Rainbow cookies are wonderful because this layered Italian American dessert is a sweet checklist of everything good — in a vibrant, chocolatey casing. They’re moist but not soggy or crumbly and, more important, they’re vibrant— if they’re well-made.

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Typically, rainbow cookies are layers of colored almond paste-based cake — usually red, green, and white or cream, mimicking the Italian flag. The layers are then slathered with raspberry or apricot jam, and it’s finished with thin chocolate.

Grown-ups and children adore rainbow cookies: Rainbow is my toddler niece’s favorite color. And for my wedding favors-slash-seating placards, we stuck names and numbers onto rainbow cookies sourced from a Brooklyn Italian bakery.

New York is awash with excellent classic rainbow cookie options. See: Circo’s Pastry Shop in Bushwick, Il Fornaio Bakery in Astoria, and William Greenberg Desserts in Manhattan. This season, a few local restaurants and bakeries are exploring the genre by reimagining other forms of the rainbow cookie, from cakes to stuffed croissants to baked Alaska.

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JR & Son

575 Lorimer Street, at Metropolitan Avenue, Williamsburg
Rainbow cookie layer cake, $15

Chef Patricia Vega first encountered the wonders of rainbow cookies when she moved to New York 20 years ago and worked at her neighbor’s Italian deli on Long Island, which, of course, served the tricolor sweet. “I’m like, ‘What is this?’” she tells me. “I used to eat them every single day. So every time that I worked in an Italian restaurant, I always had rainbow cookies, but they were super-traditional.”

For JR & Son, the revamped Italian American restaurant in Brooklyn, she tagged pastry chef Amanda Perdomo (who has since left for New Orleans) to help develop the sweets. Perdomo told Vega: “Mine is going to be a little different because your menu, even though it’s Italian, is a little different.” Vega responded, “I trust you.”

The result is an Italian rainbow cookie layer cake, served by the slice, that happens to be vegan. The cake is made with coconut sponge, along with raspberry jam and dark chocolate ganache. Vega tells me that people even order it to go.

Favorite classic rainbow cookie destination: “To be 100 percent honest, I haven’t been lately to a deli where I’m like, ‘This is it.’ If I’m going to eat one, I’m going to eat mine.”

Video: Tucci

Tucci

643 Broadway, at Bleecker Street, Noho. Rainbow cookie baked Alaska, $22

The family behind iconic NYC restaurant Delmonico’s opened this Italian restaurant in 2024. And because Delmonico’s was the birthplace of the baked Alaska, executive chef Adam Plitt wanted to create an Italian homage to the restaurant’s roots, landing on the rainbow cookie baked Alaska.​

The cake sponge with layers of chocolate ganache and raspberry jam is topped with raspberry sorbet and vanilla gelato covered in meringue.

Favorite classic rainbow cookie destination: “Tucci’s.”

Tall Poppy

156 W. 20th Street, near Seventh Avenue, Chelsea. Rainbow cookie croissant, $10​

Co-owner and Australian Nina McGrath’s bakery is known for croissants, so it makes sense the team is stuffing the laminated pastry with rainbow cookies. (h/t Mike Chau and also bear with us: this is a special available only in August, so you’ve got a couple of days to get it, sorry, sorry.)

McGrath writes to me that the bakery’s sous chef, Greer Shanley, recently taught herself how to make rainbow cookies for a friend’s birthday. That made McGrath wonder about what they could do with her new skill. “Baking in a shop that really only sells croissants, you start to wire your brain to figure out how to turn anything into a croissant,” she writes. “Thus, the rainbow cookie croissant was born. It’s a gift that keeps on giving.”

They took Tall Poppy’s twice-baked almond croissant, added raspberry jam, and topped the exterior with chocolate icing and rainbow sprinkles “because they’re so dang cute,” she writes.

Favorite classic rainbow cookie destination: “In Shrewsbury, New Jersey, at La Rosa’s. They’ve been perfecting that recipe for 100 years. I think that memories and food are two sides of the same coin.”

Barano

26 Broadway, near Kent Avenue, Williamsburg. Rainbow cookie sundae, $20

Chef, partner, and owner Albert DiMeglio grew up surrounded by rainbow cookies. “We didn’t have a function without them,” he tells me. “Those were the ones I used to hoard and put to the side and eat them all. It’s always been my favorite cookie.”​

He had introduced his rainbow cookie at Little Italy pizza restaurant Rubirosa (he’s a co-founder; the classic version’s still on that menu), and when he opened his now-10-year-old modern Italian restaurant, he thought about marrying the cookies with ice cream for something different. That led to the rainbow cookie sundae: vanilla gelato, rainbow cookies, raspberries marinated in rum, and topped with bruleed meringue. “It was everything about a rainbow cookie, but that ice cream and meringue torched is such a phenomenal flavor together.”​

DiMeglio notes people come just for the sundae, but also, unfortunately, Barano is closing on Sunday, August 30.

Favorite classic rainbow cookie destination: “Fortunato, hands down. What I like about Fortunato is that it’s so moist. A lot of people get that texture wrong; it’s either too cakey or too pasty. And theirs is just soft — it has all the structure you need while being soft with so much flavor.”

Ciao, Gloria

550 Vanderbilt Avenue, near Pacific Street, Prospect Heights. Jumbo-sized tricolore bar, $6

“I’m Italian; it’s my favorite cookie on a tray,” Ciao owner Renato Poliafito tells me.

When he co-wrote his first book in 2008, Baked, inspired by his bakery of the same name, he included a tricolore cookie (aka rainbow cookie) recipe that played with orange flavor.

After leaving Baked and opening Ciao, he experimented with Neapolitan and spumoni combinations, but landed on the classic. “It’s a cake, it’s a cookie, it’s a bar. It falls under every category, and people love it.”

But what makes Ciao’s different is that it’s jumbo-sized. “It’s not like the slivers you get,” he says. “Do you ever see someone just eat one of those? You eat like three or four, so why not just cut to the chase?”

The same cookie is served at his Italian restaurant Pasta Night across the street.

Favorite classic rainbow cookie destination: Vinny Cakes. “He’s based out of Staten Island. He’s the sweetest guy, and he does all sorts of different flavors depending on the season, like pumpkin spice or pistachio. They’re just delicious, and they’re really cute.”

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Intel

• For Jersey Shore-bound types, Terroir Tribeca’s Paul Grieco is bringing Summer of Riesling to James Beard-recognized Judy & Harry’s in Asbury Park on Sunday, August 30. The home of more than 90 wines by the glass will take that sensibility to the wine list takeover with six Rieslings by the glass and Riesling-inspired cocktails, too. Also on tap: Local tattoo artist Karissa Anne of Fast Time Tattoos will offer a collection of wine-inspired ink options. Reservations for Judy’s, the Jewish-leaning Italian restaurant, are available — for a dinner of items like oysters, latkes, zucca pasta, and New Jersey’s Belmont Tavern-inspired chicken. The bar is open for Riesling revelry, too.

• Turkish restaurant Ankara has closed on the Lower East Side. The restaurant opened in 2023, former Eater NY critic Robert Sietsema reported, from Ramazan Turgut, who used to own Bereket on Houston and Orchard streets for nearly 20 years until a condo project forced him to close in 2014. The new place was a third location for a small group of Turkish restaurants based in Brooklyn.

• Mimi Cheng’s will wrap up 12 years in the East Village on September 11. And while it’s the last location in the city, the dumplings are sold across the country in Whole Foods.

Hi there. Let’s face it: It’s been a conservative year for restaurant openings. People are apparently spending less (or those of us who aren’t in the one-percent are). Prices are going up — and diners have been less adventurous than previous years. That’s part of what makes a crop of new museum restaurants among the most interesting spots to dine around New York lately— even if the food isn’t groundbreaking. They’re encouraging us to go beyond the dining room for entertainment. The rooms are often striking and filled with museum-worthy things. And some of them have proven to be really quite good. Have you been trying them out? (So far my favorite is Ned Baldwin’s Zoli in East Williamsburg).

Today, we’re spotlighting the newest museum restaurant opening in October, this one from DeVonn Francis at MoMA PS1. Also in the newsletter: An uptown restaurant is closing after 45 years. Thanks for reading. — Melissa McCart, lead editor, Northeast

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Symone joins a growing crop of ambitious restaurants opening beside New York art institutions

DeVonn Francis, the chef behind Caribbean-leaning pop-up and dinner series Yardy World, is opening his first restaurant inside MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, Queens. Before the restaurant officially opens in late October, Francis will preview some of the food during Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair at PS1, running from Thursday, September 24 through Sunday, September 27.

Called Symone — named for his niece — Francis describes the cooking as French African, drawing on his Jamaican and Caribbean roots, with a menu of seafood, salads, sandwiches, soups, and pastries. Dishes include a curry chicken salad sandwich, patties, cod and rice porridge, and soft serve, with coffee from La Cabra.

“I believe that the extension of food in a museum fortifies it as a cultural center, giving visitors a reason to return again and again,” Francis said in a statement. “[The name is] a reference to our relationship, and to the dynamics that come with familiarity, with getting to know a place over time.”

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Symone arrives as art-adjacent restaurants are seeing an uptick. In July, the newly expanded New Museum also opened Oberon, its first full-service restaurant, with the Oberon Group and chefs Julia Sherman (who has since left) and Ali Ghriskey behind a vegetable-forward American menu. Zoli, from Houseman chef Ned Baldwin, opened in late April at Amant, the contemporary art campus in East Williamsburg, with a seafood menu and a dining room built around a three-part aquarium installation by artist Pierre Huyghe. Marcel followed in April inside the Marcel Breuer-designed building on Madison Avenue that is Sotheby’s global headquarters. From the team behind La Mercerie, with chef Marie-Aude Rose in the kitchen, it serves a French continental menu amid objects that are largely for sale. Together, the openings have made museum and art-world restaurants some of the higher-profile dining debuts of the year.

Other museum restaurants that have held their own include Robert, on the ninth floor of the Museum of Arts and Design at Columbus Circle, overlooking Central Park. Brooklyn Botanic Garden has Yellow Magnolia Cafe, its daytime restaurant overlooking the garden. There’s also the Modern at MoMA, the currently closed Cafe Sabarsky at the Neue Galerie on track to reopen in October, and Frenchette Bakery at the Whitney.

PS1 has cycled through several restaurants. Most recently, the museum had Ora’s Market, a grab-and-go cafe selling sandwiches, salads, coffee, and drinks. Before that was Mina’s, chef Mina Stone’s Greek cafe, which opened in 2019 and closed in June 2023. Mina’s replaced M. Wells Dinette, the museum restaurant from Hugue Dufour and Sarah Obraitis, which closed in 2019.

Francis founded Yardy World in 2017, using the culinary studio as an umbrella for pop-ups, dinner parties, events, and collaborations centered on Caribbean food and culture. His projects have crossed into fashion and art, including work with Gucci, Converse, and Burberry. Francis studied at Cooper Union and later worked at New York restaurants including Estela and Altro Paradiso. In May, he served as executive chef for MoMA PS1’s 50th anniversary gala.

