Brad McDonald, executive chef at Colonie in Brooklyn Heights, is opening two new restaurants in DUMBO with his partners at Colonie. One will offer a modern, kitchen-driven, local and seasonal menu. The other will apparently showcase chef Brad's take on Mexican.

Colonie Executive Chef Brad McDonald must be a glutton for punishment. In addition to taking the helm at Colonie, on Atlantic Avenue on the borderlands of Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill, McDonald, who we interviewed back in October, is opening not one, but TWO new restaurants near his home in DUMBO, each with a different flavor.

The first restaurant is a project McDonald and his Colonie partners Tamer Hamawi, Emelie Kihlstrom and Elise Rosenberg have been working on for a while: a small restaurant (under 40 seats) with a “kitchen-driven” local and seasonal focus at 1 Main Street. He told us about the project last fall:

“We’re well on our way to starting construction on a second space in DUMBO, at the foot of the clock tower building. It’s going to be a small joint. A little different, more modern than Colonie. I hope to push the meaning of local food, great ingredients there. Hopefully it’ll always be busy and bustling. We’re really looking forward to it…while always staying focused on keeping things strumming here at Colonie.”

Maybe while they were working long days planning the new restaurant and long nights working at Colonie they got a craving for nachos, because Grub Street reports that the team is also now planning a Mexican restaurant at Five Front Street, just two blocks from their other DUMBO location. Details are slim on this second spot, but we’d have to guess that McDonald’s devotion to his ‘hood is what encouraged him to open two places at once. He told us last fall that he feels the same way about DUMBO as his partners felt about Atlantic Ave.

“They saw the potential for a great restaurant in a neighborhood that could use one. I felt the same way about trying to open a restaurant in DUMBO, which is where I live. I see the need in DUMBO for something new, something fresh, something a little more contemporary, and maybe even something that pushes the ticket a little bit.

DUMBO’s food cred is certainly growing: One Girl Cookies just joined Jacques Torres and Almondine Bakery on the sweet side of things, and experiments like pop up pizzeria Wild Rise and the food stands at Brooklyn Bridge Park have spiced up the area’s dining options.

Even though he’ll have three times as much to worry about when the two new restaurants open (set for spring 2012), McDonald keeps promising he isn’t stepping away from the wheel at Colonie, so everyone can just calm down…and figure out the best subway/bus/bike/hike routes from their ‘hoods to DUMBO.

Ben Roshia and Michelle Carello of East Williamsburg's One Stop Beer Shop are introducing beer cocktails to Brooklyn.

by Rachel Khona

I slammed down my Borscht Back– a shot of moonshine followed by a shot of borscht soup–and wiped my lips. I do not like shots and I have a strong abhorrence of beets. Yet Ben Roshia had convinced me to try both and like them to boot.

Convincing people to try new things is only one of Roshia’s many talents.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I stopped by the One Stop Beer Shop, a new beer bar in East Williamsburg, to visit owner Ben Roshia. For some, the idea of a bar specializing in beer conjures up images of loud, boisterous beer halls or frat-like pubs. But Roshia is all about flipping convention on its head.

The stage-lit copper pipes, brick walls, and retro Edison bulbs give One Stop Beer Shop the feel of a comforting neighborhood bar; the perfect place to bring a date, meet your neighbors, or pull up a chair and sip on a cocktail while browsing through an early-twentieth century travel guide from the impressive library shelves. A raucous beer hall this is not.

“It’s a neighborhood bar, people should know each other. What did we do before TV? We talked, we hung out. I built a bar for writers, artists, musicians, and business people to come create stuff and talk and have meetings.”

One Stop Beer Shop doesn’t just serve a rotating selection of local and foreign craft beer – they specialize in beer cocktails, made by mixing beer with a variety of spirits, including the aforementioned moonshine, with fruit and aromatics.

“There are a really only a few people dabbling in beer cocktails in New York, but they’ve been getting more and more popular on the West Coast in recent years. I thought, why not bring them to Brooklyn? Most people here have never had a beer cocktail. I think the idea kind of scares people at first, but they like them once they try them.”

Having been in the business for awhile, Roshia was familiar with the ins and outs of running a bar. His grandfather owned a bar upstate and his family has a long history in the hospitality business. But he really cut his teeth working in the trenches at a series of restaurants. Unlike many, he didn’t just hustle so he could make some moula – he actually learned a thing or two.

“I worked at established restaurants that had people who had been working there for thirty years. You just ask people. Questions are the key to learning everything. I would always ask the bartenders what they were doing. I would ask, ‘Why do you chill the martini glass? Why did you put vermouth on the rocks?’ And they would tell me.”

Together with the bartenders, or tapsters as Roshia calls them, the One Stop Beer Shop staff gets together to recap what’s working and what’s not, and to decide what beers to feature every two weeks. Though a handful of his favorite beers are always on tap, most beers are rotated out every three weeks to keep their stock fresh and interesting. For example, Narragansett is one of the permanent choices. “It’s just a solid, cheap house lager. For a beer on the cheaper end, Narragansett beats PBR by leaps and bounds. And it’s very cool too; they drank it on Jaws.” Film buffs and hipsters take note.

Trying to strike a balance between the familiar and the unchatered waters of beer imbibing, Roshia opted to offer customers both the regular suspects and a few lesser-known varieties. “We had to be sensitive to the fact that it is a community bar and we knew we would have people coming in who would only be comfortable having Brooklyn Lager, because that’s what they always have. I wanted people to have something that they were familiar with when they came in here, so I keep things like the Brooklyn Lager, and Duvel on draft. But then we have things like Piraat, a pretty rare, very strong Belgian beer that you almost never see, and people love it. The Piraat is one of our favorite beers.”

At $9 for a half pint, it’s a testament to Roshia’s instincts and beer knowledge that it remains one of their best-sellers. “People who aren’t avid beer drinkers might be shocked at spending that much money, but we aren’t. You have to teach people about different beers, and about what makes them special. And most people want to learn about them. Our tapsters here all love beer, and they’re happy to talk about any of our beers. Or the beer cocktails.”

As it turns out, those beer cocktails are surprisingly tasty. Throw out all the old wives’ tales about mixing spirits with wine or beer; those old wives don’t know jack. An unexpected element in a cocktail, the beer adds a refreshing burst and the bitterness of the hops balances the sweetness associated with more run of the mill mixed drinks. And there’s something for everyone from those who prefer lighter ales to those who prefer heartier brews: “We have a cocktail for a stout drinker; we wanted to keep it defined as a stout, but make it different. So we took a stout, and added a little gin and nutmeg.”

One of the more popular beer cocktails is the Sinfully Originally, a Roshia concoction made with black tea-infused Tito’s vodka and Original Sin Cider. But I found myself gravitating towards the Clandestine Moon, an intoxicating mix of Southampton Brewery’s Double White, Drambuie, Original Moonshine, agave, mint, and blueberries. No reason one can’t get some anti-oxidants in while drinking.

While the cocktails here will make you think differently about imbibing, what really sets One Stop Beer Shop apart from your average bar are the gleaming growler-filling stations. “I first noticed growlers when I was in Russia on vacation. I saw these shops everywhere, where people would go in and fill up their jugs of beer to take home. And I loved the idea. The problem with growlers is that most places just fill the growlers directly from the taps. If you do that, the beer is going to go flat in a matter of hours. Our growler-filling machines are counter-pressure systems – they inject carbon dioxide into the bottle, forcing the oxygen out and creating a perfect atmosphere for pouring the beer without losing carbonation, and for sealing the growler. Beer in growlers poured on our system stays fresh for weeks. Really – we’ve tested it. We poured beers from a five week-old growler and it was just as fresh as it would be coming from the tap.”

