Turkish food, chicken curry and Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Tin Building

Menu Talk

On this week’s podcast, Pat Cobe, senior menu editor of Restaurant Business, and Bret Thorn, senior food & beverage editor of Nation’s Restaurant News and Restaurant Hospitality, discussed the time they spent on and near the water in New York City. Pat took a ferry down the East River to Wall Street to check out Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Tin Building, a much-ballyhooed food hall that neither co-host had had a chance to visit yet. Pat enjoyed a savory buckwheat crêpe, and observed that she also had the option to have a South Indian crêpe-like item called a dosa, a fact that dovetailed nicely with a feature that Bret had just written on chicken curry, one of the fastest-growing types of chicken dishes on menus these days.

Bret has taken to watching the birds flying over Sheepshead Bay, where he lives now, and he strolled along the bay to Rocca, a Turkish-accented restaurant with a bayside view, where he had a light meal of various mezze dips such as labneh, hummus, babaghanoush and Turkish bread.

Pat, too, had sampled a Turkish food she’d never had before, a tiny dumpling called manti, which she had with labneh at a Turkish place called A la Turka.

In other food samplings, Bret was sent Buffalo Wild Wings’ chicken wings with its new Bacon Buffalo sauce as well as its Triple Bacon Cheeseburger.

The guest this week is William Dissen, chef and owner of The Market Place in Asheville, North Carolina, as well as three-unit Billy D’s Fried Chicken.

Dissen recently returned from a culinary ambassador mission to Malaysia, where he cooked for stateless children near the city of Kota Kinabalu. He also recently published his first cookbook, “Thoughtful Cooking: Recipes Rooted in the New South.”

Dissen said the book reflects his own ethos of using wholesome, local food, and he advocates for people to cook that way at home, too.

The restaurateur doesn’t just help Malaysian kids. He’s also involved in education programs for young people at home in North Carolina, and he discussed that mission and also shared strategies for keeping his restaurant’s staff engaged, motivated and excited to provide great hospitality.