Here is my new article in Success magazine, about chef Ryan Umane, and the pop up restaurant phenomenon:

The intersection of 79th and Third is close to the bull’s-eye center of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, whose residents are as rich, glamorous and well-fed as those of any piece of terra firma.

Standing there on a frigid January night, one could wander in any direction, and before going a mile not help but fall into a world-class restaurant: Daniel, Ladurée, Sasabune, Luke’s Lobster, Café Boulud, Campagnola, Caravaggio, Uva—you can’t make a mistake.

But for our delicious meal tonight, instead of going north, south, east or west, we are going straight up, ascending 11 stories to the apartment of Ryan Umane. He’s a 28-year-old up-and-coming chef who has grabbed his spatula and cast-iron frying pan and joined the pop-up restaurant movement. Testaments to culinary and entrepreneurial innovation, pop-ups first blossomed as a fad some five years ago, then became a wave, and now show every sign of sticking around as a thriving alternative to the traditional restaurant experience.

Pop-up is a phenomenon of loose parameters. Purists reserve the term for the most evanescent of the species, the small place with a haphazard ambience but a molto delizioso cuisine that shows up in an empty storefront one day but is likely to be gone the next, unless it turns into a whopping success. Ad Hoc in Napa, for instance, started as a placeholder restaurant but was so popular it became a brand, spinning off a cookbook and a fried chicken mix.

(To read the rest, click here.)

We hosted Sandy, the Storm of the Century here this past week, and frankly, we pretty much missed it. Oh, we had impressively high winds that we could see thrashing the trees across the street all day. And yes, we lost phone/cable/internet service for three whole days. But in terms of personal impact, we’ve had worse.

Not that I’m complaining. We did the rising flood thing in 1998 (Floyd, theoretically a hundred year storm) and in 2011 (the widely disrespected Alice, which did us upwards of $20,000 worth of damage), and the no power thing during the 2010 Olympics. I don’t need to get clobbered every time. I’m sorry anybody gets hurt by these things anywhere, at any time. But I’m glad that this time, it wasn’t us.

But it could have been. Trees were down all over–four giants right in Law Park, a mere two blocks from us–and many friends and neighbors are still without power.Things might not be restored for a week. Good luck to them.

Found on Facebook, a photo of a couple, Alexis Creque and Russell Murphy, after their arrest last month for allegedly spray-painting a Lower East Side building. An 1980s-era infraction, but the sentiment is au courant.

I LOVE IT!

This is the undefeated cap which my daughter Cara gave me for Christmas. With the magic conjured by the combination of this cap and my head, the Giants beat the Jets and the Cowboys to close out the regular season, and then beat the Falcons, Packers, 49ers and the Patriots to win Super Bowl XLVI. Tomorrow, I shall offer it to the permanent collection at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.

The Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel, for more than a half century on the premier locations for cabaret in Manhattan, has closed. Prior to its musical incarnation, the Oak Room was famous for being the home of the celebrated Algonquin Round Table, where gathered the great witty writers of the 1920s and 1930s. Pictured in the famous Al Hirschfeld cartoon reprinted above, clockwise from lower left: Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Lynn Fontaine and Alfred Lunt, Frank Crowninshield, Alexander Woollcott, Heywood Broun, Marc Connelly, Frank Case, Franklin P. Adams, Edna Ferber, George S. Kaufman and Robert Sherwood.

I’m married into a teaching family. My wife took up teaching as a second career, and has spent the last decade teaching in various New York City and Westchester County middle and high schools of widely different conditions of wealth, quality and ambition. Two of her uncles were teachers, two of her cousins are school superintendents, and and at least three other cousins are or were teachers. When Chris Christie and his ilk start blaming teachers for the inadequacies of the educational system and start looking for ways to cut their pay, you can guess our response.

But you might be surprised. My wife comes home with stories of her colleagues’ inadequacies. She works with one man, comfortably tenured, who weekly offers some statement of scientific principle that shows that he really doesn’t know how the world works. She works with another, fresh from the Teach for America program, who has such a wilting classroom presence that he cannot hold his students’ attention. The older man probably get paid $70,000 a year or so, and could probably be whipped into shape by a motivated administration. The younger man should probably earns $30,000 or less, and would have been sent packing long ago if he didn’t carry such a light price tag. My wife would show no regret if under some grading system these two were sent packing.

