Growing up, Aria Aber’s favorite thing to eat was her mom’s aushak, leek-filled Afghan dumplings. “But I only like it when my mom makes it, or my dad,” she says. Even other relatives’ versions don’t compare: “They just don’t love me as much, and I can taste it.” Aber — whose 2019 poetry collection Hard Damage won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and whose debut novel, Good Girl, is out next month — isn’t eating much home cooking at all these days: She just wrapped up the semester teaching at the University of Vermont and is settling into her new Prospect Lefferts Gardens apartment. She did get the gas turned on, however, so she can turn her attention to preparing her other favorite food. “I just love soups,” she says. “I don’t like cooking when it involves more than one pot.”

Monday, December 9
I should start this by saying I don’t know how to take care of myself at all. My most successful text of all time is a tweet in which I compared my eating habits to a bodega rat in Bed-Stuy. But now that boyfriend, Noah Warren, is my husband, so I eat more regular meals instead of abjectly snacking for sustenance. Usually, Noah brings me coffee to bed. Every morning, I get up a few hours after him, because I am nocturnal and like to read and write in the stolen hours after everyone has gone to sleep. But this morning, there is no coffee that magically appears after I wake up. The semester ended last week, and we just moved into our shitty pied-à-terre in PLG, and we don’t have anything set up yet, let alone a full kitchen. So we end up at Ciao Bella Coffee, a café in the neighborhood, to repeat what we did on Sunday: coffee, pastry, and reading the news together. I drink an almond latte and wait about 30 minutes before ordering an everything croissant, lightly toasted. I usually don’t eat until midday, but I’m in a new place and don’t have a routine anymore.

After a massage, I get a fresh orange juice from Union Market and some bananas, then make my way through the rain with a newspaper over my head, like a character in a movie. Lunch is pizza from the Swiss Slice, which we had for dinner the night before. Because the gas isn’t yet set up, I can’t reheat it, and because the topping is “fresh veggie” — broccoli, spinach, tomatoes, peppers — I just consider it a salad on bread.

In the evening, I meet my friends Sally Wen Mao and her boyfriend, Bo, in Manhattan for drinks. I hate going to the city, but Sally is leaving for six weeks and she lives in Harlem, so John Devoy’s is more or less the midpoint between us. We have oysters and some parmesan truffle fries while we discuss Luigi Mangione’s six-pack. I wish I could order picklebacks without anyone judging me, but a dirty martini will do for now: vodka, extra dry, extra filthy. My ideal cocktail would honestly be a jar of olives with a splash of vodka, but because I have to maintain decorum, I take my time with the three olives on the toothpick. After John Devoy’s, we walk to Tara Rose, where we order another round of drinks (Prosecco with blueberry foam) and real dinner. Bo gets the burger, Sally gets the pasta, and because I have been eating like crap all day, I get what looks like the healthiest and warmest thing on the menu: the soup du jour, which is a white bean vegetable soup and tastes like every brothy dish I’ve cooked over my winter months in Vermont.

Tuesday, December 10
At around 9 a.m., I receive a coffee from the French press with a splash of almond milk in bed as I deserve. Breakfast is a banana and three ibuprofens for the excruciating menstrual pain I’m suffering from this morning. I’m also quite hungover from that one martini and the Prosecco and feel dehydrated, but I don’t drink any water because I love torture. However, my appetite is raging today, so we’re intent on ordering some big, fat sandwiches. Eggs are amazing in theory, but I hate the taste, so brunch menus are my enemies in general. After cursing at Noah’s UberEats app for half an hour, I settle on a halloumi bun and a side of Yukon potatoes from Cafe Madeline. I gorge on half of it for lunch while sitting on the living room floor. We still don’t have a table, but I make it my mission to find one today.

After grading student papers, I crave something sweet. I go to the hardware store to buy light bulbs and glue for a hanger that broke during the move and get a vanilla almond milk latte and a cinnamon roll from Ciao Bella on the way back. Later in the afternoon, I am feeling peckish again, so I’m eating the rest of my lunch (cold, papery, but the halloumi is still delicious) while fantasizing about dinner. My friend Maggie Millner recently raved about the Mexican soup from Kimchi Grill, and I browse the restaurant’s menu online (this, by the way, is one of my favorite pastimes: studying restaurant menus in advance). I still haven’t had water but am drinking my fourth can of LaCroix. I suddenly remember my late mentor, Louise Glück, who also preferred sparkling drinks out of a can and hated hydration. “Water tastes like sickness and hospitals,” I said to her once. She just looked at me. “No,” she said with an earnest face. “It tastes much worse than that.”

In the evening, while having a conversation with my editor at Bidoun about an essay I wrote on Fatih Akin’s film Head-on, I snack on almonds and a Babybel and have another can of LaCroix. For dinner, Noah suggests ordering Vietnamese, which I have to admit is a genius idea, because I never feel at home until I have a good vegan pho spot. This is a habit I cultivated back in 2020, when I lived in Berlin and had just started writing Good Girl and would end up at the restaurant Chay Village two to three times a week. I was a vegetarian for 14 years, and even though I eat everything now, I still love veggie food best. The Vegan Ginger Chick’n pho from Lucy’s Vietnamese arrives at around 9 p.m., and I eat some of it before we drive to the East Village to pick up a table from Facebook Marketplace.

The plan is to have some more when we get back, but destiny has something else in store for me: I find a cockroach in the bathroom and, like a character dreamed up by Clarice Lispector or Yasmin Zaher, I spend the rest of the night crawling around on my knees with a bottle of bleach, some caulk, and a steady flame of hatred flickering in my heart. I fall asleep with a faint taste of Lysol in my mouth.

Wednesday, December 11
The day begins with two cups of coffee with almond milk. I wish we had chocolate in the house, but the only things in the pantry are bananas and a jar of peanut butter. So I’m having a banana with peanut butter. I’m furiously vaping while responding to student emails for hours. Noah is working on his book, and I’m left to my own devices until around 2:30 p.m., when we heat up the leftovers from the night before and have lunch at our beautiful marble table, which Noah brought up the stairs single-handedly. I realize quickly that I’m not feeling very hungry, so I eat only a little bit and refrigerate the rest for another day. How long can pho survive in the fridge? For as long as I want it to, I’ve decided, especially if it’s vegan.

In the afternoon, my merch for the novel arrives — a hat and a tin of mints that say “EAT ME” on them. I greedily eat a couple of mints, then take the train to Grand Central. I’m a guest at the NYPL Christmas Party to celebrate my friend Isabella Hammad, who is a Cullman Fellow this year. I buy some coconut water at the station and have it while waiting for my friend Perwana Nazif. It’s raining and we’re drenched, but the gathering is sweet and it feels magical to drink and eat at the library. To be honest, these small-plate buffets at literary parties are my favorite — I wouldn’t complain if I could have dolma and pickles and white wine every day for the rest of my life. I fill up my paper plate with olives and grapes and cheese and crackers, a slice of mushroom pizza, and a piece of cake with icing so sweet it makes my teeth hurt.

Dinner at home is takeout from Jerusalem Falafel House, a Palestinian restaurant on Nostrand Avenue. My falafel platter is legendary and delicious, but Noah’s chicken shawarma smells much more delectable, so warm and spicy and homemade, that I am having more of his than of my own order. And because I’m feeling especially generous, I even let our cat, Jeanie Rhys, eat a bit of chicken as a treat. In the middle of the night, I sense a headache coming on — hello, dehydration, my old friend! — but instead of having a glass of water from the tap like a normal person, I’m drinking two cans of LaCroix in front of the fridge.

Thursday, December 12
Overnight, the internet stopped working, and Optimum does not want to send someone over to fix it, so the mood is anything but optimal this morning. I’m also feeling groggy because I stayed up until 3 a.m. to read a contemporary novel whose happy ending left me irate, though the writer did create some beautiful images of food (apples, gourds, autumn soups). I’m dissecting the plot over text with my friend Asiya Gaildon while having my usual coffee with almond milk, as well as a banana with peanut butter and three ibuprofens. Perhaps this is my new routine.

The rain has finally cleared, but it’s freezing outside. I buy a large bottle of Smartwater at CVS and feel very proud of myself for finishing it during my icy walk through the park. Looking at the trees, I’m whispering to myself, “Water is good, water is necessary, water is life.” In the afternoon, I camp out at Hamlet Coffee Company, which, according to my friend Daniel Poppick, is “the only good coffee in our neighborhood.”

I order a latte with macadamia milk and the grain bowl that comes from UpTaco. The coffee is indeed very good but so strong that I start vibrating. While finishing my email work for the day, I eat almost all of the cheese and none of the greens of my salad and take the rest to go. Because we still don’t have any groceries, I stop by a store and buy a haphazard assortment of things: a papaya, kaki fruit, limes, Pedialyte, cucumbers, apples, Kinder chocolate, and Tunnock’s caramel wafers. Back at home, I have an apple and then half of a caramel wafer, but it tastes like old socks and paper. I feel sufficiently hydrated and nourished, even though I suspect that I will undo all my good work in a matter of hours: Fountains of alcohol and cigarettes are on the horizon, winking at me.

Perwana invited me to the Eckhaus Latta holiday party, but because all my friends are in town and all of them are writers, we decide to go to the Paris Review party instead. I realize it’s the fourth day in a row that I’m traveling to Manhattan — I guess I can’t hate it that much. As I’m making my way through the cold, dark streets between the high-rises, I smoke a couple Marlboro Golds and listen to an episode on the fall of Assad by the podcast It Could Happen Here. I wish I was back in Germany so I could talk and celebrate with my Syrian neighbors and eat a large plate of the glossy Yabrak with dried apricots and beef that they used to make for me.

The old-fashioneds at the party are so stiff they taste like acetone, but they’re free, so I’m having too many and get stuck on a sofa with Perwana and our friends Maya Binyam and Hannah Zeavin. By the time the Lyft drops Noah and me back at home at around 3 a.m., my heart is very full, my throat is made of sandpaper, my hair smells like an ashtray, and I’m way too drunk. But we’re responsible adults tonight: We drink water and have the leftovers of the falafel platter, which we can heat up on the stove like normal people because the gas is finally set up.

Friday, December 13
A raging headache startles me awake at 7 a.m. All things considered, I thought last night was quite civilized, but I realize I didn’t take off my make-up and fell asleep with my vape in one hand and my phone in the other. I blame my recklessness on the shots of Jameson with my friends Sam Ross and Bobuq Sayed at Westside Tavern, where we ended up after the office party. Two hours later, the Ikea delivery team is forcing us out of bed, even though they weren’t supposed to arrive until 4 p.m. at the earliest. For obvious reasons, I’m recalling Jemima Kirke’s feature in Interview Mag, where she talks about how vaping reminds her of watching someone at the hospital press a button to get more drugs, and I feel a little disgusted with myself. But hey, at least we have a couch and a mirror now.

Breakfast is two cups of coffee with almond milk as usual. After building half of the couch together, Noah and I venture out on a walk. We want bagels, but we haven’t found a reliable bagel spot yet, so we settle on buying a loaf of sourdough from a secret kosher bakery called Crust Baker. They don’t have a real storefront and usually make food to order, but we get lucky. The bread is still warm, and we tear pieces off it on the street. As far as sourdough goes, this is one of the best I’ve had — fluffy and soft on the inside with a perfectly hard crust on the outside.

Back at home, Noah is making his famous grilled cheese, but I insist on having a cold sandwich with butter, tomato, and cheddar, because it reminds me of the good old belegte Brötchen from the German bakeries of my childhood, and some cucumbers with sea salt, a simple Afghan staple snack. I build the rest of the couch by myself and as a treat graze on Kinder chocolate. Magically, the internet has started working again, so I’m having an Olipop apple crisp and a glass of Pedialyte while responding to interview questions for The Brooklyn Rail.

Dan is cooking for a group of friends tonight, but hangovers make me antisocial, so I stay in by myself. At 6:40 p.m., I finally DoorDash the tofu Mexican soup from Kimchi Grill, the dish that has been haunting my thoughts all week. The soup consists of a dashi broth base, fresh kimchee, avocado, kale, beans, fried tofu, and rice gnocchi. I’m usually suspicious of fusion cuisine, but this Mexican Korean soup tastes like heaven. Peppery and hot and healing, it does to my body what Pedialyte failed to do. I practically inhale most of my dinner while trying to watch Girl, Interrupted because I love looking at Angelina Jolie, Winona Ryder, and Brittany Murphy, but tonight I, too, am a girl, interrupted, so I turn it off and instead stare at the wall for 30 minutes. By 9:30, I am starting to feel a little better and sip the rest of my kimchee broth while reading Ghassan Kanafani’s The Land of Sad Oranges. I fall asleep dreaming of Jaffa, children playing on dusty streets, and rows and rows of orange trees.