For Symone, Francis is working with architectural studio Marsollier Villacorta on a space that will use warm natural materials while retaining details from PS1’s original life as a 19th-century public school. There will also be outdoor dining on the museum terrace. The cafe will operate during museum hours. Admission to MoMA PS1 is free.

Intel

• Jean-Georges is one step closer to taking over the prime real estate that is Bryant Park Grill.

• Major Food Group — behind Carbone’s, Torrisi, Parm, and others, makes “in excess of $500 million” a year.

• Say it isn’t so: Brooklyn Cyclones withheld tips from concession workers.

• After 45 years on the Upper West Side, Good Enough to Eat is closing on Sunday, August 30.

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Back in New York a few days later, I visited the Kirbee’s pop-up at Eater favorite East Village spot, Bar Snacks, and I can’t wait until that barbecue spot opens in Greenpoint in the fall.

Regarding the newsletter at hand, we’ve got a conversation with Ivan Orkin of Ivan Ramen on the announcement of his new television series: TBD as to when it’s coming out, as it’s early days. And I couldn’t resist asking him at which restaurants he’d consider himself a regular. If you’re looking for more of that kind of content, we’ve got lots of chef picks among our videos. And don’t forget to check out our picks on the app, like Bettina Makalintal’s suggestions for really good cake. Thanks for reading. — Melissa McCart, lead editor, Northeast

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A new TV show about a NY chef is in the works

Hulu is developing a drama inspired by chef Ivan Orkin’s path from culinary school dropout to Tokyo ramen shop owner. Gaijin is being executive produced by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who is also eyed to star in the series. Orkin opened his NYC location of Ivan Ramen back in 2014 and continues to run locations in the city.

Orkin — who told his story in the Netflix Chef’s Table documentary and in his own cookbooks — is now watching it get the fictionalized treatment, with new characters, new settings, and room to invent. The series comes from Shōgun co-executive producer Shannon Goss, with Lionsgate Television producing.

I caught up with Orkin by phone as he was headed to the Chef’s Table Festival in Utah, ahead of his 21st wedding anniversary trip to Japan. He talked about how the show came together, how he feels about handing his life over to a writers’ room, and — because talking to him without talking about food is impossible — the restaurants currently in his rotation. Here’s the Q&A.

Melissa McCart: Congratulations. You must be thrilled.

Ivan Orkin: I am. I don’t have that much to share beyond what’s in the Deadline post, but I can confirm everything in there.

Did you pitch this, or did someone come to you knowing your story?

Someone came to me about three or four years ago — my production company partner, Nickel City Pictures.

How do you feel about it being inspired by your real life versus telling it directly?

Well, it’s a TV show. I did Chef’s Table, which was a documentary — completely factual. I wrote a book that told the same story. I’ve done something like 11,000 interviews about it at this point. I’m sure some people are like, “Oh my god, Ivan, again.” But at the end of the day, I’m just a small business owner with a handful of ramen shops, and the story’s really great — I lived it, I loved it. [The upcoming show] doesn’t have to be completely factual, because I think it’s a fun story, and there’s a lot more room for fun when you have latitude to introduce new characters, new places, and new things.

Any sense of timeline?

No. I don’t have any sense of when. I’m just hopeful it’ll move along. It’s a really strong group of people who are really good at their jobs, so I’m pretty humbled to be mentioned in the same sentence with them.

Anything else you’d like readers to know?

Just that Ivan Ramen celebrated our 12th anniversary in New York, and my 19th anniversary since we opened. We opened in London and Vegas, and those are doing nicely. It’s a really tough business, and now it’s summertime, when people don’t really dream about steaming bowls of soup — except for maybe me.

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Where Ivan Orkin eats right now

• S&P Lunch and Barney Greengrass: “I’m still always into S&P Lunch, which I love. If I were to say my two casuals, these are the ones that I always love to get over to.”

• 28 Nomad: “I just tried a new place, 28 Nomad, that was really, really good. It’s very thoughtful, relatively reasonable, and it’s in a great location. It has a really nice beverage program, and the food is super tasty.”

• Ceres: “Of course, Ceres, which I’m a devotee of. It’s exactly 19 minutes from Ivan Ramen. In the early days, I would walk over there, get, you know, two slices, and they keep going. Now that they’re selling whole pies, there has to be a little more planning. I need someone to help me eat a whole pie.”

• Stars and Penny: “I loved everything from the guys who do Stars and Penny. Really fun.”

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Restaurant merch is a coveted asset — sometimes signifying IYKYK vibes (Wo Hop’s coveted Lunar New Year shirts): other times, the basic but well-loved tastes (Katz’s Deli hats). It’s a different, fun revenue stream for the businesses, typically created and sold by the restaurants themselves.

At the same time, larger clothing retailers and fashion brands have been teaming up with restaurants to up their clout — it’s not a new thing, and even Dunkin’ is getting in on it. This summer, three big brands are collaborating with New York City-based restaurants on well-designed merch. (I am sure the big brands paid these food businesses handsomely for their partnerships, right?)

Los Tacos No. 1 x Gap

The 1990s-popular clothing brand is back to being cool again, tagging big-name celebs and designers like Victoria Beckham and Sandy Liang for collaborations. And the company’s latest match-up is with beloved NYC taqueria chain Los Tacos No. 1.

Los Tacos co-founders Christian Pineda, Tyler Sanders, and Kyle Cameron started their business as a food stand inside Chelsea Market, slinging simple Tijuana-style tacos with fantastic flour and corn tortillas. Since then, it’s grown with nine other locations around Manhattan, with its most recent opening in Flatiron this past spring.

For the apparel, Gap brought in artist Steve Powers, one of the people behind the taqueria’s fun imagery. The line includes a version of Gap’s iconic logo hoodie but about guacamole ($118); T-shirts ($54) with a park bench and a taco cart or a molcajete; white tote bags ($28) that mimic plastic takeout bags; white denim shorts with subtle red icons like a bottle of hot sauce ($88); and even an apron ($58).

The collaboration is available for sale on Gap’s website and several stores across the city. (You can also buy Los Tacos’s OG shirts through their website.)

I’m donut? x Uniqlo

Tokyo-based doughnut shop I’m donut? Opened its very first American location in Times Square last year. The doughnuts are soft and fluffy thanks to pumpkin used in the brioche dough.

It makes sense that Japanese clothing retailer Uniqlo tagged the bakery chain for its Graphic-T Universe line, showcasing various pop culture worlds. The I’m donut? T-shirts ($29.90), designed with New York graphic designer Kei Saito, feature one with a display of its doughnuts against a pink background (in a sort of beautiful-ugly way), alongside the bakery’s plushie-esque characters like a bunny-snail with a doughnut for its shell and an anthropomorphic savory doughnut sandwich.

“As two born-in-Japan brands rooted in craftsmanship and innovation, this collection is a natural fit,” Miyu Egami, the executive PR manager of I’m donut? emails to me. “We want to build an immersive lifestyle ecosystem for our community.”

The collaboration is available now through Saturday, September 26, for in-person sales at Uniqlo’s Soho and Midtown stores.

Matchaful x Fleur du Mal

New York City matcha chain Matchaful teamed up with chic lingerie brand Fleur du Mal for a very-banana special. Because the retailer brought back its popular banana embroidery set (bananas ARE everywhere, after all), Matchaful is making a special banana soft serve. The Bananas for You ($9.75 for cups, $16.50 for pints) is made with banana, cashews, oats, extra virgin olive oil, Himalayan salt, and coconut sugar. At the same time, Fleur du Mal is selling a white baby tee ($98) in honor of the soft serve, featuring a sexy banana in fishnet thigh-highs and heels while holding a tropical drink.

“We wanted to capture that same sense of nostalgia and joy in a soft serve that feels fresh, unexpected, and made with the thoughtfully sourced ingredients we’re known for,” Hannah Habes, the founder of Matchaful, writes to me about creating the flavor.

The soft serve is available at six of the Matchaful locations (Brookfield Place and Clinton Hill don’t have soft serve machines) until Saturday, August 15. The shirt is available on Fleur’s website and Matchaful’s Soho location.

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Intel

• West Village seafood staple Mary’s Fish Camp is returning to the neighborhood at a new address this week, at 626 Hudson Street, at Jane Street, starting on Friday, July 31 — Sarah Jessica Parker is quite happy. Mary Redding closed the original Mary’s location at 64 Charles Street in 2024 after 20 years. The new restaurant — with reservations on Resy —will start with dinner service and add lunch later.

• That was fast: chef and artist Julia Sherman has already left the New Museum’s new restaurant Oberon, which opened earlier this month. Sherman was pegged as the co-executive chef of the Lower East Side art museum’s first full-service restaurant, along with Ali Ghriskey (who remains there). She’s turning her focus to working on powdered salad dressing mixes and a new cookbook. Oberon is run by the Oberon Group, which is behind NYC wine bars like Rhodora, June, and Rucola.

• A nearly 90-year-old Queens Italian pastry shop has closed. La Guli in Astoria closed on Sunday, July 26, as reported by the New York Post. While the website lists that the store is temporarily closed, the newspaper reports that the storefront has been emptied.

• James Caputo — who was the owner of the 120-year-old Caputo Bakery, which shuttered in Carroll Gardens earlier this spring — is opening a bagel shop this fall. He’s teaming up with Rafael “Rafi” Hasid, the chef and owner of NYC Mediterranean mini-chain Miriam and Tribeca Cajun restaurant 1803 NYC, to open Caputo Bagels in Park Slope at 81 Fifth Avenue, near Prospect Place, in September. The menu focuses on sourdough bagels, used for open-face and breakfast sandwiches, as well as pastries familiar to Caputo regulars.

• Flatiron Korean fried chicken restaurant Coqodaq is featuring a new Korean gochujang sauce on some of its dishes this summer. Jangin is co-founded by chef Mingoo Kang of Korean restaurant Mingles and cookbook author Nadia Cho. At the restaurant, the fried chicken bucket comes with a side of the sauce. The takeout Jangin dakgalbi bowl comes with charcoal-grilled chicken thighs glazed with the sauce, plus steamed rice and pickles. Both are available starting on Friday, July 31, and run through Sunday, August 16.

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Hi there. Two weeks ago, we held a giveaway to Nourish by the Roundtree in the Hamptons; congrats to the reader who claimed the dinner for two. We’ll be holding future giveaways here and will DM you over Substack to let you know you’ve won. Watch this space in the upcoming weeks. Next, we’ve got a sneak peek at a taqueria I’m really excited about that’s opening early next month and news that Polo Bar is going to move. Thank you for reading, and consider sharing with a friend. — Melissa McCart, lead editor, Eater Northeast

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El Califa de León, one of Mexico City’s most famous taquerias, is bringing its thin-sliced beef (gaonera) taco to New York. The nearly 60-year-old restaurant opens on Monday, August 24, at 20 W. 23rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, in Flatiron.