But there are two problems. First, any system based on student performance is apt to also claim good teachers, because, let’s face it, in a lot of schools, the kids are not destined for success. They are not prepared, they don’t do homework, they do not have proper parental support. Second, school administrations are highly political bodies, and are often quite happy to shirk the dirty work and shift blame onto teachers. At one suburban school, for example, my wife confiscated a phone from a student who was playing with it in class. She put it in a drawer, from which it was subsequently stolen. The student’s mother, a power in the Booster Club, complained to the principal, who ordered my wife to pay for a new phone. When my wife, through her union, refused, the school promptly gave her two surprise classroom observations, on which basis they declared her performance substandard, and dismissed her. A year later, the school was ruled to be in violation of the union contract, but that’s not the point. Schools are political environments, and teachers need protection from the failures and foibles of administrators and parents.

Here’s an idea. Before my wife worked in education, she worked in health care. It is her observation that when patients have bad outcomes–that is, die–hospitals are very serious about rooting out why. When patients die, especially patients who were not admitted in dire condition, the hospital convenes a Mortality Panel to investigate what happened, with an aim to fixing the problem. Sometimes they find shortcomings by a doctor or a nurse or someone else on the staff, and take steps to address it. But often they find that the outcome wasn’t always within their control. Patients drink, smoke, take drugs, have poor diets, have underlying conditions, suffer environmental insults, and so on. Here’s the idea: if you want to hold teachers responsible for student performance, make the teachers’ performance part of a total evaluation. By all means, examine whether the teacher was up to the job. But other questions should also be asked. Did the student do his homework? Did the student come to class? Does the student possess a learning disability, or an underlying medical or psychological condition that affects performance, and does the school address those issues? Does the student have a parent at home? Did he have breakfast? Did he have a place to sleep? Is the student a discipline problem? What has the school done to address this kid’s challenges? If not, is it because of a funding issue?

By all means, hold teachers accountable. Better yet, hold everybody accountable.

News we could use later this year:

STEVE’S LAST GIFT!
Jobs’ Final Invention Solves Nation’s Unemployment Crisis!
New iJobs Device Pays People to Sit and Twiddle Their Thumbs!

SLUGFEST!
Ex-Comedian Sinbad Latest to Grab Lead for Republican Nomination
Overtakes Garth, the Capital One Viking;
Romney Holds Steady at 25%

IT’S A MOCKERY!
Kim Kardashian Denounces Sinead O’Connor’s Short-Lived Marriage
“Nobody Tanks Faster Than Me,’’ Celebrity Narcissist Vows;
New Fiance To Be Introduced; Said to Be a Fruit Fly

EXPOSED!
Celebrity Phone Hackers Claim New Victim
Rupert Murdoch’s Cellphone Tapped;
Revealing Pix Show Mogul Dispensing Power in the Nude

INSOLVENCY SOLVED!
Greece Is Back in the Black!
Tourism Leaps After Nation Is Reinvented as a Theme Park
Devoted to John Travolta-Olivia Newton-John Musical;
“Shut Up About the Spelling!’’ Says Finance Minister

DESPOT DEFICIT!
Middle East Running Out of Dictators!
Around the Globe, Out-of-Work Strongmen, Warlords and Kommissars
Updating Resumes, Seek to Fill Openings


WHY TWEET WHEN YOU CAN TWEIN?
Former Congressman Heads New Instant Messaging System
“It’s Going to Be Big!’’ Says Weiner

EXTREME WEATHER FORCES VAST POWER OUTAGES!
Residents Forced to “Talk’’ To One Another;
“Conversations’’ Reported;
Senior Centers Raided for Instructors;
“One Starts, Then You Take Turns Speaking’’

CONGRESSIONAL LOGJAM SMASHED!
Stimulus Bill, Deficit Reduction Agreements Pass
“Funny’’ Brownies Distributed Before Session
Pelosi Teaches Boehner How to Tie-Dye
Eric Cantor Wears Flowers in His Hair