The Latest

Chance Dinners is temporarily on hold, as we're filliing our open spots for the last season of the Chance Beach House on Kismet, Fire Island.

We're currently building a kitchen in Bushwick that will host all future dinners. Please stay tuned and please forward this site and encourage any friends to sign up!

Thanks and I hope to see you soon!

Come join us for our largest, less formal (and least expensive) dinner yet.

Forty of your fellow diners will we sharing the award-winning fare of Austrian Chef Oleg Voss and two great varietals from the Fire Island Beer Company.

Please click on Upcoming Dinners for full details and to sign up.

If you are not yet a member of Chance Dinners, signing up for an account takes sixty seconds and is free!

See you soon!

As our season out at the Chance Beach House winds down, I’d like to invite you to join me at the 5th Annual Vendy Awards on Saturday, September 26.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Vendys, it is quite simply New York City’s best eating party--a gathering of the cream of the crop of NYCs best street venders paired with an open bar. It’s a very fun afternoon of small dishes, drinks, and mingling. Also, you’ll be supporting the Street Vendor Project, which advocates on behalf of vendors who work really hard to feed us, and who now contend with thousand-dollar fines for frivolous infractions. Since I loves me my food and my First Amendment, I’m proud to support (“support” is such a nice word for overindulgence) an event that promotes my two favorite freedoms.

Saturday, September 26, 2-7 p.m.
Queens Museum of Art (Address and map in the website)
Tickets: $80 in advance ($100 at the door) are tax-deductible.

http://streetvendor.org/vendys/

Every year, the Vendys garner more and more press, from NPR to Good Morning America, so it’s likely that tickets won’t be available at the door. Please let me know if you plan to join us and I hope to see you on Saturday the 26th!

Dear Diners,

Apparently, running an epicurean singles beach house and a dinner series for epicurean singles at the same time is actually kind of hard. We'll pick up right where we left off in September. (Depending on how my season out here at the beach goes, we may do a dinner sooner.)

In the meantime, please continue to encourage your fun, interesting single friends to register on the site.

Have a great summer & I hope to see you at our next dinner!

Voraciously,

John

When you sit down to eat Kobe beef, you kind of expect that that’s going to be the most amazing thing you’re going to eat that night. Only Satsko’s Spicy Jellyfish Soup with Lemongrass and Button Mushrooms, paired with a Loimer Gruner Veltliner was a hardcore display of Zen Japanese Samurai palate mastery. The broth of the soup was seriously spicy. And the Gruner Veltliner was sweet, extinguishing that savory fire.

What followed was a Wakame Seaweed Salad with Sesame Ginger Garlic Dressing paired with St. Urbarns-Hof Estate Riesling QbA, setting the stage for the Kobe Steak Frites we all came for.

For dessert, Satsko continued that palate ballet with a Panna Cotta made with Nigori Sake, served with slices of mango that was not quite ripe, creating another sweet/sour dance paired with Moscato.

As I gear up for another season out in Kismet, our next dinner won’t be until June 4, at Capsouto Freres. (Menu coming soon.) See you then!