July 24, 2008 / GO Brooklyn / Brooklyn Restaurants / Breaking Chews

Tasty restaurant gossip

By Kate Ray

for The Brooklyn Paper

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Wine and art, two of the things that Brooklyn does right, are the focus of LeNell’s July 26 tasting.

The wines, a 2005 Chardonnay and a 2005 Merlot, are both made by Alie Shaper of the Greenpoint winery Brooklyn Oenology. The tasting at the Red Hook shop is timed to coincide with the opening of the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition’s summer show “Hot!,” down Van Brunt street at the Red Hook pier.

Tasting is free all day, from noon to midnight, and snacks will be available.

• • •

“If there’s anything close to manna from heaven, it’s raw food,” said Mawule Jobe-Simon, owner of the new raw food restaurant Rawstar in Prospect Heights. The Trinidad-born chef, who formerly owned Prospect Heights’ Green Paradise, cooks nothing above 95 degrees, in order to preserve the nutrients and enzymes of fresh food.

“I like to think of it as cooking in the sun,” he said.

The menu has West Indian influences, but also “simulates some of the dishes that people are more accustomed to,” with banana pancakes and fruit pies being among the most popular dishes.

For an entree, Jobe-Simon said that customers love the “napa sandwich” with tomato sauce, cucumbers, mixed greens and “nut cheese” — made from macadamia nuts, pine nuts and sesame seeds — between two pieces of Chinese cabbage.

Rawstar also hosts monthly raw-food cooking classes for $45 a person.

“It’s exciting, it’s different, it’s healing food,” Jobe-Simon said. “We are blessed just to have it for people to try.”

• • •

Getting a little sick of Swedish meatballs and lingonberry sauce already? For your next trip to IKEA, stop by Rocky Sullivan’s in Red Hook for its new Sunday brunch and live country music.

Fort Greene-based singer Sean Kershaw and his country band play on Sundays, from 1 pm to 4 pm, on the restaurant’s rooftop deck, which owner Chris Byrne touts as “a welcome respite from a day of hectic shopping.”

The music is a great accompaniment to the restaurant’s cheap, filling fare: the signature “Irish breakfast” — with Irish bacon, Irish sausage, black-and-white pudding, fried tomatoes, scrambled eggs and toast — is only $10.

No surprise here: the $3 Bloody Marys are also quite popular.

Now, if only it sold couches.

• • •

The fresh bread from The Brooklyn Bread Cafe, which has for so long perfumed the air in Carroll Gardens, has now come to Park Slope.

The new, larger location — which features an expanded menu, sit-down service and later hours — opened in mid-June and is serving breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert every day.

“The best thing about the store is that it’s a hybrid,” said co-owner Dimitri Beylis. “It’s a restaurant, cafe and bakery all mixed into one.”

The chicken Marsala is already popular, as are the “Nutella chocolate loaf” and walnut-fig bread, according to Beylis.

He added, “We basically have something for everybody.”

• • •

Put on your puddin’!

On Thursday July 31, colonial cook Carolina Capehart (pictured) is teaching us how to make “A Pudding or Two” at her second free “Fireside Feasts” cooking class at the Wyckoff Farmhouse Museum in East Flatbush.

You’ll get to help out the Park Sloper at her open hearth, while learning about 19th-century cooking, and then enjoy the sweet fruits of your labor.

©2008 The Brooklyn Paper