Mrs. Braver invites to her store chefs like Jeffrey Nathan (no relation to me) of Abigael's restaurant in Manhattan, who introduced customers to kosher Japanese panko, which can be used instead of challah crumbs to top savory kugels.
Inside the stores chefs in white hats sauté scrod under a hammered-copper stove hood.
The store sells chef's supplies, knives, cookbooks, aprons and jackets, long woolen under-drawers espadrilles, sabots, waiters' paper dickies and ties with rubber band.
And then there's my favorite Zeytinia amenity: Give the store's chefs 20 minutes and they'll cook any meat or fish you buy from them, free.
The 12-inch oval uncovered roasting pan that Mr. Boulud, above, has filled with a sweet potato gratin has a list price of $50 but is often discounted to $39.99 and is available at Bed Bath & Beyond, Bloomingdale's, Chefs Central stores and Chef's Catalogue, at www.chefscatalogue.com or (800) 967-2433.
(Consumers can go to its Web site, traceandtrust.com, to find participating stores and chefs, and to trace a fish's identification tag back to the boat or fisherman who caught it).
This month, the store invites the chef and cookbook author Sonia Ezgulian to host a night of TV dinners.
More recently, Artie Hoerning, who personally caught most of the fish he sold, built an extension onto the back of his store, hired a chef, put his daughter and nieces to work as waitresses and his wife behind the counter and opened the spotless, friendly, unpretentious lunch-counter restaurant that offers fish dinners starting at $7.95.
A buck ninety-nine at your local chef store.
They are scheduled to be in stock in a few weeks at Le Gourmet Chef stores.
