Monday, October 15, 7:00 P.M.
Members $95, guests $120

ARCADIA AND LOBSTER CLUB, ALAS, are gone, but dejected Upper East Siders don’t have to travel far for a taste of the good ol’ days. Last February, chef/owner Anne Rosenzweig and her former chef de cuisine at Lobster Club, Charleen Badman, teamed up at Inside, a comfortable eatery in Greenwich Village, where, as Elaine Louie wrote in Avenue Magazine, "Badman turns out addictive dishes."

Badman, an Arizona native, began cooking at 16. She prepped and chopped at a local Italian restaurant, then moved on to the popular Cafe Terra Cotta, where she rose up the ranks from garde-manger to chef de cuisine. Hungry for knowledge, she traveled to L.A. on a week off and spent time in the kitchen of the renowned Campanile. On January 1, 1996, Badman, then 24, packed up two bags and headed east. She’d read about Rosenzweig and Lobster Club and was intrigued. In the middle of New York’s worst blizzard in years, Badman showed up at the door. No openings, they told her. But Badman hadn’t come this far to be discouraged, and a few days later, Lobster Club hired her as a line cook. By the time she left, about six years later, she was chef de cuisine and had logged stages at the Michelin-starred Dal Pescatore in Italy and Chez Panisse. At Inside, Badman works in a minimalist vein. She changes the seasonal, Greenmarket-driven menu weekly, composing dishes of three to four pristine items that she combines "in a way that lets them assert their most vibrant qualities," Emily Nunn wrote in The New Yorker. Inside, Nunn continued, is the "ideal neighborhood spot."

A former anthropologist and ethnomusicologist, Rosenzweig developed an interest in "peasant" food while doing fieldwork in Africa and Nepal. Back home, she made a name for herself at Vanessa, and in 1985 opened Arcadia. Ten years later, the place remained as good as ever, earning a glowing three-star review in The New York Times. In 1987, Rosenzweig was instrumental in the rejuvenation of the landmark ‘21’ Club, and in the mid-’90s, she opened Lobster Club, "an uptown bastion of haute comfort food," as Robin Raisfeld described it in New York. These days, Rosenzweig has proved herself a generous culinary mentor. She has provided support, emotional and material, to a number of her former chefs, including Badman, who now run their own restaurants. "Anne and I work together really well," the grateful Badman says. "She helped me look for spaces. We collaborate on menus. She taught me a lot about the business. She definitely bails me out quite a bit."

This month, get an Inside look.