Michael Psilakis has found the secret to world domination: Steadily, quietly build your empire in places nobody would think to look until you’ve achieved full saturation, at which point it will be too late for them to resist. This has long been a tactic for military leaders and Bond villains, but has never been a particularly popular strategy for those who like to use their power for good rather than evil. Like chefs.

The tried-and-true strategy for restaurant empire-building these days is to open in the next neighborhood to explode—or, if one of your partners is a celebrity sibling, on the long-smoldering Lower East Side. Make it small, preferably uncomfortably so, and watch as wait times climb into the hours while your staff rushes diners out the door, throwing dishes large and small at them all at once and letting them sort out what was what as they stand on the sidewalk, stuffed and dazed, 35 minutes later. From there, you quickly spin out a few more branches doing basically the same thing, spend all that banked-up patron capital, and then pray they like you enough to come back six months after the shine has worn off.

Think of it. Even the venerable Momofukus, which began with the noble goal of differentiation, have become multiple iterations of either the small-plates/large format spot for groups (Ssam, Noodle Bar) or the intimate tasting-menu-only extravaganza (Ko, Sydney, Australia’s Seiobo).

Psilakis’ trajectory, however, seems more in line with the heady days of the ’90s. In 2008 he opened Kefi, an approachable Greek tavern serving the chef’s childhood favorites writ large, as well as Anthos, a refined interpretation of the cuisine that garnered a Michelin star in its first year. Never mind that he was single-handedly steering the revival that took Greek cooking out of the plate-smashing, Opa!-shouting ghetto and brought it to napkins and tablecloths; he was building grand restaurants without the Vegas-targeting gimmickry or faux-exclusivity of his peers.

His stable today consists of the abovementioned Kefi, now a grande dame of the city’s Greek scene, and several locations of his casual MP Taverna in such gauche locations as Roslyn, Long Island, Irvington, in Westchester County, with one soon to come in Astoria, Queens, bringing coals to Newcastle in an incredibly audacious way. Most interesting of his properties, though, is Fish Tag (222 W. 79th St., michaelpsilakis.com/fishtag), nominally a wine bar-meets-seafood restaurant but in reality a playground for pescetarian experimentation.
Dishes run roughshod over national boundaries, from a smoked trout salad that is squarely Nassau County to Catalan shrimp served on top of one of the most convincing renditions of patatas bravas served outside Madrid. Greek grilled octopus is buried in a warm, mustard-dressed salad of new potatoes straight from a Munich picnic. Sheep’s-milk dumplings are of the same technique as Italian gnudi but tasting of feta cheese you once had in a dream, served with crumbled merguez sausage and drowned in a roasted red pepper coulis you will end up sneaking indelicate spoonfuls of, praying for a loaf of bread.

It takes a lot to overcome the space, the below-ground level of a townhouse on West 79th Street, a low-ceilinged rectangle with bar up front by the only window and spartan gray seating at back centered around a butcher-block-topped island that seemed to serve no purpose grander than well-disguised wait station. It takes even more to overcome the loneliness of a recent 6:30 pre-theater reservation. Fish Tag did so handily.

A meal of small plates was thoughtfully coursed from lightest to richest, revealing a cohesive progression of flavors we hadn’t imagined when we ordered with wild abandon. Service is on point, friendly and helpful without calling you “dude” or upselling the table on hand-wrought breads or unnecessary snacks.

If he so desires, Psilakis has built himself a restaurant that could easily take over the world. And if he does, I, for one, will welcome our new Greek overlord.

Benefits of Eating Well
Eating well is vital for everyone at all ages. Whatever your age, your daily food choices can make an important difference in your health and in how you look and feel.

Eating Well Promotes Health
Eating a well-planned, balanced mix of foods every day has many health benefits. For instance, eating well may reduce the risk of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, bone loss, some kinds of cancer and anemia. If you already have one or more of these chronic diseases, eating well and being physically active may help you better manage them. Healthy eating may also help you reduce high blood pressure, lower high cholesterol and manage diabetes.

Eating well gives you the nutrients needed to keep your muscles, bones, organs and other parts of your body healthy throughout your life. These nutrients include vitamins, minerals, protein, carbohydrates, fats and water.

