Home Care In New Haven, CT

NEW HAVEN — Hu Ping-Dolph and her husband, Jonathan Dolph, want you to know how Chinese people really eat.

They also thoroughly enjoy introducing people to new experiences — and they love owning and running restaurants in New Haven.

How else could you explain the fact that they now own three totally different regional Chinese restaurants in New Haven? The couple have Taste of China at 954 Chapel St., Steamed at 77 Whitney Ave. and now the latest creation, Jin Fu Hot Pot at 68 Whitney Ave.

They also have owned the original, Sichuan-style Taste of China in Clinton since 2000 and have additional Steamed locations in Madison and Middletown, offering northern China-style dumpling.

"I do really authentic Chinese food," Ping-Dolph, who grew up in Nanjing, China, said Thursday, sitting at a table amid the rich, wood-paneled interior of her new restaurant. "I want to show what we eat in China."

Jin Fu Hot Pot, which is in the midst of a soft opening after opening its doors on Feb. 29, offers a traditional, yet modern take on a warming and healthy Chinese dish, hot pot — in this case with individual hot pots with warming elements built into the tables.

According to Ping-Dolph — who met her American-born husband in Singapore when she was a student and he was an English teacher — they saw a totally empty space on Whitney Avenue and decided to follow their dreams to make something happen there.

"We made a wonderful restaurant," Ping-Dolph said. "We made a wonderful space here."

Jin Fu Hot Pot is next door to Katalina's Bakery.

Ping-Dolph spoke on a day when officials from Yale University Properties and the City of New Haven — plus some close friends — joined her and her husband for some spicy Cheng Du dumplings, sparkling wine and other treats to celebrate Jin Fu Hot Pot's opening.

Part of Ping-Dolph's goal over the years — opening Taste of China in New Haven in 2012 and Steamed in 2016 — has been to show people a different, more authentic kind of Chinese food in a different kind of restaurant with perhaps a little more style than some others, she said.

Jin Fu Hot Pot is not the first hot pot restaurant in New Haven. The Great Wall, which used to be across the street where Chef Ziang is now, had them, as did the short-lived Chuan Du Hot Pot on Temple Street.

With the individual hot pot elements built into the tables at Jin Fu Hot Pot, Ping-Dolph said it's easy to tailor a meal to one's own personal tastes. Customers build off of one of four soup bases: a chicken-based fish maw broth, a chicken-based pork tripe broth, a vegan matsutake mushroom broth and their Jin Fu Special MaLa brothe, which is chicken-based and spicy, using Sichuan peppercorns and chili peppers.

Separate plates of meat or vegetables are then ordered to add.

"We teach people how to eat and how to make the sauces," she said.

While eating hot pot may be a somewhat new experience for many customers, "all Asian people know hot pot," Ping-Dolph said, adding it's great when the weather is cold.

Jin Fu Hot Pot currently is using a special soft opening menu and will shift to a more extensive menu once the place gets better established, Ping-Dolph said.

At a brief outdoor ceremony to celebrate the opening, Alexandra Daum, the former state commissioner of the state Department of Economic and Community Development, who now is Yale's associate vice president for New Haven Affairs and University Properties, welcomed the latest addition to what's becoming a hotspot for Asian restaurants along Whitney near Audubon Street.

Others nearby include Tiger Daddy, K-food, Chef Jiang, Steamed, The Whale Tea, and around the corner on Audubon Street, the Hawaiian-Japanese accented Pokemoto.

Daum said the restaurant business is hard but Ping-Dolph "has made it work six times."

"It is clear how excited people are for the opening of your third restaurant in New Haven," Mayor Justin Elicker told the couple.

Several of Ping-Dolph's Chinese-born friends were looking forward to stopping by.

"It's beautiful," said Tony Zhou, a commodities trader who was born in Hunan Province and now lives in Woodbridge.

"Hot pot is one of the favorites of the Chinese people," Zhou said, calling it "healthy, less oily" and good for a party or a group of friends.

Charles Lu, of Madison, another friend who was born in China and has lived in the United States for 38 years, said it's a step up from the low-cost, inexpensively-decorated, Americanized Chinese restaurants that once dotted the landscape.

"She has such a nice sense of decoration, high standards," Lu said, adding Ping-Dolph's restaurants are "culturally very rich."