And for those who prefer to enjoy a beer at home, One Stop Beer Shop delivers: “You can call for a growler delivery anytime we’re open. We’ll deliver growlers at one o’clock in the morning. We actually had special insulated growler delivery backpacks made. We keep them in the cooler. We normally deliver just in the neighborhood, but we had a guy call from DUMBO a few weeks ago. He was visiting from out of town and he was having a bunch of people over and he wanted eight growlers. That was way out of our delivery range, but he was visiting New York and trying to have a great experience here, so we helped him out.”

As much as Roshia loves beer and the craft of it, at the end of the day it’s not all about the booze.

“It’s funny, I have a friend that works at a bar that’s been open for thirty years, and they have people who come in to propose to their girlfriends because because their parents got engaged there. And I thought I would love to have a bar like that some day. On New Year’s Eve, when we’d only been open for three days, we had a couple propose.”

Looks like Ben got his wish.

One Stop Beer Shop is located at 164 Kingsland Avenue, at the corner of Beadel Street, in East Williamsburg.

There are more craft breweries in the United States now than at any time since 1900. So why can't craft beer's biggest fans stop complaining?

In 1900 there were 1751 breweries in the United States. In 1983, after decades of consolidation there were 80, six of which were brewing 96% of all the beer in the U.S. But once a few pioneering craft brewers began to reintroduce good beer to the American public in the 1980’s, the pendulum began its backward swing – In 2011, craft brewing history came full circle, with over 1750 small breweries once again operating, from sea to shining sea.

Visual.ly, a data visualization company on a mission to transform dry stats into engaging stories, gave the history of brewing their creative treatment -

The American Beer Revival from visually on Vimeo.

In summary:

• 1900: 1751 breweries are operating  in the U.S.
• 1910’s: The temperance movement gains momentum.
• 1919: Prohibition is passed, outlawing all production and consumption of alcoholic beverages.
• 1930’s: No breweries are operating legally, but illicit homebrewing flourishes, producing about 22 million barrels a year.
• 1933: Prohibition is repealed.
• 1936: Over 750 brewers are back in action.
• 1940’s: Grain rationing for Word War II slows growth in the brewing industry.
• 1950’s: Beer production increases, but the number of breweries begins to decline, as consolidation takes the brewing industry (and pretty much everything else) by storm.
• 1983: Only 80 breweries are in opertation, and the six largest brew 96% of all beer in the U.S. (and it pretty much all sucks).
• 1990’s: Microbreweries start making good beer again, and as people rediscover good beer, the craft brewing renaissance begins.  Some tie this to the maturation of the first generation of ‘legalized’ homebrewers -  Jimmy Carter re-legalized homebrewing in 1978.
• 2000’s: After a big expansion, a small slowdown in growth of craft brewing.
• 2011 – After 111 years, over 1750 breweries are once again in operation. Today, craft breweries consist of 96 % of total breweries in the U.S., but the big breweries still totally dominate sales, holding down 92.4% of the market.

All good news, right? Well, for the most part.  With success, of course, comes scrutiny. While American craft brewers are pushing brewing in ever-more experimental directions, and as good beer is ever-more accessible in ever-more places, beer geeks seem ever-more to love to scrutinize and nit-pick every mad-genius brewer’s latest release, and any kind of move to expand operations, with high school-style mean girl  glee.

Sam Calagione, the founder of Delaware’s wildly successful Dogfish Brewing Company, recently decided enough was enough. Responding to a popular thread in a forum on Beeradvocate’s website about over-rated breweries, he wrote:

“It’s pretty depressing to frequently visit this site and see the most negative threads among the most popular. This didn’t happen much ten years ago when craft beer had something like a 3 percent market share. Flash forward to today, and true indie craft beer now has a still-tiny but growing marketshare of just over 5 percent. Yet so many folks that post here still spend their time knocking down breweries that dare to grow. It’s like that old joke: “Nobody eats at that restaurant anymore, it’s too crowded.” Except the “restaurants” that people shit on here aren’t exactly juggernauts. In fact, aside from Boston Beer, none of them have anything even close to half of one percent marketshare. The more that retailers, distributors, and large industrial brewers consolidate the more fragile the current growth momentum of the craft segment becomes. The more often the Beer Advocate community becomes a soap box for outing breweries for daring to grow beyond its insider ranks the more it will be marginalized in the movement to support, promote, and protect independent American craft breweries.

It’s interesting how many posts that refer to Dogfish being over-rated include a caveat like “except for Palo…except for Immort…etc.” We all have different palettes which is why it’s a great thing that there are so many different beers… We hope a bunch of you will…try some of the very unique new beers we are proudly bringing to market like Tweason’ale (a champagne-esque, gluten-free beer fermented with buckwheat honey and strawberries) and Noble Rot (a sort of saison brewed with Botrytis-infected Viognier Grape must). One of these beers is on the sweeter side and one is more sour. Knowing each of your palettes is unique you will probably prefer one over the other. That doesn’t mean the one you didn’t prefer sucked. And the breweries you don’t prefer but are growing don’t suck either. Respect Beer.”

Word. But end of conversation? Definitely not. The forum section of Beeradvocate.com, an organization has been tirelessly promoting the craft beer movement since 1996, went down hard on Saturday, under the weight of some 3.5 million posts. They’ll be back. In the meantime, relax, respect and enjoy one of Sixpoint, Kelso, Barrier, Schmaltz, Chelsea or Brooklyn Brewery’s creative, fresh, locally-brewed concoctions.

The mild winter means that wild garlic mustard should be in abundant supply around Brooklyn.

With the mild winter we’ve been having in Brooklyn, garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) leaves are still tender and perky. They taste like a lightly bitter green with flavors of…you guessed it, garlic and mustard.

Garlic mustard offers different ways to spice up your cooking at different times of year. It is a biennial, which means it takes two years complete its development. During its first year, it hangs out as a rosette of heart-shaped leaves with scalloped margins and a net-like pattern of veins.

At this time of year, I like to use foraged garlic mustard combined with milder greens and field garlic in winter pestos and braised greens. Now is also a good time to dig up some of the roots. These can be used just like horseradish.

In the spring, Alliaria shoots up flower stalks that can get to be 2 1/2 feet tall. The flowers start out looking like miniature broccoli heads, then open into small, 4-petaled white flowers. The leaves on the flower stalks have a more pointed, triangular shape than the rosette leaves. In BK, garlic mustard flowers in mid-spring.

When the new flower stalks are still tender (around 8 inches tall) and bearing the green, unopened flower heads, treat them like brocoli rabe. At this stage they are one of my absolute favorite wild vegetables and I don’t bother adding other greens to them. Stir-fry them in a little extra-virgin olive oil with a few red pepper flakes and a pinch of salt – delicious as is or added to pasta and served with grated cheese.

Later on in the summer the flowers become slender, dry capsules 1 to 2 1/2 inches long. Before the seed capsules are fully dry, when they are still green and easy to pinch in half, they make a good, mildly-spicy raw snack. Once ripe, each capsule contains a row of black seeds. Not everybody loves the taste of these seeds, but I find them very good lightly crushed and added to curries.

