Putting My Best Foot Forward

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Earlier this month, I found myself navigating an incredibly packed room of hungry foodies at New York magazine’s New York Taste event, where hundreds of us alternately pushed in front of each other for a chance to taste the dozens of appetizer-size samples from New York’s trendiest eateries. Most of the dishes on hand were your usual suspects: Kobe beef sliders, high-end BBQ brisket, amped-up oysters, creative panna cottas and the like. But then I walked by the station for chef Ed Brown’s Eighty One and found something I hadn’t tried before.

“Crispy trotter with slow cooked egg?” offered one of the sous chefs, as she slid a tantalizingly yolk-topped plate my way.

I didn’t quite know what she was talking about, but her dish sure followed the ES mantra that anything fried and topped with an egg can’t be bad. I eagerly snatched the offering from her and quickly zeroed in with my spoon, asking almost as an afterthought, “so what is trotter?”

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