Bits and Pieces

Face Your Pockets

From Cityfile: New York
Jolie Palm dessert

DAILYFILE
[10-26-09]
If you love Top Chef and Top Chef Masters, you'll be pleased to hear that a third iteration, Top Chef: Just Desserts, will debut on Bravo next year. [via]

Mikhail Prokhorov

Nello Balan Strikes Again
[10-23-09]
The Post reports that Mikhail Prokhorov, the Russian billionaire close to sealing a deal to buy the Nets, stopped off at Nello's on Wednesday and dropped $19,000 on lunch. What did he spend all that cash on? Miraculously, a crack reporter at the paper managed to obtain the bill:

$825 for three orders of truffle tagliolini
$600 for four orders of truffle carpaccio
$210 for three orders of veal chops with mushrooms
$72 for six large waters
$15 for a bowl of chicken soup
$5,000 for a bottle of vintage 1998 Chateau Petrus
$3,600 for two bottles of 2002 Montrachet Latour
$3,750 in tips

Of course, Nello Balan, the restaurant's bleached-blond owner and one of the city's most relentless publicity seekers, had absolutely nothing to do with revealing any of these details: [...]

Nello Balan: Call Your Lawyer
Nello Balan is the owner of Nello, the exceedingly mediocre Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side. He's also one of the city's most shameless—and most notorious—publicity hounds. Balan's latest attempt at drumming up attention, however, now appears to be exploding in his face. Last week, a receipt "surfaced" indicating that Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich had spent $52,000 on lunch. (The bill was for $47,000, but TMZ, which first reported the story, said the billionaire had tacked on a $5,000 tip.) But a spokesman for Abramovich tells us the bill wasn't his and the mogul may pursue legal action against Balan for suggesting otherwise. [...]

COMMENT
Why compliment Nello's by saying the food is mediocre when we all know you can get better tasting pasta at a church social in rural Appalachia. The owner of Nello's obviously needs mental counseling and seems to be a compulsive liar. What's really more telling is the stupid people who eat there. It speaks volumes about them. When will Madison Avenue be rid of such a greasy shit hole run by an equally slimy creep?

RELATED
Nello
You might think that a restaurant where $26 buys you four slices of roasted beets and a dollop of baked goat cheese would be a gastronomic paradise, whose heavenly dishes demand sky-high prices. But if you thought that about Nello, a perennial redoubt of the Upper East Side's rich and occasionally famous, you would be wrong. While the food is excellent—not only those beets, perched delicately between sweet and savory, but also pastas like a penne rigate with brightly anise-flavored sausage—eating is not a particularly important activity. What counts at Nello is being seen at Nello: seen in your Chanel, your St. John's knits, your tailored Italian suit; seen canoodling on the banquette with your co-star; seen escorting your grandson to a lunch he'll ignore in favor of watching Spy Kids on his personal DVD player. Not that there's anything wrong with any of this. The culture of celebrity (and of money) is the culture of Manhattan, and if dropping upwards of $100 per person lets you experience for a few hours the life you desire, then a night at Nello can't be, well, beet. — Matt Gross

Cafe Bruxelles fries

DAILYFILE
[10-22-09]
Star chef Alain Ducasse weighs in on New York's best french fries. [via]

DAILYFILE
[10-26-09]
Jennifer Aniston is reportedly close to signing a deal to host a weekly talk show on OWN, Oprah's long-delayed cable network. Go figure. [via]

DAILYFILE
[10-26-09]
Bad news for CNN: The network now occupies fourth (and last) place in the cable news ratings. Not only did it fall behind Fox News and MSNBC in October, it also dropped below its sister network HLN as well. [via]
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NOTEWORTHY
Georgina Chapman
WHO
The arm candy of film producer Harvey Weinstein, ex-model Georgina Chapman is also one-half of eveningwear label Marchesa and a small-time movie actress.

