The Young & Hungry Arrive on NYC’s Culinary Scene

It brings a fuzzy feeling to our hearts to see former interns who use the skills acquired at BlackBook to actually do something meaningful with their lives like, you know, marry Mandy Moore. So last night, we were brought to near tears when our own Jena Steinbach hosted the SoHo launch party of her newish gastronomically inclined website The Young and Hungry.

Y&H is a grassroots endeavor started by four former NYU students, who, according to their website, moved to Manhattan seeking an “alternative to frat parties and gin buckets.” The website is their outlet to share with you all the best New York has to offer in good (and more importantly, inexpensive) food. But the site’s founders and contributors, which include Steinbach, Frankie Celenza (also the talented host of the web cooking series Frankie Cooks), Seth Kallen, and Madeline Warren, enjoy expanding their minds as well as their stomachs. The site combines their culinary passions with their artistic pursuits, often seamlessly. A recent interview with the band Passion Pit asked them not the overused default music questions ("What inspires you?"), but instead questions like, “What do you usually order at a Chinese restaurant?” When they interviewed writer Jonathan Safran Foer, it was about his grocery habits and what kinds of juice he likes to drink.

Yesterday, a freight elevator—the same one Diane Lane and Oliver Martinez defiled in Unfaithful—opened up in Celenza’s loft, which was packed with stylish kids who looked fittingly young and came appropriately hungry. Y&H managed to recruit a slew of artisans in the New York culinary scene to cater the event, including Van Leeuwen ice cream and The Brooklyn Salsa Company. By the time we got there, the macaroni and cheese and fried chicken from Mama’s Food Shop were long gone, but we did get to sample the fresh Veev-cured scallops from self-described “aggressive American” restaurant JoeDoe. Y&H also used their burgeoning influence to strong-arm Kayne Konecny, the first-place winner of the Brooklyn Beer Experiment’s homebrew competition, to craft a special ale just for them—mysteriously called Squirrel Tail. They also projected a 90-second clip of the best of Frankie Cooks and You Can, Too, and as Simon Cowell would put it, this kid has “it.” As we were leaving, we noticed that Jena was getting a little boozy off of what was probably her 50th beer, but hey, the girl’s earned it.

Photo by Hannah Heinrich.