The family-run restaurant made history in 2024 as the world’s first Michelin-starred taqueria after Michelin launched its inaugural Mexico guide, holding the distinction through the 2025 update. Though it lost the star in 2026, it remains Michelin-recommended.

“We like to say that we didn’t win a Michelin star after 57 years of operating,” co-owner José Andrés Hernández tells me. “It just took Michelin 57 years to find us.”

The restaurant’s signature gaonera traces back to its founder, Andrés Hernández’s grandfather, Juan Hernández González, a butcher who opened the original location in Mexico City’s San Rafael neighborhood in 1968. Built around a thin slice of prime beef tenderloin, the taco reflects his experience selecting, butchering, and grilling premium beef.

Why New York

Toronto was originally supposed to become El Califa de León’s first international outpost, according to Hernández and partner Rod Diaz. But after a series of pop-ups Tacombi in 2024, which introduced New Yorkers to the tacos, the team changed course.

“We realized there was a huge opportunity,” Diaz says.

The New York pop-ups marked the first time El Califa de León had served its tacos in the United States. The enthusiastic reception encouraged the team to look in New York, where they eventually found a storefront in Flatiron about two years ago.

“When we were there the first time,” Diaz says, “we knew that was the place.”

What’s on the menu

Along with the gaonera, El Califa de León will serve bistec taco made with New York strip steak, the costilla with prime rib-eye, and chuleta with pork chop. The tacos are served on corn tortillas from Sobre Masa in Bushwick, alongside the taqueria’s rojo salsa made with guajillo and pasilla chiles and verde salsa with serrano peppers and tomatillos. The New York menu also includes a vegetarian taco with roasted poblano peppers and huitlacoche, created exclusively for the Flatiron restaurant.

New York loosens things up a bit. Unlike the Mexico City original, the Flatiron restaurant will have a full bar serving tequila, mezcal, beer, and cocktails, along with a selection of margaritas.

A taco stand, reimagined

According to the Michelin Guide, the original taqueria has “just enough room for a handful of diners to stand at its counter,” where cooks prepare tacos with little more than prime beef, salt, lime, and fresh corn tortillas.

The New York restaurant seats close to 60 across a full-service dining room in the rear, a taco counter as well as a standing area near the entrance for a quick taco, echoing the experience in Mexico City.

Designed by Mero Studios, the space centers on an open-air grill where tacos are prepared in full view of diners. White subway tile updated in El Califa de León’s signature red, accordion doors that open the room to the street, and a glowing “MARGARITA” sign above the rear bar nod to the team’s Mexico City roots while embracing New York’s longer, more leisurely style of dining.

Diaz says the larger footprint reflects a different approach to hospitality from the Mexico City restaurant, giving diners room to hang out over tacos and drinks.

Editor’s note on August 5, 2026: This post was updated to reflect a new opening date.

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Intel

• There’s a 65-foot hot dog in Times Square. If that makes you hungry for one, consider these four hot dog picks.

• Impossible-to-get-into Polo Bar is leaving its longtime home for a new spot that’s rent-free for at least two years at 625 Madison Avenue.

• Over on the Eater app, my colleague Nadia Chaudhury is killing it with her recommendations and notes. Consider her recently updated Good NYC Sandwiches picks.

• NYT critic Ryan Sutton thinks this is the perfect wine bar. (I’m also a fan of this one, too.) — MM

The best New York City-related cookbooks of 2026 so far

I love cookbooks — I enjoy the way that books work in multiple ways: at their core, they’re instructional guides on how to cook, but they’re also educational tomes, history lessons, memoirs, and photo collections. For this mid-ish year check-in, I’m highlighting the most interesting cookbooks from New York City chefs and restaurants, listed in chronological order.

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Will This Make You Happy: Stories & Recipes from a Year of Baking

By Tanya Bush
Published on March 3, 2026, by Chronicle

The pastry chef of Prospect Heights’ daytime restaurant Little Egg and co-founder of amazing indie publication Cake Zine (also on Substack) put together this wonderful narrative cookbook. Bush recounts the year she started baking in her early 20s, interspersed with recipes like raspberry-lemon cheesecake tarts; sweet potato cakes; and the famous cardamom cruller with plum drizzle at Little Egg.

Hello, Home Cooking: Do-Able Dishes for Every Day

By Ham El-Waylly
Published on March 24, 2026, by Clarkson Potter

The head chef and culinary partner of New Orleans-leaning Fort Greene restaurant Strange Delight (who is a Substacker) published this cookbook highlighting his Egyptian, Bolivian, and Qatari roots with casual dishes such as labneh mashed potatoes, Bolivian cheesy rice, and chicken and mochi dumplings.

Cake From Lucie: Recipes and Techniques from the French Countryside to New York City

By Lucie Franc de Ferriere
Published on April 14, 2026, by Clarkson Potter

The French baker behind the popular pop-up-turned-hit East Village bakery From Lucie divulges her romantically beautiful cake secrets with this bakebook, from complex (pistachio-prosecco-cherry tiered cakes) to simple (vanilla), as well as other desserts.

Tavern on the Green Cookbook: Seasonal Recipes and Historical Treasures From New York City’s Iconic Restaurant

By Bill Peet
Published on April 7, 2026, by Globe Pequot

The current executive chef of Central Park’s Tavern on the Green deep-dives into the nearly century-old American restaurant’s legacy and recipes through this cookbook. Find honey-roasted Christmas duck with wild rice and sun-dried cherries, yellowfin tuna burgers, and lemon curd meringue tarts.

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Ammazza! Culinary Adventures from New York to Italy and Back Again

By Hillary Sterling, with Theresa Gambacorta
Published on May 12, 2026, by Scribner

The chef of Union Square Hospitality Group’s Italian restaurant Ci Ciamo near Hudson Yards showcases her life and career path, from growing up in Brooklyn to cooking Italian food to working in NYC restaurants, in this recipe book.

Nothing Matters but Delicious: A Radically Honest Cookbook

By Greg Baxtrom, with Joshua David Stein
Published on May 26, 2026, by Ten Speed Press

The chef of the now-shuttered Prospect Heights restaurant Olmsted and Rockefeller Center’s still-open Five Acres distills his biography and culinary history so far through this cookbook. In fact, many dishes from his Olmsted days make appearances, including the carrot crepes and heirloom tomato schnitzel (as seen on the cover).

Solid Wiggles: Recipes and Techniques for Phenomenal Jelly Shots and Cakes

By Jena Derman and Jack Schramm,
Published on June 23, 2026, by Ten Speed Press

The co-founders of the Brooklyn-based fancy-fun Jell-O shots business published a how-to guide to their delightful cocktail jellies and cakes.

My anticipated upcoming NYC-related cookbooks

• Dona Murad, the founder of East Village Bahraini bakery Librae, is publishing her namesake bakebook on Tuesday, September 22.

• Chef and Substacker Ryan Bartlow of Spanish NYC restaurants Ernesto’s and Bartolo is publishing his first cookbook, Essentially Basque: Bringing Spanish Cooking Home, on Tuesday, October 13.

• Eric Sze, the chef and co-owner of NYC Taiwanese restaurants Wenwen and 886, is publishing Taiwanese?, where he and co-writer Elyse Inamine explore Taiwanese dishes, debuting on Tuesday, October 27.

Hi there. Today we’ve got another giveaway, this one focused on the Hamptons, for a dinner valued at $200: Share your thoughts on a favorite NYC outdoor dining experience for a chance to win. Speaking of outside, don’t miss Nadia’s where to eat ice cream in NYC on the app. (For that matter, we’ve got tons of personal lists over there, like my favorite places to drink wine right now. Check them out!)

Also in today’s newsletter: Cosme is opening a sibling bar in the old Atla space, Zoli’s rooftop, opening tomorrow, has its own menu, and more. Thanks for reading. — Melissa McCart, lead editor, Eater Northeast

GIVEAWAY: Win Dinner for Two at Nourish by the Roundtree in the Hamptons

Summer is a time for weekend escapes and eating outside. We’re giving away dinner for two worth $200 at Nourish by the Roundtree in Bridgehampton, plus a glass of wine for each person.

The restaurant opens onto a leafy garden, while large windows and natural wood throughout the dining room blur the line between indoors and out — a fitting setting for a long summer dinner. Chef Dewa Wijaya’s menu draws on his Balinese heritage and East End ingredients, with dishes like lobster rolls, salt-baked branzino, and grilled Acabonac Farm sirloin.

To enter: What’s the most memorable meal you’ve had outdoors in New York? Tell us in the comments where you were and why you still think about it.

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We’ll randomly select one winner from the comments on Friday, July 17— only one entry per person. Good luck!

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. VOID WHERE PROHIBITED BY LAW. Sweepstakes begins at 9 a.m. ET on 9/9/2026 and ends at 10:00 a.m. ET on 9/17/2026. Open to Eater New York Substack subscribers (free) who are legal residents of the 50 U.S. states and Washington D.C., of legal age of majority and have access to the internet, and a valid email address. Odds of winning depend on the number of eligible entries received. Subject to Official Rules, additional eligibility restrictions apply. Sponsor Privacy Policy. Sponsor: Vox Media, LLC, 1701 Rhode Island Ave., Washington, DC 20036

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Intel

A new rooftop in Brooklyn

Zoli, the new (mostly) seafood restaurant from Houseman chef Ned Baldwin, opened this spring at the Amant arts campus at 312 Maujer Street, near Waterbury Street, in East Williamsburg. Now it’s adding another draw: a rooftop terrace with its own more casual menu opens to the public on Friday, July 10.

The roughly 25-seat rooftop will offer a collection of mostly finger foods, Baldwin tells me, with nothing priced above around $23. “It’s so nice up there,” he says, calling the teak-lined terrace “preposterously beautiful,” with “so much greenery.” It’ll open Friday through Sunday for its first week or two before expanding to Wednesday-through-Sunday dinner service. About half the seats will be available by reservation, with the rest reserved for walk-ins. Beginning on Thursday, July 16, the rooftop also kicks off a collaboration series with guest chefs, starting with the team from Mili on the Lower East Side.

The old Atla space will become Bar Cosme

Enrique Olvera and his Casamata hospitality group are opening Bar Cosme this fall at 372 Lafayette Street, at Great Jones Street in Noho — the same address that housed Atla, his all-day Mexican restaurant, for nearly a decade before it closed in May. Bar Cosme is a nightlife-focused destination anchored by food that complements nearby Cosme’s menu: raw and slightly cooked preparations, tortillas and salsas, and dishes cooked asador-style. Sebastián Tollius, formerly of Eleven Madison Park and Clemente Bar, set up the bar menu. And the space is being designed by Taller ADG, a Mexico City-based architecture studio.