Ask anyone what the biggest problem facing restaurants today is, and they’ll inevitably say the same thing: bots, specifically those ones that are always scooping up online reservations at places like Carbone, Polo Bar, downtown’s Polo Bar clone Corner Store, Cote, and Don Angie. At some of New York’s trendiest restaurants, tables — besides a few strays at opening and close — seem to disappear within ten seconds.

Now, Governor Kathy Hochul has finally done something about this crisis: As Eater NY reports, she’s signed the Restaurant Reservation Anti-Piracy Act into law. Through the law, which was passed by the State Legislature over the summer, Hochul promises that the state will “put an end to the predatory market” so that ordinary people can eat at these trendy restaurants. Through platforms like Resy, resellers snatch up reservations using bots, then peddle them to consumers who fork over hundreds to thousands of dollars for tables.

Of course, there’s the question of enforcement and how the state will go about stopping people from selling reservations entirely. As Luke Fortney noted in a story about the reservation-trading group #FreeRezy, people have been selling reservations online for at least a decade. Apps have made this easier, but it’s nothing new. Once the law goes into effect, it will prohibit third-party services from listing, advertising, promoting, or selling reservations without a written agreement with the restaurant, which means that pay-for-play services like Dorsia can continue to do business, and restaurants can still set aside reservations for customers who possess certain credit cards. Gray-market resellers who violate the law can be fined up to $1,000 for each violation, and individuals who are charged by these resellers can take them to court to recoup the cost of their Polo Bar reservation. Regardless, Hochul can now do something about the other big problem facing New Yorkers: TikTok-induced lines at neighborhood places we used to be able to get into.

• [Eater NY]

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As the year comes to a close, I’ve been thinking about something I’m going to call “staircase cuisine.” It’s like l’esprit de l’escalier, except instead of coming up with the perfect thing to say after a conversation, I keep running into new food that would have been perfect for columns I wrote in 2024. I decided that instead of silently lamenting these missed opportunities or keeping these new favorites to myself, I would round them up into a catalogue of bonus recommendations.

One more takeout sushi: Sushi Sho’s lunch box
Sushi Sho is the hottest bromakase joint in town thanks to some new Michelin stars and a Pete Wells–penned profile. Dinner starts at $450 per person, but there is a way to eat this fish more affordably. Takeout lunch boxes that cost either $100 each or $60 for takumi chirashi, of which they make 20 each day. (Either must be reserved on Tock at least a day in advance, alas.) I opted for the $60 version, and after I opened the lacquered box, a savory-smoky scent emerged from the comprehensively seasoned components dabbed and layered across a canvas of seaweed-sprinkled rice. I found sweetly glazed black cod next to a mound of shredded hairy crab, separated by five tiny wedges of snappy cucumber. The centerpiece was three slices each of bluefin tuna and mackerel, both cured in ​​a mix of soy sauce, konbu, onion, and herring roe. Discoveries like ebi-oboro, a granular mince of shrimp and fish, and the tidbits of simmered clam and scallop made me feel like I had a window into Nakazawa’s old-school Edomae style.

One more crispy potato: Superiority Burger’s fries
To mark one year in business at Superiority Burger’s new location, chef Brooks Headley finally put fries on his menu. What started out as a lunch-only special is now available during all service hours. What’s so special about them? The extra-long, thick planks are triple cooked and “crazy labor intensive,” Headley says. The result is something between a proper English chip and Five Guys. While $10 may seem like a high price for a side of fries, they’re quite hearty, much like my other crispy fave, Sungold’s celery-root latke.

One more smoothie: East Village Organic
For the Coco Cloud smoothie at this First Avenue shop, cups are given that telltale Erewhon look with tropospheric swirls of coconut yogurt and blue spirulina. The actual smoothie portion is made with a combination of coconut meat and water, with enough pineapple and mango to keep things feeling tart and tropical.

One more kitschy cocktail: a Salted Lychee Martini
In August, I wrote about Bad Roman’s spiked Diet Coke. Now I’ve discovered this cocktail at Twin Tails, the South Asian restaurant opened in the same mall by the same restaurant group. The name — Salted Lychee Martini — doesn’t necessarily telegraph the impressive balance I found in the finished drink. Floral fruit and gentle sweetness were tamed by salinity with a floating lime leaf for garnish. I liked it with an order of extra-crunchy chicken spring rolls.

One more sauce: homemade sambal
If I could add a 23rd sauce to last month’s dossier, it would be the jarred sambal at the East Village patisserie Lady Wong, which you should inquire about next time you stop by for a slice of calamansi cake. The tangy red-chile condiment is packed with enough lemongrass and dried shrimp to awaken anything you decide to adorn with it, but I would start with some skewers.  

One more thing under $10: Bayard Meat Market chicken-skin chips
In March, I wrote that Nawabi Bhoj’s egg-filled Muglai paratha was the best thing I’d found for $10. That honor now must go to the $3 chicken cracklings at this Chinatown standby. When I spotted them a couple of weeks ago, a sign indicated that these cellophane bags of rendered skin, as golden as anything from Popeyes, were a new offering. I hope they’re here to stay. The chicken chips tasted freshly fried with an airy crunch that made it hard to stop eating them, especially after I doused them in Crystal hot sauce.

This post has been corrected to update the spelling of Twin Tails.

During a year of upheaval and change, food, as it so often does, offered a degree of comfort and familiarity. Grub Street’s most popular stories of 2024 prove it: Our audience — you — turned to pieces about xiao long bao and oeufs mayo, New York’s restaurant history, our most charming bodegas, and a surprising number of reports that were Chipotle-adjacent (two). Below, you’ll find our 20 most-read articles, defined by total minutes of audience engagement. It’s a small selection of the work that’s published by New York’s print magazine and on all its digital sites. If you missed any of these, we hope you’ll use this as a guide to catch up before the New Year arrives. And to stay current with us in 2025, be sure to sign up for our daily Grub Street newsletter and Eating New York. And read everything on New York’s excellent new app.

20. Oeufs Mayo Are All Over the Place

They’re a dead-simple bistro staple and chefs can’t resist them. Read the story …

19. Delaney Rowe Is Eating Like a Gym Bro

“Men will eat anything if you add ‘protein’ to the name.” Read the story …

18. Chloe Fineman Got Hooked on Pedialyte This Summer

“I’m worried I have hypertension due to salt, but whatever.” Read the story …

17. ‘If You Were a Chef in the City … You Had a Moment With Him’

What James Kent meant to New York’s restaurants. Read the story …

16. Meet the Super-Regular

Gar Guttman’s been eating schnitzel specials at EJ’s for 31 years. Read the story …

15. Frog Club Needs to Grow Up

The scene is fun. The food is funny. Read the story …

14. Do You Know Mr. Mango?

How Brooklyn’s beloved fruit bodegas came to be. Read the story …

13. A Diner Designed by Movie People

How a bunch of Brooklyn filmmakers took over their neighborhood luncheonette. Read the story …

12. Vinson Cunningham Is a Ritualistic Eater

“This is my self-elevating way of admitting that I am a ‘creature of habit.’” Read the story …

11. Molly Baz Is Mostly Mayo These Days

“I’m slightly horrified and also totally energized by this realization.” Read the story …

10. Matty Matheson Is Not an Accident

From burger tutorials to The Bear, the internet’s favorite chef has been all in this whole time. Read the story …

9. Din Tai Fung Is Ready to Go, at Last

After a wait that took forever, a grand opening arrived. Read the story …

8. The Restaurant That Made a Customer’s Birthday Cake Disappear

What happened after a midtown steakhouse was accused of dessert theft. Read the story …

7. 48 Scenes From a Century of New York Dining

Debbie Harry at Katz’s, David Byrne at the Locale, and Bastille Day at Florent. Read the story …

6. Joanna Goddard Loves a Smash and Grab

“It just means eating whatever’s in the fridge. Before there was girl dinner, there was the smash and grab.” Read the story …

5. Steve Ells Is Still Trying to Solve Lunch

He built Chipotle and its burrito bowls. Now he’s obsessed with vegan burgers cooked by robots. Read the story …

4. Who Ate Where

A social history of the city, told entirely through its restaurants. Read the story …

3. The $9.5 Million Hangover

Did a wine-world insider swindle his Bordeaux-swilling pals? Read the story …

2. The Case Against Deli Meat

They’re consistent, convenient, tasty — and at a time of recalls and outbreaks, one of the riskiest things you could eat. Read the story …

1. The Empathy Punishment

A woman hurled a burrito bowl at a Chipotle employee. Then a judge made her walk in the victim’s shoes. Read the story …

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In an episode from an early season of the Simpsons, Moe — Springfield’s lone bartender — is about to toss his jar of pickled eggs into the trash. Homer is aghast: “Moe, don’t throw out that brine!” he cries before guzzling down the jar. As anyone who’s ordered a martini in New York lately can tell you, we’re all Homer now.

Dirty Martinis have been with us for around a century, the addition of olive brine falling in and out of favor over the years. But over the last couple of years, they’ve taken over, with the majority of martini orders in this city veering dirtier and dirtier.

In fact they’ve become filthy, a descriptor that appears on any number of menus. Eel Bar calls its house dirty, which comes in a squat stemmed glass, a Filthy Martini. Time and Tide, a sprawling new seafood restaurant, also sells a Filthy Martini. Other bars have drafted other words to evoke their savory bonafides. Bonnie’s, the Cantonese restaurant in Williamsburg, serves a famous MSG Martini which, on its own is not “dirty,” but which inspired the dirty martini at Smithereens in the East Village that is composed with a gin made from Adriatic seawater and a “Seaweed Eau de Vie.” Bar Snack, a new bar in the East Village, takes its nautical inspiration from Moana, spicing the Boat Snack Martini with chicken bouillon and a chicken-skin-chicharron garnish.

Then there are the dirty-adjacent food martinis: Shy Shy, a new bar in Chelsea, has a Caesar Martini anchored by vodka infused with lemon peel, black pepper, shiitake mushroom and salt, which is fat-washed with extra-virgin olive oil. It is garnished with a romaine leaf, parmesan and an anchovy. Grand Army in Boerum Hill is running a Monday-only special in December: a “Gazpacho Martini.”

Yet no current martini destination is dirtier than the Corner Store. Their $40 “Martini Service” is two martinis, one called Oli’s Dirty and other The Filth, which is nothing more than vodka and brine. A third drink on the menu, the Sour Cream & Onion, tastes like the potato chips sprinkled with sugar.

Any of these bars will tell you their dirty rendition is their top seller, or close to the top. One reason may be the same thing that caused Appletini sales to surge in the ‘90s: People don’t really like the taste of alcohol. “I think they think it’s a sophisticated version of a vodka soda,” says Krissy Harris, the beverage director and co-owner of Shy Shy. “It’s something they can drink that’s safe. They’re scared of the vodka martini, so they’re going to have a little bit of olive juice in there. It’s just easier to drink.”

Harrison Ginsberg, the beverage director of Time and Tide, says the drink’s popularity begets more popularity: “More bartenders are adapting to playing with them and more people are talking about them,” he says. “Bartenders stopped taking things too seriously. They were just like, ‘Let’s just make a good version of it.’” Time and Tide’s version, which is borrowed from Hong Kong’s Bar Leone, features only vodka and a brine informed by smoked olives.

Logan Rodriguez, head bartender of Smithereens, says there’s an element of camp. “We’re bringing back and reinterpreting some of the tackier, trashier classics of yesteryear and embracing how good they can be when you bring an informed sensibility to them,” he says. “There’s a beauty to a really bold, savory cocktail, especially one that is steeped in so much nostalgia and faux glamour.”

From an historical perspective, dirty-martini mania is hardly an anomaly. Martini trends tend to operate in extremes. In the years after World War II, the cocktail could not be dry enough, with society contriving all sorts of gizmos and techniques to hocus-pocus vermouth out of the equation. In the late 20th century, anything called a “martini” swung to the opposite pole, becoming florid and cloyingly sweet. Then, for a short time in the 00s, vermouth-loving urban aesthetes campaigned hard in favor of vermouth-heavy, wet Martinis as the drink’s Platonic ideal.

We probably haven’t reached Peak Dirty yet, but an eventual correction is inevitable. For someone like me, who prefers a martini that’s crisp and clean, the most surprising thing about all these dirty renditions is that most of the drinks I’ve mentioned above are pretty good. They’re balanced and surprising, and as much as I want bartenders to stop screwing around with pantry ingredients, I have to admit that much of what they are coming up with in the name of dirty innovation is pretty damn polished.

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The Upper West Side’s Absolute Bagels is no more: On Thursday, the neighborhood blog West Side Rag reported that the shop was likely closed, citing conversations with employees. This immediately set off alarm bells among neighbors. “Do you know anything about this?” one texted me. “I’m crying.” When I asked another if he’d heard the news, he wrote back, “oh my god, oh my god.”

