SOHO—Guest of a Guest checks out opening night at Southside, the remake of Bella's, and you know what? She likes it: "...besides the music, besides the new grown-up and sleek decor, and besides the new drinks, they have the key that makes or breaks a nightlife venue: the crowd...The Martignettis have it down to a science. It takes a mixture of people to make nights like last night happen. It takes the hipsters, the socialites, the bankers, the artists, the famous actors, the Aussies, the young and the old." [GoaG]

SAN FRANCISCO— In response to Frank Bruni's piece earlier this week on gender roles, SF's big critic Bauer decides that the issue lies not so much with sexism in restaurants, inasmuch as inattentive, incompetent servers. While he concedes that there may be gender-specific restaurants—wine bars are the new feminine sports bars, he proclaims—he doesn't think women order differently from men, and in the end, sexism becomes a moot point if the server can read the table well. [BetweenMeals]

SOHO— Sonya Moore over at Standards & Pours is doing a bit of a stage at Tailor with bartender Eben Freeman. The essentials she learned from Freeman: always have a clean workspace and bar, know your techniques, and know which drinks can sit, and which would be diluted. [NRN]

NOLITA— Grub St. has a great Q&A with Andrew Carmellini today. He doesn't really reveal anything about his new restaurant in the old Tasting Room space, but he does have some interesting thoughts on celeb chefdom: "Celebritydom is perceived as the easy life. And yet the reason you fall into a celebrity-chef situation is that you’re doing manual labor (usually, but not always — there are a lot of instances now where you see people becoming celeb chefs that never really cooked much). It’s a double-edged sword — you became famous for sweating your balls off, taking apart animals, and screaming at people in three languages. It’s entertainment but not the kind where your hands stay silky smooth." [GS]

Filed under Manhattan: Soho, Andrew Carmellini, Southside, Tailor

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