Garlic mustard is an invasive alien. Sounds scary, but that also means you can harvest it freely without worrying about sustainability issues. In fact, Parks Department tries to weed this plant out. Native to Europe and brought to Long Island by early colonists as a garden plant, it has spread to 4 continents. You won’t make a dent in this plant’s population by eating it all year.

Look for garlic mustard in places that will be only partially sunny or in light shade once nearby trees have leafed out in the spring.

Winter Pesto with Garlic Mustard
1/4 cup walnuts or pine nuts
1 cup garlic mustard leaves
1 cup chickweed (Stellaria media) or fresh parsley leaves
1 teaspoon cleaned field garlic bulbs OR 1 clove garlic, peeled
1 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1/4 cup grated parmesan or romano cheese (or a pinch of nutritional yeast if you’re keeping it vegan)
Salt to taste

Put the nuts and garlic into a food processor or blender. Blend until the garlic is minced and the nuts are finely chopped.

Add the garlic mustard leaves and the chickweed or parsley. Pulse a few times to coarsely chop the leaves.

With the processor or blender running, add the olive oil in a steady pour, stopping 2 or 3 times to scrape down any leaves that are clinging to the sides of your machine.

Add the cheese, if using, and blend for a few seconds longer. Add a little more oil if it seems too thick, more nuts or cheese if it’s more liquid than you’d like. Add salt to taste.

Toss with pasta, add a spoonful to winter root vegetable stews, or use as a dipping sauce for a good, crusty bread.

Pungent garlic mustard pesto goes well with a local Cabernet Franc like the one from Raphael Vineyard.

Leda Meredith is the author of The Locavore’s Handbook: The Busy Person’s Guide to Eating Local on a Budget. She is the Gardening Program Coordinator for Adult Education at the New York Botanical Garden and an instructor specializing in edible and medicinal plants at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Info on her many upcoming classes and events can be found on her blog at www.ledameredith.com

Photo © Valery Rizzo.

Smorgasbrewery
Winter’s not over yet, so there’s plenty of time to catch the Smorg at the Brooklyn Brewery before it heads back outside. This week’s vendors include Skytown, Porchetta, Brooklyn Bean Co. and Short Order Eggs. As always, there will be plenty of house beers on tap and free brewery tours on the hour.

Saturday, February 18 from noon to 5pm at Brooklyn Brewery, 79 N 11th St between Berry St and Wythe Ave (Williamsburg)

Small Batch Whiskeys
Part Two of Sycamore‘s winter tasting series focuses on brown spirits. Drew Kulsveen of Kentucky Bourbon Distillers and Chris Hiatt of Slope Cellars will walk you through a sampling of small-batch whiskeys, accompanied by snacks from Market & Mimi’s. Sign up here.

Monday, February 20 from 8 to 10 pm at Sycamore, 1118 Cortelyou Rd between Stratford and Westminster Rds (Ditmas Park). $30.

Beer & Cheese Rules
Breukelen Bier Merchants teams up with the Joy of Cheese to celebrate the dynamic duo: cheese and beer. With the guidance of the Joy of Cheese’s Martin Johnson and Maggie Fuller of 12% Imports, you’ll sample six Belgian brews, each paired with a hand-selected cheese that complements its unique flavors. To reserve a spot, get tickets.

Tuesday, February 21 from 7:30 to 9pm at Breukelen Bier Merchants, 182 Grand Street between Bedford and Driggs Aves (Williamsburg). $35

How to…Slice It!
The next gathering in the how-to series from Edible Brooklyn and the Brooklyn Brewery is all about meat, with local butchers and purveyors sharing their wisdom on slicing, curing, and other meat-centric skills. Speakers include reps from Fleisher’s and Brooklyn Cured. Get tickets here.

Wednesday, February 22 from 7:30 to 10pm at Brooklyn Brewery, 79 N 11th St between Berry St and Wythe Ave (Williamsburg). $5.

Trade Up! Kitchen Swap
Upgrade your pantry at this bartering bazaar, hosted by Brooklyn Based. Any unused item in good condition is fair game: appliances, utensils, spices, cookbooks, even homemade goodies. Admission is free for new subscribers (and current subscribers who bring a friend). Read more details and RSVP on Facebook.

Thursday, February 23 from 7:30 to 9:30pm at Brooklyn Brewery, 79 N 11th St between Berry St and Wythe Ave (Williamsburg)

Mary’s Maple Brewery Brunch
Waffles and beer? Sounds like a perfect way to spend a Saturday! To celebrate its latest special release, Mary’s Maple Porter (named for brewer Mary Wiles and made with plenty of her family’s own maple syrup), Brooklyn Brewery invites you to an all-you-can-eat affair with Belgian waffles from Wafels & Dinges, plenty of Wiles’s own maple syrup, coffee from Brooklyn Roasting Co., and of course, a free-flowing supply of the namesake beer. Get tickets now.

Saturday, February 25 from 10am to 1pm at Brooklyn Brewery, 79 N 11th St between Berry St and Wythe Ave (Williamsburg). $35.

Further ahead:

Knife Skills
Tired of spending twenty minutes getting the perfect dice on your mire poix?  Local Roots has you covered. They’re hosting a Knife Skills shesh at Boerum Hill’s 61 Local. In addition to chopping, slicing, and dicing, chef Will Griffin of I8NY will cover knife maintenance, safety and sharpening. Sign up here.

Monday, February 27th, at 3pm and 7pm, at 61 Local, 61 Bergen Street between Smith and Court (Boerum Hill). $40.

Meatball Slapdown
The Brooklyn Kitchen and Brooklyn Grange host this meaty cookoff, with a roster of notable foodies and chefs both judging and competing. Contestants include Roberta’s, The Meat Hook, Masten Lake, The Meatball Shop and others, while folks from Edible Brooklyn, Lucky Peach, and last year’s champ Stuzzicheria will decide the winner. Proceeds benefit The Brooklyn Kitchen’s classroom program and Brooklyn Grange’s farm education program. Get tickets here.

Friday, March 2 at The Brooklyn Kitchen, 100 Frost St between Meeker and Manhattan Aves (Williamsburg). $50.

Beer for Beasts
The second annual edition of this event (benefiting The Humane Society of New York City) may still be over a month away, but tickets are already selling like hotcakes. Hosted by Sixpoint and BeerAdvocate, the charitable fete brings craft brews, food from the likes of Calexico and Big Gay Ice Cream, and live entertainment to The Bell House for a good cause. Read more and get tickets here.

Saturday, March 31 at The Bell House, 149 7th St between 2nd and 3rd Aves (Gowanus). Two sessions: 1-5pm and 6-10pm. $60.

Tasting Brooklyn
Brooklyn Exposed gives us another reason to look forward to spring with its annual celebration of the borough’s food. The formidable lineup features eateries like Littleneck, Fort Reno, Saint Austere, Tchoup Shop and Brooklyn Soda Works among a dozen others. Check out the full lineup and get tickets here.

Tuesday, April 3 at Dumbo Loft, 155 Water St at Pearl St (DUMBO). $50.

Adam Smith knew Brooklyn would be full of artisanal pickle makers back in the 1780s - It's just the fulfillment of his master plan.