The suddenness of the closing — why wasn’t there an announcement? — has people wondering what’s going on. Some initially theorized it has to do with the Department of Health, and indeed a December 11 report reveals the shop received 67 points for violations that included “evidence of rats or live rats,” “live roaches,” and “pesticide not properly labeled or used by unlicensed individual.” (At least they were trying to do something about the roaches and the rats?) The Rag confirmed the closing yesterday with the building’s real-estate broker, Rafe Evans, who told them that the shuttering came “out of the blue.”

Around 3 p.m., when I stopped by, the metal gate was almost fully down and a “we are closed” sign was taped to the front. A small crowd had gathered, seemingly on the verge of rioting. Some were kneeling down, asking the workers inside what was going on. At one point, an employee started handing out small bags of bagels. “It’s an absolute shonda!” an older woman with a petite dog yelled. “This is Trump’s America.” One employee, who only gave his first name, Jose, said that the owner had repeatedly said the store was going to close but people told him not to.

Absolute Bagels was opened in 1992 by Sam Thongkrieng, who came to New York in 1980 and learned the trade at the famous Ess-a-Bagel. He was one of a number of Thai immigrants who ended up in the bagel business during the 1990s, many of them after the Thai government sent members of Local 338, the bagel union, over to Thailand to train locals. Absolute Bagels is maybe the most visible and famous piece of this particular moment in New York food history — but it’s also a great place to eat. Depending on whom you ask, Absolute Bagels is either the best bagel shop in New York or one of the best bagel shops in New York. There was nothing fancy about it: Its charm came from its complete lack of frills, and also the fact that you could get a Thai iced tea.

As the quality of bagels around the city declined, it was held up as a place that preserved what still feels like a disappearing tradition. In 2003, Ed Levine called Absolute’s bagels “something near perfection” and the minibagel “a perfect simulacrum of the 1950s New York bagel.”

Ethan Levenson grew up a few blocks away and cannot recall a time before Absolute Bagels. He knew that to get the full experience, one needed to “submit to the rhythms of the shop,” even if that meant ordering a sesame when you really wanted an everything. “There was a certain level of spontaneity and roulette-ness to the shop that I’d let dictate my experience,” he says. “I’d ask the person, ‘What’s the hottest?’ Because to toast an Absolute bagel would be a travesty, a shonda.”

What Levenson liked best about Absolute, he says, is the rate at which they turned out the bagels: “There’s no bagel like it, it’s kind of undersized, it has a certain elasticity and bounce. I think it just traps heat really well.” He adds, “People talk about delicious food, like when you’re in Mexico City, you just inhale the tacos. There’s some quality to an Absolute bagel where it just warrants inhalation.”

Yesterday afternoon outside the store, despite the sharpness of the whipping wind, people kept stopping to linger and ask what was up. One customer, who identified himself as Mark and has lived in the neighborhood since 1977, said he couldn’t remember when he started going to Absolute. “I come here and get two plain bagels — because I don’t like them to sit and I live five blocks away — every other day,” he says. “If it’s the Health Department, I can’t buy it.”

Another local, Jane, came over to join the conversation. She said she’s lived in the neighborhood for 20 years. “I come here once a week for a bag of bagels. It’s a loss.” But she knows that — whatever the reason for the closing — that feeling of loss is, to some degree, the price of living in the city. “What are you going to do?” she sighed. “You live in New York, you’re used to it.”

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In the Manhattan food world, few names hold more weight than Eli Zabar. At 81, the Upper East Side magnate is “always grazing” through his dozen or so shops, cafés, bakeries, and restaurants — all of which continue to reflect his taste for the finer things. Last week, as he started tracking his eating in a tiny black notebook that he keeps in his shirt pocket, two receipts slipped out. One from when he flew his Grumman Tiger up to Nantucket on opening day of scallop season. Another for a half-dozen bottles of Leflaive Bourgogne Blanc from Sotheby’s. “That seemed to kick us off on a good note,” he says.

Tuesday, December 3
Every morning, I have coffee with my wife, Devon, before walking the dogs around 6. I prepared the coffee the night before, so all I have to do now is press the button on the Moccamaster.

Cup still in hand, I grab my telephone and leash my dogs. When I come back in, I send Pippa upstairs — she’s already had her treats. Gio, on the other hand, hasn’t had anything, so he sits there expectantly. I take his muzzle off — he tries to bite everybody — and give him one, then another, and another, then probably another for being so good.

When it’s time to head over to my stores, I park either on my block or on Madison Avenue. People always ask, How do you get parking spaces? Well, if you leave before 9 o’clock, you can park anywhere. The closer you get to Madison or Fifth, there’s no struggle for parking spaces like there is on the West Side, where folks sit in their cars all day waiting to move when the sweeper comes.

I start at my Essentials store on 91st Street. It’s full of children and lots of parents. It’s right down the block from Spence and Sacred Heart and across the street from Dalton. I park there for a moment and make the biggest eating decision of the day: Is it an apple day or is it a frittata day? Every day, the team at Essentials makes a big frittata with seasonal vegetables and Parmesan cheese. But sometimes I decide to go celibate and just have an apple and another coffee.

Today, it turns out, is a celibate day. Devon and I have a breakfast meeting at E.A.T. with our city councilmember, Julie Menin. (Only coffee for all of us.) She’s running for president of the City Council, so this is a chance to air our grievances, namely congestion pricing. I personally think the money is going to be stolen by the MTA and none of it will be used effectively. They should try to fix mass transit before they start limiting cars.

I’m still at E.A.T. when the roast chickens came out from the kitchen, with caramelized carrots roasted in the pan alongside the birds. I grab two with my hands. Possibly the most delicious treat ever.

I have an afternoon interview with Flynn McGarry for Interview magazine. We each have some more coffee. He’s a very interesting young man, went into the restaurant business at 14 or 16. He wants to know if we share the same frustrations, issues, and pleasures — we do! For instance: It is not possible to train someone in sensibility. They have to come to you fully loaded. Afterward, I sample some miraculously still-ripe Brazilian melons from our produce section, great big black cherries from Argentina, and heirloom tomatoes. Years ago, I built greenhouses on 91st Street to try to grow tomatoes, so tomato season runs from November through Christmas for me.

It’s also prime gift-basket season, which means Devon comes home exhausted; we decide to do dinner at home. I stop at Bar 91 and pick up sausages and lentils. We eat it alongside Devon’s famous garlicky green salad. You can pick up the leaves and eat them with your fingers. Or at least that’s the way I do it.

Wednesday, December 4
Same coffee routine, same apple-versus-frittata conflict. This time, the frittata wins. I still take an apple as backup.

I go in early to meet the mechanics fixing equipment. By 7, I’m back home to deliver coffee to Devon, then I’m off to my pastry shop. We’re having problems with rancid nuts, especially walnuts and hazelnuts. A few rancid nuts ruin whole batches of cakes and fillings, so I make a point of tasting them often. We’ve got big plastic bins; this morning, I dig deep with a spoon and take a good whiff.

Back at E.A.T., a batch of raisin-nut rolls arrive, and Fouad, the longtime manager, is so pleased with them that he insists I try one. Delicious. I worked on perfecting the rosemary ciabatta, so I also had to try one of those four-inch squares to be sure it held up well.

Tonight, we’re going to have a party at E.A.T. to celebrate our 50th anniversary. The clothing store agnès b. has been across the street for 40 years, so it is co-hosting. One of the hors d’oeuvres we’re serving is a one-bite biscuit with ham and honey mustard. In the past, the biscuits have been overbaked, and I was concerned they wouldn’t be delicious. So, in the early afternoon, I meet with our pastry chef, Gabriel, and punch out the dough in a few sizes. We watch it bake for ten minutes. I nosh on three or four of the runts.

The event starts at 6, and I eat tons of little sandwiches along with some damn good Pierre Peters Champagne. The single best hors d’oeuvre in the world is my chopped liver on thinly sliced raisin-nut bread cut into triangles. Of course, we also serve smoked salmon on seven-grain bread. The party is half people in their late 20s and early 30s, half longtime regulars in their 80s and 90s.

As we say at Passover, it should have been enough. But my son Oliver convinces me to have a proper dinner, so we go to Eli’s Table. We have a bowl of pasta with white truffles and Nantucket scallops. Absolutely the best combination. I don’t want to sound too egotistical, but I think I kind of invented it.

Thursday, December 5
It’s an apple day — but that only gets me to 11 o’clock. Then I need to do some more noshing.

At 91, I resist the siren call of the spare ribs, caramelized and shiny, and instead go for the shepherd’s pie. It’s a combination of all sorts of ground meat that we have left over from different things — brisket, hamburgers. Then they pipe mashed potatoes on top. I spoon a couple of tablespoons into a paper cup. It is absolutely terrific. Chef Rodrigo deserves a moment of praise.

In the early afternoon, Devon calls me with a gift-basket emergency. A basket has to ship to Miami Beach, and she needs six plain bagels and six everything bagels. So I go to H&H on Second Avenue. (We were out of bagels at the store.) I hate it when you buy 12 bagels and they give you two for free. I have no choice but to eat one of them, nothing on it, on the way to deliver the dozen to Devon.

I swing by my son Sasha’s ice-cream store, Glace. The line is around the corner, and I have to fight for an opening. I usually only eat vanilla ice cream, but I love all his flavors; today, I opt for New York Cheesecake Crumb.

Back at Eli’s Market, we’re working on a salmon niçoise sandwich. We switched to a brioche hamburger roll, but I can’t get it to stand up on its own. We’ll keep at it.

It’s the 90th anniversary of my father opening Zabar’s on Broadway. My nieces Annie and Marguerite had the idea to light up some skyscrapers in Zabar’s iconic orange to celebrate my brothers Stanley and Saul. My friend Douglas Durst generously offered to light up all his tallest buildings, and tonight lots of family gather on the 102nd floor of a building in Hudson Yards to watch. There are some small bowls of food around, pieces of beef on polenta and another I don’t remember. Annie brings a half- kilo of Italian caviar.

Getting down from the 102nd floor is a nightmare. Hudson Yards feels like a sci-fi movie to me, and I’m alone in the elevator. The doors close and a screen depicts some kind of topsy-turvy version of what you’d see outside. I’m dizzy and terrified and there aren’t any handrails!

Back home, I decompress with a glass of Burgundy. I eat another Devon-classic salad with leftover grilled chicken. Dessert is, of course, Eli’s vanilla ice cream. No need to scoop it. Just a spoon in the pint. Keep skimming across the top; you don’t want to compress the air or deflate it. Don’t dig in — ever.

Friday, December 6
Will the week ever end?

Apple and frittata morning.

We’ve got my favorite peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches next to the register at E.A.T. today. There is absolutely nothing like them. The brioche bread has to be soft like the tramezzini bread of Venice. Homemade dark-seeded raspberry jam (no pectin). Getting the ratio of peanut butter to jelly is the key. It’s my longtime manager Nunny’s specialty. They’re a messy affair, like eating a Georgia peach over the sink.

I stop at Eli’s Market to check on the progress of my salmon niçoise sandwich. We’re cutting the celery, peppers, potatoes, and haricots verts very small. That seems to help.

While in the kitchen, one of the staff drops a basket of chicken fingers directly into the fryer and scorches them to nothing but crunch in an instant. I eat a few. Not bad — interesting like Chinese fried-pork skin.

I check in on the setup at Bar 91 and see the cut-up hot Italian sausages and onions that I find irresistible. I sample a few before visiting the pastry commissary. Trays of granola are on racks, so I spoon a bit for quality control.

Friday night is dinner at home with the Elkuses. I greet them with glasses of Pierre Peters Reserve Oubliée Champagne, and we keep drinking that right through the whole meal. I’d almost forgotten the joys of dining at home. It’s embarrassing and inconvenient to say, but our oven doesn’t work. Seems they don’t make the computer board for this lovely Thermador from 2006 any longer.

Devon is determined to keep the meal simple, and it is superb: thinly sliced Jerusalem bread, toasted, with salted French butter; thinly sliced smoked salmon; and just a few drops of lemon juice. And, of course, ground black pepper.

This is followed by Devon’s scrambled eggs: about half-butter, half-eggs, slowly stirred together on more toasted, buttered loaf. I tower each plate with fluffy white truffles. On the side, Devon’s garlicky crunchy salad again, but this time with shaved Vaucluse black truffles.

One of my favorite Barolo winemakers, Melva, gifted Devon a jar of her homemade orange marmalade from her Seville orange trees. I carried the jar back from Italy in November. Tonight, Devon makes a crostata in an amoebalike shape and covers it with a thin smear of the marmalade, then bakes it until they are one. So, so delicious.

Saturday, December 7
The apple wins out.

Sasha needs more whipped cream at his shop, so I pick up a couple of gallons at my pastry shop. There’s already a line at Glace when I arrive at 11:30. (It opens at noon.) I try out a small hot chocolate and attempt to torch my own marshmallow fluff. Very lopsided. Sasha would not approve.

