Honk if you’re hungry! A blockbuster lineup of munch-mobiles and food flicks in Dumbo.

Street food fans found their fondest wishes realized at the sold-out Food Truck Drive-In Movie, the marquee event of the fourth annual NYC Food Film Festival. More than 20 trucks parked inside the sprawling digs of Dumbo’s Tobacco Warehouse—from the savory stylings of Schnitzel & Things and the Bistro Truck to the beloved offerings of the Red Hook pupusa vendors to the healthful leanings of the Cinnamon Snail (vegan, organic baked goods) and the tropical-themed Green Pirate (fruit and veggie juices).

Sucking People’s Pops dispensed gratis from a Cooking Channel-sponsored truck, fusion fiends lined up en masse for eats from the Krave Korean Barbecue truck, whose Korean tacos, kimchee quesadillas and Kraver sliders usually require a jaunt to Jersey City to enjoy. A special section featured a tableau of vendors from the Brooklyn Flea, including Red Hook Lobster Pound, AsiaDog, the Milk Truck, McClure’s Pickles and more. Meanwhile, in a blessedly shady tented area, food-themed films screened throughout the afternoon and into the evening. Features of various lengths highlighted everything from LaFrieda Meats to Brooklyn Flea vendors to straight-up pizza and pasta porn. And the refreshments? Well, they sure beat the offerings at Regal Cinemas. Were you snapped?

Photos by Gabi Porter.

Last summer’s fro-yo war continues, this year in truck form. Competing with Berry Froyo as of July will be a combination fro-yo–and-coffee truck called Joyride. There are two flavors: original and Buzzed (original, but caffeinated). Expect organic, seasonal fruits for toppings, as well as bittersweet chocolate croquants, coconut shavings, and jaggery, a sweet Sri Lankan palm syrup. “I love everything from the hot-dog vendors to haute cuisine on food trucks, but there’s so much out there that’s just really, really unhealthy. Frozen yogurt is actually pretty healthy,” asserts co-founder Lev Brie.

Joyride will also serve Brooklyn-roasted Stumptown coffee and a selection of specialty drinks like the “flat white,” a New Zealand drink that’s “in between a macchiato and cappuccino,” Brie says. Follow the truck on Twitter to track its launch and location.

Brisket blowout! Top pitmasters keep the ‘cues smoking and the crowds coming.

As the 17 pitmasters at the Big Apple BBQ demonstrated, there’s no right way to cook a pig—or cow, or sheep. Barbecue mavens rolled in from 13 states, including NYC’s own Blue Smoke, Dinosaur Bar-B-Que and Rack & Soul. And, as Charles Grund—who presided over Hill Country‘s1,500 pounds of brisket—explained, ”Barbecue is a thing where everybody does something just a little bit different: their own flavor, and their own different technique. There’s not a whole lot of people doing it exactly the same way, so there’s not a whole lot of cutthroat.”

Indeed, the 125,000 atendees who were expected for the two-day festival chomped on barbecued brisket, whole hogs cooked up two ways, ribs done in myriad technqiues, a smorgasbord of sausages, and even that Owensboro, Ky., special, barbecued mutton. Everyone had set up the night before, and some stayed up all night tending fires and preparing meat.

But it was all worth it the next day, when the hungry crowds showed up toting kids, dogs and Wet-Naps. “Taste the meat, taste the spice, taste the salt,” exulted ‘cue granddaddy Mike Mills, of 17th Street Bar & Grill in Murphysboro, Ill., gesturing at his baby back ribs. “You’ve got a rodeo in your mouth.” …

Read the rest and see more photos on Metromix.com.

Photos by Gabi Porter

Order your wine on tap at Vesta Trattoria, an Astoria wine bar that pours glasses from a keg. Four handles draw wine from 28-bottle kegs that are pressurized and stay good for months — not that Vesta can keep it around that long. “I would say 80 percent of the people drinking wine are drinking [from the tap],” owner Giuseppe Falco told Grub Street. The attraction is that you’ll never get a past-its-prime pour, and the absence of bottles and labels reduces waste as well as cost. “Our cheapest wine by the glass went down by a dollar,” Falco said, noting that all the tap wines sell for $6 to $8 per glass.

On tap now are two whites and two reds: a 2008 Cabernet Franc, a 2008 Estate Merlot, a 2009 Chardonnay, and a 2009 Grand Cru Sauvignon Blanc, all from Raphael Vineyard in Peconic. Falco plans to expand his offerings, assuming that he can get other vintners interested in the keg system. “This is what we’ll all be doing soon,” he says.

Read the original story on Grub Street.

Photo: Courtesy Vesta Vino

A drink before dinner? Try a drink for dinner with meaty libations that are a boozy meal in a glass.

Meat mania has set in so hard that we’re no longer content to just eat the stuff. Or maybe it’s just that flesh is the last frontier for mixologists, who’ve already added all manner of botanicals and offbeat vegetables to liquor. These days, we’ve fully entered the carnivore cocktail craze, a boozy parlor trick popping up on drink menus across New York City.

