In a 113-year-old brick building in the industrial Brooklyn Navy Yard, five small metal stills are churning to make an urban version of America’s Native Spirit: bourbon made in Brooklyn.

King’s County Distillery is New York City’s first operating whiskey distillery since the end of Prohibition, the 13 years during which it was illegal to make or sell alcohol in the United States. Even though federal prohibition was repealed in 1933, many state laws remained on the books until 2002.

“We were the first distillery to take advantage of the new law,” Colin Spoelman, the founder of King’s County Distillery, said. The 33-year-old got his start making illegal moonshine in his apartment but in 2010 Spoelman turned the business to spearhead a wave of small-batch brewing of spirits in the Big Apple.
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This is the ninth installment of "Eat This List" - a regularly recurring list of things chefs, farmers, writers and other food experts think you ought to know about. Today's contributor is the pseudonymous "Manuel T. Waiter." He's the author of the wildly popular blog Well Done Fillet, and works as a waiter at an undisclosed restaurant in Belfast, Ireland. He'll be right with you.

Complaints, eh.

Complaints are magical little moments that allow you, as a waiter, to look deep into the soul of the guest and see what makes them tick. You see beyond the well-dressed (or otherwise) exterior and deep down into their insecurities and paranoid psychosis. Or something, not that I want to over-think things. Sometimes a steak is just an overcooked piece of meat and not the start of a mental breakdown.

But quite often when a customer complains it's less about you or your restaurant's inability to sling three appetizing courses over two hours down onto a table, and more about the punter and their state of mind. Honestly some days I know they're only one overcooked tuna away from a William "D‑Fens" Foster moment.
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This year, the Southern Foodways Alliance celebrates women, work, and food. Today's subject is Karen Barker, who was happily co-proprietor and pastry chef of the Magnolia Grill in Durham, North Carolina (1986–2012). Now, happily, she is not.

I grew up in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, where there was a very strong corner-bakery culture but little actual home baking. People tended to purchase their breads and desserts rather than produce them out of cramped urban kitchens.

I was lucky that my maternal grandmother, an exception to this rule, lived upstairs. She was a Russian immigrant who barely spoke English, had no written recipes, and never used standardized measures. Bubby Fanny turned out an amazing array of Eastern European specialties and taught me that homemade sweets were a tribute to one's family and always included the ingredients of time and love.
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While you're frying up some eggs and bacon, we're cooking up something else: a way to celebrate today's food holiday.

Ice, ice baby! March 6 is National Frozen Food Day.

We’re not just talking about the pre-packaged meal you pop in the microwave when you’re too tired to cook, we’re talking about the four or five or six cases of the freezer section in your grocery store.

Since humans realized that keeping food cold kept it edible longer, the race was on to find the coldest form of food storage possible. Even though the first domestic refrigerator was invented in 1834, freezers were slower to catch on. It wasn’t until the mid-20th century that people started keeping both a refrigerator and a freezer in their homes.
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