Corner Deli to Become Qdoba

The McDonald’s on 6th Ave between 14th and 15th St. has been remodeled in a sleek and sexy European style.  Well worth a visit to see what the future of fast food looks like.

If you’re having trouble coming up with a composting strategy, read this article from the New York Times Wirecutter, which provides insight into the available options for composting bins and buckets.

Next week (September 16 to September 20), material and equipment deliveries and installation work will continue on the academic floors inside the building.

The following week (September 23 to September 27), material and equipment deliveries and installation work will continue on academic floors. This weekend the site will be open on Saturday, September 14th for interior activities between the work hours of 7AM and 5PM as permitted by the City.

Check out the new Time Out food hall when it opens at 14th. St east of the park on September 26. Will a new food hall succeed in a location where the previous food hall failed? We’ll see.

Over on East 12th St., it was Piola, the Brazilian pizza place, and now it’s Ribalta, the Italian pizza place. And it’s a pizza school, too. UrbanDaddy writes:

There are book smarts.

There are street smarts.

And then there are pizza smarts.

Today, we’re going to focus on that last one.

Also, we’re going to eat a bunch of pizza pies.

So let’s enroll at Ribalta, the only pizzeria in New York with three different types of ovens and its own university (but alas, no football team), now open.

Bottom line, this restaurant is really quite absurdly serious about pizza. The dough: imported from an Italian mill and aged 48 hours before baking (we’ll let you imagine what this does to a crust). The tomatoes: all San Marzano and all hand-crushed. The ovens: plentiful, varied and powerful.

Yes, these master pizzaiolos/fusspots felt it was necessary to install three different ovens in the place. Brick. Wood-burning. And stainless-steel convection. Reason #1: to bake your sausage-and-sage pie precisely the way God intended. Reason #2: the syllabus required it.

See, when this place is not standing in as the prototypical Friday night date spot, it’s doubling as the city’s first Scuola Italiana Pizzaioli—an esteemed pizza school that’s been around in Italy since the ’80s. So eventually you’ll be able to register here for classes, seminars and lectures on the science of the slice.

Assuming you scored high enough on the pizza SATs.

Tisserie, the fancy pastry shop that closed at the northwest corner of Union Square, will be replaced by popular British-based sandwich shop Pret a Manger. They have rather good coffee, by the way.