Beefbar gets an Italian sibling

Ludico Tribeca, a new Italian restaurant from the family behind Beefbar, opens this fall at 339 Greenwich Street, at Jay Street, in the former Sarabeth’s space. Chef Nelson Gonzalez leads the kitchen, and David Rockwell designed the 150-seat space, preserving the vaulted ceilings of the old Bazzini building and adding a wine room in the passage between the two spaces, a private dining room with a skylight, and a bar in the back room that exits on Jay Street. Owner Mahween Rahman will run the restaurant with her sons Aqib and Tareef. Art from local galleries Andrew Kreps and Nino Mier will appear throughout. Tribeca Citizen first reported the news; the opening is expected shortly after Labor Day.

Sweetgreen teams up with Alice Waters

On the heels of Sweetgreen introducing sandwich wraps, the company is releasing a new menu item today, Thursday, July 9, in collaboration with Alice Waters — a peach bowl with goat cheese inspired by her famous peach-on-a-plate dessert at Chez Panisse, with proceeds benefiting the Edible Schoolyard Project. To mark the collaboration, Sweetgreen is releasing a limited-edition zine, Love Letters to Alice, featuring tributes from New York food figures including David Chang, José Andrés, Mark Bittman, and Dan Barber, available on the website (with proceeds also going to Edible Schoolyard). The bowl is available across all 300-plus Sweetgreen locations in more than 30 states.

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After 25 Years, Craft Shutters on Saturday

Tom Colicchio's Craft helped shape how New Yorkers dine out. As it closes on Saturday, June 27, its influence is everywhere, particularly in the chefs who passed through its kitchen. The restaurant at 43 East 19th Street, at Park Avenue South, closes just months after celebrating its 25th anniversary in March.

When Colicchio opened Craft on March 7, 2001, he was still the chef and a partner at Gramercy Tavern, running two neighboring kitchens, according to Florence Fabricant’s 2001 preview in the New York Times. The name, she wrote, referred to the materials used in the restaurant’s design — stone, wood, bronze, leather — and to a menu built around simply braised, roasted, and poached ingredients meant to be mixed and matched with garnishes, vegetables, and sauces. There was also, from the start, a five-course tasting menu. Marco Canora, who would go on to open Hearth and Brodo, ran the kitchen as chef de cuisine.

William Grimes awarded Craft three stars in his June 2001 review for the Times. He notes the menu had already been simplified, with main ingredients organized by type (fish, meat, mushrooms, potatoes) and subdivided further by preparation method (marinated, roasted, braised), requiring what he called “a very necessary orientation lecture” just to order dinner.

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He lamented how choosing a meal was an ordeal. “Which would go better with leg of lamb — braised escarole or sauteed Swiss chard? Perhaps a little truffle jus would be in order. Or would that spell disaster?” Grimes wrote that he “grew restive” under the weight of so much choice. Yet he awarded the restaurant three stars anyway, because the food kept overriding his objections to the format.

Exceptional ingredients, demanding format, and a hefty check for the time mirrored a bit of what was going on at steakhouses during Craft’s heyday. As Danny Meyer told the Times earlier this month, Colicchio “wanted to challenge the notion that only steak houses could offer a naked protein with sides.” Meyer declined to partner on the project and called the arrangement — Colicchio running two kitchens in two restaurants — “certainly unusual.” Now it has become standard, with scores of chefs running multiple kitchens at once.

A decade later, then-critic Sam Sifton followed up with a three-star review for the Times in 2011, detailing why simple food is unforgiving. “There can be no hiding behind artifice,” he wrote. “No lipstick is available for the pigs.” Running the kitchen was James Tracey (who is now at his own restaurant, Monterey) and Jennifer McCoy was turning out desserts, of which Sifton said recalled “the best work of her most noted predecessor,” Karen DeMasco. The dry-aged porterhouse, still paired with the same gnocchi Grimes had praised a decade earlier, remained a signature dish.

Around that anniversary, Colicchio gathered Craft alumni — Four Twenty-Five’s Jonathan Benno, Alta Calidad’s Akhtar Nawab, Momofuku’s David Chang — for a reunion chronicled in the New Yorker. Canora spun a dish towel on his finger, calling it his “signature move.” Damon Wise recalled the night the meat oven wouldn’t close and Colicchio’s response — “I’m not a mechanic. What do you want me to do about it?” Chang declared it “the tenth anniversary featuring the assholes of Craft.”

By the time former Eater critic Robert Sietsema revisited Craft for the “Is It Still Good?” series in 2019, the empire around the restaurant had contracted. Craftbar and Colicchio & Sons had closed. ‘Wichcraft had shrunk from several locations to a few. But Craft remained, in Sietsema’s accounting, a genuinely good restaurant if you knew how to order — strategically, with restraint, treating the menu’s side-dish section as potential entrees. Craft was still worth the splurge, with dinner for three running $283 before tip. The key was taking on the menu “like a general approaching a battle.”

Last year, Colicchio shifted Craft’s menu to an a la carte format, having concluded that family-style pricing had become untenable. He later announced one more addition: a daily tasting menu. Colicchio framed it as a response to changed habits — fewer diners sharing plates post-pandemic — and his own creative restlessness after years of paring things down.

Earlier this month, Colicchio announced on Instagram that Craft would close three weeks later, on Saturday, June 27, taking the Italian restaurant Vallata next door down with it.

“Twenty-five years is a long time in New York,” he told Fabricant. “I’m grappling with the situation. Things have changed; rents and expenses for everything keep going up. You can’t function.”

He pointed to how dining habits have shifted: “Back then, I could sell 26 squab a night. Now, I’m lucky to get two orders.”

Colicchio hasn’t given up the lease, according to the Times. “He set a gold standard when he opened that place,” Canora said. Few restaurants make such a mark in training the next generation of chefs. Fewer still shape the way a city eats. Craft did both.

Intel

• Rakish internet chef Thomas Straker — who will be opening a Manhattan restaurant any day now — kicked off a pop-up series in the Hamptons at the Surf Lodge as part of the Sunset Supper Club. Future events are scheduled on Thursdays, including: Orianne Ani Shapira (Shmoné, July 9); Dustin Everett (Fish Cheeks, July 16); Gaz Herbert (Comal, July 23), and more through September. Reservations are on Resy.

• Starting this Saturday, June 27, Stars opens at 10 a.m. on weekends with espresso beverages and other specialty coffee drinks. It’s a serious program, says a spokesperson: They’ll be pouring a custom bean blend and serving an egg custard tart and pastries, too.

• From the Take Root duo in Brooklyn, Vale will be opening soon: Elise Kornack and Anna Hieronimus will debut a 30-acre farm and restaurant on the Esopus Creek in the Catskills. Kornack had been named a James Beard Rising Star more than once, and Take Root closed at its peak, having earned glowing reviews.

• Barbetta, the legendary Theater District restaurant, may be closed after more than a century, but its award-winning wine collection will live on. Prize bottles from the cellar, considered among the most extensive Barolo and Barbaresco troves in America, have been scooped up by wine retailer and curator Zachys, and will be auctioned off, online only from Tuesday, June 30 through Monday, July 13. The collection will be offered by the estate of Laura Maioglio, daughter of Barbetta’s founder, who ran the restaurant for over 60 years. — Beth Landman

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Hi there. Hopefully you’re either firmly in your spot for the parade or have managed to steer clear of the gridlock connected to the confluence of events this weekend that also include World Cup and the Juneteenth holiday. Today, we’re spotlighting an option for a weekend getaway in New Jersey that punches above its weight as far as food and drink. For intel, we’ve got Claudette reopening and a new one from Jungsik Yim. Thanks for reading. — Melissa McCart, lead editor, Northeast

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New Jersey doesn’t exactly scream “weekend getaway” unless you’re headed to the Shore — and anyone who’s sat in summer traffic outside the Holland Tunnel knows that escape comes at a price. But an hour west of the city, hugging the Delaware River, Stockton makes a compelling case for heading west instead of the Hudson Valley.

What surprised me most wasn’t the scenery: It’s that a corner of Hunterdon County has assembled the most stacked restaurant lineup in New Jersey. The surprise isn’t that there’s very good food here; it’s the number of excellent options. (As a native New Jerseyite, I regularly lament how New York pilfers our talent, in no small part due to handicapping liquor laws that demand restaurateurs shell out $500K or more compared to New York’s $5K for liquor licenses, but I digress.)

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A big reason to plan a visit is the Stockton Inn, a 300-year-old landmark that spent nearly a decade in disrepair before local couple Steven Grabowski and Cheryl Olsten bought it in 2022. Working with Anthony Rudolf, whose résumé includes Per Se and Jean-Georges, they reopened the property in stages beginning in 2024. Bob Truitt leads the kitchen, whose resume spans El Bulli and Marea in the Michael White-era. After that, Truitt opened Mexico City-influenced Casa Pública in Brooklyn.

At the inn, there’s a tavern and a dining room anchored by the same menu that stretches from polished to casual fare. There’s also the boutique hotel as well as a standout Stockton Market two doors down. That market, owned by Dana Rae Ashburn, features Chadd Jenkins at the helm, who’s cooking daytime meals as well as monthly market dinners. Jenkins founded Philadelphia’s Little Fish before he sold it and headed to the area.

Another good meal awaits a few miles away in Sergeantsville, where former Momofuku Ko executive chef Sean Gray is turning out the kind of food I want to eat in a neighborhood tavern. Gray helped Ko earn two Michelin stars between 2009 and 2021; at the Sergeantsville Inn, that pedigree translates to a more relaxed format — oysters and deviled eggs alongside Griggstown chicken, scallops, and an $85 chef’s-choice menu.

I’ve now eaten in both the tavern and dining room at Stockton Inn, attended one of Jenkins’s monthly market dinners, and made the trip to Sergeantsville. Here’s how I’d spend a weekend.

Day 1: Stockton

9:00 a.m. Grab a coffee and explore an inn from the Revolutionary War-era. The nine hotel rooms — some in the carriage house, some in an 1850 wagon house, some in the main house — are meticulous without being fussy. Japanese globe pendants float over king beds in white linen. A potter from the next town over made custom clay vases etched with delicate finches that appear throughout the rooms. Inn guests have access to a lounge with an honor bar, a stately fireplace, and hand-painted landscape wallpaper. A fire pit surrounded by Adirondack chairs is as good a place as any to start the morning with coffee.

Noon. Sit for an easy lunch, shop, take a walk, and visit an art studio or garden cafe. Two doors down, Ashburn — Grabowski and Olsten’s daughter — owns the Stockton Market. The space has soft colors, abundant florals, a café with rotating toasts and sandwiches, and shelf-stable goods worth bringing home — locally produced Nina’s Jams, quality olive oils, tinned sardines, and gifts. Grab a bite, then take to the towpath — the 70-mile D&R Canal path runs north toward Frenchtown and south toward Lambertville, open to runners and cyclists alike. Just north of the inn, a dam and the historic Prallsville Mills sit at the river’s edge, where visitors can take private painting lessons with the inn’s partner art studio. Then spend an hour at Black Shed, a garden center, cafe, and bar on CR-519 down the road. The layout and greenery are truly unique, and it’s a fun place to people watch.

