Rao

Two scoops.

Good news for vegans this summer: One of Fork's favorite parlors in the city,Van Leeuwen, has debuted two new flavors made without the shop's usual cream, milk, and eggs. We stopped in for a taste of the new vanilla and chocolate scoops, to see how they stood up to our usual order of strawberry and palm sugar.

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Christopher Street's Il Cantuccio bakery is the first American branch of a venerable Florentine institution, an oven specializing in the salt-free bread of Tuscany. Tasting wonderfully bland on its own, this bread is of infinite utility in making bread salads and bread soups, but it also works well with crostini and bruschetti -- in which the toppings are so salty that the salt-free product makes complete sense. In addition to this extraordinary bread, an array of biscotti, bakery pizzas, and unusual breakfast pastries (some containing giant chunks of dark chocolate) also fly out of the oven.

Now, among the small collection of simple sandwiches offered on homemade focaccia, one featuring porchetta is the latest and most delicious.

[Update: This sandwich will be regularly available on Saturdays and Sundays from here on.]

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The idea was popularized by Momofuku Ssam Bar and by Xi'an Famous Foods--sandwiches featuring lamb or pork in a steamed or baked bao with pickled vegetables and a thick, sweet soy sauce. The idea might have occurred spontaneously in several places, because Taiwanese do something similar. Now, a new Taiwanese restaurant called Chinger--an offshoot of a next-door hot-pot place--is debuting a bao burger joint in the shadow of Elmhurst's LIRR tracks.

Those of us who fervidly celebrate the joys of immigrant cooking and its eventual assimilation into the standard American diet―think tortilla chips and guacamole, beef stroganoff, wonton soup, and IKEA's bouncy Swedish meatballs―may still be occasionally dismayed at the way certain dishes enter our collective gastronomic vernacular. One such discouraging example is Cosi Sandwich Bar's new chicken mole sandwich.

No doubt that the neighborhood pizzeria, once a leading dining institution in all five boroughs, has been undergoing a decline lately at the hands of fast-food franchises, dollar slice joints, and the tendency to think of pizza as a gourmet item. But its death has been prematurely announced; the old warhorse still has lots of life left in it. And the new branch of Joe's Pizza, just opened near the corner of Third Avenue and East 14th Street, is evidence of that.

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The abrupt opening yesterday of the first branch location of Burger Joint occasioned a flood of notoriety, suggesting you get more publicity by behaving impulsively than by following the typical slow-moving campaign that usually attends a restaurant opening. After I'd read about it in Eater, The New York Times, and Fork in the Road, I had to run over there and check out the menu.

I'd popped into Chelsea Market last Saturday to score a lump of guanciale at Buon Italia, when the meat case at Dickson's Farmstand Meats caught my eye--always good to give it a look and see what sorts of products, many of them oddball, are currently being offered. There among the novel sausages, pork sirloins, bone marrows sliced two ways, delicious smoked ham, and homemade pancetta a neat array of burgers scampered forward, advertised as 80 percent beef and 20 percent bacon, for $6 each. My dinner plans were settled! They appeared to be about a half-pound each, and were mottled with what looked like pork fat. Would they be any good?

When New York barbecue legend Robert Pearson departed the final location of his Queens establishment, Pearson's Texas BBQ, in 2005, he left it in the hands of his able pitmaster, Angel Domingues, and the new owner, Cenobio Canalizo, both natives of Puebla, Mexico. They changed the name to Ranger Texas Barbecue, and the place soldiered on for a few more years, turning out 'cue that originally ranged from good to decent, but later was sometimes awful. Then a couple of months ago, due to a rumored death in the family, Ranger's eight-person crew mysteriously departed to points unknown, leaving Jackson Heights bereft of barbecue. Some say the extended family that ran the place returned to Mexico.

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Can an ingredient be too local? The gelatinous seaweed served at New York's newest pop-up restaurant is scraped each morning from the bottom of the Staten Island Ferry and strewn over sheets of fried kale. It's slippery stuff and it tastes dangerous, like it could kill you. It just might.

For the price of $120, the menu at '13 seems very short, but you'll be grateful for that once things get started. A tasting in late March allowed me to choose four dishes from a list of six, all of which were hopelessly underseasoned. I later learned that this kitchen's one luxury, a delivery of Welsh sea salt made with water from the Isle of Anglesey, had been delayed en route (a bag of the crystals arrives by sailboat once or twice a month).

Spring's first green nettles, foraged from the cracks in the chef's driveway, and from the path leading from his garden shed to the back door, were dehydrated to a crisp and shredded with raw knotweed and wild catnip, then served with a lukewarm shot of smoked puddle water.

Pizza-by-the-pound purveyor Pie is offering matzo-based pizzas for Passover. This popular parlor--which won a Voice award for Best Fast Food in 2003--offers lush thin-crust pies in elongated shapes, all displayed on a long marble counter, to be cut at any length at the diner's request.