Adam Davidson, co-founder of NPR’s Planet Money, has a piece in the upcoming edition of The New York Times Sunday Magazine called ‘Don’t Mock the Artisanal Pickle Makers,’ in which he argues that, “The craft economy is the fulfillment of Adam Smith’s notion of capitalism.” Davidson calls Brooklyn, “ground zero of the artisanal-food universe,” and spotlights Kings County Jerky as a prime example of the type of specialty goods manufacturing that he believes is the model for American economic success in the coming decades:

“Like many successful entrepreneurs in the United States, [King’s Country Jerky Founder Chris] Woehrle followed what seems like an ancient business model: making things by hand. He rejected the high-volume, low-margin commodity business in which ConAgra and Pepsi­Co compete against each other with their Slim Jim and Matador jerky products. Instead, Kings County found a niche in which engaged consumers will pay a premium for a specialty product.”

And craft manufacturing isn’t just a Brooklyn food fad, Davidson argues, citing the case of Jason Premo, a South Carolina entrepreneur who crafts precision parts for ICBMs and Black Hawk helicopters. Yes, artisanal inter-continental ballistic missiles – they might not be the next big thing, but they’re out there.

To Adam Smith, the 18^th century social philosopher who crystal-balled the emergence of capitalism, it was all about specialization. The Industrial Revolution eventually freed individuals from the need to do a little bit of everything to survive, allowing them to focus on specific tasks, which drove technological and economic development at a far greater pace than ever before.

Now, Davidson says, we’re entering an era of hyperspecialization, which is allowing vast numbers of middle-class Americans to make a living by specializing in something they enjoy doing (like making really good high end beef jerky), which in turn generates enough wealth to allow them to afford similarly hyperspecialized products (like, say a growler of locally-brewed craft beer, or for the fortunate few, a $100 shot of whiskey at Char No. 4).

“When it comes to profit and satisfaction, craft business is showing how American manufacturing can compete in the global economy,” Davidson writes. “It’s tempting to look at craft businesses as simply a rejection of modern industrial capitalism. But the craft approach is actually something new — a happy refinement of the excesses of our industrial era plus a return to the vision laid out by capitalism’s godfather, Adam Smith…Instead of rolling our eyes at self-conscious Brooklyn hipsters pickling everything in sight, we might look to them as guides to the future of the American economy. Just don’t tell them that. It would break their hearts to be called model 21st-century capitalists.”

Find the full article here: Don’t Mock The Artisanal Pickle Makers (NY Times)

Plovgh partners with several upstate farms to bring a wide variety of fresh local produce to locations throughout Brooklyn each week. The twist? With Plovgh, there’s no season-long commitment requiring you to pay an upfront subscription fee for a pre-determined amount of weekly produce. In fact, there’s no commitment at all.

Plovgh members (there is no fee to sign up) receive an email each week listing all of the produce available from each farm, along with details about the growing practices of each farm (organic, kinda organic, not organic etc.) Members then place orders online for whatever veggies they want, from any of the participating farms, and pick up their haul at a pre-determined place and time.

East Williamsburg-based Plovgh allows users to purchase fresh, local produce from upstate farms, for pickup at locations throughout Brooklyn.

Pickup locations currently include Tuffet and Huckleberry Bar in Williamsburg, 46 Bogart in Bushwick, Veronica People’s Club and Hosh Yoga in Greenpoint, Brooklyn Brainery in Carroll Gardens, 365 Bridge Street Downtown, and Five Spot Soul Food in Clinton Hill, in addition to spots in Queens and Manhattan. More locations are in the works (and if you’d like to see one in your neighborhood, Plovgh encourages you to contact them at hello@plovgh.com.)

Plovgh is also working with Partners Trace, a new practicing organic farm near New Paltz, to help them raise some much-needed cash to fund their first season on their new farm. The deal? Fresh, local produce fiends can pre-purchase credits to use to purchase Partner’s trace produce at any time throughout the growing season, at a discount. A purchase of $50 worth of credits gets you $59 worth of produce. $100 in money gets you $125 in veggies, plus some pickles; and $250 gets your $358 worth of the good stuff, with pickles and a farm visit and dinner included.

To create a free Plovgh account (required to get their weekly produce lists and to make purchases), see their website at www.plovgh.com

To purchase credits and shares in Partners Trace, click here.

606 R&D, a new restaurant from a duo of City Bakery vets, is open in Prospect Heights. The menu includes everything from housemade donuts to sandwiches, salads, and egg drop soup.

Prospect Heights is getting hella classy. In the past few months the neighborhood has gained a ramen shop from three Morimoto vets (the beloved Chuko on Vanderbilt), a new casual spot from the folks at Al Di La (Bar Corvo on Washington), andFranny’s has announced they’re moving to a bigger space down Flatbush Ave. and opening a second fine-dining restaurant in their current space.

Joining the club this week is 606 R&D, a new restaurant from Ilene Rosen, savory chef at City Bakery for 15 years. She and partner Sara Dima (also a City Bakery alum) opened their new spot on Vanderbilt Avenue between Prospect Place and St. Marks Ave a few weeks ago, after generating some early excitement in the neighborhood with their Kickstarter campaign to buy a Donut Robot, a “3 foot contraption complete with a river of hot oil and a flipping device,” which they’re using to make fresh donuts daily.

The 30-seat restaurant is open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and the menu is local/seasonal, and influenced by comfort foods from around the world. Need a pick-me-up Jewish grandmother-style? Try the chicken liver with celery. Were you thinking of ordering crappy Chinese takeout but decided your stomach deserved better? Try R&D’s chicken egg drop soup with butternut squash and dandelion greens.  Don’t love donuts? Give their grilled variety topped with ricotta, honey and thyme a whirl. Just want to go home and crawl under the covers? There’s a mini market section where you can buy meats, cheeses and fresh breads to take home. But you might want to think about staying–Rosen has an interior design degree from Parsons and designed the cozy space herself.

See the full menu here, and check out a drool-inducing slideshow of R&D dishes on Serious Eats here.

606 R&D is located at 606 Vanderbilt Avenue in Prospect Heights. 718-230-0125

Perhaps more than anything, chocolate is the food of love. Chocolate famously contains the hormone the brain produces when falling down the rabbit hole of love. This month, in honor of Valentine’s Day, photographer Valery Rizzo takes us on a tour inside the chocolate factories at Mast Brothers Chocolate, Cacao Prieto and Raaka Virgin Chocolate.

Mast Brothers Chocolate, Williamsburg

American bean-to-bar hand-crafted chocolate at Mast Brothers Chocolate in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Mast Brothers Chocolate buy their beans directly from small organic cacao farmers, whom they regard as family, from the Dominican Republic, Belize, Papua New Guinea, Peru and Madagascar.

Rob Alvarez hand-wrapping and stacking some of the day's finished chocolate bars - the 70% Cacao, Almond & Sea Salt bars. Biodynamic almonds from the Anderson family Farm in California are roasted in Frankie's 457 Organic Olive Oil and seasoned with Maine Sea Salt.

The Mast Brothers, Rick and Michael, have a love affair with the spirit of craft, history and adventure. They have become the faces of an era of artisan food makers in Brooklyn.

Cacao beans from Madagascar. Mast Brothers Chocolate produces organic hand-crafted Chocolate Bars, Chips, Tablets, Cacao Nibs, pastries and confections, using local ingredients whenever possible.

All bars are made with two ingredients - organic cacao beans and cane sugar, and are 70 - 75% Cacao. The one exception is the Crown Maple bar which is made with maple sugar instead of cane.

