Continental finally sets a closing date

Continental, the East Village dive bar known for its shots specials, announced it would be closing over a year ago, with owner Trigger Smith noting the closure would happen in August 2018. But after hanging on for dear life, it now has a new final closing date. On December 15, the bar will close up shop after one final night of excessive drinking hosted by rocker Jesse Malin. The bar, which offers five shots of anything for $12, has been in the neighborhood for 27 years. It’s being replaced by a boutique office building.

Lalito has a new rising star head chef

Just a few months after moving from Tallahassee to New York to work as the sous-chef at Lalito, the 24-year-old chef Kia Damon is now the restaurant’s head chef. Her new menu at the California-Latin spot includes a grilled half-chicken rubbed with achiote and served with duck fat, a garlic green sauce, and ají mole. Whole steamed snapper comes in a banana leaf with ginger, kaffir lime leaf, fried cilantro, and a coconut-curry broth. Damon worked closely with the previous head chef Gerardo Gonzalez, who left his post to move to the Cayman Islands. “What G did was so special,” she told Grub Street of his menu, “but it was that way because he was cooking it. I could never do exactly that because that is not my experience with Latin food as a queer black woman from the South.”

Another chef switch-up in town

The East Village Southern food restaurant Root & Bone is bringing on chef CJ Bivona to run the kitchen. Bivona previously worked at Miami’s Gotham and NYC’s Petaluma and helped open some of Root & Bone’s outposts, including those in Puerto Rico and South Beach. Bivona is bringing a new pasta section to the flagship NYC location, which will include three or four rotating handmade pastas. The kitchen shakeup is also coming with a renovation to the space, which will be able to accommodate more diners.

One of skateboarding’s biggest young stars just opened a restaurant in the Bronx

Tyshawn Jones, a 19-year-old skateboarding star, opened a restaurant in the Bronx called Taste So Good (Make You Wanna Slap Your Mama), a reference to the 2002 movie Friday After Next. The kitchen for the casual counter spot that draws a Supreme-wearing crowd is overseen by Robert Bailey, who serves up a Caribbean-American menu of dishes like oxtail, plates of jerk chicken and curry goat, and mac and cheese. Jones hopes to eventually add a breakfast menu.

A proposed sausage truck is causing drama in LES

The UES butcher that has been around since 1937, Schaller & Weber, is planning to bring a sausage food truck to the vacant lot at 159 Ludlow St. in Hell Square. The plans involve cleaning up the lot and turning it into a “seasonal outdoor food market,” but neighbors aren’t really having it. Tenants around the lot are worried about cooking fumes and smells and noise from the proposed food truck, which is also seeking a beer and wine license.