Café Chatter
From the Source
Chefs search
near, far and
wide for only
the freshest
ingredients
BY LIZ JOHNSON
ILLUS TRATIONS BY SERGE BLOCH
As you’re dining at Eighty One—the
new restaurant on the Upper West Side
in Manhattan—you might be marveling at the floor-to-ceiling glass wall of
wine, which holds 3,200 bottles at just
the right temperature, or cooing over
the Chatham cod, which was FedExed
that morning from the Cape. I can pretty
much guarantee that you won’t be thinking about pumpkins.
That’s OK. Ed Brown already has.
In fact, Brown, the chef and owner,
has given pumpkins quite a bit of
thought. Enough to know that the best
pumpkin seed oil comes from pumpkins
grown in Austria, which he uses to flavor
his pumpkin risotto with braised chicken
wings. And enough to know that if he’s
looking for the actual seeds—which he’ll