The beloved museum has been reimagined for the 21st century with bright new galleries, expanded classroom space, and compelling exhibits accessible to all.

March 11, 2024

5 min read

Following a transformative four-year renovation, the Yale Peabody Museum reopens to the public on Tuesday, March 26, at 10 a.m., with rejuvenated galleries, reimagined exhibits, and refurbished dinosaurs, including a towering Brontosaurus with some new pep to its step.

Guests can pre-book visits on the Peabody’s website. The museum will use a reservation system for the first 30 days after opening to manage anticipated crowds.

The renewed Peabody — which now offers free admission for all visitors — is a dynamic center of participatory learning, groundbreaking research, and more accessible exhibitions that present the ever-changing story of life on Earth to a new generation of schoolchildren, university students, and museum-goers from New Haven, the region, and the world.

“I am delighted to see the Yale Peabody Museum open after undergoing a comprehensive renovation that makes it better able to serve members of the Yale community, K-12 students from our home city, and visitors from the region and beyond,” said Yale President Peter Salovey. “I am particularly impressed by all the ways the museum is expanding teaching and research opportunities on campus — from new classrooms and a student-curated exhibition space to increased storage and research facilities.

“Of course, as a long-time New Haven resident, I am especially looking forward to seeing young people from the surrounding area benefit from the expanded and more accessible exhibitions and the new education center for public school programs.”

The renovation, made possible by a landmark $160 million gift from philanthropist Edward P. Bass ’68 and designed by Connecticut-based Centerbrook Architects and Planners, expanded the museum’s galleries by more than 50%. The expansion provides additional exhibition space for the Peabody’s collection of 14 million objects — fossils, meteorites, and anthropological artifacts among them — as well as new research spaces, classrooms equipped with the latest audio-visual technology, and a new education center for K-12 students from the New Haven area.

Through the generous support of Bass and other donors, the Peabody joins the Yale University Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art in offering free public admission in perpetuity.

“Whether you have been coming to the Peabody for decades or have just discovered us for the first time, we want you to feel welcome, excited, and inspired from the moment you walk through the doors,” said Peabody Director David Skelly, the Frank R. Oastler Professor of Ecology at Yale School of the Environment and Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “This renovation has transformed every exhibit in the museum, but I think its biggest impact will be the ways it helps us engage with audiences and communities in much more meaningful ways. By removing the barrier of an admission fee, we want our guests — and especially our New Haven neighbors — to visit us often and have a different experience each time.”

The renovation expanded the museum’s classroom space three-fold. New imaging, sound, and 3D-printing studios will allow students to work hands-on with collection objects using the most advanced technology.

The exhibition galleries, now represented on three floors instead of two, are brighter and easier to navigate. The third-floor galleries, including the David Friend Hall mineral and gem gallery, will open on a phased schedule later this spring.

The museum’s famed dinosaur and prehistoric mammal fossils — including the first Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus and Triceratops specimens ever discovered — were cleaned, mended, and remounted in dynamic new poses that reflect the modern scientific consensus that dinosaurs were alert and lively animals, not the plodding brutes depicted in old textbooks and 20th-century popular culture. For example, the museum’s 65-foot-long Brontosaurus once again towers at the center of the Burke Hall of Dinosaurs, but the hulking herbivore appears newly nimble and energetic. Its tail, which previously rested on the ground, was lengthened and raised into the air, allowing guests to walk beneath it. Its head and neck are repositioned in an inquisitive, birdlike manner.

Near the entrance of an adjoining hall, the American mastodon, previously displayed in profile behind glass, wields its mighty tusks in the open, seemingly ready to stride from its platform.

In a scene suspended from the ceiling of the museum’s spacious new Central Gallery, Archelon, the largest turtle ever documented, flees a hungry mosasaur, a predatory marine lizard from the Late Cretaceous. The same scene could have played out over and over in the vast inland sea that once split the North American continent in two.

And while the dinosaur and prehistoric fossil collections have held center stage since the museum’s founding in 1866, the renovation has created new space for exhibiting more of its cultural, anthropological, and other scientific collections, including never-before displayed artifacts and contemporary art. For instance, an eclectic assortment of scientific tools from the Peabody’s History of Science and Technology Collection, including Yale’s first microscope — purchased in 1734 — are exhibited in a second-floor gallery.