Eating Well Promotes Energy
Eating well helps keep up your energy level, too. By consuming enough calories—a way to measure the energy you get from food—you give your body the fuel it needs throughout the day. The number of calories needed depends on how old you are, whether you’re a man or woman, your height and weight, and how active you are.

Food Choices Can Affect Weight
Consuming the right number of calories for your level of physical activity helps you control your weight, too. Extra weight is a concern for older adults because it can increase the risk for diseases such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease and can increase joint problems. Eating more calories than your body needs for your activity level will lead to extra pounds.

If you become less physically active as you age, you will probably need fewer calories to stay at the same weight. Choosing mostly nutrient-dense foods—foods which have a lot of nutrients but relatively few calories—can give you the nutrients you need while keeping down calorie intake.

Food Choices Affect Digestion
Your food choices also affect your digestion. For instance, not getting enough fiber or fluids may cause constipation. Eating more whole-grain foods with fiber, fruits and vegetables or drinking more water may help with constipation.

Make One Change at a Time
Eating well isn’t just a “diet” or “program” that’s here today and gone tomorrow. It is part of a healthy lifestyle that you can adopt now and stay with in the years to come.
To eat healthier, you can begin by taking small steps, making one change at a time. For instance, you might:
Take the salt shaker off your table. Decreasing your salt intake slowly will allow you to adjust.
Switch to whole-grain bread, seafood or more vegetables and fruits when you shop.
These changes may be easier than you think. They’re possible even if you need help with shopping or cooking, or if you have a limited budget.

Checking With Your Doctor
If you have a specific medical condition, be sure to check with your doctor or registered dietitian about foods you should include or avoid.

You Can Start Today
Whatever your age, you can start making positive lifestyle changes today. Eating well can help you stay healthy and independent—and look and feel good—in the years to come.
For more information visit nihseniorhealth.gov

By John Friia

As people grow older, the chances of getting diagnosed with a chronic illness or weakened immune system increases. The Food and Drug Administration has created guidelines of what seniors should consume, to ensure that they remain healthy.

Like the standards for adults, seniors are encouraged to stay away from foods that have high cholesterol, trans fats and saturated fats. The FDA is also concerned about seniors contracting food borne illnesses, and has stressed that foods such as meats, seafood and vegetables be prepared properly.

It was for this reason that Golden Cuisine was created. Golden Cuisine is a company that delivers ready-to-eat frozen meals especially for seniors. In addition, the meals are easy to prepare and promote emotional and as well as physical well-being. Meals from Golden Cuisine can be home-delivered or found in local senior centers.

“Golden Cuisine is specifically made for seniors. We look at the interaction of medicine and foods, and the easy-to-read packaging,” Adriane Berg, spokesperson for Golden Cuisine, said.

The meals are broken down into different categories, including low sodium and cholesterol, meals for diabetics and rehab hyper-metabolic for patients who are recently recovering from surgery and need to gain weight.

Though the meals are FDA-approved, the New York City Department of the Aging has additional requirements that must be met by organizations serving local seniors. “DFTA sets regulations for senior nutrition, and Golden Cuisine is one of the few companies that have been approved by both the FDA and DFTA,” explained Berg.

Compared to other prepared meals, Golden Cuisine has a lower average of sodium in each meal. Each type of meal is specially composed for seniors by a board-certified nutritionist to ensure that it meets senior requirements, which include three ounces of protein, one cup of vegetables and one serving of starch.

Golden Cuisine aims to educate seniors about growing old gracefully and offers special nutritional tips for seniors and caregivers through their online newsletter. The company also offers seniors the chance to share family and cultural recipes through their new website, www.GoldenCuisineCookbook.com

Golden Cuisine has assisted numerous seniors throughout the country, and has been included in the annual Inc. 5000 list. In 2011, Signature Foods, the parent company of Golden Cuisine, was ranked No. 102 out of all the companies, and No. 5 in the food companies category. The headquarters are located in Georgia, and the company has been named as one of the winners of the 2011 Pacesetter Awards, for maintaining excellent customer service and for being the fastest-growing private company in the Atlanta area.

Seniors interested in trying some of the meals can purchase them online at www.GoldenCuisine.com.

