Granny Poo's Guide Changes Hands

Granny Poo's, an annual guide to restaurants on the North and South Forks, is slated to be sold to a Manhattan resident, Emmy Neidick. She plans to distribute it not just in the metropolitan area but around the country, she told The Star this week.

Renee Schilhab, a former reporter for The Southampton Press and the wife of former East Hampton Town Supervisor Tony Bullock, owned and published Granny Poo's for the past two years.

"I'm sad to be giving it up," Ms. Schilhab said this week. Granny Poo's was "a lot of fun."

Ms. Neidick, who owned a house in Noyac some years ago, has both writing and food in her background. Her mother was a caterer in Montreal and her grandmother a baker there. She has worked for corporations in human resources.

Ingredients

The freshness and quality of ingredients will be a focus of Granny Poo's reviews, said Ms. Neidick, who used to work at Manhattan's Union Square green market in the late '70s. "Everything has to do with ingredients, and where they're from," she said.

Ms. Neidick noticed Ms. Schilhab's offering to sell the publication in The New York Times. She had recently been downsized, she said, was looking for something new to do, and was intrigued.

She will follow "the same basic philosophy" as Ms. Schilhab in her approach to Granny Poo's, she said. The biggest change will be in broadening distribution.

Farther Afield

In addition to the East End and New York City, the publication will be available in places where people who live on the East End in the summer might spend their winters, including Florida's east coast from Palm Beach south to Key West, Scottsdale, Ariz., Albuquerque, N.M., and Boulder, Colo.

It will be distributed by Bookazine, which is based on the East Coast.

Writing the reviews will be Ms. Neidick, many members of Ms. Schilhab's staff, and some new faces. This year's edition of Granny Poo's will be available locally by Memorial Day, and in other areas by January 1998.

House, Too

The publication, by the way, isn't the only thing Ms. Schilhab has sold.

The Amagansett house where she and her husband lived has also been sold. The couple has just bought a house in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C., where Mr. Bullock is working as chief of staff for Senator Daniel P. Moynihan.

Some have suggested Ms. Schilhab write a restaurant guide to the Washington area, which she said is a "possibility." For now, however, she hopes to return to newspaper reporting.