Throughout the museum, exhibit labels and other text are tailored to be more accessible and interesting to a wider range of audiences. Museum ambassadors will be stationed alongside exhibits to share insights, answer questions, and create a sense of belonging for all communities. The Peabody is fully accessible to people with disabilities. Visitors will also enjoy a new gift shop.

Hours of Operation: Mondays - Closed Tuesdays through Saturdays - 10am to 5pm Sundays - 12pm to 5pm

Reserve a Time to Visit: https://peabody.yale.edu/visit

Campus & Community

Frank Zabski, owner of the New Haven Pizza School, will serve as an ambassador, bringing the New Haven-style pizza to the world.

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — A New Haven pizza maker is counting down the days before he flies to Las Vegas for the International Pizza Expo, where he will introduce the New Haven-style pizza to attendees from across the world.

Next week, Frank Zabski, owner of the New Haven Pizza School, will compete against other pizzaiolos, or pizza makers, while he judges other pizza-making competitions and demonstrates how to make the New Haven-style pizza to thousands of audience members.

“I grew up in Connecticut in West Haven. I absolutely love pizza,” Zabski said. “It’s in my blood in more ways than one, so I love New Haven-style pizza. But here’s the kicker, outside of Connecticut or New England, and even as far as the east coast, New Haven-style pizza is not well-known.”

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Zabski hopes to change that when he arrives at the three-day expo, which is dedicated to all things pizza and runs from March 19-21. He noted that New Haven-style pizza is growing rapidly in popularity and he hopes to ride the surge, bringing it even more acclaim.

Zabski first learned of the international expo while participating in its “sister competition,” the Pizza & Pasta Northeast and Artisan Bakery Expo in Atlantic City, N.J. After presenting there last October, he was invited to Las Vegas for this month’s convention.

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When he made his first pizza at a church carnival at 12 years old, Zabski fell in love with the process, but he never expected to teach. Between 2012 and 2016, he operated the Fired Up Pizza Truck, and when the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, he established a Facebook page called “All About New Haven Style A’pizza”.

“I started that with zero people and have about 18,000 (followers) right now. I’ve also done a lot of pizza reviews in Connecticut under the brand ‘Pizza Gavones’. That all kind of led me up to where I am now, which is the New Haven Pizza School,” Zabski said.

Located on Humphrey Street, the New Haven Pizza School teaches students of all ages how to make the famous New Haven-style pizza. Zabski has earned recognition throughout the country for launching his “pizza learning” school.

“Over the past couple of years, I’ve taught over 3,000 people how to make New Haven-style pizza,” Zabski said. “I’ve also competed several times in the United States for best pizza in specific categories. I’ve actually done some speaking and have been really fortunate to have some articles in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Washington Post (written) about the school or myself.”

The premise of the school is to teach home users how to make New Haven-style pizza in their home ovens. The class begins with dough tossing, as Zabski shows attendees how to toss dough in the air.

Then, Zabski shares the history of New Haven-style pizza before teaching the class how to make the dough and sauce, ball and stretch the dough, assemble and launch the pizza and bake, cut and eat the pizza.

RELATED: A local doughnut chain closes its doors

When it comes to the New Haven style, Zabski said the final product is not a traditional eight-slice pizza. The class ends as students learn how to complete a “New Haven cut,” which involves cutting the pie in different, crazy and unsymmetrical shapes.

“The premise is really to bring people together. Most of these people don’t know each other. It’s a really fun environment, and I have Italian music playing the whole time. It’s something completely different. That’s really what it boils down to,” Zabski said.

To learn more about the New Haven Pizza School, people can contact Zabski at [email protected] or visit NewHavenPizzaSchool.com.

As a testament to Zabski’s success, it is worth noting that there is a wait.

“The blessing and the curse on that is this business has just taken off like crazy, so I’m booked from now until almost the end of June. It’s definitely a long line,” he said.

Dalton Zbierski is a digital content producer at FOX61 News. He can be reached at [email protected].

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Yale Lift Truck Technologies announces the availability of its Yale Reliant™ forklift operator assist solution on an additional 16 Yale® models. The new entrants to the Yale Reliant lineup are predominantly warehouse lift trucks and expand the technology’s availability to a total of 59 models covering a wide range of applications, including those common in retail and e-commerce fulfillment, wholesale distribution and third-party logistics operations.

