William F. Buckley Jr., conservative columnist and long time Stamford resident passed yesterday at his home. According to his son Christopher (author of "Thank You For Smoking"), Buckley was a fan of Colony Grill's hot oil pepperoni pizza. Politics aside, anyone can find common ground on that.
Here is the first render of the Harbor Point Hotel, the first project planned to break ground in Antares South End redevelopment plan. Looks like they are trying to appeal to Shadow Ghosts, who are under served in the lodging market.
The New York Times isn't just about the sexcapades of John McCain, they also printed a cool review of Fratelli Market up in Turn of the River this weekend.
Stamford Talk owns my blog right now. She updates her site everyday and is super excited about The City that Works whereas my blog is updated intermittently, partly because my supposed co-authors have managed one post between them ("Manford") and partially from the indifference that the grey skies and short days of winter bring. Stamford Talk also delivered me the scoop on Fox's "Kitchen Nightmares" filming at Sabatiello's this week.
I design digital ad campaigns for Fox shows, so it was pretty disappointing that one could slip a filming next to the bodega where I buy milk and brillo pads without me aware. Once I had the info though, I was pretty certain I would get the chance to watch Gordon Ramsay cuss out some shitty waitress in person. In college my roommate and I successfully broke onto the set of a Beautiful Mind and enjoyed a day of Kraft Service and awkward exchanges of pleasantries with Ron Howard. (We were only shown the door when I pushed the experience too far and signed up for an onset massage). Monday I scoped the scene and came back Tuesday with the instructions from the casting director to ask the hostess for a table for two on the second floor.
I have never been to Sabatiello's before and I'm only loosely familiar with the format of Kitchen Nightmares. Sabatiello's is an Italian Grille on the corner of Bedford and Forest with a small bar and seating area on the first floor with a larger restaurant section upstairs that doubles as a piano bar/ dance club. I believe the owner is a regular in any article in the Advocate where the mall plaza is accused of cannibalizing the downtown restaurant scene. Kitchen Nightmares is a reality show where celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay takes a failing restaurant, curses out the staff, throws a few of his dishes on the menu and is off to the next town like a culinary David Banner. I'm guessing we were still in the "before" phase of the restaurant transformation since I doubt Gordon Ramsay is partial to disco balls on the ceiling. Gordon's dishes were a Baked Pasta and Filet Mignon for two. I was slightly disappointed the guest dishes weren't more exotic, like Skewered Leprechaun or Ground Panda, but the meat sounded tempting and we settled on that and some Caesar salad.
The upstairs room was freakishly bright with florescent lighting to accommodate filming. Gordon made a few loops through the dining room looking concerned, but we were robbed of any real drama beyond a woman next to us sending a dish back for being cold. The waiters were mum, on edge and not really open to giving us a peek behind the curtain. The main course arrived after almost an hour. M enjoyed, I didn't think it was anything that blew me away. Dunn's Loft can slap that meat off the table any day of the week.
Eating with a camera and boom mic in your face can be jarring. The second any food is placed on the table a crew descends like you are Britney at a Starbucks. Suddenly you forget how to use a fork and second-guess how exactly to work a knife. Every sip of your drink dribbles down your chin. Conversation becomes painfully stilted. "Do you enjoy stuff?" "Yes, in particular instances I perhaps take pleasure in partaking in stuff"
As we were packing up to leave the owner made the rounds to a few tables and he looked like he had been though a few rounds of a fight himself. We left satisfied knowing that somewhere Gordon was kicking some ass.
It's slightly outdated now that the Giants have sealed the deal, but this article from the New York Times gives a great run down of the team's deep roots in the state, from practices at Fairfield U to Stamford's own Andy Robestelli.
Little old CT steals some national election coverage again when we went for for Obama yesterday over Hillary.
The win, 51% to 47%, was close and even closer in Stamford where Obama edged Clinton by 1% percent, a mere 28 votes! You can check out all the CT town by town results listed here & mapped here.
I’m not surprised by an Obama win; we are a people with our Nutmegs in a twist. We are the state that threw out Rob Simmons and Nancy Johnson, two long serving Republican Congressmen, for the fresh Democratic faces of Chris Murphy and Joe Courtney. We are the state that dumped Joe Lieberman off the Democratic ticket for Ned Lamont. Even though Lieberman finally found that ever elusive “Joementum” he had been talking about (mostly in the form of strong Republican support) and beat Lamont in the general, the electorate here is definitely feeling some buyers remorse.
The national media seemed to have us misunderstood. Connecticut was “Hillary’s backyard”. Well CT looked around and didn’t see Buddy the Dog taking a leak on the Charter Oak and decided to show them otherwise. The case can be made that Fairfield County is the backyard of New York City, but we don’t feel any overwhelming connection to Chappaqua. That is a mistake that only someone looking at us on a map can make.
Connecticut is a hard state to pin down. We are the Tri-State, but we are New England. We’re celebrating the Giants win and sulking over the Patriots loss. Mark Twain wrote “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” and Who’s the Boss took place here. Think twice Chris Matthews before you declare us serfs of Westchester County again.
The Merritt Parkway… Connecticut’s traffic gambit. I95 is slow, do you take the chance on crossing town to sit in the same traffic crammed in with one less lane? DO YOU?!!!
Apparently there was a push that culminated in 2004 around building trails that run along the Merritt Parkway. The original design of the Parkway left space to accommodate trails and that buffer space has been protected up until this point from lane expansion. Some towns embraced the idea; Stamford even offered to create a demonstrative section of the trail in the 1 mile stretch between High Ridge Rd. and Newfield Rd. Other towns were against it and the DOT never got behind the project.
I love the idea of utilizing the Merritt to create a new trail system through Connecticut. If there is enough room in between the road and private property on each side why not? The CT DOT remains uninterested and the Stamford Demonstrative Trail remains off the drawing board.
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