Devon calls and asks what I’m thinking for dinner. I say, “Beef Stroganoff?” She says, “Where did you come up with that?” Anyway, she’s game.

I come home, and she’s borrowed my coffee scale to measure the exact quantities of each ingredient … which I immediately (if not sooner) disregard. So, of course, I add too much hot paprika, and we have to use twice the amount of heavy cream Sam Sifton suggests in his recipe. Our eyes are tearing up and we cannot stop sneezing, but other than that it comes out great!

On Friday and Saturday nights, we have a jazz band at Bar 91. Before dessert, we go over and have a glass of wine, listening to the music. Then back home to polish off a pint of vanilla.

Some said it would never happen: Five years after first announcing they would expand to Dumbo, the owners of L&B Spumoni Gardens have finally opened their second location, conspicuously, across the street from those other famous Brooklyn pizzerias. L&B is one of the most famous names in New York pizza, which is, of course, the most famous name in pizza. It’s home to a sauce recipe that was, maybe, once stolen, which led to a mob confab in a Staten Island Panera. Going there is a summertime rite of passage in southern Brooklyn. But this is their first expansion after 85 years of business, and I needed to know: How does the pizza at the new shop compare? To find out, I hit both spots in the same day.

Yesterday morning, I took the subway down to Gravesend. Despite the dreary weather and midweek timing, there was a small and happy crowd: A worker in his DSNY clothes, another in a Verrazzano Bridge sweatshirt, a trio of guys loading half a dozen pizzas and more food into an MTA van, someone taking a business call and talking about CEOs. Of course, no one was eating the regular slice, which is a trap, roughly on par with what you’d find at any East Village counter at 1 a.m. after too many beers.

Before going on, I’ll confess that I have recently described L&B’s famous Sicilian slices as “bricks,” but it was a lot better than I remember. Still, it’s dense and bready, with that gummy layer toward the top where the cheese melts into the bread that has never worked for me. (It still doesn’t.) The crust of my corner slice was cooked well and a bit blackened, and very crunchy. There’s nothing bad to say about the sweet tomato sauce, which spills over the edge, and almost caramelizes with the sprinkling of Parm on top. You understand how this sauce could inspire stories of mafia infighting.

Satisfied with the comprehensiveness of the research I’d conducted in Gravesend, I hit the road again and made the hour-long subway trip to Dumbo. Trudging through the rain, I arrived at Old Fulton Street and found a much tonier space than in Gravesend, where a security company’s office is across the street. There’s no outdoor seating at the new restaurant, and it’s a bit more refined inside, with small black-and-white photos on the walls, a long counter and row of pizza ovens upfront, with white marble tables. (The menu is more limited for now as the shop is in soft-open mode, but it includes essentials like chicken-Parm sandwiches and mozzarella sticks.)

But what about the pizza? To my tastes, there was hardly any difference between the two shops. Down in Gravesend, the slices were baked a little harder, with a crunchier crust. Both had that gummy layer; both had that great sauce. Both feel like relics of an earlier era in New York pizza, before talk of dough fermentation became big. (The technique would help to lighten slices like these.) Yet there’s an obvious appeal to the Dumbo outpost if you don’t live near Gravesend. Still, there’s something to be said for a schlep.

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Each month, we sit down at Grub Street and put together a list of places that we think would be ideal spots to sit down for a nice meal. We call it “Where to Eat,” and the choices are not necessarily the hottest restaurants in the city; we make an effort to uncover spots we’ve truly loved that we think deserve more attention. And now, we’ve put all of those picks together into a map that we’ll update each month. (In November, we added a great Greek destination in Williamsburg, for example, and December brought an East Village seafood shack that’s perfect for the colder weather, among others.) Are you looking for that neighborhood Italian place in Bed-Stuy with the good calamari salad? Or the Hell’s Kitchen spot with the latke-crusted sea bass? We’ve got you covered — with the next handful of new picks on the way later this week — right here.

There are two likely reasons why Ippudo V, the sixth New York location of the Japanese ramen chain, hasn’t achieved the line-out-the-door status of its other outposts despite having opened this summer. First, the V stands for “vegan,” and the window and sidewalk signs proclaiming “vegan ramen” may be doing more harm than good regarding the people who rightly associate Ippudo’s noodle soup with the essence of pork. (A co-worker walks past the space several times a week and told me that he never even realized it was an Ippudo.) The other detrimental detail is that this restaurant is located in Dumbo, and not the cute waterfront part of Dumbo. This restaurant is in bridge-overpass Dumbo at a particularly windy intersection of construction and multilane traffic.

But Ippudo V is worth a stop, especially on the windiest night, no matter what one’s meat-eating credentials might be. Right away, it doesn’t seem quite like a “restaurant” owing to a full-fledged gift shop hawking Ippudo-branded gear — a rack of hoodies, stacks of tie-dye T-shirts and caps, insulated water bottles — immediately to the left of the entrance. But behind the streetwear is an open kitchen facing a brightly lit bar that, along with the random coffee-table books and plastic ivy wall, evokes a co-working space. The menu is presented via a QR code imprinted on a wood block.

The plants may be fake, but the vegan menu doesn’t lean on Impossible-style imitation protein, except for something called “soy meat,” which appears in one of the ramen dishes and which I also suspect could be the “plant-based pork” found in the gyoza. All four soups — soy, miso, “chicken,” “pork” — are largely garnished with vegetables cut and cooked to various effects, like a slice of grilled tomato and onion tempura in the soy broth. (Plant-based “tuna” shows up in some of the sushi rolls, but the one I had was skippable; you are coming here for the noodles.)

This happens to be the first vegan Ippudo out of its many locations in California, Europe, and all over the Pacific, and while there does seem to be some component overlap with the vegan options at a “regular” New York Ippudo — tofu chashu, fried enoki mushrooms — the dishes at Ippudo V feel totally different, starting with tonkotsu-inspired broth, as cloudy as the recipe made from pork bones and possibly more savory. My server suggested stirring in a scoop of natto — fermented soy — for a flavor boost, but the soup was salty and rich enough to support the thick, curly ramen noodles that were still plenty chewy as I ate them. Those noodles also fared better than the thinner wheat noodles in a clear, poultrylike broth, though I liked the heavy dose of leeks, cabbage, and garlic chips that perfumed the bowl.

Compared to a recent stop at the East Village Ippudo, which had a wait list at 4 p.m. on a Saturday, I can say that the bowl-for-bowl experience is currently better at Ippudo V, even if it’s not on the radar of ramen trackers yet. In Dumbo, two guys sitting next to me at the bar had stopped in on their way back to Queens after a Nets game after learning about it on social media. One of them, a vegetarian Japanophile, told me that he thinks of Ippudo as “the old gray lady of ramen,” where “vegetarians seem like an afterthought.” This, he said, felt different. That hunch was reinforced when my miso ramen arrived under a dome of glass. The server lifted the lid and woody smoke floated across the bar. My new friends were impressed with the show. “This,” one said, “was not on the TikTok.”

Over the past dozen months, as our food team ducked into the subterranean seafood shanties, plush hotel lobbies, and revamped chrome diners that make up this year’s roster of new restaurants, we kept noticing a particular feeling: It all seemed so fun. There were no chefs pontificating on the genius of their own recipes, no processions of overtweezered intricacies, no “suggested” dress codes that forced us to swap out our old sneakers. Instead, we found drink lists filled with Moxie (the soda, in addition to some chutzpah), banchan platters inspired by Korean cabbies, overstuffed dessert trolleys, and even noodles drenched in Sprite (again: the soda). Stuffing our faces each night is not always the dream assignment it may sound like — one person can tackle only so many shellfish towers in a week — but after a joyful year of eating, these are the highlights that made us most excited to head out again and again.

Our Sandwich of the Year

Lunch lines start to form outside Radio Bakery (135 India St., at Manhattan Ave., Greenpoint) well ahead of 11 a.m., when sandwiches are released. This is because the fresh, craggy sesame focaccia is stuffed with a salad’s worth of dressed Tuscan kale and chunky pesto that gives necessary heft to sliced turkey galantine. Great lashings of olive oil help everything stick together to melt further into the crumb of the bread.

Actually Good TikTok Bait

It’s the rare stunt dish that’s also delicious, but lobster “triangoli” at San Sabino (113 Greenwich Ave., at Jane St.) delivers. Four unassuming ravioli are covered in “white vodka sauce” — Alfredo in all but name — and a heavy scattering of powdered black garlic. The show begins when the black-and-white pastas are pierced to release the crimson shellfish-butter sauce hiding inside — as striking as it is silly.

Fish That Deserved the Spotlight

Various grades of trophy Wagyu still fly into town from Japan or Texas or Montana for those who demand it, but in 2024, many new dry-agers are reserved for fish, as at Time and Tide (48 E. 26th St., at Park Ave. S.), a “steakhouse that only serves seafood” where a centerpiece offering is a $125 tuna collar, enormous fin still attached (and even the “bread” course is an oversize Goldfish-looking cracker). Raw bars and fish houses are big too: The genre is French-ish at Penny (90 E. 10th St., nr. Third Ave.), New England–ish at both Smithereens (414 E. 9th St., nr. First Ave.) and The Otter (The Manner hotel, 58 Thompson St.), Italian-ish at San Sabino, Cajun-ish at Strange Delight (63 Lafayette Ave., nr. Fulton St., Fort Greene), and any other ish you might wish at plenty of other spots around the city. As a trend, seafood has a lot going for it. For ambitious cooks, it offers variety that meat does not (maybe Penny will get periwinkles — tiny sea snails — to catch on), and the relative lightness means diners can leave dinner feeling at least somewhat virtuous. Do we yearn for the days when every new spot in town offered its version of a signature chef burger? It’s hard to miss them too much when you’re wrapping a warm sourdough tortilla around a hunk of hamachi collar at Corima (3 Allen St., nr. Division St.).

A Transporting Time Warp

Kisa (205 Allen St., nr. E. Houston St.) is a near-perfect reproduction of a 1980s gisa sikdang, a taxi-drivers’ restaurant. In building the set-menu cafeteria — where $32 gets a platter of pick-your-own protein and assorted banchan — David Yun set about re-creating the proletarian cafés of Korea, from the CRT-TV to the wall-mounted bank calendar. The wave of excellent Korean cooking that has swept the city has tended to be of a more expensive, more exclusive type. Kisa makes a strong case for the affordable charms of bulgogi, fish-cake jeons, and sweet, milky coffee dispensed from an ’80s-vintage machine.

An Hors d’Oeuvre That Took Over

The Gilda is queen of the Basque pintxos, yet it is just three items skewered on a toothpick. Still, wow. With its canonical combination of anchovy, pickled pepper, and Manzanilla olive, there may be no greater volume-to-punch ratio in all of cookery. At Eel Bar (252 Broome St., nr. Orchard St.), Aaron Crowder serves his two to an order, subbing pickled cucumber for the usual pepper, while at Bar Oliver (1 Oliver St., at St. James Pl.) nearby, a single Gilda (named for the Rita Hayworth film) is done in the classic style first made in San Sebastián in the ’40s. Across the island at The Otter, the Gilda’s puckery profile is repurposed as a dressing for tuna tartare.

The Sexiest Room

Cinematographers say everything looks better in the rain; even when it’s dry, the wall of textured glass that separates Eel Bar from the Broome Street sidewalk makes the space feel as if there’s petrichor in the air. Indoors, thin strips of pink and green neon add a playful note to the wood-paneled room, a little reminder that this isn’t just any old tavern. It’s still a spot to drop in, but for stuffed peppers, burgers with blue cheese and anchovies, and squid pintxos instead of steak and a beer.

A Great New Shoppy Shop

The people behind Syko in Windsor Terrace proved that a Syrian-Korean restaurant can work, and now they’ve shown that a Syrian-Korean corner store is a good idea too. At Dukan Syko (214A Prospect Park W., nr. 16th St., Windsor Terrace), there is not a bottle of Graza in sight. Instead, the tight space is lined with bulk bins of olives, a library of spices, multiple varieties of rice, an extensive selection of nuts and seeds, imported instant ramen, and a fridge stocked with freshly prepared kimchee, hummus, and frozen dumplings. There’s a bakery in the back making cheesy za’atar pies as well as fluffy pitas that are sold by the six-pack.

Deeply Comforting Pasta

Italians may disagree, but New Englanders know that seafood and dairy have a particular affinity for each other, especially when they’re topped with crackers. This is the inspiration for the agnolotti that Alex Stupak served on his opening menu at The Otter. These pillows of dough are filled with a celeriac-like purée of smooth, butter-rich parsley root that’s topped with piles of sweet crab and crumbles of Ritz pulled directly from their wax-paper sleeve.

