While we aren’t all hankering away for Welsh food, it’s certainly good to know a new Welsh restaurant has come on the scene. Illtyd Barrett has opened an awesome restaurant for truly authentic and delicious food. The Sunken Hundred is located at Cobble Hill at 276 Smith Street. The bar and restaurant is named for the sunken kingdom of Cantre’r Gwaelod. The restaurant is decorated with paintings by Fran Evans who went to high school with the Barretts. Illtyd has contributed some of the artwork as well.

The great finds here include lamb, leeks and seafood. There is also seaweed, particularly nori-like laver, which they boil and then make into a paste. Chef Coughlan will be serving all sorts of Welsh classics including lamb pastry with tomato chutney and ffagodau. They are also offering local beers, Spanish ciders and wines from the Loire Valley and northern Spain.

This isn’t happening in SoHo, but it’s happening in New York and it’s too good to pass up.

While Nathan’s Famous hot dog eating contest is hard to rival – the Taste of Buffalo contest is attempting to come as a close second. But don’t expect to down a bunch of hot dogs here. This is a kale contest, through and through. The Kale Yeah! is being advertised as “the world’s healthiest eating championship” and the contest will take place on July 9th. Competitors need to get their green palette ready and will have eight minutes to eat as much kale as they can on the steps of Buffalo City Hall. The winner will actually take home $2000!

Here is what one of the advertisements for the event said (we kid you not): “For the first time in human history, the world’s greatest eaters will test themselves against the ALMIGHTY KALE—the leafy green vegetable that has captured the hearts and minds of both the culinary set and those for whom their body is a temple.This battle of man vs woman vs kale promises to be the healthiest eating contest in the history of the world. All eyes will be on Buffalo, NY, this coming July 9th to see how Major League Eaters tackle this new and unique food type for the first time in sanctioned competition.”

Whether you are renovating your home or just love looking at home redecorating showrooms, Pirch has arrived in SoHo. And what an arrival. With its opening on May 21, Pirch allows all of us to dream about home renovations and to drool away an afternoon. As you arrive, they offer you a free coffee and the chance to browse, browse, browse.

You can try out the appliances on display and you can use the iPad they offer with the geolocation that will guide you as you shop so that you can price out products. There are two test kitchens here with chef-led cooking classes on weekends! During the week, chefs will also be demonstrating delicious things that you can do with the appliances they have on sale.

There are dozens of shower heads and steam showers that you can test out. Wow.

If you have a sweet tooth, then get ready to enjoy. Magnum is bringing a pop-up shop to SoHo soon. They create a pop-up shop in a few cities each year, coming to Milan and London last year. And this year, New York is the lucky one.

They have guests design their own custom ice cream bars. Customers start with either vanilla bean or chocolate ice cream as the base and then select dark, milk or white Belgian chocolate dip and three toppings. The topics include everything from Himalayan sea salt and rose petals to goji berries and others.

The dipping bar will open in just a few days, on April 23 at 134 Prince Street and it will be open daily from 12-9pm through Sunday, August 7.

Get your bar and enjoy today!

Raoul’s in SoHo recently celebrated its 40^th anniversary with a dinner party that brought together both patrons and former employees. Michael Cecchi-Azzolina, for instance, used to be a waiter there and now runs the West Village restaurant Bobo. The birthday party continued for 10 hours.

Opened in 1975 by Serge Raoul and his brother, Guy, Raoul’s is a family operation that caters to families in addition to a who’s-who scene in New York. Mr. Raoul has retired from the enterprise and lives in Nyack, New York. His son, Karim Raoul, 37, started to manage the establishment in 2010 and he’s keeping the family legacy alive.

As Karim explained, “We wanted the real regulars in tonight: those people who had 90 reservations and upwards. We have three generations of customers: the parents, the grandparents and the kids.”

Raoul’s got its first real break when Lorne Michaels arrived with his group from Saturday Night Live one night. As James Signorelli, a producer at SNL for decades explained, “At that time we were finishing up our work at 11 p.m. and no one was serving. Then we discovered Raoul’s, and it was like going to heaven, and we were here midnight to 2 a.m. three nights a week.”

In the mid-1980s, Raoul’s really took on a life of its own when headwater, Rob Jones, would get into drag and lip-sync the crowd in a dance. Mr. Jones died of AIDS in 1989 and in the 90s Raoul’s became a hangout for those in the indie film industry. Quentin Tarantino and the “Pulp Fiction” cast celebrated their movie debut at the New York Film Festival here.

And this continues to be the place to be 40 years after it all began.