January 26, 2012
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Not open yet, but its menu is tweaked
Wondering what’s been holding up the opening of the new restaurant, Oregano Bar and Bistro, on Johnson Avenue? The television show Mission Menu, which airs on nuvoTV — a station geared towards Latin American viewers — provided some answers when it aired an episode about the restaurant and its owner, Erick Caceres, in December. In addition to clues about the eatery’s delays, the show also outlines some of the food that will eventually be on offer there. The 3522 Johnson Ave. restaurant’s executive chef, Ricardo Cardona, is part of the television show’s Restaurant Impossible type-team that researches the ethnic cuisine of eateries that need help and creates menus in the hope of saving them. Without mentioning Mr. Cardona’s role at Oregano, the Dec. 17 episode features the restaurant. In it, Mr. Cardona asked Mr. Caceres about the delays the restaurant has been facing. Mr. Caceres explained that renovations needed at the former Josepina location were more numerous than expected. “I had to redo the entire electrical and the entire plumbing,” Mr. Caceres said, after noting that he invested more than $600,000 in the project. For the episode, Mr. Cardona and a co-host traveled to Montreal to find inspiration for French dishes, such as bistro burgers. Mr. Cardona — who has lived near West 256th Street and Broadway for 18 years — pumps Riverdale up as “the Beverly Hills of the Bronx” and said his goal is to bring a lower Manhattan ambiance to the restaurant. “If Oregano’s going to be a French bistro in an upscale neighborhood, the customer’s going to want a high-end product, we definitely have to bring a high-class burger to the menu,” said Mr. Cardona’s co-host Giuseppe Bologna (a.k.a. Chef G). Mr. Caceres told The Press that he’s hoping to have the grills fired up for hungry customers by the end of February. But the Latin flare he and Mr. Cardona had originally planned to bring to classic French cuisine might be toned down a notch. “Internally, as far as the menu, we’ve shifted a little towards the French,” Mr. Caceres said last week.
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As faculty advisor to Bronx Science's Animal Rights Club (LEAP) I was educated by my students about creuelty in the food production industry.
Delicious sliders are served in Riverdale at Bronx Burger House, without "Foie Gras" (a prime example of cruelty based food production). To produce "fatty liver" workers push tubes down ducks' or geese's throats two or three times daily and pump as much as 4 pounds of grain and fat into the animals' stomachs, causing their livers to bloat to up to 10X their normal size.
A PETA investigation at Hudson Valley Foie Gras found so many ducks died when organs ruptured from overfeeding that workers who killed fewer than 50 birds per month were given a bonus. Many develop foot infections, kidney necrosis, spleen damage, broken bills, and tumor-like lumps in their throats. One duck had a maggot-infested neck wound so severe that water spilled out of it when he drank.
Foie Gras is so inhumane that in '2004 California passed a law banning the sale and production of Foie Gras effective in '2012. Force-feeding has also been outlawed in the U.K., Austria, Germany, Czech Republic, Finland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, and Israel.
***mricle***