Molds are used to shape the tops of dark chocolate bar, while other ingredients like almonds hide beneath.

Jimmy Lyons preps the raw cocoa beans on baking sheets before roasting them in a convection oven. Cacao Pods together with beans from Peru and Madagascar. Cacao beans were used as currency by the Aztecs and considered food of the gods.

Chocolate makers Mikhail Garbinsky and Jimmy Lyons sort through the beans before roasting, removing any leaves or twigs and discarding them in a bowl. They roast in small batches to ensure quality and to minimize the risk of over-roasting the cacao. After roasting, the beans are cooled by fan.

After roasting, then cooling, the beans are put into a winnower, where the husks are separated from the cocoa nibs to prepare them for grinding. Instead of discarding the husks, other Brooklyn food makers are finding use for them. Kings County Distillery has created a Chocolate Whiskey and P&H Soda Co. a chocolate soda syrup using Mast Brothers' left-over husks.

Chocolate maker Dan Derby grinds the cocoa nibs together with cane sugar in the grinding room, which now houses 15 stone grinders. The chocolate is left to grind for about 2 days.

After grinding, the chocolate is left to age in metal bins anywhere from two weeks to a couple of months. Chocolate maker Bakary Sise cuts chunks of aged chocolate and adds them to a melting tank or temperer to melt down for bars. At left, chocolate molds ready to be cleaned after the bars have been removed.

The chocolate factory offers tours and also holds various events, pairings, cooking demos and classes.

Haley Dekle wrapping and sealing a bar with labels containing ingredient details and tasting notes. At right, stacks of 74% Cacao, Pecan & Maple bars, which are made with slow-roasted and caramelized organic American Native pecans with Crown Maple Syrup from the Catskills.

Alexis Rose hand wrapping each bar first in gold foil wrap and then a beautiful paper which has the feel of old butcher's paper. The paper is designed by fellow chocolate maker, friend and designer Sean Walker.

At the the Mast Brothers' factory shop, There are 19 beautiful bars to choose from with flavors like Stumptown Coffee, Serrano Pepper, Black Truffle, Brooklyn Blend, Sambirano Valley, Moho River, Dried Cranberry, La Red de Guaconejo, and many more.

Derek Herbster holding Cacao Pods. Inside the tasting room and test kitchen Mast Brothers offers chocolate samples from the 5 different origins from which they source their cocoa beans.

Mast Brothers Chocolate also crafts Dark Chocolate Bonbons, with Salted Caramel, Liqeur and Coffee varieties.

Hand-rolled hazelnut, almond and cocoa nib truffles, Gianduja and macaroons and confections can also be found in their tasting room and test kitchen. Vesa Parviainen, their renowned pastry chef, is from Finland.

In honor of Saint Valentine they have handcrafted a heartbreakingly delicious collection of chocolate bars and confections. The bottom box contains 5 of their craft bars, 3 single origin bars and 2 'inclusion' bars. The top box contains classic cherry cordials, chocolate macaroons, pecan praline and almond chocolate cake confections.

Cacao Prieto, Red Hook

Red Hook-based Cacao Prieto's 100% organic, bean-to-bar chocolates, are hand-crafted daily from the finest organic, single-origin Dominican cacao. Cacao Prieto also distills a line of small batch, cacao-based liqueurs and rums.

Their cocoa beans come from their own self-sustaining family farm, Coralina Farms, in the Dominican Republic. Their 'mélange' or giant stone grinder is an 1895 Lehman model that came from the now closed Scharffen Berger factory. The granite wheels roll over the nibs, pulverizing them and forming a paste known as liquor.

Inside a barrel of freshly ground cocoa nibs.

Sales manager Alex Clark using their Vortex Winnower to separate the nibs from their husks. The machinery was invented by, produced by and sold by their sister company, Brooklyn Cacao.

The factory uses an impressive industrial gas-fed Sirocco roaster to roast their beans. The beans rotate in the sphere above as they roast evenly and are then deposited into a cooling chamber at the bottom.

Roasted cacao beans. Founder and CEO, Daniel Prieto Preston, is an inventor and aerospace engineer whose family has been farming organic cacao and sugar cane in the Dominican Republic for more than 100 years.

Cacao Prieto also produces chocolate liqueurs and light and dark cacao-infused rums, all made from organic Dominican sugar cane and cacao beans from the Prieto family's farm. Widow Jane is one of their Whiskeys made using water from the Widow Jane Mine in Upstate New York.

Heirloom varietals of American organic corn are used for their bourbons and whiskeys.

The factory distillery houses a copper 1000 liter still and is the first and only rum distillery in NYC since prohibition. Cacao Prieto produces 5 different varieties of organic, 72% dark chocolate fruit and nut bars, as well as 12 varieties of bonbons.

Cacao Prieto's bars each include limited-edition postcards illustrating the Prieto family history. The cards are illustrated by local Brooklyn artist Sophie Blackall.

Rum Caramel, Hazelnut Cassia, Toasted Coconut, and Honey Caramel Bonbons are the work of Chocolatier Damion Badalamenti. The bonbons are made with organic nuts, Cacao Prieto's own artisan liquor and hand-made caramel.

The factory also houses an adjoining bar named Botanica which is known for its cocktails. Botanica will be re-opened on April 1st and leads a double life as an event space.

Each postcard includes a story on the back...Esteban Santos Prieto Casas was studying to become a priest when he set sail from Spain to America in 1898. On the way he was distracted by the sight of Blanca Maria del Carmen. He jumped ship in the Dominican Republic, proposed and the two settled, where they had nine children, grew cacao, sugarcane and distilled rum.

Cacao Prieto's factory store front will be opening April 1st in Red Hook and they currently have a pop-up shop open, from February 10th through February 14th, at 55 Prince Street in SoHo, for all your Valentine's Day shopping needs. Above, a mural across from the Red Hook factory, painted by Brooklyn artist Sebastian Gross Ossa.

Raaka Virgin Chocolate, Clinton Hill

Raaka Virgin Chocolate delivers flavors you don't find in other chocolates because they make their chocolate without roasting the cacao beans - this is why they call it Virgin Chocolate. It's handmade using primarily organic ingredients, and is vegan, nut and gluten-free.

A wall of chocolate molds and other utensils ready for use. Nate Hodge, at right, is co-founder, together with Ryan Cheney, of Raaka.

Raaka sources cocoa beans that have been directly traded with La Red Guaconejo (a co-op of 160 family farms in the northern Dominican Republic), Hacienda Elvecia (an organic farm in eastern Dominican Republic), and CIAAB (a co-op in Bolivia).

The three types of cocoa beans used, La Red, Hacienda and Blancos. With plans in 2012 to visit Haiti and develop their first trade agreement with a cacao farming community there, Raaka is working to build a new model for trade agreements that maximizes global trade's potential for community development.

Blancos Cacao beans, when eaten raw are very herbal and have hints of pine, green tea and licorice root. The La Red ferments longer than average cocoa resulting in strong fruity and spicy notes, with hints of bing cherry, allspice, orange peel and black raspberry.

Nate pouring beans into the Winnower, which removes the husk from the cocoa nibs. All of the husks are later donated to Edible Schoolyard NYC, an after-school gardening program at P.S. 216 in Brooklyn, where the husks are used as mulch and fertilizer.

An inside view of one of Raaka Virgin Chocolate's four chocolate grinders.

