This week, the oddest DVD to appear on release lists is:

“Eat This New York”

New York gobbles up new restaurants and spits them out mercilessly. In fact, about 1,000 new restaurants open in the city each year, and four out of five of them fail within the first five years. That’s a sobering fact that informs the tasty documentary “Eat This New York,” due out on DVD Tuesday.

This 2004 film from directors Kate Novack and Andrew Rossi follows two corn-fed novices from Minneapolis as they move east and decide to open a trendy new bistro in the toughest restaurant city in the world.

Best friends Billy Phelps and John McCormick, two long-time motorcycle enthusiasts, had no experience at all in the food industry when they decided to stake out a small corner space in gentrified Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 2001 and open a cozy little place called Moto.

These dreamy entrepreneurs envisioned their restaurant as a comfy community hub in the old neighborhood where Hispanic and Orthodox Jewish communities once bumped together and where now hip young scensters with fat trust funds reign.

As the two idealists tackle the vagaries of the New York City real estate market, a faltering economy, skittish loan officers, demanding potential chefs and multiple delays in opening, the film follows a parallel track by featuring pithy interviews with some of the city’s most successful chef-restaurateurs. This celebrity list includes TV chef Rocco DeSpirito, Daniel Boulud (Café Boulud), Siro Maccioni (Le Cirque), Keith McNally (Balthazar), Danny Meyer (Union Square Café, Gramercy Tavern), Drew Nieporent (Nobu) and Jean-Georges Vongerichten (Jean Georges), all discussing the tangled difficulties of opening and running a successful restaurant in this most demanding and discriminating city.

“Eat This New York” is not rated and runs 85 minutes. It’s being released by First Run Features.

- Dennis King

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