By Angela Barbuti

Chef Masaharu Morimoto is most widely recognized for being an Iron Chef. So much so that people are known to start “screaming and giggling” when they see him around town. You don’t have to travel far to catch a glimpse of the celebrity chef—just visit Morimoto restaurant in the Meatpacking District and sit at the sushi bar. Between sips of sake and tastes of Crispy Rock Shrimp Tempura, you can see the Japanese native and sushi master behind his exposition kitchen.

On Nov. 5, chef Morimoto will be at New Taste 2012, sponsored by New York magazine.

How do you describe your cooking style?
Utilizing Japanese cooking techniques with not only Japanese ingredients, but also Western ones. I hate to call it “fusion,” but want to call it “global cuisine.”

What is a typical day like for you?
I wake up early and walk in the city as exercise. Then in the afternoon I go to my restaurant.

Your restaurant is known for its tasting menu, omakase, which frequently changes. Where do your menu ideas come from?
I usually think about seasonal ingredients and then come up with ideas using them. For Japanese cuisine, seasonality is very important. Even for fish—the same fish tastes different depending on the season.

Are you recognized in Manhattan now that you were on Iron Chef?
As I mentioned, I walk a lot in the city. Some people do recognize me as an Iron Chef and wave at me or sometimes ask me to take pictures with them. Some people’s reactions are funny, screaming and giggling.

Of all the food battles you participated in on the show, which one was the most memorable?
I should say it was the Tofu Battle because I got the perfect score.

What do you think of the fact that chefs are now celebrities in our culture?
I think TV is one of the reasons. Chefs appear on TV more and more and are treated just like other celebrities.

Morimoto plays Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell music. How would you describe the atmosphere you are trying to create there?
I want to create an atmosphere where customers enjoy our food—but each Morimoto restaurant has a different atmosphere depending on the location. For example, Morimoto New York plays music relatively loud because that’s what the customers expect in the Meatpacking District.

Are you planning on opening more restaurants?
A new restaurant, Tribeca Canvas, will open in early November in Tribeca. More to come in the next year.

You have some unique-sounding names for your dishes. Describe “Duck, Duck, Duck” and “Angry Chicken.”
Duck, Duck, Duck is Morimoto Peking duck, foie gras croissant, and duck egg. Angry Chicken is very hot as if the chicken was angry.

If you had to take your wife out to dinner in New York City, where would you go?
A nice four-star restaurant. I’ve already taken her to Daniel and Eleven Madison, so next will be … but actually, my wife and I like eating comfortably at home.

What is the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten?
Ask Andrew Zimmerman!
Morimoto is at 88 Tenth Ave.
www.morimotonyc.com

Marc Murphy is the successful owner of Benchmarc Restaurants, with six restaurant and catering locations across the city, a board member of the nonprofit charity City Harvest, and has been a judge and competitor on cooking competition TV shows like Chopped and Iron Chef America.

But despite a well-earned place among New York gourmet culinary masters, Murphy says that he is, and has always been, a believer in family-friendly community restaurants.
“My restaurants are based around neighborhoods,” said Murphy. “I want Mary down the street to know Joe the bartender.”

At each of Murphy’s restaurant locations—Landmarc in Tribeca and the Time Warner Center, and Ditch Plains in the West Village, Brooklyn Bridge Pier and the Upper West Side—community members have the option to call for takeout. Murphy’s staff also keeps kids’ menus and high chairs on hand, which is something that not many gourmet chefs are willing to do, he said.

“People always thank me for allowing them to go out to dinner with their children,” said Murphy. “We’re a very busy city, and it’s nice to be able to have families sit around the table.”

Murphy also tries to keep a neighborhood-friendly atmosphere in his restaurants by catering to his regulars. He recalled one incident at his Tribeca restaurant location when he and his staff gifted a onesie, patterned with the Landmarc logo, to a pregnant regular customer.

After graduating from the Institute of Culinary Education, Murphy worked as a chef at the famed Windows on the World and La Forchette. In 2004, he opened his first solo project, the French-Italian restaurant Landmarc. As with all of his culinary projects, Murphy focused on “approachable cuisine” for everyday occasions. In 2006, he started Ditch Plains, which serves up beach-style dishes, and now has three locations. These days, Murphy is most successful with Benchmarc, his catering company in Tribeca.

Murphy also serves on the board of City Harvest, a nonprofit charity that collects food from the city’s restaurants and grocery stores, and redistributes it to the city’s homeless and hungry population.