4 p.m. Settle onto the inn’s waterfall terrace for a glass of wine. In warmer months the river breezes come through; in cooler weather the terrace is enclosed and heated with fire pits. There’s a full bar and an excellent cocktail selection — more on that later.

6 p.m. Head in for dinner in the tavern or dining room. Bestsellers include: lump crab soldiers on potato rosi with trout roe; green garlic risotto with morels, white asparagus, and pickled ramps; mussels with vermouth, shallots, and fennel served with crisped bread for dipping. I love the cozy warmth of the tavern and the lightness that invites the outside in for the dining room. In both locations, there’s a good chance you’ll see manager and partner Rudolf, often cited by NYC folks in books and otherwise for his example of great hospitality.

8:30 p.m. Divert to the bar for amazing cocktails. Drinks powerhouse Brian Miller, veteran of Death & Co. and Pegu Club, runs the bar. He’s known for his tiki cocktails and beyond as well as his mentoring the next generation of excellent bartenders, right here in Stockton (one of them made me an excellent Copperhead with Laird’s, rye, and yellow Chartreuse). After dinner, that cocktail list justifies staying for another round.

Day 2: Lambertville and New Hope

10 a.m. Do some shopping for vintage wares. Lambertville is ten minutes south. Start at the People’s Store, a four-story building with over 50 dealers selling European, American, and Asian antiques, vintage vinyl, mid-century modern furniture, and more, with working artist studios on the upper floors. Lambertville’s compact downtown is built for wandering, with independent bookstores, antique shops, galleries, and coffee spots packed into a few canal-side blocks. Stop for tacos outside for lunch at El Tule Mexican and Peruvian Cafe.

2 p.m. Follow up with cocktails followed by a tasting menu. Visit the Boat House, a small cocktail bar tucked into an alley off the main drag with nautical décor and a no-cell-phone rule. I love this place and could hang here for an afternoon. If it’s a Saturday, book dinner at the Speckled Egg, if you wish, a ticketed supper club. Tickets are somewhere between four and five courses for at most $85; book at thespeckledegg.net.

8 p.m. Check out some music. After dinner, cross the bridge into New Hope for music at John & Peter’s, a dive bar and music venue that has been running nightly shows since the 1970s. The room is small, the drinks are cheap, and the bookings are higher profile than I had expected. Past performers include Norah Jones and Ween; current regulars include Wayne Hancock and St. James and the Apostles.

Day 3: Sergeantsville

10 a.m. Breakfast at the market, a run, and a massage. Stop for breakfast at the Stockton Market for items like the smoked salmon Benny with poached eggs, smoked trout roe, and tarragon aioli, or the honey bee toast with whipped ricotta, pear, apple, and fig. Then it’s back to the towpath for a run or a ride. Chill for the afternoon with a book or an in-room massage.

5 p.m. Head to nearby Sergeantsville. Head to the Sergeantsville Inn circa 1734 for Sean Gray’s menu of starters like oysters or deviled eggs, grilled mushrooms, or shrimp casino. Move on to the Griggstown half chicken with asparagus and herb sauce; Barnegat scallops with artichokes; or a leg of lamb with lentils and chard. There’s also a chef’s choice option for $85. Wines are also compelling, with white Burgundies, an orange Trebbiano, and a Morgon Beaujolais. Yes, there’s a freezer martini, too.

Intel

• French restaurant Claudette reopens in Greenwich Village today, June 18, at 24 Fifth Avenue. Open for over a decade before closing in 2024, Carlos Suarez’s restaurant debuts with a new chef, menu, and updated interior. Formerly with Alain Ducasse, Igor Cabral runs the kitchen.

• Jungsik Yim’s new restaurant, Muje, is opening soon in his former Sea space at 151 W. 30th Street. The website says it’s focused on “fusing influences across the Asian continent with our team’s varied backgrounds and experiences.”

• Morning Market Meetings are back at Union Square Cafe, starting

  Marco Canora of Hearth and Claudia Fleming of Daily Provisions. Market meetings are from 9 to 11 a.m. and include pastries, coffee and tea; a conversation, and guided walk through the farmers market. Future options include Suzanne Cupps of Lola’s on July 15; Ed Dzymanski and Patricia Howard of Dame, Lord’s, and Crevette on August 12; Alison Roman on September 23, and Anthony Mangieri of Una Pizza on October 7. Bookings are $85 through Open Table.

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Hi there. We have a lot going on for you this week, starting with the World Cup, with matches that stretch through July. Our very own Nadia Chaudhury has assembled a handy guide for your dining and viewing options, and I’ve added a few updates in this newsletter. We’ve also got a few Knicks-related items for your perusal. Have a good pick for a watch party? Leave it in the comments. And thanks for reading. – Melissa McCart, lead editor, Eater Northeast

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New additions to our World Cup guide

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Alma, the Mexican restaurant at Columbia Waterfront, is streaming every World Cup match on a 120-inch projector screen on its third-floor rooftop, with views of the Manhattan skyline behind the screen. They’re selling $5 draft beers, $10 margaritas, and a food menu of tacos, guacamole, and mole negro throughout the tournament. Sign up ahead. 187 Columbia Street, at Degraw Street

Leon’s in Greenwich Village is turning into a World Cup watch bar for select matches this summer, in partnership with Cocchi, an Italian aperitivo brand. The menu leans into the occasion with merguez frites sandwiches (lamb sausage, baharat-spiced fries, and citrus aioli on a Breads Bakery baguette), plus wings and cocktails. $26 gets you a Cocchi cocktail and a mini-merguez frites sandwich. Check the restaurant’s Instagram for the full match schedule. 817 Broadway, at East 12th Street.

The NYC Neighborhood Passport — a free program which launched on Thursday, June 11 — encourages New Yorkers and visitors to explore neighborhoods, cultural institutions, and small businesses across all five boroughs during the World Cup. Participants collect stamps designed by local artists at participating locations throughout the tournament; passport booklets are available at all NYC public libraries. The thinking behind it: research found that the moments people remember most often happen in everyday neighborhood spaces, not major attractions. Think about watching a match in Little Senegal rather than waiting in line at MetLife. The program is a partnership between Team Wonder, NYC Tourism + Conventions, and the city. Learn more about the program on its website.

• Where to eat, drink, and celebrate the World Cup in New York and New Jersey

• Hundreds of restaurants are offering $26 World Cup dining deals

• New Yorkers can party until 4 a.m. at bars across the state

All Things Knicks

You need no help figuring out where and how to watch Saturday’s game, nevertheless, here are a few options.

• Watch at Roberta’s

• Watch at Top of the Rock

• Watch at Brooklyn Bowl

• Watch at Bar Avant

• Crew’s Alex Pincus confirms that Brooklyn’s Montero and Tribeca’s Holywater will have watch parties, too.

• More from the Knicks

• More places to watch the game from Eater

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Summer is finally here — on the calendar, at least. Even if the weather isn’t dazzling, I hope you plan to relax, get a little exercise, read a book, catch up with friends, or however you might acknowledge Memorial Day. Before we go, I have some details below I thought you should know about before we head into the long weekend. Otherwise, take it easy, and we’ll see you back here next week. — Melissa McCart, lead editor, Eater Northeast

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Birdee will turn into a wine bar with Brazilian snacks

Birdee, the Williamsburg bakery from Brazilian-born pastry chef Renata Ameni, has a new after-hours identity. Botequim at Birdee, a wine bar rooted in the casual neighborhood bar culture of Brazil, will debut on Saturday, May 23, at 316 Kent Avenue, operating Thursday through Saturday evenings from 5 to 9 p.m. in the same space that serves pastries and sandwiches by day.

“There are so many wine bars around here,” Ameni tells me. “I just wanted to make it a little different.” Her answer: Brazilian bar food that keeps it fun. The menu draws from São Paulo street culture — pão de queijo (cheese bread), linguiça Calabresa with caramelized onions — alongside sweets like brigadeiro, quindim, and passionfruit mousse.

Kristen Goceljak, Kent Hospitality Group’s wine director, has picked the wine selection. The list skews toward young, New World producers — a fit, Ameni says, for a neighborhood open to trying different things — with 12 by-the-glass pours and a roughly 75-bottle list. Cocktails include the Tropicale with sherry, pineapple, and a green tea cordial.

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Downtown’s En Brasserie returns for two nights in a free pop-up with Dom Pérignon

Dom Pérignon is partnering with restaurateur Reika Alexander to bring back the swishy West Village En Brasserie for two nights — and there’s no charge. The restaurant closed in 2024, after the landlord did not renew the lease in favor of one with Daniel Humm of Eleven Madison Park for his first Downtown restaurant, opening soon.

En Brasserie was a totemic spot in the context of Manhattan’s Downtown arts scene. “Basically, anybody in New York connected to the culture you would find there,” artist Marina Abramovic told Caper.

In honor of a big-deal year for Dom Pérignon — the first time the brand has released three vintages in a single year — they decided to hold a series of intimate dinners under the name “Expressions of Harmony,” with Alexander as the headliner.

The pop-up runs from Friday, June 12, through Sunday, June 14, in New York in a to-be-announced location adjacent to the High Line. Those who’d like to go can visit the website and sign up for one of five seatings per day, 10 people per session. After the New York stretch, Dom Pérignon and Alexander will pop up in Los Angeles.

The menu — developed with Dom Pérignon’s chef, along with chef Kenjiro Shioyama— consists of three dishes. The first one pairs caviar with uni ice cream. The second — the one Alexander is most excited about — is a study in harmony: tofu mousse layered with shiso shaved ice, dashi gelée, and seasonal vegetables, hitting every texture and temperature in a single dish. The third is En’s classic miso black cod.

The word “en” in Japanese carries multiple meanings, among them, harmony and destiny. For her, the collaboration with Dom Pérignon — a house with a long history — felt like a natural alignment. “I always wanted to create something timeless,” she says. “It feels great to work with a team that has the same philosophy.”

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Today, we’ve got a few things in the mix, starting with a look at brasseries from freelancer regular, Andrea Strong, as well as a few events in intel. Thanks for reading and enjoy the weekend. — Melissa McCart, lead editor, Eater Northeast

How New York Chefs Are Reinventing the Brasserie

By Andrea Strong

Last July, when the chef Michael Anthony opened Lex Yard at the storied Waldorf Astoria, he declared it was a brasserie, but an American one. His menu, steeped in spiffed-up stalwarts tied to the iconic property — a turkey club, a Waldorf salad, baked clams, a lobster roll, a signature burger — had nary a duck confit, steak tartare, oeuf mayonnaise, or soupe à l’oignon in sight. So the term brasserie was perhaps a curious one.

For Anthony, it made perfect sense. “We serve breakfast, lunch and dinner and we wanted approachability, not only the elegance of a fine dining restaurant,” he said at a panel discussion about the evolution of the brasserie.

