Sign up for Special Events at Purple Yam

Sign up to be on our mailing list for our special events in 2012:

Email Amy Besa at acbesa49@gmail.com

Upcoming special dinners:

Our last Guest Chef dinner with Indonesian Chef Ratih Norojono was so much fun and so delicious that we are hoping to get more of our visiting friends who are good cooks to jam with us in the kitchen.  Since Ratih was only here in NYC for about a week, we really did not have much time to prepare and promote the dinner.  So we decided to just cook a limited menu of main courses and desserts and offered them as a special.  We announced it here on our website, FB and tweeted it and were surprised to get some people in through the social media.  Our regular customers who did not know about it responded positively and ordered from her Indonesian menu and so we sold most of what she and Romy prepared.  So that was quite a rewarding and an enjoyable night.

There are some possibilities on the horizon but I will only announce them when I am sure that the event will go through.

In the meantime, we are looking forward to coming up with specials for the Chinese New Year on Monday, January 23 and Valentine;s Day, Tuesday, February 14.

Happy new year of the Dragon!

*****

Romy and I have lived in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn since 1981 and so have lived and cooked with Caribbean ingredients both for our own home cooking and at Cendrillon (our SoHo restaurant which we opened in 1995 and closed March 2009).  The Philippines and the West Indian countries share many ingredients as we were all in the same path of colonizers that brought food, people and culture all over this part of the globe.

So this is an exciting tradition that we started at Cendrillon which we want to revive and continue in Purple Yam: opening our kitchen doors to other chefs of other cultures and cuisines so that we may learn and savor their cultures.  There is nothing like good food to bring peace and understanding in this troubled world.

I never forgot the words of one of our regular diners at Cendrillon, a soft-spoken Japanese woman who was baffled by the nastiness of the politics the U.S. finds itself in these days:

Of the people who speak meanly of immigrants, poor people and the suffering middle class, she shook her head and said:  “These people have no sense of humanity because no one ever cooked them a good and loving meal in their entire lives.  If these people truly experienced good food in their lives, they would not be this mean!”

Amen.

Tagged as: Indonesian regional food, Jogjakarta dish, Lombok, purple yam