Organic freeze-dried blueberries used in Raaka's Blueberry Lavender bar. South African Green Rooibos and Honey Bush tea are ground into a fine powder before being added to the chocolate for the Vanilla Rooibos bar.

Guajillo peppers are ground together with Aji Amarillo chiles and a touch of cinnamon to create Raaka's Chili bar.

For Raaka's Cask Aged Bourbon bar, cocoa nibs are aged in oak baby bourbon barrels from Tuthilltown Spirits, one of the first small whiskey distillery is in New York State. They also have plans to acquire Cabernet barrels to produce a wine-infused chocolate. At right, Nate depositing chocolate into the molds from the temperer.

After being chilled in the molds, the bars are removed and each bar is shaped to perfection before being hand wrapped and sealed. The excess chocolate is either melted down with the next batch or used for samples.

Livingston Ordway wrapping batches of coffee bars, cut and prepped by Jim Goose.

Each of Raaka's seven bars are wrapped in paper designed by designer and friend Elissa Barbieri at Loop. Loop’s paper is printed with soy inks on FSC-certified, 100% post-consumer recycled, chlorine-free paper that was processed by wind generated energy.

Nate Hodge with Danielle Lawrence, director of sales, in the office. Raaka Virgin Chocolate also produces smaller coffee bars - those at right were found at Café Grumpy in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

All photos © Valery Rizzo. All rights reserved.

Valery Rizzo is a Park Slope-based photographer with a love of good food and all things Brooklyn. You can find more of her work on her website, and follow her food adventures on her photo blog, Eating Brooklyn.

Bay Ridge's Allison and Matt Robicelli give us a Valentine's Day glimpse into the roller coaster ride of love and marriage in the food world.

“Marriage is about two flawed people making each other better…And with us a lot of the time, we make ourselves better by fighting.” – Allison Robicelli

Does life offer any greater gifts than food and love? Where a well-executed balance of flavor and textures – sweet and savory, acid and heat, creaminess and crunch – is the key to good food, a well-executed balance of other forces – harmony and discord, laughter and tears, fighting and prospering – is at the heart of many of the best, most productive relationships.

With Valentine’s Day approaching, we wanted to take a look at a relationship between a couple for whom food, love, and marriage and are inexorably intertwined. And we could think of no one better to shed light on the roller coaster ride of life and love in the world of food than Allison and Matt Robicelli, a Bay Ridge couple who lost everything, but survived, clawing their way back to the surface with relentlessly creative, surprising, and delicious…cupcakes. That’s right. Cupcakes.

We met Allison and Matt at Hom Café, near their home in Bay Ridge, to talk.

So guys, not many couples live and work together, spending twenty four hours a day, seven days a week in the pressure-filled environment of a start-up food business. How do you do it?

Allison: It’s not that uncommon to find couples in this sort of situation in the food business. Because nobody who’s not in the food business would put up with this shit. Nobody.

When I was younger I didn’t think I was ever going to get married. I didn’t want to. My career was what was most important. I remember there was this one guy I was dating. It was late October and he said, “When can I see you again?”

I was like, “January.”

He said, “What do you mean?”

I said, “It’s the holidays. It’s my busy season. I can’t deal with you right now.”

To make it in this business you have to give everything. You’re not doing it for the money. And people who aren’t in the business never understand that. They’re like, “How can you be working ninety hours a week for a hundred dollars a day!? What are you doing!?

I’d say, “A hundred dollars a day? That’s great money! I can cover my rent, I can drink and I eat at work. I don’t need anything else.”

It’s a very stupid career for stupid people, and outsiders don’t get it.

So why do you do it!?

Allison: It’s the only thing I can do.

Matt: It’s the only thing we enjoy doing. It’s like a sickness. It’s an addiction and you can’t get away from it. Sometimes you get burnt out and you think, “God I hate this! I just want it to end. I can’t do it anymore!”

So you find yourself on Craigslist looking for a job that has something to do with the degree you got in college and you think, “God this all sounds so boring!” And you find yourself just casually checking the ads in the restaurant and hospitality section, and before you know it you’re like, “Ooooooh, this looks interesting. Hmmmmm.”

Allison: We’ve quit the kitchen so many times. I’ve been in the food business for ten years. I’ve quit six times. I’ve said, “I can’t do it anymore. I’m going to have a normal life. I’m going to get a normal job, work in management instead of the kitchen…”

Matt: I mean, we’ve closed our own business about four hundred times!

Allison: We shut down Robicelli’s last week! For forty-five minutes!

Matt: We were like, “SCREW THIS!”

Allison: For forty five minutes there was no more Robicelli’s. It was done. I was like, “Matt, just say the word. I’ll go on Twitter right now and tell everyone we’re done.”

We opened our first gourmet shop a few years ago here in Bay Ridge because we wanted to get out of the kitchen. Not because we really wanted to, but I was pregnant with Atticus, our first son, and we wanted to have a normal life, with normal hours and benefits. Health insurance.”

Before that, when we were both working in restaurants, we’d get off work at three or four o’clock in the morning. We’d cook at home or we’d stay up and play Trivial Pursuit.

Matt: She’d play Trivial Pursuit and I’d go along for the ride.

Allison: I’m known as an expert Trivial Pursuit player. I’ll win the whole game on my first turn. I’ll just get every question right until the game is over. And he’d just sit there and play with me anyway. Because he loves me and he’s the coolest guy ever.

With a kid coming, we realized we couldn’t have that life anymore. We figured opening a gourmet shop was the great compromise. You wouldn’t be making food, but at least you could be around food, curating food.

The universe keeps telling you to get out of the food business. I’ve had every good reason to get out. I’ve bussed tables, washed dishes, cooked, done sales…I’ve done everything that’s supposed to convince you not to do it, but we still did it and we’re still doing it…because we’re dumb!

So we decided to open this gourmet shop. To be curators of food, to work normal hours, and to have health insurance. That was the thing – with the baby coming we needed benefits. We had to be a real family and have benefits so we could take care of our kids. We had never had benefits before!

That had been a big thing between me and my family for years. We grew up here in Bay Ridge. If you grow up in Bay Ridge, you join the civil service or become a teacher or work for the city – to get the benefits. That’s what everybody does here. That’s what it’s all about and that’s what we were told to do.

And here’s me working ridiculous hours for no money, coming home in the middle of the night with knife wounds, and they’d be like, “Why don’t you go to the hospital?” And I’d say “Because I don’t have benefits!”

So when I got pregnant, they all said, “OK listen. You’ve had your fun. Go work for the city. Or get a real job.”

Matt and I said, “OK, we’ll do this retail thing. We’ll have a normal life.” We opened the gourmet shop specifically to get out of the kitchen, to give our kids a normal life.

Matt: We opened the store on a Friday in September of 2008, and the stock market collapsed the following Monday. We did pretty well until March of 2009, when the city started cutting back city employees’ overtime.

Allison: This neighborhood was built on overtime. People went from making six figures a year on overtime, to making their base salary, which was less than half that.

Right after the city cut overtime, people stopped coming in. That’s when we started to make the cupcakes – just to do something different to bring people in. The store was failing, but the cupcakes started to take off. So all of a sudden we were running two businesses – a gourmet shop that was barely surviving, and a cupcake bakery. It was hell.

I don’t think we’ve ever been closer to divorce than we were then.

Matt: No way, that was as bad as it could possibly be. We couldn’t afford babysitters, so Allison had to be home during the day while I was running the store. I’d come home and she’d go in to bake all night.

