In honor of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Cherry Blossom Festival, Park Slope’s Rosewater Restauarant will have a RW-does-Japanese-American menu at a special price. There will be sake, beer and wine pairings for those that want ’em. The special meals will be on: Monday, April 28th through Sunday, May 4th. All the details will be on the Events page of Rosewater website by April 21st.

If you’ve never done the Cherry Blossoms at the BBG, do yourself a favor this year. Go! And, if you can, stop by us and say heyThere’s no clearer evidence that Spring has Sprung in Brooklyn than Hanami – the Viewing of the Cherry Blossoms, under way now at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Hanami culminates each year with Sakura Matsuri, the beloved and astonishly attended Cherry Blossom Festival at the BBG. Sakura Matsuri first came to our attention after we’d gotten our butts kicked two years in a row on the same weekend, early on in our history. Why are we so busy, we asked? We’re a little slow sometimes, but we usually figure stuff out eventually. (Sakura Matsuri will be held this year on Saturday, May 3rd and Sunday, May 4th.)

This time around, for the first time, we’ve decided to do something to honor the flowers and all the folks that come to see them. We remembered that Chef Marcellus Coleman has a deep background in how Japanese cooking dovetails so nicely into the larger mantle of New American cuisine, and asked if he’d like to run with a special menu for a week at blossom time? (Being a Maryland boy, he knows blossoms, too!) His reply was something like, “well, hellyesss!”