Saturday, November 18, 2017

Manifest Turns 4 on December 17th


Manifest, the popular new pop-up dinner in Durham, is holding its fourth event on December 17th from 3-6 pm at Ninth Street Bakery.  We have 50 spaces available for this event.

Unlike previous versions, this one will directly benefit local Latino mental health non-profit El Futuro. Also unlike previous iterations, we will be taking a holiday party drop-in approach. We will have fireplaces going, and you are welcome to come to the cocktail hour (3-4 pm), food service (4-5 pm), dessert and performance (5-6 pm), or all three.  The cocktail hour will feature complimentary Manifest limited edition IPA, wine for sale by the glass, as well as BYOB.

Manifest focuses on real foods prepared with ingredients from local farmers and ends with a live performance. Check out our Ten Commandments of Manifest below.

Dinner is served in a shared setting and offered at a reasonable price for value.

Manifest is at once old-fashioned and novel, marrying the old tradition of the country inn table to the modern culinary world, setting the way we eat now within the ways we ate then.

Manifest’s menus, different for each dinner, are full of variety, guided first by the knowledge that food can and should be both healthy and tasty.

We are committed to deriving flavor less from cholesterol and salt, and more from freshness of food and its combination.

We take chances and explore ingredients. We challenge convention and also abide by it, omnivorous in our cuisine and our interests.

Manifest is about more than the cuisine. The central experience of eating should be part of the larger one of dining: getting to know the people we’re sitting with, widening our frame of perception, taking in more than the food.


RSVP is on a first-come first-served basis via email to this address and pre-payment is encouraged via our online storeThe suggested donation is $25. All net proceeds will go directly to El Futuro.




The 10 Commandments of Manifest

1.     Communal tables
2.     Prix Fixe: A Planned, Rather than Selected, Variety.
3.     Priced So All Can Afford to Eat
4.     Health, Freshness, and Real Foods
5.     Facilitate Culinary Creativity via (Ingredient) Deconstruction
6.     Less Waste
7.     No servers, No Tipping
8.     No Cult of the Chef
9.     Use the Venue for Performance
10. Good Hospitality is Not a Service to Be Rendered but a Gift to be Shared

Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Alex Ruch

Longtime regulars of the Bakery will notice that our crusty artisan breads have become especially amazing as of late.  In July, Alex Ruch, previously a baker at Bellegarde Bakery in New Orleans, came on with us here.  He actually baked with me back in the days when I ran the Berenbaum's bakestand.  He left for a post-doc at Tulane in 2012 and I was trying to recruit him back pretty much as soon as left.  His bread has made a huge step forward for NSB's quality, and I am extremely proud of him with every bake.  We have gained new wholesale customers as a result of these fine breads, and we will be looking to add on more in the months to come.
Alex leading a baking class 

    

The breads