Anthony is not the only one taking the French term and bending it to meet the mood of the moment. In June, Daniel Boulud will open Brasserie Boulud, a new flagship that combines three of his Upper West Side restaurants (Bar Boulud, Boulud Sud, and Épicerie Boulud) into one Rockwell-designed 10,000 square-feet flagship spanning two floors, with a light and airy main brasserie-styled dining room, and an intimate speakeasy. In the fall, pastry chef Camari Mick will open L’Atelier Ébène, an “Afro-Caribbean brasserie” serving jerk lobster thermidor, coconut canelés, and cassava madeleines. Chef Gabriel Kreuther’s latest restaurant, Saverne in Hudson Yards (temporarily closed due to a fire), is dubbed “a modern wood-fired brasserie.” And Rocco Dispirito just unveiled his “Italian American brasserie” Bar Rocco in Midtown’s Kimpton Era Hotel, and the Serafina team will open Brasserie American by Michael Lomonaco, in a nearly 28,000 square-foot space on Seventh Avenue. Enter the era of brasseries without borders.

The term brasserie dates back to 19th-century Paris and originally referred to a boisterous and welcoming eating hall, where beer was both brewed and served. “It was a place to go where you left your cares and woes at the door, where you’re instantly welcomed,” said Jonathan Waxman, chef and owner of Barbuto, with locations in the West Village and Brooklyn. “The food is good, not terrific, but it doesn’t matter because the place is magical.”

Over the centuries, it evolved. “A brasserie started as a working restaurant — open all day, no ceremony, no friction,” said Rocco Dispirito, whose Italian brasserie serves meatballs, pastas, chops, and seafood. “It was a place you could get a proper meal at almost any hour, with consistency and a certain level of polish without feeling formal. In New York especially, it became shorthand for a big, lively room with a European point of view with food that should be recognizable and repeatable — dishes people want regularly, not just once. A brasserie menu isn’t about chasing trends; it’s about having a deep bench of things done really well.”

Brothers Bruce and Eric Bromberg were among the first to make the term “American brasserie” their own with the opening of Blue Ribbon Brasserie thirty years ago in an 800 square-foot space on a side street in Soho. The restaurant was inspired by trips with their father to Paris as kids, where they often ate at the brasserie Au Pied de Cochon.

“We wanted to open a place with continuous service that was lively,” said Eric, “but with the comfort foods of our childhoods – matzo ball soup, fried chicken, and mashed potatoes. We are American guys doing an American restaurant deeply steeped in French culture.”

While they could have leaned into the city’s semantics and called it a diner, they decided against it. “A diner has a lower-level connotation,” said Bruce. “A brasserie is far more elevated culinarily.”

The Brombergs opened the door in New York to a reinterpretation of the French model. “The idea behind brasserie is a restaurant that allows your customers to use it for a number of different reasons and levels of service and levels of occasion,” said John McDonald, the restaurateur behind the recently opened Seahorse, his sprawling seafood brasserie at the W Hotel. “It’s a chameleon, a blank canvas, ideal for interpretation. Restaurateurs can write it into their narrative.”

That blank canvas is what’s fueling the current explosion of brasserie culture. Kreuther’s new brasserie, for instance, offers wood-fired roasted chicken, a trio of tarte flambees and pretzels with horseradish dip at the bar with beers. It’s a marked shift away from his Michelin-starred namesake. It’s a formula that works because “it signals freedom,” he says. “In an era when dining can feel overly precious, a brasserie promises, ‘come as you are, eat what you crave atmosphere’.”

Of their upcoming brasserie, Mick says, “L’Atelier Ébène is very personal to us. We are traveling up from the west coast of Africa, through the Caribbean up to the east coast of America. We consider it a love letter to our ancestors. We are taking that word ‘brasserie’ and developing it into our food today.”

Of course, the quintessential French brasserie still holds its appeal, but even Daniel Boulud has a soft spot for the “American” brasserie. For Boulud, “an American brasserie begins with the spirit of the French original: it’s about generosity, rhythm, and a certain joie de vivre. But it’s really in New York that I feel inspired to open one.”

The difference is that “in America, the brasserie becomes more dynamic, a little more open to the world. That balance, between heritage and evolution, is what makes it feel American to me.”

Intel

• On May 29, Chama Mama hosts a Georgian Independence Day wine dinner at Platform by the James Beard Foundation at Pier 57 (25 11th Avenue). The evening spotlights rare qvevri wines — including what the restaurant claims is the world's only qvevri-method sparkling wine — alongside traditional dishes rarely seen in New York, among them Duck Braised with Wild Plums and Wine and Pelamushi with Gozinaki. Tickets start at $185 and are available through the James Beard Foundation website.

• This summer, Santo Taco (114 Kenmare Street as well as 94 University Place) is launching a Summer of Steak series — one-night-only collaborations with some of New York's most famous meat institutions. Peter Luger kicks things off May 16 (Soho location only), followed by Keens (June 10), Katz’s Deli (June 23), Delmonico's (July 16), and Smith & Wollensky (August 13), and Gage & Tollner (September 10).

• Uptown cookbook bookstore Kitchen Arts & Letters is popping up at 111 Broadway at Thames Street from Memorial Day to Labor Day. The longtime Upper East Side bookstore is part of a Fidi free rent program from the Downtown Alliance.

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Hi there. The weeks before Memorial Day are nonstop with news, with restaurants eager to launch projects ahead of the kickoff to summer. We’ve got a big closing to discuss and a couple of openings for you to check out, as well as an event for ramen fans coming up soon. Thanks for reading. — Melissa McCart, lead editor, Eater Northeast

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Ilis is closing in Greenpoint

Ilis — the ambitious Greenpoint restaurant from former Noma co-founder, Mads Refslund — is closing after service on May 28, less than three years after opening with enormous hype and a clam-shell drinking vessel that briefly became one of New York dining’s stranger status symbols.

“The building was sold and we lost the lease,” Refslund wrote in a mass email announcing the closure. “Ilis has been a dream of mine for more than a decade, a place built through curiosity, creativity, and the belief that food can bring people together in meaningful ways.”

When Ilis debuted in 2023 at 150 Green Street near Manhattan Avenue, it arrived with the kind of expectation that tends to follow anyone associated with the (now maligned) Noma. Diners sipped tomato water and clam broth from a flask made of bound clam shells; cooks also played the role of servers who’d ferry courses through the cavernous warehouse dining room.

The room itself was as memorable as the food. Former Eater critic Robert Sietsema, who called Ilis a “great restaurant,” described the space as “mottled with what looks like ancient paint,” with candles leaving “gothic heaps of white wax.” Built-in refrigerators lined one wall beneath racks of drying sunflowers. Staff worked around a stage of kitchen islands, an archipelago around the kitchen hearth.

The restaurant also became the subject of one of Pete Wells’s pans in the New York Times. Wells described the clam flask as “a corset designed for bivalves with a taste for mild kink,” while taking aim at the breathless food media coverage surrounding the opening. Still, he acknowledged, “It’s true that Ilis has served me some of the most memorable dishes I’ve eaten in a long time,” before concluding that the cooking itself was less dramatic than the restaurant’s elaborate “stagecraft.”

Refslund — who was also behind Acme in Noho prior to Ilis — took the review to heart (how could he not?), tweaking the menu and experiences across the restaurant. He introduced Sunday chicken dinners in the bar as well as fancy and unique one-time events, like a promenade tuna tasting.

In the announcement, Refslund says he’s looking for a new space. When I called him Saturday morning, he says he and a group of investors tried to save the building, but they were outbid by a developer who will tear it down to build condos.

Before it closes at the end of the month, the restaurant will be open for dinner Tuesday through Saturday. Refslund says as he looks for a new place to open the restaurant, he will have pop-ups in the future.

A follow-up to the Noortwyck opens in Nolita

Chef Andy Quinn along with co-owner and sommelier Cedric Nicaise — the duo behind the Noortwyck in Greenwich Village — are opening the swanky Oriana in Nolita on Tuesday, May 19 at 174 Mott Street, at Broome Street. Housed in a restored 1890s building, the restaurant will feature a menu built around an open wood-fired grill.

Oriana spans two floors and includes a 7,000-bottle wine cellar, private dining rooms, and a listening lounge lined with vinyl selected by musicians including Rosanne Cash and Rufus Wainwright. The onyx bar faces the street, while the dining room is anchored by an open kitchen and a 25-foot mural from Brooklyn-based artist Tunji Adeniyi-Jones.

Quinn, who was at Eleven Madison Park before opening the Noortwyck in 2022, will cook dishes like turbot with mussels, grilled leeks with gigante beans and taleggio, whole barbecue duck with smoked breast and neck sausage, and a pork chop with black mustard. There’s also a lobster toast with caviar, roasted oysters, and a baked potato loaded with smoked bone marrow.

The drinks continue the fire theme, with cocktails involving squid ink, oak smoke, black tea, and za’atar. Nicaise, another Eleven Madison Park alum, says more than 150 bottles on the list will fall under $100.

A Katz’s throwback has been restored

The iconic Katz’s Delicatessen on the Lower East Side is reopening what they’re calling the Ludlow Room, its original 1916 dining room that hadn’t been available for seating since 1949 — as it had been turned into a fridge before it was converted back to its original purpose. The restored 50-seat space retains its original tin ceilings and period-inspired lighting and will serve as overflow seating and a private dining room, according to a spokesperson. Fifth-generation owner Jake Dell is overseeing the project that will be open to the public later in the season.

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The company behind Barclays Center is getting into the restaurant business

Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment, the company behind Barclays Center, announced this week that it has partnered with Casa Tua to open Cucina by Casa Tua at One Hanson Place (at Ashland Place, near Atlantic Avenue) in 2027. The project signals that Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment intends to expand its hospitality business beyond its basketball-and-concert investments. Casa Tua, the sceney celebrity spot from couple Miky and Leticia Grendene, debuted in Miami Beach in 2001. Following an expansion to Aspen and Paris, it opened a new location at the Surrey Hotel on the Upper East Side.

The disciple of a Japanese ramen master is coming to New York

Daisuke Watanabe — a disciple of Shota Iida of Ramen Iida Shoten, who is widely regarded as one of Japan’s most revered ramen masters — is bringing his Tokyo ramen to New York for the first time starting Tuesday, May 12 at the Gallery by Odo in Flatiron. At Ramen Feel in Tokyo (which closed in late February), his bowls would sell out within minutes of opening daily. The residency is in partnership with Marukome, the Japanese fermentation house established in 1854. Three bowls are $25 each: the Marukome collaboration miso, shio, and vegetarian shojin. The residency runs through June 13; reservations at the Gallery by Odo. Book seats for the residency as well as a launch event on May 12.

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Hi there. Welcome back. Hope you have grand plans for a spring weekend that looks decent (but refuses to really let loose and warm up). Today we have news about longtime favorite Mary’s Fish Camp that shuttered in 2024 and a new Eastern European spot debuting in Greenwich Village. Also, if you’re taking your mother out for Mother’s Day, we have some ideas for you. — Melissa McCart, lead editor, Eater Northeast

Mary’s Fish Camp Will Reopen in the West Village

Mary Redding is bringing back Mary’s Fish Camp, this time at 626 Hudson Street at Jane Street in the West Village. She signed a lease on the new space and hopes to open this summer, though the timeline depends on NYSLA.