OF NOTE
Because the notoriously pushy Weinstein is her husband and backer, Chapman's quick rise to the top has been controversial, to say the least. The movie mogul has pressured the actresses in his movies to wear Marchesa on the red carpet, it's claimed—a charge he's denied. (Although a number of women in Harvey's extended circle, including Cate Blanchett, Renee Zellweger, Sienna Miller, Anne Hathaway, and Jennifer Lopez, have all walked the red carpet in Marchesa gowns.) It also emerged that Weinstein had attended a meeting with Anna Wintour and promised to help Vogue land covers with his actresses if she provided the fledgling label with exposure in the mag.

Jared Kushner
WHO
The son of real estate developer Charles Kushner, Jared is also the proud owner of the Upper East Side's favorite weekly, the New York Observer.

TRUE STORY
Jared's application to Harvard is discussed in detail in Dan Golden's 2006 book, The Price of Admission, which explores the system by which the extremely wealthy donate millions to universities to secure admission for their kids. Cited as one of the most egregious cases of pay-for-play, Golden revealed that Charles pledged $2.5 million to Harvard to gain admission for Jared, despite the fact his academic record hardly warranted it. "There was no way anybody thought he would on the merits get into Harvard. His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it. We thought, for sure, there was no way this was going to happen," Jared's high school English teacher told the author.

Shepard Smith
WHO
Fox News Channel host Shepard Smith is famous for his rapid-fire delivery, weird eyebrows, and ambiguous sexuality.

ON THE JOB
Smith consistently performs well in the ratings game—The Fox Report is the top-rated newscast in its slot cable—but he also has a reputation for being blunder-prone. He notoriously jumped the gun on announcing the death of Pope John Paul II, making the proclamation a day before the holy man actually passed away. In another slip-up—one that later became a YouTube sensation—Smith said that Bronx residents were more likely to give J. Lo "a curb job than a blowjob." (He meant to say "block party.")

CRIME FILE
During the 2000 Bush-Gore debates, Smith was arrested in Florida and charged with aggravated battery with a motor vehicle, after brawling with a fellow reporter over a parking space. The charges were later dropped.

PERSONAL
Smith has repeatedly dodged the question of his sexuality, but in 2005 he was outed in a column in the Washington Blade. Kevin Naff, the managing editor of the gay weekly, said that Smith "chatted me up in a New York City gay piano bar, bought me drinks, and invited me back to his place." He lives in a two-bedroom West Village loft that he purchased for $1.87 million in 2004. Fashion designer (and fellow gay) Michael Kors lives in the same building.

Padma Lakshmi
WHO
An ex-model and the ex-wife of novelist Salman Rushdie, Lakshmi is an author, the host of Bravo's Top Chef, and an aspiring brand name.

PERSONAL
Lakshmi met author Salman Rushdie at the 1999 Liberty Island launch party of Tina Brown's Talk. She introduced herself to Rushdie, and he stunned her by proceeding to rattle off a list of facts he already knew about her. (As it turned out, he'd been infatuated with her since he'd read a magazine profile of her years before.) Padma became the fourth Mrs. Rushdie in April 2004, when Rushdie was 56 and she was just 32. Three years later, after months of rumors that their marriage was on the rocks, the couple announced they were divorcing. She's since been linked to a series of older billionaires, including Ted Forstmann—the buyout mogul who also happens to own IMG, the agency that represents her—and Adam Dell, the venture capitalist and brother of Dell founder Michael Dell.

Stephen Colbert
WHO
Adored by smug blue-state yuppies everywhere, Stephen Colbert is the host of the second most popular fake news show on Comedy Central.

BACKSTORY
Colbert could hardly avoid a comedy career, given the laugh riot that was his childhood: He grew up in South Carolina, the youngest of eleven children in a strict Irish Catholic family, and lost his father and two brothers in a plane crash at age ten. [...]

IN PERSON
Speak loudly into his left ear, he's deaf in his right one. He's also a religious Catholic, notwithstanding the fact that his audience consists mainly of godless heathens. He claims to keep Lent, attend church regularly and teach Sunday school.
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NEW POSTS
Mile High Club
Hollywood Tan
Hollywood Fake Out
Something Borrowed
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LINK
Close to Home
It's the Upper East Side. This isn't supposed to happen here!
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