With her partner, bartender Phil Casaceli, Anne Burrell gets ready to open Phil and Anne’s Good Time Lounge in Brooklyn, New York.
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Let's see. What makes up the DNA of a chef?
Well, I mean, are you crazy? Are you masochistic? Are
you passionate? Are you creative? Do you like to eat?
Do you like to drink a lot? That's a cook.
[LAUGH] [MUSIC] I've been in the kitchen for a long
time. I started in restaurants in 1990. So, it's now
2017, you do the math because I don't want to.
[LAUGH] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] There still is the time when I
walk into the kitchen and where I'm like let's turn
the music off, let's start cooking. I'm probably more emotional
now than I was then because I know so much
More, and so I have been doing the TV thing,
and food and wine festival thing, appearance things for a
long time, and it was a pretty fun life. But
I missed it, I missed cooking, I missed the energy
of a restaurant, I missed feeding people, I missed the
hospitality. Hospitality. I miss the nutty waiters. So I met
Phil at the bar he owns in the West Village,
Daddio. It was my local. So I've been bartending about
27 years now. And making cocktails pretty much most of
that time. Time in the whole 27 years. A couple
of years ago, Phil came to me saying like, the
dude who owns this building. There was a restaurant in
it before. The restaurant closed. Maybe it could be turned
to a good space for a neighborhood bar restaurant, where
we could like be part of the neighborhood, the community.
I was like, good bones, I see potential. Let's do
this. And she was in. Phil and Anne's Good Time
Lounge is a neighborhood joint. I mean, it's food that
it's approachable and comfortable and we want to be everyone's
local. This is a collection of my favorite dishes, of
dishes that I really want to eat. Our cocktail menu
is a mix of fun Original and classic cocktail. Easy
to drink and promotes good time. Super popular dish that's
here is the grilled piazzetta. So it's basically like a
grilled flatbread. You get that little char flavor. And then
we top it with taleggio cheese. So creamy, stink cheese
with some italian sausage and pickled hot cherry peppers. [SLURP]
It's spicy, sausagey. It's creamy. It's like a little burned
tasting. It's crunchy. There's a lot going on. It's delicious.
When you're opening a restaurant there's so many things that
go wrong. Your projected opening date. Like, ha ha ha
ha. That's always a joke. With all the trials and
tribulations that we had to encounter, it took us a
year and a half to. Open up the space, it
was all worth it, you know, the hard work you
put into it. It's just being creative is where the
payoff is. I want people to, when they come to
Phil & Anne's Good Time Lounge, I just want them
to have a good time, that's it. Whatever that means
to you, just come here and have a good time,
and then come back. [MUSIC]