Allison: Any time we were together, I was working on my Blackberry, just trying to find ways to get people into the store. We couldn’t afford a computer, so whenever we were together he’d be watching the kids and I’d be on the Blackberry.

We were trying to find money for staff, money for rent. We had to drop our health insurance, which was the whole purpose of opening the store! We started to hate each other.

At some point we sat down and we asked ourselves, “Is this worth it? How much money is our marriage worth?”

We both thought there was something really special about our relationship. I knew that no matter what happened, I’d never find anything like what Matt and I have together again. So we agreed to close the shop.

Matt: We had been fighting like cats and dogs as the store was going under. And the day we decided to close the store, it just stopped. There was no more fighting.

Allison: We were happy again, but it was also terrifying. We knew we’d had a great product but it didn’t work and we lost our life’s savings. We went from having a little bit of income to having almost no income. I’d look at the kids and think, “God, we did this for the kids, and it didn’t work and I’ve ruined everything. Their college money, health insurance…everything we had is gone.”

It was the scariest thing ever.

Matt: But there was nothing else to do but figure out our next step. And that’s when we started the wholesale cupcake business.

Allison: We had decided to start the cupcake business a few weeks before we closed the store because that’s what everyone was asking us about. We were getting calls from people saying, “Where can I get your cupcakes in Park Slope? In downtown Brooklyn? Why don’t you open a store in this neighborhood or that neighborhood?”

Everyone wanted the cupcakes. So we said, “OK, let’s do this.”

We started out with two clients – Hom right here in Bay Ridge, and Blue Apron in Park Slope. We would make cupcakes and drive around in our 2000 Honda Civic with the kids in the backseat making deliveries.

Matt: At the beginning we had orders for maybe seventy five cupcakes a week, so we were pulling in about ninety dollars a week.

But it slowly started growing, and kept growing.

How did it grow? Were you out there hustling all over Brooklyn, or did word just spread?

Allison: Oh God, we were working it so hard. Walking into every shop in Brooklyn. One thing we’ve always had going for us is that drive to make things work.

I started my first business in high school, at Stuyvesant. I was a political consultant for kids running for office on the student council. At Stuyvesant, if you wanted to get into Harvard, which everyone did, you had to have killer ‘extra-currics.’ I won a hundred percent of my clients’ campaigns. I placed two class presidents. I was the high school’s first political consultant.

I had cancer when I was twenty one. When I was going through chemo, what was I going to do, lay around at home waiting to die? No. I learned how to cook, studying Jacques Pepin videos and all kinds of books.

When we didn’t have enough money for Christmas one year, I baked illegally out of our house, making cookies. I’d go out and sell them at church fairs. I did that every weekend for two months so we’d have enough money for a nice Christmas.

Maybe it’s a Brooklyn thing, or maybe it’s an entrepreneurial thing, but we’re both kind of programmed to do what we have to do to survive. OK, we don’t have enough money? We can sit around and bitch about it or we can get up and do something. And that’s how we do things – we get up and do something.

So how did you manage things with the kids at home when you were getting the cupcake business started?

Allison: The plan was that I was going to make the cupcakes and Matt was going to get a job until we built up enough clients to be able to bring him back on. So he started interviewing.

Matt: I went on one interview, and the woman recognized me. She knew who I was. She lived up the block from Blue Apron and she had had our cupcakes and she liked them a lot.

And she refused to hire me! Not because I was overqualified or underqualified, but because she thought I needed to keep making cupcakes. She thought that that if she gave me the job, the cupcakes would come to an end.

It was a $75,000 a year job! I was like, “I have a wife and two kids! We’re broke! I need the benefits!”

She said, “No. You can’t give up on your dream!”

Allison: Ha ha ha. It’s funny now, but it was not funny then.

With kids involved, the stress of all this must have been insane. How did you keep it together?

Allison: I don’t know whether most marriages would survive that. I don’t think we’re special or anything. I just never take Matt for granted. We appreciate each other.

When you’re married, everyone likes to think back to when you were single – “Oh, that was so much fun!” But when you really think about it, being single sucked. When you’re single all you want is to find someone who will love you completely and unconditionally. We knew we had that, and we were like, “What? We’re going to give this up because we’re broke?”

I’m really happy that we lost everything. I wasn’t happy then, but I’m happy now. When you lose everything, there’s nothing you can do but sit back and look at what you have. I had the kids, and my parents and extended family who rallied around us and made sure we were ok. I had good friends who didn’t treat me any differently because we had failed, because we were broke. And I had Matt.

It’s the worst way to completely understand what matters in your life, but if it helps you understand what really matters, then it’s worth it.

And you survive. We survived losing the store. We survived losing everything. And when you go through all that with one person, you realize that you can survive anything. As bad and scary as it gets, what’s the worst that can happen? We’ll have to stop making cupcakes? I mean, I’ll go work in a diner on the side of a road somewhere. We’ll mow lawns. We’ll figure something out. We have each other, we have our kids – we’ll figure something out.

Matt: It’s not all about money. Money is worthless in a lot of ways.

You guys said that having a normal family life was a big priority when you opened the store. Are you managing to have some degree of normalcy now with the cupcake business?

Allison: We could have been a lot more aggressive in expanding. As we’ve been growing the business, every time we’ve had to make a decision we’ve asked ourselves, “Can we do this and maintain a good family life?” And if the answer is no, we usually don’t do it. You don’t get this time back. Your kids don’t get this time back. They’re only little once.  You don’t get a do-over.

Our kids don’t know we’re poor right now. They have no clue, which is great. As long as they have their mom and dad they’re happy, and that’s what we’re giving them.

How is it working together all the time? Do you get sick of each other?

Allison: I left the kitchen a few months ago when we could finally afford to hire a couple of people, to start managing all the paperwork and the business side of things. Before that, we were together all the time. We realized that the only time we were apart was when we were in the bathroom, and sometimes not even then. And we said, “You know, this can’t be healthy.”

Now that we’re apart for eight hours a day, we’re like, “We’re not spending enough time together!”

Matt: The worst part of being together all the time in the kitchen was that when we’d go on dates we’d have absolutely nothing to say. You can’t ask, “So, how was your day?” when you’ve spent all day, every day for the last year together. And I would feel like that should bother me, but it didn’t.

Allison: There’s nothing wrong with not talking sometimes! One of my biggest fears in life is awkward silences. And that’s why I ramble so much. And rambling can be exhausting so it can actually be nice to be with Matt and not have to talk.

After being married for seven years you get complacent. We had to make an emergency cupcake delivery to the Upper East Side before the Super Bowl and we were in the car and didn’t shut up the whole time. Other times we’ll go to a restaurant or something and there’s all that pressure to talk. We’re not good at that. We’re good at impromptu moments.

Matt: And we’re good at texting. We text each other constantly.

If I’m at work and my phone is in the other room charging or something, she’ll freak out and start texting the girls at the kitchen being like, “Where’s Matt? Why isn’t he answering?” She starts sending me messages saying, “I’m getting in the car and coming to the kitchen if you don’t answer your phone right now!”

Allison: I’m always worried that he’s lost his hand in the industrial mixer or something. That’s how my brain works.

Matt: Right. Of course we have two other people working with me in the kitchen. I’d like to think they could handle an emergency. But she’ll start thinking, maybe they all got sucked into the mixer!