In September, the Ditch Plains Upper West Side location participated in Dine Out Week, and for every kids’ meal bought, one dollar was donated to Share Our Strength, a nationally recognized organization that raises awareness of childhood hunger.

“I just can’t stand that people go hungry in this city,” said Murphy.

Most recently in 2011, Murphy opened up a Ditch Plains on West 82nd Street. Each restaurant location, he said, has its own personality based on the surrounding neighborhood. But all of his restaurants have at least one common factor: great service.

The secret to being a great restaurateur is in the attention to every detail, he said, and taking the time to train his employees to run things smoothly when he is away.
“I would tell my managers, we hire nice people first, and then we can teach them how to wait tables later,” said Murphy. “It’s about getting the staff to care as much as I do.”

“Tutti a tavola a mangiare,” chef Lidia Bastianich repeats at the end of every episode of her televised cooking show. The message welcomes everyone to the table to eat, and Bastianich has taken that saying to the next level.

Bastianich can now add Dean of La Scuola di Eataly to her résumé. For the past two years, people have signed up for individual and group classes to get educated in the Italian cooking arena at La Scuola di Eataly, located in Eataly at 200 Fifth Ave.

“Our school expanded in April,” stated Brooke Adams, director of communications at Eataly. There are now two classrooms: La Scuola Piccola holds 20 students, and La Scuola Grande holds 34.

People wanting to broaden their knowledge of Italian cuisine can register for classes and see demonstrations of cooking a wide variety of foods. To complement the meal selections, there will also be a wine pairing when students get to taste what has been cooked.

“We have guest chefs and in-house wine experts,” Adams said.

To ensure that the students remember what has been prepared, La Scuola di Eataly gives everyone who registers a folder filled with all the recipes from the class, wine notes and the opportunity to walk around Eataly to become familiar with the different ingredients.

The classes are divided into different categories, including Chef’s Kitchen, Food and Language, Spotlight on Artisanal Products and more.

If you are looking to immerse yourself completely into the Italian culture, La Scuola di Eataly offers a Food and Language course, which teaches basic Italian, and how to prepare a selection of dishes. Another course is Parlare, Mangiare e Viaggiare All’Italiana, a four-class series that takes you throughout Italy teaching you the language and different foods, without leaving the classroom (the fall session is already full, however).

The Chef’s Kitchen series brings in guest chefs to cook some of their signature dishes with wine pairings. One of the latest classes in the Chef’s Kitchen is Getting to Know Gnocchi, which discusses the history of gnocchi going back to the 16th century and will include them in prepared dishes.

Some of the past chefs who have been part of Chef’s Kitchen have included Mario Batali, Joe Bastianich and Lidia Bastianich.

Walking through Eataly, the 58,000-square-foot Italian market, may seem intimidating, and visitors may be unaware of what is offered. The Spotlight on Artisanal Products class educates people about the unique items that can be found throughout Eataly. Some of the classes involved within the series include fresh fall pasta, cheese and wine, beer and Italian chocolate.

Registration for the fall classes is currently open. Classes for the coming year will be posted in the next few weeks. The price of each class varies but normally is $60 to $125 per person.

Rescuing October’s star from the seasonal coffee ghetto

Dunkin’ Donuts has a lot to answer for, and not just about the rising obesity rate or their perversion of the word “artisan,” which apparently now refers to absurdly flavored bagel-type foods made from a powdered mix in a warehouse in Darkest Queens. No, their greatest crime is the one they perpetrate every October in the name of pumpkin.

Sure, Starbucks carries some of this blame, as the originators of the great seasonal fraud known as the pumpkin spice latte, but it’s Dunkin’ that has been dancing on pumpkin’s grave for the past five years, with donuts, muffins, cakes, the ubiquitous lattes and, inexplicably, an iced coffee variant.

The problem here is really one of vocabulary. When they say an item is “pumpkin”-flavored, what they really mean is that it’s sweet and cinnamon-flavored. The winding etymological path takes us from pumpkins to pumpkin pie, from which the spice combination is lifted, dosed with a hit of honeyish sweetness and tinted orange for the appropriate visual cues.

Thing is, pumpkins themselves are delicious, and as a seasonal treat are among the best. Even pumpkin pie is pretty great; if only it weren’t being shoved into a white chocolate mocha. Thankfully, intrepid souls in this city willing to escape Dunkin’s tyranny need not look too far to find a real taste of the season.