The Crispiest Potatoes

The team at Sungold (Arlo Williamsburg, 96 Wythe Ave., Williamsburg) takes a bit of poetic license with the latke—its wedges of shredded, fried hash browns are more cake than pancake. To make them, a mass of grated potato and celery root is first slow-cooked in butter, then chilled and fried again. The two-day process gives this latke the soul of a rösti and the weight of au gratin potatoes. It’s served with a sticky pear butter and a flurry of grated horseradish that could help this dish pass for a main course.

The Most Welcome Comeback

In 2015, the vegan chef and Cupcake Wars winner Chloe Coscarelli opened By Chloe — only to have it wrested away in a hostile takeover before her onetime partners drove it into the ground. This year, Coscarelli made her return with Chloe (185 Bleecker St., at Macdougal St.) in the same storefront that housed her original shop. The recipes — quinoa taco salad; a mushroom-walnut patty that ranks among our favorite veggie burgers — are improved, and the space is as Instagram friendly as before. The only thing that’s changed is the lack of predatory partners. Don’t forget to try the cinnamon rolls!

WTF of the Year (Complimentary)

There are jokes that elicit eye rolls and jokes so committed to their bit that you have to respect them. Blue Hour (1525 Myrtle Ave., at Grove St., Bushwick) is a case of the latter. It is a takeout kiosk in a BP gas station, and it’s far better than that description makes it sound. A few yards from the premium and diesel pumps, just opposite the screens showing Lotto drawings — someone won $28,748 this summer — Ali Zaman and Mohamed Ghiasi are serving stoner-y junk food that is bewilderingly irresistible. A “Cwunch Wap Supweme” (take that, Taco Bell legal) is soft and griddled on the outside and oozy, crispy, and greasy within. The “NY chicken over rice” is comparable to what’s served at the topmost percentile of midtown street carts. And a monstrous composé of onion rings, fries, mozz sticks, halal beef bacon, and a chicken cutlet on Parisi bread might take a few years off your life, but we can’t think of much else that’s better at 2 a.m., Blue Hour’s closing time.

One Giant Fire

You can smell the smoke, a mix of cherry, apple, and hickory, wafting off the massive open grill and wood-burning oven as soon as you walk into Theodora (7 Greene Ave., nr. Fulton St., Fort Greene). But you have to find a seat — no easy proposition, alas — to taste the way it imbues nearly everything on the menu: bits of pineapple that are tucked into a snapper ceviche, hearty winter greens that hit the flame before they’re topped with smoked vinegar, and the crisp-skinned branzinos that are dry-aged on the premises and seem to land on every table at some point in the evening.

Eye-Opening Offal

In a year that saw gnarly bits make a welcome return to many of the city’s fine-dining menus — sweetbread nuggets at La Tête d’Or, skewered beef hearts at Borgo — it is chef Aaron Lirette’s morcilla Bolognese at Heroes (357 W. Broadway, nr. Broome St.) that has most stuck with us. The gentle paprika spice of the homemade blood sausage is thinned into a sauce, sweet with onion and pear, that’s tossed around spaghetti cooked until there is the exact right amount of chew to the noodle, a skill Lirette likely picked up during a previous stint in the kitchen at Roscioli.

And For Dessert, a Doughnut

On the dessert menu at galley-esque fish spot Smithereens, which includes intriguing oddities like celery-ice-cream floats and “candied seaweed” napoleons with licorice, it’s easy to overlook an “apple cider donut.” Delivered warm and made with cider and various degrees of Christmas spice, the doughnut is tossed in a mix of cinnamon, sugar, salt, freeze-dried apple, and malic acid. The effect is like those Sour Punch candy straws: It’s as puckery as it is sweet, a palate-whetting tang on top of soft dough that’s impossible to stop eating until it’s gone about four bites later.

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Book people, says Youngmi Mayer — who published her first memoir, I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying, last month — are a little gentler than the crowds she usually runs with. In her 20s, Mayer opened Mission Chinese Food with her then-husband; later, she found a new kind of success doing stand-up and posting comedy online. Being a server and making jokes on TikTok share some similarities, she thinks: “There’s a perception that the people who work at a restaurant are there to perform for you.” And customers-slash-commenters feel entitled to complain when they’re not amused. “I was forged in the fire of social media,” she says, “and the literary world feels great compared to that hellscape.” Earlier this fall — during a particularly hectic five days just before she skipped town for her book tour — she indulged in Instagram-famous pasta, New York’s finest larb tod, and several hastily eaten staff meals at the Mission Chinese pop-up.

Wednesday, October 23
I wake up on the floor of my friend Chris Crawford’s living room at three in the morning. The night before was her birthday so we went to karaoke and had a bunch of martinis at Baby Grand before heading back to her place on the Lower East Side with a handful of friends. The last thing I remember before passing out is Chris telling us how boring Ina Garten’s memoir is and playing the audio version over a speaker. I didn’t want to say anything, but I found it absolutely riveting — though I still passed out within ten minutes.

On the kitchen counter, I find a bunch of half-shucked oysters, bottles of natural wine, and fancy French cheese melted onto cute ceramic plates. I spot some fried potatoes in a Le Creuset pan on the stove and eat some of those along with a slice from an olive loaf that looks like it’s from one of those artisanal bakeries in Brooklyn where you have to wait on line for two hours to get a sourdough baguette.

I love eating at Chris’s house because she’s a chef and spends a lot of money on food that I wouldn’t. She and I have known each other since 2007, when we worked at a nice restaurant in San Francisco called Serpentine. She was a line cook, and I was a server. Now Chris owns Tart Vinegar. These days, I have this shitty teenager’s attitude toward nice food, like it’s an indie band I liked before it blew up. But it’s good to have a friend who cares so much about it that even the scraps I eat off their counter while drunk at 3 a.m. are way better than anything I buy for myself.

After the late-night snack, I fall asleep in Chris’s son’s room — he’s staying at his dad’s place. Chris and I both co-parent with our former partners, and luckily her birthday landed on a day neither of us has our kids. When I wake back up at 9:30 a.m., I run out the door to make it home in time for a Zoom meeting. I stop at Dreamers Coffee House in my neighborhood for a pumpkin-spice latte — iced because it’s a terrifying 70-something degrees in late fall. Honestly, I think pumpkin-spice lattes taste like ass, but at Dreamers, they make them in-house with pumpkin purée, which gives the drink a distinctive earthy flavor that’s way more satisfying than the chemical bathroom-air-freshener–tasting one at Starbucks.

After my meeting and some work emails, I take a shower and head to the Mission Chinese pop-up at 45 Mott Street, where I work as a server part time. Mission Chinese is owned by my ex-husband, Danny Bowien; we ran it when we were married. When it was really big, there were so many moving parts, so many different people working there. Now, he’s the only boss, and there are literally three servers. Danny and I have a great relationship, and it’s a very chill working environment. I eat staff meal, which is scrambled eggs with tomato and rice. During the dinner shift, there’s a kung pao–pastrami misfire and I hover over it until I annoy the chef enough that he gives it to me. A kung pao–pastrami misfire is like winning the lottery. Back at home — I get out of work around midnight — I eat it with rice before bedtime.

Thursday, October 24
I wake up and make myself a horrible cup of coffee. I am really bad at making coffee and I could never figure out why, so now I just add a ton of condensed milk. After my coffee, I head to 1-900-BLEACH-ME with my dog, Corn, to get my hair dyed by my friend, the owner of the salon, Chansophalla Nop. My friend John deBary is also there getting his hair done. I ask him to get me a seltzer because I’m under the heat lamp, hoping he’ll bring me a black-cherry Hal’s. Instead, being a fancy-food person, he gets me a 24-ounce bottle of San Pellegrino. The fancier sparkling waters are softer with their bubbles. I prefer industrial-strength seltzer.

At the salon, I have a slice of tres-leches cake that the wife of the building’s super has been selling to the tenants. Afterward, I go to Somtum Der and order the larb tod, which is one of my favorite dishes in New York — basically deep-fried pork meatballs in the shape of a doughnut. At Somtum Der, they’re served with sliced Thai chile, red onion, cilantro, ginger, lime, and peanuts. Not to sound like a white person with dreads, but I’ve eaten this dish a bunch in Thailand, and in my opinion, the version at Somtum Der is the best.

I head straight to work after I drop my dog off at home. The staff meal is stir-fried pork belly and rice. I’m too full to have it right away, so I put my share in a to-go container. Later, in the middle of the dinner shift, I get really hungry and try to sneak a bite in the kitchen, but a cook yells at me for making a mess. I get stressed out and try to slyly pour myself a glass of sparkling wine behind the bar, but a co-worker tells me I’m not allowed to drink wine so I get scared and leave it on the bar. Basically 90 percent of my job is trying to surreptitiously eat food and drink wine, then being yelled at for it. After my shift, I go home and eat the pork belly and rice while finishing up some work emails, and I get to bed around 2 a.m.

Friday, October 25
I wake up at seven and make myself another cup of horrible coffee with condensed milk. I have a middle-school tour for my son, Mino, at nine o’clock, then I’m picking up his Halloween costume, which I asked my friends Justin Hager and Kristine Reano-Hager to make. Every year, he chooses a costume because he wants to carry a toy gun. One year, he was like, “I want to be a policeman … and I get to have a gun.” The next, he said, “I want to be a soldier … and I get to have a gun.” And every year, I’m like, “You can’t carry a gun!” This year, he told me he wanted to be a spicy chicken nugget, and I was like, Thank God, he’s over the gun thing. But then he was like, “Get this: It’s spicy because it’s gonna have a suitcase. And the suitcase is gonna say ‘Hot Sauce’ on it. And when you open the suitcase, there’s gonna be a gun.”

Justin and Kristine live in Ridgewood, so I take an electric Citi Bike there from the East Village. After I pick up the chicken-nugget costume, which is hand-painted and sewn onto a hoodie, I go to the Peruvian-chicken place Super Pollo. Whenever I visit Justin and Kristine, I make a point of eating there. I get the quarter-chicken lunch special with arroz habichuelas and a side of maduros. The lunch special is only $12.50 or so, and even with the plantains, the total is only around $17. The chicken, which I eat with a bunch of green and white sauces, is amazing as usual.

I go home and do some cursed work emails, then head to Union Hall for a show. I’ve been doing stand-up since 2018. Before lockdown, I was going out every night, first to open-mic nights and later to shows I had booked. These days, I spend more time on online content and writing my book, but I still perform two or three times a month. Justin comes to the show with our other friend Amara Dan. Afterward, I follow them to a sports bar called the Dram Shop to meet up with their friends, who are all there to watch a sports game or whatever. The bar is packed with extremely divorced and unfortunate-looking men. One of them bumps into someone from our group and then starts screaming at her. I contemplate throwing hands, but he is just so divorced and unfortunate looking that I decide he would probably enjoy any kind of physical contact with a woman too much.

Justin, Amara, the friend who got screamed at, and I are starving at this point, so we walk over to the Long Island Bar to get burgers. Sadly, it’s closed for a private event, so we Google “burger” and end up across the street at Henry Public. I order a dirty martini, and everything is sort of blurry after that. Justin and Amara both get burgers, and I know we’re probably going to end up splitting everything so I order some sort of Little Gems–esque or wedge salad. It’s all really good. I like New American restaurants. They always have the same menu that tastes identical no matter where you are. I know I sound like a hater, but I’m being earnest. I love that the half-chicken, the Little Gems, and the burger are always going to taste exactly alike and are always going to be delicious.

At some point after I’m drunk off the dirty martini, I go to the server’s station to ask for aïoli for the fries. I feel really embarrassed by my request and try to endear myself to the server by saying I am also a server, but I think it backfires and makes me seem even more annoying. Anyway, the aïoli is really good.

Saturday, October 26
I wake up around nine and order an oat-milk cappuccino at Dreamers. Afterward, I pick up my son from his dad’s place to take him to his school’s Halloween party. He has no idea I had Justin and Kristine make his costume, and I wear the chicken-nugget hoodie so he’ll be surprised when he sees me. I even put a toy gun in a briefcase and carry it over. When he spots me walking in, he laughs really hard. Ultimately, though, I decide he can’t take the toy gun out in public, so he’s just a regular, unspicy chicken nugget.

We were planning on eating at the Halloween party, but the line is really long and I eventually realize it’s just pizza from the place down the street, so we end up at this new pasta takeout counter in front of his school called Pastasole (on Google Maps, it’s called Pasta de Pasta, but the sign and the official Instagram say otherwise). They blew up on social media because they make all their pasta in a wheel of Parmesan cheese. It’s like a Chipotle situation where the base is fettuccine Alfredo tossed in the TikTok-famous Parmesan wheel, and you have the option of adding toppings.

Mino gets smoked salmon and mozzarella balls as his toppings, and I add arrabbiata sauce and garlic shrimp. The pasta is $9, but it comes out to about $16 to $20 each with all the toppings. The smoked-salmon portion is a little too big and hard to eat, but the garlic shrimp is amazing. Mino has been wanting to go to this place ever since he saw it open a few months ago. It’s kind of funny raising a kid in New York. There are so many fancy restaurants, but I always end up eating at places like the fettuccine Alfredo counter or the mac-and-cheese-in-a-skillet restaurant or Benihana or some shit like that.

After lunch, I drop Mino off at his dad’s place so I can go to work at Mission Chinese. I don’t have my usual one sneaky glass of wine per night because I was yelled at during my last shift. For dinner, I eat rice and cucumbers from the salad station in a quart container over the dish pit at 11 p.m.

Sunday, October 27
I wake up and clean the whole house in anticipation of my son coming home from his dad’s. I choke down another cup of horrible coffee with condensed milk and head to Trader Joe’s around noon to buy groceries for Mino’s school week: bread, cheese, vegetables, sandwich stuff, and fruit. I also get some lunch-salad supplies for myself as well as something called a Nantucket cranberry pie from the frozen aisle. At home, I have a weekend-brunch cocktail with prosecco and St-Germain over ice. Then I shave some fennel and add olives, Parmesan, and sardines and make a little salad. I defrost the cranberry pie and eat a slice of that, too.

When Mino gets home, we run errands in Chinatown. Dinner is guacamole, from ingredients I got at TJ’s, and chili, which I serve over rice with cheese. Mino doesn’t have any of the cranberry pie, so I eat a little more of it after he goes to bed.

In case you haven’t heard, we have an app, and — though we are admittedly biased — it is excellent: fast and smooth and packed with every story from across all of New York’s verticals and sites, including our weekly Grub Street Diets, Tammie Teclemariam’s Underground Gourmet dispatches, Matthew Schneier’s restaurant reviews, and everything else from Grub Street the moment it’s published. The app also features an “Editor’s Picks” section that highlights our best investigations, reviews, essays, profiles, and more, as well as personalized notifications and a new “Collections” section that are both exclusive to the app.

If you’re already a subscriber, there’s nothing to do but download it to your iPhone — Android availability is coming shortly — and get started. You’ll only have to log in once (promise!), and you’ll be set.

We were barely a week into 2023 when a New York Times headline caught the restaurant-world’s attention: “Noma, Rated the World’s Best Restaurant, Is Closing Its Doors.” Speaking with reporter Julia Moskin, René Redzepi said that he had come to the conclusion that the fine-dining business model is “unsustainable” and “we have to completely rethink the industry.” The restaurant, Redzepi said, would “close for regular service at the end of 2024” and Noma would live on as a food lab with an e-commerce operation and periodic pop-ups. A flurry of takes followed: The Guardian wondered, “Are we seeing the death of fine dining?” Wired more emphatically declared it to be “the end of fine dining.” The Independent blamed the movie The Menu, in which Ralph Fiennes plays a murderous chef. But Fiennes, at least, can sleep easy, because we are now at the end of 2024 and Noma is open for business with no signs that it will close at all.

The first indicator that the end was not imminent may have come the same day the Times story was published, when Redzepi & Co. shared a plan on the restaurant’s website for regular pop-ups around the world and “seasons” in Copenhagen once they’ve “gathered enough new ideas and flavors.” By March 2024, the chef explained to Bloomberg that Noma was going to pop up in Kyoto and would instead close in the spring of 2025. “For real,” the story emphasized. But in October, Redzepi was back on Bloomberg for another course correction: Noma “will exist as a pop-up entity” that will “open once a year” in Copenhagen or elsewhere on earth. And so it went that last month, Noma released and immediately sold out of tickets for its next menu, “Ocean Season 2025,” which will run January 21 to June 27. This is not typically what a restaurant does when it closes.

A rep for Noma says the plan is to still “evolve into a new type of restaurant organization” that will “operate as a pop-up entity” and so on. “Aside from the autumn pop-up in Kyoto and the shift in timing, we are working toward an evolution of Noma with much of this transformation already being under way,” the rep writes. That is, at best, an interesting interpretation of “closing.”

What happened? One going theory is that Noma’s shuttering was always a deflection. Not long before the Times story was published, the pandemic’s culinary revolt had brought scrutiny to the restaurant’s treatment of stagiaires — “stages,” pronounced the French way — the unpaid kitchen interns, as well as foreign workers tied to workplace-specific visas. Writing in the Financial Times, Imogen West-Knights reported that Noma’s stages, on which the restaurant depended to assemble its intricate, labor-intensive food, were misled about their hours and the type of work they’d be doing. While that story was being reported, Noma announced that it would start paying its stages for the first time, having previously only offered experience and the chance to glean a bit of the restaurant’s reputation on their résumés. (It cost Noma $50,000 a month, the Times later reported, to pay its interns.)

Shortly after the Financial Times report, the Danish weekly Weekendavisen published an article, by Jeppe Bentzen, about the ways that Noma and other restaurants run by its alums were violating Danish labor law for foreigners on work visas. The businesses are required to pay workers from outside the European Union a minimum salary, which at the start of 2024 was 487,000 Danish krone, or about $69,000. As Bentzen noted in his story, this is much higher than what Danish cooks are paid, and many restaurants can’t afford these salaries. But these restaurants were using accounting tricks like deducting the cost of meals, he reported, from the workers’ salaries to pay them less than they were legally owed. At Noma’s now-closed sister restaurant, Restaurant 108, Bentzen reported that several employees had 5,000 Danish krone, or $705, a month deducted from their pay every month. More details about the workplace came out in the Times story, including one former stage who said that she’d spent her three months at Noma only making beetles out of fruit leather and was forbidden from laughing.

People on both sides of the Atlantic express their doubts that Noma was ever going to close at all. One New York chef who staged there said — sarcastically — it was “bullshit” to create hype. A different chef says that his well-connected friends in Copenhagen tell him “it’s never gonna close,” but agreed to be quoted only as long as nothing led back to him. “They probably have hit men,” he joked. Yet another defended Redzepi spiritedly, but would only do so off the record. Most didn’t want to chat. (Moskin declined to talk about the reporting process, but acknowledged that getting people to go on the record about Noma “with anything but full-throated praise” is “so much work, every time.”) Some speculate that Redzepi was planning to shut down his shrine to sea buckthorn because he was feeling the pressure, or that he panicked about the negative press and public outrage surrounding the restaurant’s labor practices. But then, one observer said, nothing happened with the charges.

Of course, plenty else has happened since. This summer, Apple TV+ premiered Redzepi’s show, Omnivore, and Noma launched its e-commerce operation, which includes a “Taste Buds Membership,” a $680 subscription that promises “early access” to products from Noma’s test kitchen. The organizers of the Heartland Festival have hosted conversations at the restaurant, including one between Jeremy Strong and Karl Knausgård. Right now, Redzepi and his team are in Japan for their pop-up; later this month, they’ll return home to prepare for next year’s menu. Even if it’s only open for the first half of the year, it’s still open. It also means fewer dinners, which naturally increases the restaurant’s exclusivity, at least until the next menu is inevitably announced.

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Recently at Cafe Mado in Prospect Heights, before a dinner of fries and a Caesar salad that was one-third dressing and one-third cheese, I drank an aperitif that I can’t stop thinking about. It was straw-toned and slightly hazy, and a sip revealed a drink that was as vibrantly citrusy as it was mellow and earthy. The medium-bodied liquid, prickled with a light frizzante, and emitted a dried floral fragrance upon swirling its thin-stemmed wineglass. I had the same thought as my dining partner, who tried my drink and said, “I thought it was wine.”

This was not the latest vintage of Chablis or even a cocktail, but the Bitter Lemon. It’s the latest addition to the Prospect Heights café’s nonalcoholic drink list, which I became curious about after the meal started with a free pour of the Grand Fir, a sparkling drink flavored with the needles of a Pacific Northwest tree whose coordinates are known only to their forager, Tama Matsuoka Wong.

The first thought I tend to have when drinking even the best mocktails is, This would be better with some gin in it. But the Fir was crisp and dry, evoking a proper G&T without the alcoholic bite, while the Bitter Lemon offered enough dimension from the structure, aroma, and bitterness that I didn’t have the urge to guzzle it down. I pictured myself having a glass at lunch or bringing it to a party, or drinking it on tap if I ever decide to do a dry January.

Cafe Mado’s beverage director, Piper Kristensen, became a specialist in complex “non-alcs,” as he calls them, while opening this restaurant’s predecessor, Oxalis, in the same space in 2018. Upon launching its multicourse tasting menu, the restaurant lacked a liquor license but still wanted to offer a serious beverage pairing. Kristensen was tasked with developing a full range of drinks that could live up to the food as well as the wine might.

“If you take away alcohol, which is a huge built-in reward for your brain, you’re like, How can I make this exciting?” says Kristensen, who achieves winelike equilibrium in spirit-free drinks using traditional cocktail techniques, like making lemon oleo saccharum, wherein sugar is macerated with the citrus zest to draw out the oils before turning everything into a syrup. This gives the Bitter Lemon drink its bright top notes as well as some coloring, as does a base of chrysanthemum tea. Since fresh juice loses its pop over longer periods of time, Kristensen tweaks the drink’s tartness with citric and malic acids that “mimic the lemon profile,” plus tartaric acid for “rigidity that makes it not just like a juice.”

Then there are what Kristensen calls nonalcoholic modifiers for that “X factor”: products such as Seedlip, which in this case rounds out the middle palate in ways that sugar and acid cannot achieve alone. Seedlip is basically flavored water, but it’s got a lush texture and well-calibrated tang that even a professional like Kristensen can’t replicate, which is also why a bottle costs $35 at my local market. The Bitter Lemon employs two varieties: the citrus-forward Grove 42 with a touch of Spice 94.

Tonic water adds the grounding bitter note, then Kristensen lightly carbonates the batch for a textural element that ties the drink together: “All of our nons are kind of bubbly. Carbonation really ejects aroma and flavor outward.”

It also helps preserve the drinks in their canned versions, which are sold in the retail section for takeout, but since I’m not in the neighborhood of Cafe Mado, I decided to try my hand at a pared-down home version that nixes the acid adjustment and carbonation rig, and only uses one type of Seedlip. I think it’s pretty close to the real thing.

First, I have to assure you that making an oleo saccharum is both easy and worth the (minor) trouble of zesting four lemons with a vegetable peeler and mixing them in an airtight container, or sealed ziplock bag, with two cups of sugar. The whole process took me maybe ten minutes. Then just let it all sit for a day or so, swishing it around a couple of times, and by the end, the oils in the citrus peels should have visibly transferred to the sugar, giving it a clumpable texture in the process. To make a syrup, combine the sugar and peels with two cups of boiling water and whisk until everything is dissolved. Let it cool, and you can keep it stored in the refrigerator for a month.

To replicate the tea, I bought whole dried chrysanthemums from Ten Ren on Mott Street, but you can find them, or a bagged equivalent, at most Asian supermarkets. I steeped a heaping tablespoon in 20 ounces of boiling water until it cooled. Then, to make the actual drink, make sure everything is completely chilled so you don’t have to use any ice that might dilute the mixture. Combine two parts of the chrysanthemum iced tea with one part Seedlip Grove 42 and one part of the lemon syrup; you can do this directly in a glass, or make a larger batch, which can also be stored in the fridge for a couple days. When you’re ready to drink it, top each glass off with a splash or two of nice tonic water, like Fever-Tree.

A meal at the Carroll Gardens restaurant Ugly Baby is atomic, especially when the duck salad or kua kling are on the table. Opened in late 2017 by the chef Sirichai Sreparplarn, the destination for blast-your-face-off Thai food stood out in a neighborhood mostly known for New American brunches and Italian American time warps. Yet Ugly Baby quickly became regarded as Brooklyn’s, if not the whole city’s, best Thai restaurant, a place where, New York once wrote, “everything feels like a pure manifestation of its chef-owner’s taste and personality.” But before the end of this month, the owners will manifest the end of Ugly Baby: Via social media, they announced that they’re shutting it down for good.

“We’re closing because chef Sirichai is just really tired and needs a long, long break,” one of the business’s partners writes. “While we’ll miss the restaurant and all the great things that come with it, the upside is that this will give chef Sirichai the chance to work on a cookbook, which he’s long been wanting to do.”

Born in Bangkok, Sreparplarn moved to New York in his late 20s to study journalism. He worked at his aunt’s Thai restaurant in the East Village, and the curry pastes came calling. In the mid-2010s, he established himself with Kanlaya Supachana as one of the conspirators behind Red Hook’s thrilling Chiang Mai and Kao Soy. At the latter, he told the New York Times, their goal was to expose New Yorkers to “the real food from the north” of Thailand. Those restaurants received acclaim, but neither lasted. On Smith Street, Sreparplarn went solo, and his career took off. Bon Appétit ranked Ugly Baby No. 3 on its list of the country’s “Best New Restaurants,” then-Times critic Pete Wells rhapsodized about the fried coconut cakes called tue ka ko, and here at New York we praised a deep-fried whole sea bream that was so compulsively edible it made “the evil food-science technicians” come across “like amateurs.” Most importantly, it — along with a few other spots — helped expose a generation of Brooklyn white guys to the thrill of incredibly spicy food and allowed other operators to tap into the previously nonexistent market.

As Tammie Teclemariam wrote a few months ago, “Excellent Thai restaurants — spots that promote regionally inspired menus filtered through individual chefs’ experiences and sensibilities — are becoming the norm” in New York. This new norm was established by a wave of Thai restaurants that, during the 2010s, brought the cuisine to new regions of the city, and included Sreparplarn’s businesses. Before, Thai food outside Queens mostly meant gloopy green curries, and if you wanted quality papaya salad, you had to head to Sunnyside’s SriPraPhai (est. 1990) or Elmhurst’s Thaitown. But Isaan mania began to spread around Manhattan a decade and a half ago through places like Somtum Der as well as restaurants opened by Ratchanee Sumpatboon of Elmhurst’s Chao Thai and Astoria’s Podam. These included Larb Ubol, which spawned the mini-chain Lan Larb, and the East Village location of Zabb Elee, which crowds mobbed right after a J. Kenji López-Alt review. In 2012, Andy Ricker opened a branch of his Portland restaurant Pok Pok Ny in the “Columbia Street Waterfront District.” Ann Redding and Matt Danzer opened Uncle Boon’s the following year, and it stayed mobbed until it closed during the pandemic. Thai Diner, Uncle Boon’s spiritual successor, is still one of the city’s most popular spots.

More recently, Zaab Zaab has become the latest Thaitown success story and is on an expansion tear across downtown Manhattan, Williamsburg, and Flushing. There are scene-y successors to Uncle Boon’s like Bangkok Supper Club, and its predecessor Fish Cheeks, as well as a handful more of Brooklyn spots like Sukh.

Ugly Baby isn’t a victim of its own success; its popularity hasn’t waned as newer options have proliferated. In fact, it seems to be as buzzing as ever. In 2022, the restaurant stopped taking reservations in order to, the explanation went, serve more people. Last year, Zach Schiffman found it was the rare “impossible table” restaurant that was actually as busy as it claimed. The closing news has, of course, brought crowds who don’t want to spring for tickets to Bangkok: On Monday, Eater NY’s Emma Orlow reported the restaurant was quoting “two-hour waits” over the weekend. It’s good to go out on top.

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Ask any working chef to pinpoint that particular time of the day when the sense of anticipation, intensity, and madness is at its most frenzied peak and they’ll usually say sometime in the late afternoon, an hour or so before the doors open and service begins. But for Dan Richer, that time is earlier, when the day’s dough, which has been gently rising all night, is first unpacked and made ready for service at his pizza mecca, Razza Pizza Artigianale, which occupies a double-wide storefront across from city hall on Grove Street in Jersey City. There are two ovens to fire up, and ingredients to sort, and there is the sacred sourdough starter to tend to, something Richer began doing several times a day close to two decades ago, when he first started his quixotic quest to produce the most consistently excellent pizza pie the world has ever seen.

“This is my peaceful time. It’s like I’m a conductor standing before the symphony,” says Richer, who is dressed on this weekday afternoon the way he is every day, in a black cap, short-sleeved J.Crew henley, and pair of black jeans dusted here and there with white flour. Even in a discipline filled with quirky perfectionists, Richer is known as a man of obsessive routine and ritual. Over the years, he has drawn up charts on how to evaluate the perfect tomato (the “Tomato Evaluation Rubric”) and the perfect mozzarella (“Oh, I could talk to you for hours about cheese”). At Razza, he keeps a large plastic box on hand, filled with esoteric gizmos for measuring things like the sugar content and viscosity of a canned tomato, and when he first began his quest for the perfect pie, he started recording his observations in a notebook that has grown over the years in thickness and heft to resemble the flight manuals that pilots haul around airports.

“Dan’s pizza notebook was about 200 pages when we worked together, and that was 11 years ago. I can’t imagine how big it is now,” says chef Nick Anderer, who had hired Richer to help develop a pizza restaurant called Marta. Anderer and Richer agree that this kind of attention to detail comes in handy in the upper realms of the pizza world, where, like a pilot or a mountain climber, a chef must deal with with all sorts of swirling, ever-changing elements, such as the yeasty dough that mutates in taste and texture throughout the day or the roaring wood fire. As one pizza chef tells me, “It’s like working in the mouth of a dragon.”

Anderer found the seemingly simple process of making consistently delicious pizza so fickle and unnerving that after Marta folded, he vowed to never again open another pizza joint (and his new Italian concept in Union Square, Leon’s, is blissfully pizza free), though for Richer and the new generation of pizzaiolos he represents, the opposite seems to be true. “Everything is in constant motion; we’re always chasing flavor. It’s not exhausting — it’s invigorating!” he cries as the crescendo at Razza slowly builds through the afternoon. Eventually, a few margherita pies are put in to bake, filling the restaurant with a comforting, toasty smell. Richer describes his philosophy as “anti-Neapolitan,” but he considers this ancient mozzarella-and-tomato classic to be the ultimate expression of the pizza-maker’s art. It’s the best seller at Razza by a factor of two to one, and it’s also his favorite pie to eat.

“It’s all part of the magic that you’re not going to figure out in five minutes or even 20 years,” says Richer, crouching down and peering into the flames before taking one of the pies, and then another, from the oven. He runs his fingers around the crust, then lifts each pie into the air to inspect the char underneath before tossing both of them in a nearby trash can. “It’s like making pancakes: The first couple always end up in the garbage,” cries the pizza maestro of Jersey City as he rushes off to roll tomorrow morning’s dough through his fingers and stick his nose into a batch of starter yeast.

If it seems as though the ever-expanding, increasingly global pizza universe — the cooks and bakers and legions of pizza loons who travel the world filling their Instagram feeds with pies fashioned by masters in Tokyo, Arizona, or Copenhagen — is in the midst of a pizza revolution, it is probably because we are in the midst of many. Over the past couple decades, pizza wizards like Richer have been popping up in all sorts of unlikely places, including Phoenix, Arizona; Dana Point, California; and the Lower East Side of New York City, which, as any self-respecting pizza loon can tell you, is the home base to the monastic, famously intense father of the nouveau New York Neapolitan school, Una Pizza Napoletana’s Anthony Mangieri. Unlike many of Richer’s peers in this new generation, however, he has no plans to open other Razzas in far-off places like Brooklyn (“I think I missed my Brooklyn moment”), Manhattan (“Yes, there have been offers”), and Los Angeles, nor does he employ a public-relations team (“I’m sorry, Anthony would rather not talk about other people’s pizza,” Mangieri’s press flack told me when I asked whether he would chat with me for this story). And if you take the PATH train across the river to Jersey City on most any evening, you won’t have to stand on line along Grove Street for close to an hour for a bite of rusty-tasting marinara poured over a crackerlike crust, the way one does at Taylor Swift’s beloved, TikTok-approved Carroll Gardens destination, Lucali.

“Dan is the Le Bernardin of pizza-makers — he doesn’t need to open 20 restaurants to prove himself. He has one, and he does it right,” says the Brooklyn chef and pizzaiolo Frank Falcinelli, who, along with his partner, Frank Castronovo, makes regular pilgrimages to Jersey City to commune with the maestro’s pies. Katie Parla, who met Richer on one of his visits to Rome and is the co-author of his chart- and rubric-heavy book, The Joy of Pizza (“In Praise of the Caliper” is the name of one section), describes Richer as “the pizza-maker’s pizza-maker.” Long before she agreed to the daunting task of working on his book (and before a glowing New York Times review in 2017 put Richer and his restaurant on the national pizza map), she was a regular at Razza, often going directly to Grove Street from the Newark airport after her plane landed from Rome, where she lives, for a furtive taste of Richer’s signature, lightly brittle “eggshell” crust.

Richer achieves this famed brittleness by baking his pies for a minute or so longer than the old masters back in Naples, and unlike those old masters, he also uses three kinds of flour in ever-changing ratios to build his pizza dough throughout the week. He rotates three types of marinara, too, during the bake depending on the heat of the ovens and the toppings he’s using, and several varieties of mozzarella and ricotta are torn or chopped or spooned onto the pie depending on the kind of melt Richer is trying to achieve. In the summer, it’s common to find five varieties of tomato pie on the menu at Razza, decked with crinkly leaves of basil and barely visible slivers of garlic, along with pies dappled with thin buttons of squash or handfuls of fresh corn from the farms around northern New Jersey. Spring brings pies topped with asparagus or garden peas, fall means pies covered with foraged mushrooms, and pies scattered with chopped hazelnuts appear as the weather turns cold in the winter.

“Dan’s pizza has a nostalgic, reminiscent quality while at the same time being very local to his part of New Jersey and also very progressive, which is extremely difficult to do,” says Falcinelli. “You get hints of Naples; you get a hint of John’s coal oven in New York; you get a hint of all of these ancient flavors. But when you look down at the pie, you’re looking at this completely modern thing that he’s created.”

The great New York City chef Wylie Dufresne, who fell down his own self-described “pizza rabbit hole” during COVID and now operates Stretch Pizza on lower Park Avenue, compares the pizza prodigies of today to virtuoso guitarists, each with their own distinctive sound and technique. “You might like Hendrix more than Jerry Garcia, and Dan’s in that conversation without question,” he says. “Lots of people cover tunes in the pizza world, but you don’t see people covering Dan. It’s too hard to play Zappa, if you know what I mean.”

Like many members of pizza’s New Wave, Richer considers himself a baker first and a pizza chef second. He credits Mangieri for sparking his interest in the Neapolitan style along with the mysteries of using mother yeast to enhance the flavor of a classic wood-burning pie — Richer used to visit Una Pizza every Sunday evening to breathe in the magical, yeasty smells of freshly rising dough when he was first learning his craft — but if you ask him to name his earliest heroes and influences, he’ll tick off the names of master bakers like Jim Lahey of Sullivan Street Bakery and Peter Reinhart, author of one of the bibles of modern baking, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. Richer often compares his work to plumbing (a difficult, unglamorous job that is mastered through years of numbing repetition), and like more than a few pizzaiolos, he’s a loner by nature, one of the philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s proverbial “hedgehogs” that toil for years in obscurity to master a single discipline, compared to the versatile “foxes” that are masters of many.

“There are people who have been making pizza in this city for 50 years who have no idea why they’re making great pizza. It’s the tradition — it’s what they’ve been told to do. But Dan is not one of these people,” says Dufresne. “Dan knows what he’s doing at every step of the process so he can say, I want a little bit more crunch, or I want a little bit more acid in my dough. And on top of that, he wants to show a team of 20 how to do it,” he continues. “I love Anthony Mangieri, but Anthony doesn’t even let anyone touch the dough; he does everything himself. Dan is a great teacher — he’s happy to show others how to do what he does — and that’s one of his great gifts.”

Growing up in Matawan, New Jersey, Richer began his pizza studies at a young age, riding his bike from one slice joint to another, often financing his research with coins he’d find buried under cushions in the family couch. At 15, he got a job as a busboy at a red-sauce joint called Dusal’s, where he remembers trading the chef a guitar lesson in exchange for learning the intricacies of making a proper chicken parm. He dreamed of being a guitar player before ending up with a degree from Rutgers, which included a couple of invaluable years at Cook College, the school’s science and agricultural program. He says he gets his love of focused routine and repetition, and a touch of artistic sensibility, from his mother, who worked as a calligrapher, endlessly copying out cards and invitations for hours on end in her office upstairs, and who died after a long struggle with cancer a few months after he returned from a post-college-graduation trip to Italy.

“That was, like, a crack in the earth for me,” says Richer, who during his travels from the Italian Alps down to the Amalfi Coast had already decided to become a chef. After his mother’s death, he began haunting Greenmarkets and bonding with many of the same farmers he still patronizes today. He went through a manic pasta-making phase and worked part time on the line at a French restaurant, where he learned how to butcher rabbits and ducks. He eventually ended up owning a portion of a red-sauce establishment in Maplewood, New Jersey, where the menu slowly evolved with his interests and obsessions to include pasta dishes made from scratch, elaborate “omakase” tasting dinners (influenced by a trip to Tokyo, where he practiced his Japanese and sampled whale meat, among other activities), and, finally, during the late aughts, bread-baking and wood-fired pizza.

“When Dan was in Maplewood, he bought two pizza ovens, which was exactly two more pizza ovens than he knew how to use,” says Parla, who grew up in New Jersey herself. He began experimenting with sourdough yeasts in his dough (the one he uses at Razza is descended from a sprig of New Jersey wheat he first cultivated back in those days). He studied the wood-burning characteristics of different kinds of trees (“We use oak, cherry, and a bit of beech at Razza, but in the end, the type of wood is less important than dryness and size”) and tossed thousands of pizzas into the garbage while wrestling with the delicate art of wood-fired cooking. Like an explorer making the first notations in his logbooks as he sets sail on an ocean journey, he began to jot down observations on different starters, different mixes of flour, different characteristics of the perfect tomato (there are eight, for the record), and the many elements (56 of them and counting) that go into making the perfect pizza pie.

Parla points out that back in those days, American pizza was still largely divided into regional specialties — the hurried slice culture of New York City, the apostate deep-dish school of Chicago, the charcoal-fired clam masters of coastal Connecticut — with each one sunk in their own particular dogmas and prejudices. By the time Richer opened the original Razza in an old theater space on Grove Street in 2012, however, the pizza world had entered a vibrant new era in which, Parla says, chefs all over the country emerged to forge their own styles and were discussed in the kind of hushed reverent tones once reserved for haughty Frenchmen from another suddenly vanished era.

Richer likes to compare the explosion of pizza around the U.S. to the explosion of ramen around Japan. Both began as humble, working-class comfort foods from another country (pizza from Italy, soup noodles from China) before evolving over time into regional specialties and then increasingly elaborate and popular national dishes with a flavor and culture all their own. Ask him to pick a favorite regional style and he’ll tend to talk about different epochs the way a Roman scholar talks about different imperial eras, though the allure of pizza — community, comfort, family memories — has always been the same. Richer considers the 1940s in Connecticut to be a golden age, along with the ’60s in New York City, and if he had to choose a venue for a last pizza meal, like most of us it would probably be an idealized version of the kind of pizza he grew up eating, preferably enjoyed with his wife and son, at the original Patsy’s on First Avenue, up in East Harlem, in one of the weathered old booths under the famous portrait of Frank Sinatra.

It’s another day of chasing pizza perfection at Razza, and the maestro has invited me to one of his blind tomato tastings, something he and the staff do periodically just to make sure that their favorite canned tomato (Alta Cucina plum tomatoes from California’s Central Valley) is still their favorite canned tomato. As he assembles the various implements from his gizmo box — the device that measures sugar content, a slidelike contraption used to gauge tomato thickness — and arranges the samples of canned tomatoes from Italy and the USA in five china bowls, Richer muses in his infectious, wide-eyed way about issues in the pizzaverse that have been occupying his attention lately: whether to bake basil leaves into your margherita in the oven or scatter them on fresh after the bake (“I like both!”), his love of manuals and rubrics (“You can’t build a house without a good set of blueprints!”), his favorite Italian pizza style (“big square Roman”), and the lack of a female presence in the pizza world, an issue that has perplexed him for some time.

“In 20 years of hiring people, I’ve received fewer than ten applications from women,” he says as we begin tasting the different canned tomatoes, some of which are too pulpy, or too rusty-tasting, and one of which, No. 4, the Alta Cucina from Napa, as it turns out, is more or less perfect. Parla says that with the emergence of pizza as a gourmet product (and a very profitable one), more women are going into the business in Italy and the U.S., but the prevalence of what she calls “pizza bro culture” remains an issue, and Richer agrees. He tells the story of one of his favorite employees at Razza, a talented baker in her 20s who was promoted every step of the way until she abruptly left, probably to explore other, more creative aspects of the baking business, and who could blame her: “I don’t really understand it, but this is a repetitious discipline rather than a creative one. It’s messy. It’s tiring. It’s boring.” One must possess a “certain mania for it,” Richer says, and becoming a pizza maniac, he’s willing to admit as we conclude our tomato tasting and he rushes off to another part of the restaurant, isn’t for everyone.

As I puzzle over my voluminous tomato-tasting notes, several freshly baked pizzas eventually arrive at my table in the empty restaurant. There’s a gently cooling pie dressed with melted ribbons of smoked pork jowl and one constructed with two kinds of cheese (milky, sweet mozzarella and the slightly more tart scamorza) and scattered with the last remnants of late-Indian-summer corn and a drizzle of fermented chile paste. There’s a mushroom pie made with the first foraged findings of the fall, sweetened with an invisible scrim of caramelized onion; a classic margherita made with the tomatoes we have just been tasting; and a creation called Di Natale, which means Christmas in Italian, that was inspired, with the help of Parla, by a traditional pasta dish that Neapolitans make using all various leftovers (raisins, pine nuts, extra-virgin olive oil, pitted black olives) from their Christmas dinners.

Each pizza has a lightly charred crust and is shaped in a way that manages to look uniform and original at the same time. The sourdough gives the pies a nutty taste, which you can smell as you break off the slices and begin to eat. The crust has a combination of structure and gourmet lightness that you don’t see in the upscale pizza joints across the river, and each of the toppings enlivens each of the pizzas in different, unique ways without overwhelming them. Richer briefly returns to the table in his cap and flour-dusted black jeans. He says that if you are a daily regular at Razza, you might not notice the subtle changes in these recipes, but if you sample his pies year to year, “you would know our pizza has gotten better.” He takes a bite of his margherita pie, sets it down, and says, “This is the pizza I want to eat all day.” When I ask whether this is his idea of the perfect pizza, the maestro shrugs his shoulders. “We’re working on it, man,” he says with a happy smile. “We’re working on it.”

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Welcome to Grub Street’s rundown of restaurant recommendations that aims to answer the endlessly recurring question: Where should we go? These are the spots that our food team thinks everyone should visit, for any reason (a new chef, the arrival of an exciting dish, or maybe there’s an opening that’s flown too far under the radar). This month: amberjack belly in the East Village, sweetbread nuggets à la Boulud, and a department-store café that feels like something out of a children’s book (yes, it’s Louis Vuitton).

Leon’s (Union Square)
A corner space like Leon’s — expansive, across from the Strand — has a sense of spectacle to it, even with half-curtains obscuring so much of the Broadway buzz. “Is this your first time?” our jocular server asked a few nights after opening as we took in the clamshell sconces and algae-like swipes of green paint on the wall. Yes. “That would make sense,” she replied. “It’s only my third day.” Yet the place already displays polish: The second restaurant from Anton’s owners Nick Anderer and Natalie Johnson, the food here is Italian but also Egyptian (in honor of Johnson’s grandfather) and a little French. The “chips and onions Soriano” are none of these things — inspired instead, Johnson explains, by the Spanish fries of 1980s New York — but they’re a must. Topped with onions and seasoned, crucially, with smoked paprika and citrus powder, they are savory and irresistible. Order the shrimp and potato salad, too, but skip the crab tuffoli with coriander in favor of the ravioli alla caprese, which are plump, rich, and a nice foil to the lamb misto, skinny skewers, fatty belly, and well-seasoned kofta. (During lunch, those same kofta are served with Johnson’s family rice, pilaf al Hakim.) For dessert: How about a cookie plate (it’s December, after all), which includes a fantastically chewy tahina, or some crème caramel? —Chris Crowley

Le Café at Louis Vuitton (Midtown)
Step aside, Polo Bar, there’s a new fashtaurant in town. Le Café du Louis Vuitton, as it’s known, is the Maison’s first eating establishment in the United States. My midwestern mom joined me on a recent visit, and she aptly called it “very Kardashian.” The dining room communicates luxury as visibly as possible, and even the POS devices for servers are hidden inside the brand’s classic trunks. The logos extend to the French-leaning menu by chef Christophe Bellanca — a caviar-embossed scallop soufflé, an emblem-shaped potato waffle — and the desserts from pastry chef Mary George are as covered in LV iconography as the handbags for sale elsewhere in the building. No disrespect to the monogramming, but my favorite dishes featured less branding: rich and layered truffle eggs à la Coque (served with an embossed brioche breadstick for dipping), and the “Vélours Noir,” a cocoa-dusted negroni perfect for this time of year. Alas, the ice is stamped with an LV logo, too, but it was easy to overlook as it melted. —Zach Schiffman 

Smithereens (East Village)
It’s not exactly coastal, but the cuisine of New England has washed up on East 9th Street. Smithereens, from Nick Tamburo, a former Claud chef, occupies a low-ceilinged, galley-shaped warren with seawater-colored walls; the lobster rolls come stuck with paper replicas of the Massachusetts state flag. Smithereens is only the latest comer in a year of upscale fish shacks, but there’s plenty to recommend it. Classics are dutifully riffed on — clam chowder reimagined as hake in a potato-and-herb broth with clams — but my tip is to treat the restaurant instead like an Eastern Seaboard sushi joint. Amberjack belly seared over binchotan with sea-lettuce vinaigrette was meaty and crisp-skinned, and we lived to regret not ordering scallops with thinly shaved matsutake mushrooms and lime zest or sliced tuna rolled around pear and cherry blossom. Do save room for dessert, whether that’s a tangy cider doughnut served hot or the odd but enticing float of celery-root ice cream with celery soda and maraschino cherries. And for a drink, instead of the traditional Narragansett, the wine list (by Nikita Malhotra, previously of Momofuku Ko) all but insists on a German white, the kind of monomania that demands and deserves to be celebrated. —Matthew Schneier

La Tête d’Or (Flatiron)
By this point in his decades-spanning, done-it-all career, Daniel Boulud could, and possibly even should logically have “DB Steak” outposts inside casinos and luxury-hotel lobbies across the globe. In reality, this Golden Head is, the chef’s various reps have relayed repeatedly, his “first steakhouse.” He seems to have no interest in disrupting genre conventions — the Caesars are tossed tableside, Texas beef careens around the room in a prime-rib trolley, everything is expensive — while offering the kind of mannered, Franco tweaks one expects from a Boulud establishment: clover-size broccoli florets garnishing “sweetbread nuggets,” a crab cake crowned with a savory tuille, a list of classical add-on sauces that Escoffier would recognize. (Also expected: a full dining room on opening night, with seats occupied by what looked like the uptown doctors and lawyers and finance barons who are the habitués of his other Manhattan dining rooms.) It’s big and festive and polished in a Vegas-y sort of way, which seems to be the goal, and which feels tonally appropriate for the sprint into the holiday season. —Alan Sytsma 

Kinjo (Dumbo)
Visit one sub-$100 omakase spot and it can feel like you’ve been to them all, but the $95 service at this counter on the Dumbo waterfront is an exception to the standard of bare-bones spaces squeezed into narrow storefronts. The ambience at the 13-seat lacquered wood bar is decidedly serene, with textured wallpaper all the way up to the former factory’s ceiling. The 11-course menu feels special too, like a scallop crudo starter with honeydew and a spicy sprig of watercress; and a curry-glazed, lightly flamed shrimp nigiri with shredded fried leeks. After six pieces of sushi, the sequence finishes with a five-day koji-cured duck breast, sliced and served on a soft crêpe with a shiso leaf and pineapple hoisin, all meant to be rolled together like a taco, followed by sablefish chazuke where the fish melts in a fine-tuned dashi. If the meal is a little light, there is an opportunity to order à la carte at the end, or you can finish the night with cocktails and snacks at the restaurant’s loungy bar. —Tammie Teclemariam

Like Caputo’s Bake Shop from 1904 and the Episcopal church built in 1884, Buttermilk Channel in Carroll Gardens is a time capsule from another era, albeit one that’s slightly more recent. Open since 2008, the restaurant’s house-made pickles and cheddar waffles with buttermilk fried chicken call back to the years of selvedge denim and artisanal mayonnaise. But if the menu feels dated in 2024, that’s only because the restaurant’s many regulars wouldn’t let owner Doug Crowell change it. “Our relationships with our customers are really deep,” Crowell says. “I mean, their children grew up eating here.”

But now, 16 years after opening, Crowell is closing the restaurant to make time for other projects, including the Boerum Hill bistro French Louie that he runs alongside Ryan Angulo and which recently turned a decade old. “We’re starting to refresh it,” says Crowell. “We’re looking at what’s still working and what needs to be new.”

For that to happen, Crowell needs to close Buttermilk Channel, where he’s the sole owner. “It’s a very personal restaurant for me,” he says. “I can’t put it on cruise control or give it to other people. I have my eyes and hands on every detail.” Its last day is December 31.

Two Buttermilk Channel outposts in Japan will stay open, and Crowell hints he may reopen the restaurant in another location if the circumstances are right. That’s not much consolation for the restaurant’s regulars, who learned about the closure in an email.

Through the years, Buttermilk Channel offered the kind of comfortable space — paper on the tables that kids could scribble with crayons, outdoor seating for brunch on nice days — and easygoing food (duck meatloaf, fluffy pancakes, warm lamb salad with sturdy greens and a soft-boiled egg) that appealed to the area’s many families, and it quickly became a mainstay.

“It’s heartbreaking,” says Matt Polevoy, who lives in Park Slope. He and his wife have been dining at the restaurant for years. They recall stumbling into the dining room during a nor’easter when nothing else was open to order a pecan-pie sundae. In 2015, they got married at City Hall — then had dinner at the communal table in the back. “It was perfect,” he says. “That’s how I’ll remember that place.”