at all. Paul’s, founded in the remote era of 1989 and bearing the accumulated grit of years of honest service, is the kind of place Jane Jacobs would have celebrated in “The Death and Life of Great Cities.”
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If I’m still living in this neighborhood when I turn 50, I’m going to knock on the door of the Third Street Music School at 11th Street and Second Avenue and join New Horizons, a wind and brass ensemble composed only of adults that old and older, many of whom had never picked up an instrument until they retired from other careers.

In the three and a half years since New Horizons came to the East Village, it has grown from 15 students to 70 and split into two bands that each meet twice a week. These students practice on their own up to two hours a day and the bands perform once every several weeks.

New Horizon’s parent organization, New Horizons International Musical Association, started twenty years ago in Rochester as the inspiration of Roy Ernst who wanted to get older adults into playing music together. It now has locations across the United States and in Iceland, the Netherlands, Australia, and Ireland. Here, the program has funding from the National Endowment for the Art and is “the first and only New Horizons in New York City,”according to Nancy Morgan, the director of school and community partnerships at Third Street.

Ms. Morgan told me that when this band of New Horizons musicians started, “they didn’t even know how to put their instruments together.” New students are always welcome, she said, so if you’re “50 or better” and you’ve always wanted to become a musician, maybe now’s the time. Check out the band and see what you think.

More information about New Horizons can be found here.

Meredith Hoffman Sigiri, 91 First Avenue.

The virtually indistinguishable Indian restaurants which line both sides of Sixth Street between First and Second Avenue, with their garish lights and obsequious waiters, constitute the one zone of ethnic kitsch in the otherwise vital world of East Village cuisine. Perhaps all those vindaloos aren’t really delivered to the Something Mahals along an underground tunnel serving a central kitchen; but they might as well be.

Authenticity, however, lies literally around the corner. Sigiri, a Sri Lankan restaurant at 91 First Avenue, up an iron staircase between Fifth and Sixth Streets, tastes like itself only. Sigiri roasts its own black curry, a mixture of spices different from the cumin-coriander-garam masala combination familiar on Sixth Street. The bread-equivalent is the Hopper, a bowl-shaped pancake made with coconut flour and rice milk, which somewhat resembles the South Indian dosa, but with a spongy base like uttapam. The Hopper in the bottom of the basket has a poached egg cooked into the base.

Mala Rajapakse, the co-owner, believes that Sigiri is the only Sri Lankan restaurant in New York City. She may be right: Sigiri is the only place listed in Zagat which describes itself so. Mala moved to New York 30 years ago, and did her cooking for the family. Five years ago, she and her friend and fellow housewife Tanya Desilva, took a trip to London, where they visited a Sri Lankan restaurant. Eureka! “We decided we have to open up a restaurant.” Now Antonia, the very English Sri Lankan woman whose brother operated the place in London, works the day shift as a waitress.

Sri Lanka is divided — violently, in recent years — between ethnic Sinhala, who dominate the country, and Tamils, who emigrated from South India. Mala is Sinhalese; she happens to share a last name with the country’s rather brutal ruling family, though she assures me that she is not related to them. Sri Lankan cuisine combines elements borrowed from the Dutch and Portuguese colonists, from the Malays and the Tamils. The Lamprais, rice, meat and spices baked in a banana leaf, combines Dutch and Tamil elements. Some dishes won’t be familiar at all even to fans of South Indian cuisine, such as the kuttu roti, described on the menu as “Sri Lankan road-side specialty prepared from doughy pancakes shredded and stir-fried with vegetables, onions and egg.”

Sigiri is narrow and rather gloomy, which is to say that it looks like a million other inexpensive restaurants in New York. Mala is a woman of few words, at least to an English-speaking stranger, so I cannot tell you much of her thoughts about running the only Sri Lankan restaurant in New York. She is, I imagine, content to let her food do the talking.

Sigiri, 91 First Avenue, 212-614-9333. www.sigirinyc.com

Suzanne Rozdeba Bike lanes along First Avenue.

The city announced on Tuesday that a record 47.8 million tourists visited New York City in 2010 and in a lot of ways that is good news. There are a plenty of things that bring visitors to New York: a fascinating history, excellent museums, and beautiful public places like Central Park and Prospect Park.

As the city noted, tourists have helped bolster the declining local economy. During his announcement at the conservatory of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that tourists contributed $31 billion last year. They have also played another positive role that has gone largely unnoticed. Tourists, in some ways, have become the newest public space activists. New York City has always been a tough town when it comes to expanding on green infrastructure, like car-free pedestrian malls and bicycle lanes. But this car-centric city is now changing. Tourists have always loved strolling in New York’s gorgeous parks and gardens and now they are also enjoying other amenities like bike lanes, open walkways in Times Square and the greenways that edge the city’s rivers. Visitors love the new green infrastructure and use it heavily – thus creating the demand for more.
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Courtesy of Eater NYThe 6th Street Kitchen last spring and after this morning’s fire.

Suzanne Rozdeba

The premises at 507 East Sixth Street, stricken by fire early this morning, housed the yearling restaurant 6th Street Kitchen which had replaced the long-established Oriental Grill early last year.

“O.G.,” as it was universally known, enjoyed a long run by New York restaurant standards – some 15 years – offering an Asian-fusion menu ranging from duck rolls to BBQ pork at reasonable prices. Regulars, including myself, missed the cozy, lived-in feel of the place and the friendly service when it closed. What replaced it looked altogether smarter and trendier, with communal tables, and an open kitchen; but an owner of O.G., Chris Genoversa, was behind the project, the prices were reasonable, and so I soon found myself eating there.

Gone were the Asian flavors, replaced by shareable plates of modern American food, evidently market-driven and seasonal, with a few hearty entrées like pork belly and radicchio topped with a poached egg. I found the transition to the new régime painless, and continued my patronage. My interest intensified last fall, when a new chef, Greg Torrech, began to stamp his personality on the menu. I discovered a remarkably light flan made with summer’s corn and topped with arugula and chanterelles, and a plate of fried chicken and waffles with what looked like cream but turned out to be smooth, seasoned ricotta.

Recently the wheels turned again and Andrew Kraft, who Mr. Torrech had brought in to work as his sous chef, assumed charge of the kitchen. He has continued the family-style dining theme of shared small plates, and you can still get the signature house-made chorizo and Manchego sliders. Publicist Annie Wang told The Local that the fire has been “devastating” for the kitchen team. Kitchen supplies were destroyed with the exception of one lucky chef’s tools. Mr. Genoversa’s guitar also survived, discovered undamaged in a well-charred guitar case. Here’s hoping this kitchen can rise again from the dismay of this morning’s ashes.

Kim Davis is the community editor of The Local East Village. He also authors a blog about restaurants and food.