“No way!!!!!! I have chills!!!!!” Sarah Jessica Parker commented. “Oh, happy day!!!!! Do you need any help?? What can your devoted customers do to be helpful?
YAY!!!!!! Welcome home! How we have missed you. Xxx”

Redding closed the original Mary’s Fish Camp at 64 Charles Street in April 2024 after more than 20 years. The restaurant had been a West Village fixture since 2001, known for its conch chowder, lobster rolls, and a menu that grew over the years to include daily chalkboard specials — fresh sardine banh mi, yellowtail muffuletta, fritto misto with sprats — alongside simple preparations of whatever was fresh. As former Eater NY critic Robert Sietsema wrote at the time, it was a neighborhood default for unhurried lunches and dinners with out-of-town friends in search of local seafood. Redding was often seen outside, tending the growing collection of potted plants that crowded the exterior, walking her dogs, chatting with neighbors.

“This will not be the end,” she wrote on Instagram when she announced the closure. “We are hoping for fair winds on our next fishy endeavor.” Apparently, she meant it.

Gusi Opens in Greenwich Village With Borscht, a Halva Cocktail, and a Point of View

Gusi — named for the Russian and Ukrainian word for geese — will open Friday, May 8, at 432 Sixth Avenue, between West Ninth and 10th streets, in Greenwich Village. The bi-level restaurant comes from husband-and-wife team Boris Artemyev and Elena Melnikova, both veterans of New York’s restaurant scene, along with partners who immigrated from Russia, Ukraine, India, and Armenia.

“With all this political stuff, it wasn’t easy to find the right decision about the name, about everything,” Artemyev tells me. “I just want the food to unite people.”

On street level, the warm bar includes vintage mirrors and custom-built speakers for vinyl sets that run until midnight. The art draws on Soviet-era themes: one restroom is stenciled with code from Orwell’s 1984; another features a portrait of an 80-year-old attorney and friend of the owners, styled as a KGB officer with black-painted nails. Upstairs, the mood shifts with tablecloths, parquet floors, murals by an artist from Odesa, and views of Jefferson Market Library across the street.

The menu highlights Eastern European fare with borscht, offered in its classic form daily, alongside rotating weekly versions: duck; porcini, beef and bean; and spicy options. Pelmeni come filled with beef and pork, elk, buffalo, goose. There’s also a Mediterranean variation filled with oxtails and finished with tahini. Pierogi are made with puff pastry, lighter and flakier than the short-crust version most New Yorkers know. Chef Galina Bovtun steers the kitchen bridging the cuisines, including a dessert that merges Eastern European sunflower seed halva with the sesame version common to the Eastern Mediterranean.

The bar menu embraces nostalgic flavors, with items like pine-cone infusions, cornelian cherry liqueur, boiled condensed milk, halva-infused bourbon for an Old Fashioned.

“We want to come to this place and bring together all the people who live in New York City and have made this place their home,” says Melnikova. Given who’s building it and why, that’s not a small thing.

Gusi opens with weekday service from 4 p.m. to midnight, and weekends starting at noon on May 23.

Intel

• SEA by Jungsik, the Southeast Asian sister restaurant to chef Jungsik Yim’s three-Michelin-star flagship, is closing on Saturday, May 1, at 151 West 30th Street. The team announced the news on Instagram, saying the closure is “not the end — but a pause before something new begins,” with a promise to return “very soon.” Yim is one of New York’s most influential fine dining chefs. His flagship, Jungsik, has been a proving ground for some of the city’s best talent — J.P. Park went on to open Atoboy and Atomix, and pastry chef Eunji Lee left to open Lysée. SEA opened in August 2024 as a casual take on Southeast Asian cuisine, drawing on a decade of Yim’s research into the region’s flavors and techniques.

• Today, Friday, May 1, the original Ben’s Chili Bowl, founded in 1958 and which underwent a nine-month renovation, reopens in D.C.; on Thursday, May 14, starting at 11 a.m., the icon makes an appearance in Manhattan. Greg Baxtrom’s 5 Acres at 30 Rockefeller Plaza (at the rink level) is hosting a pop-up serving Ben’s famous half-smoke on a steamed bun with chili, alongside the restaurant’s spiced fries. Founded by Ben and Virginia Ali, Ben’s has survived riots, urban renewal, and gentrification, feeding everyone from Nat King Cole to Barack Obama.

• Mother’s Day is the most popular brunch holiday of the year. We’ve got you covered with our brunch map. I’d recommend Cafe Sabarsky for the pastry fan, Animo for a chill vibe, breakfast tacos, and horchata lattes, or the Noortwyck for superb wine options and honey cardamom toast. A few not on the map include a fancy one at Daniel, the Italian a la carte brunch or dinner at Sartiano’s, or an unfussy morning meal at S&P Lunch.

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Happy almost-Friday, y’all. I’m back after a week off for my birthday, and today, I’m writing about the wonders of steak frites served at New York bars. Plus, we’ve got news about NYC bars getting recognized on a big-deal cocktail ranking and what’s happening with a Vietnamese coffee shop in Brooklyn. — Nadia Chaudhury, deputy editor, Northeast

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Steak frites is that classic French bistro dish of a simply prepared steak (often skirt, bavette, or hanger, medium rare, please), served with crispy fries, and maybe some au poivre sauce. New York is full of places with steak frites, from fancy French restaurants to old-school steakhouses. Yet plenty of bustling bars serve it too — cocktail bars, dive bars, or wine bars — at affordable prices.

Lori Jayne

Danger Danger, 232 Knickerbocker Avenue, between Starr and Troutman streets, Bushwick
Steak frites with miso-chimichurri ($25), au poivre-style (+$1)

Sam Braverman, the owner and chef of Lori Jayne, is the steak frites man. “I walk, and people yell at me: ‘Oh, it’s the Lori Jayne guy, aw, steak frites,’” he tells me. His steak frites started as a special and blew up after video journalist Rob Martinez asked him to make an au poivre version. The video went up, and a hit was born; thus began Lori Jayne’s famous steak frites au poivre. “Hey man, this is just what we do now,” he says.

Even though the roaming restaurant has moved three times, Lori Jayne is now settled into its home at Danger Danger, a bar and nightclub. “The bigger thing I like about what we do: It democratizes a food that is out of reach for a lot of people,” he says. “It reinforces the theme of our whole program: It doesn’t matter where you are or how much money you’re plunking down. You deserve really good, intentional, high-quality food.” And it’s been working — he averages 125 steak frites tickets in four hours on Fridays and Saturdays.

Best steak frites drink pairing: “A vesper with Cocchi Americano if you’re drinking; seltzer and bitters with a little bit of lime if you’re not,” Braverman says.

Liar Liar

285 Nevins Street, at Sackett Street, Gowanus
Steak frites au poivre, $39

Before opening the natural wine bar in February 2025, the Liar Liar team, including co-owner Gabi Gimson, asked chef Leo Ballerini to create a French bistro-style menu. He turned to Escoffier and landed on the steak au poivre, but ended up making one with Italian flair (his parents run Prospect Heights Italian restaurant Amorina), where hanger steaks are cooked with rosemary.

What makes Liar Liar’s steak fries even more appealing is that there’s a good happy hour deal on weekdays. The steak frites-red wine bottle special is $69, Monday through Thursday, 4 to 6 p.m. “It’s just fun for people,” Gimson says.

Best steak frites drink pairing: “You start with a round of martinis, you get the Caesar salad, you order a bottle of the Barolo, you share the steak frites, chicken sandwich, and a side of broccolini,” Gimson says.

Schmuck

97 First Avenue at East Sixth Street, East Village
Steak frites, $24

The hip cocktail bar got into the steak frites game very recently, as of late March, and the addition just made sense to co-owners Moe Aljaf and Juliette Larrouy. “We wanted to make it super-accessible,” Aljaf tells me, wanting to offer steak frites and a martini for under $50; the combination at Schmuck is around $43 without tip.

Chef Yuri Hernandez uses hanger steak sourced from Pino’s Prime Meats. The sauce (a take on Café de Paris sauce) is made with butter and garlic, which gets blended with lots of herbs (tarragon, parsley, basil, sage), anchovies, walnuts, and salt and pepper. Everything gets whisked with Dijon mustard, egg yolks, and some cream, resulting in this “herbal, very savory” flavor, Aljaf describes.

Best steak frites drink pairing: The Schmuck martini or the Bread with Tomatoes.

The Clover Club

210 Smith Street, between Butler and Baltic streets, Cobble Hill
Steak frites with green peppercorn jus, $39

When the nearly 18-year-old cocktail bar was being built out, co-founder Julie Reiner recalls how the owner of neighboring butcher shop Paisanos stopped by. The man told them how everyone on that block sourced their meat from him, implying that they should too, and naturally, they did.

Clover Club’s steak frites — a staple since it opened — comes with hanger steak cooked with thyme, black pepper, and some garlic. The sauce is made with just-crushed toasted green peppercorns that are mixed with demi-glace and finished with butter. House-cut shoestring fries round out the dish, plus a greens salad with sherry vinaigrette and a garlic-Dijon dipping sauce.

Reiner likes pairing steak frites with whiskey drinks. “It’s a perfect combination,” she says, “and something that will fill you up. It’s not too much meat, not like going to a steakhouse where you have a huge, huge steak.”

Best steak frites drink pairing: the Clover Manhattan.

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Plus de Vin

445 Graham Avenue, near Richardson Street, Williamsburg
Steak frites, $30

The Plus de Vin team, including co-owner and sommelier Carenn Mackinnon, was recently thinking about dishes they’d want at their wine bar. “Everyone who eats meat loves steak frites,” she says, explaining that even before they added it to the menu, regulars often requested it.

It’s a simple hanger steak, basted with butter and thyme, which gets covered in a black peppercorn sauce made of wine, shallots, pepper, tarragon, and garlic, served with shoestring fries. “It’s not groundbreaking,” she says, “and we didn’t want it to be. It’s just really good steak cooked well with a really nice from-scratch sauce and crispy salt fries.”

Best steak frites drink pairing: “Either a glass of chilled red wine or our Basque martini, a dirty martini with gin and Tximista vermouth from the Basque region of Spain. It’s briny, salty, almost a little spicy, and it’s garnished with an olive and piparra pepper. We were inspired by the fact that we love a gilda,” Mackinnon says.

Bar Nico

790 Grand Street, near Humboldt Street, Williamsburg
Steak frites, $17

Brothers Callum and Morgan Sigg are working within the constraints of a tiny kitchen in their newer Australian pub in Brooklyn: They’re serving single dishes for every day of the week, inspired by the nightly specials from the bars in their home country. This means Mondays are steak frites nights at Bar Nico (inspired by Lori Jayne).

The cuts and sources change because, as Morgan Sigg explains to me over the phone from Australia, they want to keep that $17 price point. “Sometimes it’s picanha, hangers, sometimes if we’re lucky and we get enough Denver steak,” he says. “We buy everything that day, we get everything delivered that day, and then we use what we get that day: low overheads and very low inventory.”