Of course, there’s always the farmers’ market (check grownyc.org for your closest local), where stands are overflowing with varieties like sugar pie and Japanese kabocha; try slicing them into wedges, roasting skins and all in a 400-degree oven until tender, then topping with a bracing vinaigrette of minced cilantro, jalapeno, lime juice, cumin and a touch of honey. Roasting brings out the vegetable’s natural sweetness, while the citric punch and spice add a savory, unexpected dimension.

Those nostalgic for the good old days of jack-o’-lanterns and the ritual of baking the pumpkin’s seeds after the carving was done may not feel right partaking in the crunchy snack without all the heavy scooping. The rest of us lazy types can skip right to the good stuff with Mexican pepitas, which are so well-loved they’ve become a year-round treat. Find them at Tulcingo del Valle (665 10th Ave., tulcingorestaurant.com), a tiny deli/bodega/restaurant with some of the best hole-in-the-wall mole in town, or go upscale with the pumpkin-seed cake at Empellón Cocina (105 First Ave., empellon.com/cocina), a moist, not-too-sweet cake made even more complex with browned butter and goat’s milk caramel.

Italians have long treated the zucca (what you would call a gourd) with the respect it deserves, and even die-hard Dunkin’ fans can appreciate the charms of pumpkin ravioli, scattered with cheese and brought low with sage, that star of the Thanksgiving stuffing. At Osteria Morini (218 Lafayette St., osteriamorini.com), that flavor combination becomes a topping for crostini, the creamy squash playing even better against crusty, grilled bread. Oh, and the addition of speck doesn’t hurt.

Pumpkin beer presents another level of difficulty for flavor wranglers, as too much sweetness is a surefire ticket to hangover central. Instead, these crafty craftsmen infuse the brew with the gourds themselves, letting them soak up the deep vegetal essence without much tampering. Though their kickoff Pumpkin Picking Party has passed, Idle Hands Bar (25 Ave. B, idlehandsbar.com) is featuring as many of the brews as they can get their hands on throughout the month, both on tap and in bottles. A favorite is the Harpoon UFO Pumpkin, an autumnal variant of their classic wheat beer; on the other end of the spectrum is the Southern Tier Pumking, a deep ale best for fireside sipping.

Once you’ve reminded yourself what pumpkin actually tastes like, you’ll never go back to the land of “pumpkin spice.” Though this means you’ll need to keep your lattes simply coffee-flavored for another few months, don’t worry: Eggnog season is just around the corner.

Guy’s American Kitchen and Bar is too flashy and doesn’t have much heart

The arrival at 220 W. 44th St. of Guy’s American Kitchen and Bar, aka The Guy Fieri Restaurant, was for some the final nail in the coffin of the old Times Square, that halcyon place of peep shows and slashers, flashers and freaks. For others it represented something even larger, the decline of the state of cuisine in North America. If a man who has made his name not as a chef but as a cross-country tourist of the novelty hamburger is able to open a 500-seat mess hall in the flashiest neighborhood in the city, they cry, we’ve brought the indigestion upon ourselves, like one of the lesser biblical plagues.

For most, however, it lands on the curiosity scale somewhere between that guy you know who can open a beer bottle with his teeth and Ripley’s two-headed calf; a novelty to be gawked at, whispered about, but ultimately forgotten.

That is, unless you happen to walk past. The dizzying array of television screens blasting footage of The Guy himself, the bright signage that even in Times Square, the home of neon overkill, is really a bit much and the impossibly oversized wood-slab doors all conspire to stop you in your tracks, like a crow stopped at the edge of the field by a dazzler. You start to wonder just what it’s like on the inside. What on earth could all of this be in service of?

The promise of The Guy Fieri Experience™ is, unfortunately, more than it can deliver, whether you come ready to worship at the altar or to mock. It is relentlessly mediocre; not good enough to silence the haters, but not bad enough to delight them, either. A full 90 percent of the menu items’ names include some kind of booze; 82 percent are pun-based; and 4 percent are simply incomprehensible.