As with many trends, East Village curve-racer PDT takes partial credit for getting the party started—their Benton’s Old Fashioned is famously done with bacon-infused bourbon, maple syrup and Angostura bitters. And Brooklyn Brewery even cooked up a bacon beer, though they’ve never sold it for public consumption (brewmaster Garrett Oliver told us about it in January).

Here are five carne cocktails we’ve decided to chew on.

Read the rest of the story, and see more pics, on Metromix.

Photos by Melissa Hom. Pictured: Boqueria’s Gilda Maria.

Not long ago, the American Museum of Natural History was a place to learn about the lives of dinosaurs and Neanderthals, with a possible tidbit gleaned here and there about what these creatures ate. Yet the museum has increasingly been offering food and drink events as part of its after-hours programming, through its Adventures in the Global Kitchen event series. “There’s been so much interest from our audience in the world of food,” says public programs director Ellen Silberman, who helped organize a recent lecture and tasting on Persian cuisine, and one about ancient wines, in conjunction with the “Traveling the Silk Road” exhibit. Now it seems Silberman and her staff have caught on to the cocktail-geek movement: On June 8, the museum will bring in mixologist Don Lee of Momofuku Ssam Bar and cocktail historian David Wondrich to talk about “polar cocktails.” The topic relates to the “Race to the End of the Earth” exhibit on artic exploration, and is inspired by the recent discovery of a bottle of century-old whiskey buried in Arctic ice — the drink of choice for explorer Ernest Shackleton. Among the topics these imbibing authorities will discuss is, fittingly, the importance of ice in creating the perfect cocktail. …

Read the rest of the story on Fork in the Road.

Photo: Courtesy AMNH

“The South has always been better at cocktails than the North,” says Shoolbred’s Robert Morgan, who plans to channel New Orleans in his new bar-restaurant, Ninth Ward, as of next month. The East Village spot will feature regional beers like Abita, as well as traditional NOLA cocktails such as the Sazerac. Morgan and his three partners (including Shoolbred’s William Ivey Long) road-tripped south to decorate the space. “We salvaged as much as we could” from New Orleans, Morgan says, including a stained-glass window that once graced a convent, an intricately carved wooden fireplace mantel, and many window shutters in various states of disrepair. The basement space has four wooden alcove-like booths and leads to a Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil–esque ivied brick courtyard with fountains and a brass shrouded woman. …

Read the rest of the story on Grub Street.

This story originally appeared on Fork in the Road.

The stretch of 28th Street just west of Sixth Avenue is not an area where one expects to find the kind of artisanal, housemade offerings that are now de rigueur in so many downtown and Brooklyn restaurants. Yet Roberto Bellissimo, the chef of Blu restaurant in the Hotel Indigo, which opened last fall, will soon be offering house-infused grappa as an after-dinner cap-off to his Italian menu.

Bellissimo grew up in Toronto making grappas with his grandfather, who hailed from Calabria in Italy. In traditional fashion, the chef’s “nonno” would use up extra fruit at the end of a season by throwing it into a batch of the liqueur. “He had a pear tree and a fig tree,” Bellissimo recalls.

About three months ago, the chef took apricots he’d frozen during the summer crop, along with pears, pineapple, and jarred Morello cherries, and sealed them in a grappa bath in oversize mason jars. The resulting four flavors are meant to be ordered after the meal, “like a digestif,” explains Bellissimo.  …

Read the rest of the story on Fork in the Road.

This story originally appeared on Tasting Table.

Most restaurants that offer house-made pasta want you to think it’s crafted by a real Italian grandmother, even when the reality is more often a scruffy 20-something who’s never been to Italy.

Unless, of course, you’re dining at I Trulli.

There, the high priestess of the pasta station is Dora Marzovilla, the 74-year-old mother of owner Nicola Marzovilla.

Since I Trulli’s opening almost 16 years ago, the elder Marzovilla has been rolling out snakes of dough, breaking off nubs and deftly fashioning them into a variety of precise shapes. Her delicate ear-shaped orecchiette make perfect vessels for a rich rabbit ragù, and pillows of ravioli encase creamy Robiola cheese.  …

Read the rest of the story on Tasting Table.

Photo courtesy of I Trulli restaurant.

Photo: Marcus Price

Music scenester Dante Gonzales will be frying up chicken and tofu in New York for the next ten days or so, before he leaves for L.A. to open a food truck. After rising through the ranks at San Francisco’s Zuni Café and Seattle’s Flying Fish and then deciding he “didn’t feel the same kind of love and energy” there as he had cooking with his grandma, Gonzales began serving his grub at parties and shows around the world, for artists like M.I.A., Theophilus London, and Santigold. Now, for the first time, he’s offering bicycle delivery.

The chef hopes that Ride or Fry, as he’s calling the project, will show people that “fried chicken is not junk food— it’s a character dish; it’s like gumbo.” His “Sock It to Me” chicken consists of Murray’s free-range breasts coated in a batter that includes nuts, seeds, and fresh herbs (Grandma’s trick during times when flour was scarce). Greenmarket sides include a cucumber-corn-and-string-bean salad, a roasted-paprika-corn macaroni and cheese, and a daily pie. …

Read the rest of the story on Grub Street.