“We don’t necessarily make much money on a $17 steak frites,” Morgan confesses, but it’ll get people to come into the bar and buy a drink or two. And the steak frites is even better because it’s the only time the fries are made with beef tallow.

Best steak frites drink pairing: the $8 beer-and-shot combo.

The Binc

60 Henry Street, near Cranberry Street, Brooklyn Heights
Steak frites with peppercorn cream sauce, $31

General manager Amy Mascena knows that the Binc is the right setting for steak frites, a dish that has been on the menu since the bar opened nearly a decade ago. “It’s dark, it’s cozy, it’s intimate,” she says, with a very old Brooklyn vibe.

Binc’s hanger steak is sourced from Pat LaFrieda, but at $30, the bar’s steak frites is different from the $41 hanger steak served at the attached sibling restaurant Bevacco. “We wanted to make it reasonable,” she says.

Best steak frites drink pairing: “Grandma’s Salty Tomato cocktail with sundried infused vodka. But for me, I’m a wine girl: French Bourgogne pinot noir, Pascerette des Vignes, it’s so delicious, and it’s not super-light, it has some body to it.”

High Steaks, a deep dive into steakhouse culture, continues across Eater all this week.

Intel

• We’re living in a steak world, baby: Scope out my list of steak frites at NYC bars over on Eater’s app; check out Eater NY’s steakhouse map; and read my dining reports on Las Vegas steakhouse imports Golden Steer and Carversteak.

• We knew longtime Upper East Side steakhouse Donohue’s was closing, and now we know when: June, as reported by Grub Street.

• New York City cocktail bars made a good showing in the new North America’s 50 Best Bars for 2026, announced yesterday.

  • Sip & Guzzle, the New York expansion of Tokyo bar, snagged the No. 1 slot.

  • Bar Snack made it to the list for its first time at No. 3 and won the Highest New Entry Award.

  • Schmuck got No. 4 and the Best New Opening award.

  • Superbueno (which just celebrated its third anniversary this week) nabbed No. 9.

• Vietnamese coffee shop Larry’s Ca Phe is closing both of its Brooklyn locations in May. Owner Tuan Nguyen announced the shutters on Instagram, explaining that it’s because of ongoing “significant mental health challenges.” The Park Slope cafe is closing on Sunday, May 3, and East Williamsburg on Sunday, May 10. However, Nguyen is giving over the spaces to two fellow business friends, the East Williamsburg one to Noah Hammer of pop-up Onigiri Noah and Park Slope to Wendy Huang of Yellow Pear Coffee. He also plans on eventually bringing Larry’s back as a pop-up.

• Look at this adorable bunny cake that baker Srishti Jain made for Icelandic singer, musician, and cookbook author Laufey as part of her children’s book event at the Strand this week.

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Hi there. Today, we have Bettina Makalintal detouring from her Eater Today newsletter to tell us about one of the most exciting stretches for coffee in the city. We also have just news on a couple of closures and a discussion on Key Foods’ playlist. Enjoy this outstanding weather. — Melissa McCart, lead editor, Northeast

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This Corner of Williamsburg is the Most Exciting Asian American Coffee Hotspot

By Bettina Makalintal

Recently, I was sipping an iced pandan matcha latte from Kinhfolk, the new Vietnamese coffee shop on Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg, when I realized that if you’re searching for a specialty drink like this — with flavors like pandan or black sesame — there’s probably no better three-block radius to look, at least not in Brooklyn.

The little nook of the neighborhood south of the BQE but east of Union Avenue has quietly become a hotspot for exciting, new-school Asian American coffee shops. It echoes the national trend toward more globally influenced coffee shops, as well as the growing desire for more culturally specific spaces. Here, you’ll find lattes inspired by Chinese pastries, mochas made with coffee beans from up-and-coming Vietnamese roasters, and Japanese spots known for their TikTok-famous matchas.

For Emily Shum — owner and co-founder of Land to Sea, which opened on Graham Avenue in the fall of 2021 — Brooklyn, where she grew up, was the obvious choice for where to open a space. “We wanted to build something that celebrated our heritage and our roots, with really fun, interesting drinks with Asian flavors, celebrating specialty coffee,” she told me. Having Cantonese pastries at the shop, which are made by a Chinatown bakery, was important to Shum too: She grew up eating them, but they weren’t as common in the neighborhood.

In the years since Land to Sea’s opening, a handful of other Asian American coffee shops have sprouted up nearby, making this micro-neighborhood one of the most interesting places to drink coffee (and matcha) right now.

Land to Sea

At Land to Sea, you’ll find straightforward coffee and matcha drinks in addition to roast pork buns, egg tarts, a selection of frequently changing specials (like mochas infused with Chinese five-spice and black sesame-and-pumpkin lattes that draw on Chinese nan gua), and wine later in the day. Through its pop-ups and a flexible range of programming, including regular mahjong nights, Land to Sea has become a community hub, especially among Asian Americans. “We always set the intention that we wanted it to be a third space,” Shum said. You’ll find work by local artists on the walls, a lending library by Shape of Absence, a vibey neon-tinged back room, and a bathroom wallpapered with Chinese newspapers. 402 Graham Avenue, at Jackson Street

As You Like

As You Like opened in the summer of 2022 from Mai Bakel, with business partner Yuji Haraguchi of the nearby Okonomi | Yuji Ramen. “Opening a coffee shop [has been] my dream since I was a kid,” Bakel said. Though Bakel was initially more focused on coffee, with specialty drinks such as chestnut lattes and maple-kinako lattes, the shop’s menu has expanded to feature more matcha as the demand grows. The coffee shop also sells Japanese ceramics and regularly hosts pop-ups and events, including a monthly onigiri workshop. (Some of these onigiri events have even been marketed as singles mixers.) According to Bakel, “I want to share my culture with my customers.” 428 Humboldt Street, between Jackson Street and Skillman Avenue

Kijitora East

Matcha-focused cafe Kijitora now has four locations in the city, but the one on Graham Avenue was its second. Kijitora takes its coffee seriously — at the counter is a Japanese-style slow-drip tower — but it’s matcha that’s made the shop internet-famous. The nearly milkshake-like iced strawberry matcha latte is ever-popular, though you’ll find rotating seasonal options, such as iced mango matcha lattes and kinako matcha lattes, made with roasted soy flour. The cat-themed cafe also sells cat-shaped grilled cheeses on the weekends and onigiri every day. 309 Graham Ave, between Devoe Street and Ainslie Street

Larry’s Cà Phê

Tuan Nguyen opened Larry’s Cà Phê in the summer of 2023, named for Nguyen’s father, Larry Hilton, who adopted him from Vietnam in 2000. Hilton died in 2019. The cozy coffee shop serves an assortment of classic Vietnamese coffee drinks, including cà phê trứng, ​strong coffee topped with egg custard, and cà phê muối, coffee topped with salted foam. Its matcha drinks are also popular, especially the refreshing “Larry’s Ice-Green,” featuring coconut water topped with fluffy matcha foam and shredded coconut. The coffee shop regularly hosts pop-ups and other events. It expanded with a second location in Park Slope last summer. 135 Woodpoint Road, at Withers Street

Ando Patisserie

After traveling around Europe during culinary school, Nic Yang started Ando Patisserie in 2019 as a pop-up, through which he merged French patisserie with Asian flavors. “When I first came to America, I found many of the pastries overwhelmingly sweet,” Yang said. Yang opened Ando’s first location in the East Village a couple of years ago, then expanded to Conselyea Street in Williamsburg in the fall of 2025. It’s a bright, design-minded space — think chrome accents and a Wassily-style chair. You’ll find fancy desserts here, such as crepe rolls filled with black sesame cream as well as osmanthus oolong Basque lava cakes, but also hojicha, matcha, and coffee specials, including lattes blended with jasmine tea and others made with slow-cooked corn juice. 174 Conselyea Street, near Graham Avenue

Kinhfolk

Kinhfolk’s long-awaited shop on Metropolitan Avenue opened last fall after establishing its presence in the coffee scene via events and catering. “Vietnamese coffee wasn’t something that was presented in a modern, intentional way in the coffee industry scene until recently,” co-founder Linh Nguyen told me. That’s changed as a new wave of coffee pros nationally heralds undersung coffee beans. Kinhfolk’s goal is to highlight specialty Vietnamese robusta beans, a coffee varietal that’s historically taken a backseat to arabica beans globally despite its popularity in Vietnam; the shop uses beans from Philadelphia’s Càphê Roasters and the Bay Area’s River Phin Coffee Roasters. “Ultimately, I want people to leave with a better understanding of Vietnamese coffee — that it can go beyond your traditional condensed milk,” Nguyen said. What the shop lacks in size it more than makes up for in style, with deep green walls and silver accents. 710 Metropolitan Avenue, between Manhattan Avenue and Graham Avenue

Intel

• Dinosaur Bar-B-Que will close its Gowanus location (604 Union Street) this spring after nearly years, as its lease comes to an end. Customers can still visit the chain's Harlem location, while others in New York will remain open. A spokesperson says it will close within 90 days, but the date is still tbd.

• Two of the newish locations of Le Fournil are closing. Each opened last season on the Upper East Side (1247 Third Avenue) and Park Slope (186 Fifth Avenue) have closed “due to circumstances outside our control,” the business announced on Instagram. It leaves just one location left in the city, the original that opened six years ago. I reached out for more information.

• Chef Dan Kluger’s Loring Place (21 West Eighth Street) is closing Tuesday, July 14, after nearly a decade. “The truth is simple: rising costs have made this the necessary time to close this chapter,” reads the announcement.

• EV Grieve has made a Spotify playlist inspired by music on the intercoms at Key Foods.

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Hi there. Next weekend marks a very big deal restaurant opening at 550 Madison: two of the three Simon Kim spots, including a fancier Cote and Bar Chimera, the new three-in-one bar that’s out to make the city’s best martini. We’ve also got an event that marks the glory of the Moka pot to tell you about. Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend. —Melissa McCart, lead editor, Eater Northeast

Simon Kim’s Biggest Project Yet

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In the near-decade since Simon Kim opened Flatiron’s Korean steakhouse Cote, the restaurateur has become one of the city’s standout empire builders. Since then, he has also become the most famous purveyor of caviar-topped chicken nuggets with his follow-up Coqodaq, and he has taken on a Cote expansion to Miami, Singapore, and Las Vegas.

His latest NYC project is his grandest yet. “This is my Sistine Chapel,” he told Grub Street, of the three-restaurants-in-one opening at 550 Madison, a skyscraper designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee that once housed the Quilted Giraffe. Here, with designer David Rockwell, Kim has his newest Cote destination, as well as Bar Chimera, with three bars each dedicated to a single specialty: wine, whiskey, or the martini at the start. His goal? “The best martini bar in the world belongs in New York City,” he tells me. Over the summer, he’ll open the third destination, