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MAYBE it's the suggestive power of the name, but rarely do I use pizza dough for anything else, even though it's perfectly suitable for savory tarts, flatbreads and rolls. Once I get pizza on the brain, it's hard to redirect. Then I got reacquainted with an old friend also made from that same dough: the calzone. Though it was a childhood staple at my corner pizzeria, I hadn't eaten a calzone in years. But at a dinner at Lucali in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, I saw one emerge from the oven, a burnished, puffy crescent oozing ricotta at the seams. On the side was a small bowl of tomato sauce for dunking, garnished with a few fresh basil leaves. It was a much classier presentation than the oil-stained paper plate I would use to transport my calzones of yore, and it tasted better, too. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Saraghina -- with its handwritten menu, its battered summer-share furniture, its greenmarket ingredients and its cap-wearing fashion-world owner -- has managed to become exactly what it wanted to become when it opened two summers ago: a cool, hassle-free, inexpensive neighborhood restaurant. The neighborhood in this case -- Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn -- is not exactly a Mecca for restaurants (although there is a fairly new wine bar across the street from Saraghina, at Halsey Street and Lewis Avenue, and a Southern soul food joint a few blocks away). On Saturday nights and Sunday mornings, the rambling dining rooms are filled with Williamsburgers and other L-train-riding arrivistes. But on a quiet Monday, you are likely to find a local family -- like the Kernizans -- at a casual early dinner. IN THE SEATS Kathleen Kernizan, 41, a self-described ''paper pusher'' for a well-known but ''unnamable corporate entity'' (around the dinner table, she plays the role of mom); Marcel Kernizan, the precocious, tie-wearing 7-year-old man of the meal; and Kristene Kernizan, who is 5 and would like everyone to know it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights the dinner party to celebrate the appearance of actress Tilda Swinton on the cover of Paper magazine's latest issue at Jeffrey Deitch's gallery in Soho, New York City. Comment of Swinton while circulating during the moments before a dinner party; Accounts on the party; Names of celebrities attended the party.