Wednesday Food Roundup

Sam Sifton reviews Nello, a restaurant that most can't afford, at which the food is inedible. Sign me up!
Our friends at Serious Eats talk about Pylos, one of my favorite EV restaurants.  Don't miss the fries, which are redolent of oregano and cheese.
Now that spring has come to NYC, you should be checking Lucy's Greenmarket Report at least three times a week--she'll tell you what's new and who has it.
A 135 year tradition ends, as Maine's last sardine cannery closes its doors, as reported by the San Luis Obispo Tribune. Another rural way of life ends. Sad.

Peach Ginger Sorbet from Ciao Bella

This peachy, gingery (she said, stating the obvious) sorbet, is riddled with chunks of ginger.  Breakfast of champions, particularly with the rather good California strawberries now coming into market.  There are tons of other intriguing flavors on the Ciao Bella website that don't seem to have made it to local stores; I hope that this one is the first of many.

Led Zeppole, Indeed

I truly wanted to like the zeppoles at Led Zeppole for couple of reasons:  First, I was raised on a diet of bad puns.  Second, I was a child at a time in this country when the Campbell's Soup kids were the physical ideal: I was considered underweight, and thus was allowed a bag of zeppoles from a Nostrand Avenue pizzeria a few times a week, after I'd already burned off twenty million calories in the adjacent playground.  I love zeppoles.

On the other hand,  I love pizza, and I had earlier found the eponymous pizza at LZ's companion joint, Artichoke Pizza, to be a gloppy mess, tasting as though cream of artichoke soup had been dumped on chewy, chewy mozz.  (In fact, when I realized that I had been chewing the same piece of cheese as though it were Bazooka for two avenue blocks, I gave up on the whole enterprise.)

Fitting right in with the current notion that more is better and too much is fantastic, the zeppole were coated with so damn much powdered sugar that, when I pulled one from the bag, my poor camera was showered with so much sugar that it looked like a tiny snowdrift on a strap.  The inside was doughy and heavy, likely in part because they were so supersized (see more is better, above) that they couldn't cook all the way through.   

Since this place is positioned (open until 4AM) in large part to fill the bellies of drunken revelers, not only with zeppoles, but fried Oreos and fried cream puffs, I'm sure they will do more than fine without .my approbation.  Me, I'll  head back to Brooklyn to find the ideal zeppole, and maybe have another go at that seesaw.