The lineup expansion includes several models that were not previously available for standard order with Yale Reliant enabled, as well as additional capacities or configurations of models for which only select variations were available previously. Very narrow aisle (VNA) turret trucks, narrow aisle reach trucks engineered with a smaller frame for tight retail environments like stockrooms, and the straddle, furniture and standard order picker models are all newly available with Yale Reliant. Center riders, tow tractors, enclosed end riders and reach trucks were already available with Yale Reliant, but the latest portfolio expansion extends availability to additional capacities and configurations of those models.

The operator assist technology is the focus of the Yale booth #B3810 at the MODEX trade show in Atlanta this week. In addition to providing a deeper understanding of the solution’s underlying advanced dynamic stability (ADS) technology, personalized demonstrations at the booth also feature other technologies in the Yale Reliant suite like object detection, proximity detection and real-time location sensing. Yale Reliant keeps the operator in ultimate control of the lift truck, but depending on the package selected, automatically applies interventions in response to compromised stability, obstacles detected in the path of travel or in close proximity, and even based on rules specified for certain areas of the warehouse.

“The interest that this technology continues to attract, whether at the industry’s leading tradeshows or reflected in the thousands of trucks commercially deployed with it, speaks to forklift accident prevention as a critical priority for today’s warehouses,” says Joe Koch, Emerging Technology Sales Manager, Yale Lift Truck Technologies. “Just yesterday, we introduced a standalone ADS option to empower operations with greater choice and opportunity to incorporate this tool in their safety initiatives, and this announcement takes another step in that direction, broadening our Yale Reliant lineup to help warehouses and retailers access the truck that is most appropriate for the job and technology that can help them support inexperienced operators and proper operating practices.”

The newly-renovated Yale Peabody Museum in New Haven is just a couple weeks away from opening to the public once again.

On Monday, museum officials gave the media a sneak preview. The new museum is about 50% larger than the original museum, allowing for more exhibition space, classrooms and research facilities. The institution has been closed to the public for four years.

With a $160 million gift from Yale alum Edward P. Bass in 2018, Yale not only wanted to transform the museum into a state-of-the-art facility, it also pledged to better serve the New Haven community.

Free admission is part of that, said David Skelly, director of the Yale Peabody Museum.

“We want this place to feel like, for anybody who walks in, ‘we've been expecting you, glad you're here,’ he said. “We also want this to feel really useful to a whole bunch of people.”

Before the renovation, the museum didn’t have a K-12 classroom. Now, there will be three of them, plus a dedicated space for an after-school program called “Evolutions,” Skelly said.

“So in every possible way, we're trying to think about who the audiences are, how can we support them?” he said.

Another emphasis of the new Peabody is giving Yale students and faculty the opportunity to research and display their own work in dedicated exhibition spaces and classrooms.

With help of architectural firm Centerbrook Architects and Planners, museum officials decided on more open spaces for the new facility, with lots of natural light.

The open plan does wonders for the part of the museum that explores early mammals and birds, said Christopher Norris, the Peabody Museum’s director of public programs.

“It was quite possibly the most depressing gallery in the museum,” Norris said. “There were no windows, it was dominated by huge cases. Everything was behind enormous sheets of glass, and you couldn't really tell what was there. This new space has seven times as many fossils as that old gallery, and it is also way lighter and way more open, and that lends itself to people actually seeing and understanding what’s in here.”

For die-hard Peabody fans, there are familiar sights, like Rudolph F. Zallinger’s massive panoramic mural “The Age of Reptiles.” Also on display is the giant brontosaurus skeleton that loomed over the Great Room in the original Peabody Museum for decades.

“It looks completely different than what we had in the past,” said Susan Butts, the Peabody’s director of collections and research.

What's changed is the pose.

“Our dinosaur in the past had a tail dragging down on the ground,” Butts said. “We know from the fossil record that we see footprints, but we never see a tail mark dragging behind those footprints. So we do know that dinosaurs had their tails up in the air, we know that the bones of the tail fit together much better when they're up in the air and extended than when they're dragged down onto the ground, which doesn't even work biomechanically. We've also got a new head, so the head that we had on there wasn't the right size and shape. So, we've replaced the head with something more accurate.”

Workers added 27 additional vertebrae in the tail, “so it's quite a bit longer than it was before,” she said.

When the museum opens to the public March 26, admission will be free to everyone in perpetuity. According to museum officials, only the first two floors will be ready when the museum opens. The third floor is expected to open by mid-April.

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