The Guy-talian Nachos, for instance, are allegedly Italian because they are topped with pepperoni and sweet Italian sausage. Then why, for the love of syntactical logic, are they served on fried wonton skins? Sangria-glazed shrimp are sweet, sticky and vaguely pink-tinted, as virgin as an Amish 16-year-old. Many dishes come with a long, unasked-for backstory; the Vegas Fries, apparently, were spawned when The Guy was in college and could only afford French fries, which he would douse in a startling number of sauces. Now they can be yours for $9.95, a price that would make any college student blanch.

You may be tempted to apply alcohol to the situation in a last-ditch effort to add a little entertainment value to the meal. Resist this urge. The cocktail list is a page of lies, real drink names assigned to bastard concoctions willy-nilly. Since when does a mojito feature blueberries and raspberry vodka? Nothing is as it seems; nor, unfortunately, is any of it strong enough to lend the necessary buzz.

But it’s the service staff that may be the most unsettling part of the whole endeavor. These poor souls have been subjected to the most rigorous training program/brainwashing camp ever devised for hospitality staff—the lesson on pronouncing the word “Fieri” alone must have been an ordeal of Clockwork Orange-level programming. One waiter couldn’t stop using the word “phenomenal”; things that were phenomenal included all of the beverages, the California egg rolls, a request for more napkins.

While the upsell is an accepted dirty little secret of the restaurant industry, this lack of finesse made little headway with our table of experienced diners. By the end of the meal, we had so subverted his script he was visibly terrified of us, and we had to flag down a passing stranger to ask him to bring us the check.

That, really, is the crux of the issue with Guy’s Place: It’s not for New York diners. It’s not even for tourists who aspire to be New York diners. It’s for the wealthy and lazy who want to eat food they recognize while being told they’re having fun, a not unsizeable market. Cry about it all you want, food-lovers, but Guy’s Place will probably be here long after we’re gone.

Perhaps you remember the Paleo diet. It arose during the great fad-diet renaissance of 2008, after Atkins had been thoroughly debunked by the master’s unfortunate heart attack and the market for bombastic pseudoscience was wide open. Into the vacuum rushed the French Women Don’t Get Fat diet, the Glycemic Index diet, the adoption of celiac disease as a lifestyle choice—all of which took the basic principles of healthy eating as espoused by the FDA for the past 50 years and tarted them up with Biology 101 vocabulary and some spuriously drawn cultural conclusions. You could waste a lot of time, money and social goodwill on these movements, all to learn that your portion sizes were too big and whole foods are better than processed ones.

The most impressive of these was the Paleo diet, which both imagined a cultural approach to eating and came up with some fascinating biological hypotheses—untested, of course. Paleo claims that the healthiest way to eat—and by extension the most slimming way—is to get back to our caveman roots and eat the foods our bodies were evolutionarily adapted for. It breaks from other systems with its enthusiastic embrace of meat (we were hunter-gatherers, after all) but is otherwise pretty mundane: lots of fruit and vegetables, not much grain, no refined anything. It gained enormous popularity among protein-powder-loving muscleheads, ticked along for a while, then faded into the hearts of a few lingering converts.

Two of those converts, however, have decided to bring Paleo back in a major way with the opening of Hu Kitchen just off Union Square (78 Fifth Ave., hukitchen.com). Their slogan is “Get Back to Human,” and one can only imagine they decided late in the game that their preferred name, Human Kitchen, was a little too Twilight Zone. The sleek two-level marketplace/café/juice bar/deli aims to be your one-stop shop for “pre-industrial” eating, from a $10 green smoothie for breakfast to meatloaf for dinner.

Every single menu item is accompanied by a full list of ingredients so you can be sure that your almond cookie doesn’t contain a single grain of wheat, that agrarian menace. Many have jumped on the “mash bar,” a kind of Cold Stone Creamery for the raw food set, as the highest example of Hu Kitchen’s over-the-top approach. At the bar, you choose a base of yogurt or chia seed pudding, then add mix-ins like fruit, nuts, granola and cashew butter. Aside from the name, however, this is the least ludicrous food in the place. If you’ve ever bought a yogurt parfait from a Starbucks, you’ve been to a “mash bar.”

No, the real silliness lurks at the rear steam table/grill station, where lentil burgers come on vegetable buns and spinach is creamed with cashew milk. Real celiac sufferers know how difficult and time-consuming it is to approximate bread with non-wheat-based flours; I’m pretty sure no caveman ever baked with xanthan gum and dehydrated chickpea flour out of a biological imperative. And when they managed to get their hands on a Paleolithic chicken, I can guarantee they didn’t bother to coat it in coconut sugar and almond meal to make cutesy chicken fingers.

For a restaurant so devoted to taking the industrial process out of food, there is an enormous amount of approximation and ingredient-wrangling taking place at Hu Kitchen. Leaving out the spurious evolutionary conceit of the Paleo diet (biologists have taken issue with the notion that there was an “ideal” moment in our development, nutritionally speaking, and that it’s all been downhill from there), the philosophy’s mantra of whole foods prepared simply is a rational one. But adding sugar—even unrefined, naturally derived sugar—to a prepared meat dish is still processing. Raw cocoa in a fudge brownie doesn’t make it any less of an indulgence. The veneer of science here covers just another fad diet grounded in deceit and high-priced meal replacements; Jenny Craig for the Master Cleanse set. If you really want to get back to nature, walk the block to the Union Square farmers market and eat a carrot.

Beat the onset of the winter chills with these hot-temp brews
Café Lalo
201 W. 83rd St. near Broadway, cafelalo.com
Café Lalo is primarily a dessert spot, and it doesn’t disappoint in the drink selection. This is the place to enjoy a cool-weather cordial after dinner or indulge in a hot spiked-coffee drink on a lazy afternoon. All their coffee and alcohol drinks are served with fresh whipped cream and include classics like coffee with Baileys Irish Cream and twists like the Café Jamaica, with coffee, brandy and Tia Maria. They also offer adult hot chocolates, paired with the likes of peppermint schnapps or black Sambuca.

Caledonia Scottish Pub
1609 Second Ave. near East 83rd Street,
caledoniapub.com
Home to one of New York’s most impressive collections of whisky (they insist that real whisky doesn’t have an “e”), Caledonia Scottish Pub is a cozy Upper East Side bar offering over 150 different varieties of the amber gold liquid. The vast selection includes varietals from Scotland, Japan, Ireland and the U.S. as well as an impressive array of single malts, listed on the menu according to their particular Scottish origins. They also serve up savory Scottish pies, making it a perfect spot to hunker down and get warm from the inside out.

Eggnog at Ward III
111 Reade St. near West Broadway,ward3tribeca.com
Though Ward III is an ideal place for liquor connoisseurs to experiment with flavors, be bold and just go with eggnog. Its thick, dessert-like taste has attracted the taste buds of many an online foodie, testifying to its successfully chic take on this holiday classic (the secret: the dynamic duo of orange and Averna). Not a fan of the egg? Ward III also produces a reliable hot toddy and bourbon-spiked cider. Complemented by warm lighting and tasteful music, Ward III is the ideal winter hideout.

Espresso con Panna at Eataly
23rd Street at Fifth Avenue, eatalyny.com
This large indoor Italian market offers much more than a pizza and prosecco—its espresso bar is an attraction by itself. An Espresso con Panna (whipped cream) is an indulger’s must, though any option won’t be regretted—the Espresso Torinese even comes with a small glass of sparkling water! While you savor the rich texture (and profit from the body heat of the crowded building), stroll around the other stations and admire other quirky finds, among them Buddha hand lemons, honeydew gelato and crudo bites.

Haru Sake Bar
1327 Third Ave. near East 76th Street, harusushi.com
Dark, romantic and unique, the Haru Sake bar is a great place to hole up and savor hot or chilled sake. The eclectic cocktail menu offers $13 sake cocktails, like the Ultimate Saketini (vodka, sake and plum wine served up) as well as a wide variety of sake served hot or cold and tasting flights available to sample four selections at a time. Housed across the street from its sister restaurant, the sake bar does serve sushi as well, so you can kick off the evening or park yourself there all night.

Jacques Torres
285 Amsterdam Ave. between West 73rd and 74th streets, mrchocolate.com
Sparking every chocolate lover’s fantasy, Jacques Torres’ hot chocolate is the best quencher when the temperature drops. The authentic hot, rich, thick chocolate drink—which has been described as pure chocolate in liquid form, is perfect for the upcoming chilly weather. The shop offers twists on the traditional with chili pepper kicks and white chocolate chai on the menu, so it’s a great spot to satisfy kids just looking to guzzle chocolate as well an adult with a more sophisticated sweet tooth.