Behind-The-Scenes At Black Seed Bagels

Every morning at 5am, the oven at Black Seed Bagels is already on. When I arrived on a Friday morning at 5:30am, Dianna Daoheung was already tending to the oven, setting things up, sweeping, getting the place ready to open at 7am. Most of the crew rolled in around 6am. Waking up at 4am that morning, I was thinking to myself.....WHY?! Why did I decide to wake up this early in the morning to go photograph at a bagel shop? But I really wanted to see what actually happens before the shop opens at 7am. I wanted to experience, even though it was just that one day. And I wanted for you to see as well. Bagels and croissants and pastas and pulled pork sandwiches don't magically appear. There are hours and hours of work that go into making it. Bakers are up at 3 in the morning to get that delicious bagel ready for you at 7am. Working on this project really made me appreciate the work that goes into running restaurants and the people that are running the restaurants.

Breakfast Sandwich Crawl

Another successful food crawl, done. Back in April, we did a hot dog and tater tots crawl through Williamsburg. For June (sorry, we skipped May), I decided to do a breakfast sandwich crawl cause who doesn't love breakfast sandwiches? Also, I was pretty proud of myself. I was able to convince a bunch of food writers/bloggers/photographers that were all in town for the Saveur Blog Awards to trek out to Red Hook. Hello! There was like a dozen of us all crowding into Defonte's. Ah, good old potatoes and eggs with mozz and ketchup sandwich to start the crawl at Defonte's of Brooklyn.

Next we headed to Court Street Grocers and ordered all of their breakfast sandwiches. Someone was smart enough to grab their hot sauces since obviously we couldn't fit everyone inside. After that, I showed the out of towners the magnificent Gowanus Canal before heading to Four & Twenty for pies.

What happens when you have pies and a bar full of bloggers/writers/photographers?

Then 7 of us made it up to Mile End but it was 5p and no breakfast sandwiches were in sight. So we ate poutine! BUT the friendly people at Mile End decided to make us breakfast sandwiches so it was a glorious end to our crawl.

By this time, half of the people had to catch their flights so the rest of us went to Grand Army for cocktails and more eats.

Thanks to everyone that came out (Molly, Hannah, Talia, Sydney, Alana, Summer, Phi, Stephanie, Stella, Sari, Michelle) and wandered through Brooklyn. It was great seeing old friends and meeting new ones.

Behind-The-Scenes At Taste Talks 2013

This past weekend I was photographing the first ever Taste Talks, brought to you by Northside Media Group and curated by April Bloomfield. Saturday started off with all-you-can-eat fried chicken, pancakes, grits, eggs, syrup at Brooklyn Bowl, along with pulled pork by Patrick Hallahan, drummer for My Morning Jacket. Spoilers, the pulled pork was quite amazing. The rest of the day included talks/panels with people like Paulie of Paulie Gee's, the Robicelli's, Dale Talde, Sarah Simmons, Questlove, Ben Conniff of Luke's Lobster and many more.

Sunday was the All-Star Cookout that paired up different chefs with one another to create a single dish. You know I'm into the sort of behind-the-scenes stuff, so I decided to get there an hour early to catch the chefs doing prep work. Also it was wonderful to see so many familiar faces (Nate Smith of Allswell, Tom Mylan of The Meat Hook) and got a chance to meet April Bloomfield herself, John Seymour of Sweet Chick, Noah Bernamoff of Mile End, Alexander LaPratt of Atrium DUMBO, Zahra Tangorra of Brucie, and Jon Feldman of Stumptown Coffee.