Allison: Growing up, it was like our family motto was, “God forbid!” It was, “God forbid this! God forbid that!” When I was a kid – and granted, New York was a much different place in the 80’s – but when I was like four years old I’d be told, “Don’t run ahead of us on the sidewalk, because god forbid, somebody will take you in their car and rape you and kill you and leave you by the side of the road!”

All the time. “Don’t go near the subway. They’ll stab you to death on the subway!” “Don’t go near the park. The people in the park will kill you!”

I’m from a Sicilian Catholic family. My dad used to tell me all the time, “Don’t tell a lie. If you ever tell a lie, your bed will burst into flames and incinerate your body and as the flames sink into hell they will take your ashes with you!”

Ha ha ha. So that’s how I was raised, and as a result, to this day, my imagination runs away from me that way.

I never stop thinking of terrible things that might have happened to him when I can’t get in touch, even for a minute. So we text each other constantly to say, “I miss you.” Or “Look at this dumb joke.”

You guys have been married for seven years. You have kids. You are business partners. Do you fight a lot?

Oh we fight all the time. There’s always just a ton of shit that the world is throwing at you. Whether you miss your train or you have a bad hair day or there’s no money in the bank…all the little stupid disappointments. You can’t take out your frustration on the world or you end up on the 11 o’clock news. You have to get it out and someone has to take it, and I think that’s what marriage is kind of all about.

We’ll have fights that aren’t even directed at each other. When you’re scared about things, you fight. We fight about money a lot – even rich married couples fight about money. If you’re kids are being bad you’ll fight because you’re worried that you’re not a good enough mom or a good enough dad. Do you yell at your kids for that or do you yell at your spouse? You yell at your spouse.

We know at this point that sometimes you have to fight just to make yourself feel better. And the biggest part of marriage is holding up the other person when they’re not holding themselves up well. And that’s one of the best things about being married – knowing that I don’t always have to hold myself up all the time – knowing that when I’m in a bad spot, Matt’s going to be there.

I think married couples should fight. I think it’s good for you. But there are rules. There are lines. You don’t always fight. You know when fights end.  You know how to contain them.

Matt: I’m new to this fighting thing. My background is more about keeping it all inside. But I’m doing ok with the fighting.

Allison: Ha ha ha. We can’t be productive if we have all this shit inside eating us up.

The cupcakes came out of a huge fight. We had a big fight about money. We were sitting there screaming at each other about the store. We were scared and angry. We were yelling at each other about whose fault it was that we had decided to open it in the first place, about not working hard enough. And once we were done, we were like, “OK, we got it all out. Now we can think.”

You can be productive and have ideas once you’ve emptied yourself of all the fear and anxiety.

Look, most marriages would probably end in divorce if the people fought like we fight, but it works for us. We understand that you’re supposed to fight. There are couples that want to be perfect, that want to smile all the time. You can’t do that! That’s not sustainable. If you’re pretending that your relationship is perfect, and pretending to smile all the time, you’re doing it wrong! We’re all flawed human beings. Marriage is about two flawed people making each other better…And with us a lot of the time, we make ourselves better by fighting.

Matt: We can just be honest with each other in a way that most business partners can’t. Even if there’s something you really don’t want to be honest about, and even if it leads to a fight.

Allison: We don’t lie to each other because we can’t. We know each other too well. We can tell when the other one is lying. At least I can. Matt is the worst liar ever. He’s terrible at it. That’s why I know he’ll never cheat on me.

Matt: And the thing with affairs is that they’re way too much work. Who has time for an affair?

Allison: I don’t have any time for an affair. It would be way too hard to schedule. Too much work.

But feelings do get hurt. We’re both really fanatical about the quality of what we’re doing. We’re both perfectionists.

Matt: Our standards are way too high. When it comes to cupcakes and the business anyway. When it comes to anything else our standards are way too low.

Allison: Ha ha ha. We totally shot ourselves in the foot with this whole ‘excellence’ thing! If we had just gone for ‘above average’ we’d probably be a lot happier!

Matt will come up with an idea and I’ll just say, “No. That’s not going to work. That’s not going to sell.”

And he’ll say, “You’re crushing my dreams!”

And then we’ll just fight it out and get over it.

I don’t know how other people at other jobs work – a lot of people are probably afraid to have bad ideas or make the wrong decisions. But we can talk about it and figure out the right moves to make by arguing.

Matt: A good example was the Buffalo chicken cupcake. Big fights on that one.

Allison: Huge, epic fights.

This sounds really stupid now, but he had this whole thing that I wouldn’t let him do the cupcakes he wanted. I had come up with the chicken and waffle cupcake and everyone liked that, and Matt was like, “You got to do a chicken cupcake! I want to do a Buffalo wing cupcake!”

And I just thought it was too much. I thought it was going too far. We never want to do stuff that’s silly or kitschy. Everything has to be good, and has to be done for reason.

It took us four months to develop the shell for our whoopee pie, just because we wanted a certain type of crispness on the top. We plan these things very meticulously. I just didn’t see a Buffalo wing cupcake as something that would be pleasing or balanced. I saw it as a gimmick. And we don’t do gimmicks.

So we finally fought about it so much over the course of a year and a half that I let him do it for his thirtieth birthday. To shut him up!

We spent a long time on it. Matt came up with the idea of basing it on a celery root and carrot cake. We had to do a bunch of prototypes before we got the flavors balanced right. We didn’t want it to be overly savory or sweet. But we got the cake part right.

The blue cheese buttercream we had down pat. We had invented that when we still had the store. So we had those two components, and then we said, “OK, how do we work the chicken in?”

We knew how to cook the chicken. The challenge was the sauce. The key to a good buffalo wing isn’t heat, it’s actually the acid. Whenever you cook something and you think something’s missing, it’s usually acid. Seven times out of ten it’s acid. Three times out of ten it’s salt.

We needed the right acid to act as a bridge, tying all the other flavors together. We decided to use citrus, because the acid in the citrus juice would have one foot in the heat of the pepper, and one foot in the sweetness of the sugar. In the end, it wasn’t really sweet or savory. It was its own thing. It was a trip. And that’s the point. It really screwed with my head for a while, and that’s what good food does.

In cooking the basic thing is contrast and balance. If there’s something soft on the plate, add something crunchy. If there’s something really sweet, add something salty or tangy. You have so many taste buds on your tongue – if only one of them is going off, you’re having a one-note experience. And that’s why there’s always so much going on in our cupcakes. There more you have going on in a bite, the more present you are going to be in that moment of eating. We don’t want people to take a bite of our cupcakes and then immediately forget. We want them to wake you up and make you think about what’s going on in a very subtle way.

The Buffalo chicken cupcake was very direct. Not subtle at all. And when you’re eating it, you’re really thinking about what you’re eating. You almost feel yourself processing it, which is really weird. And that’s what I liked about it. It’s kind of cool that you can do that with food. It’s like experimental art rock jazz.

It’s like Rush! You’re not supposed to always understand what’s going on on a Rush album, but you can still enjoy it.

Matt: Their drummer Neil Peart did have the largest drum kit of all time. He holds the world record for the biggest drum kit ever. I think he had a hundred and thirty six pieces, and he’s still adding more.

Allison: Exactly – the Buffalo chicken cupcake is the Neil Peart of cupcakes. I don’t think Neil Pert ever thought somebody would make a cupcake that was the embodiment of his career! He’d probably be horrified!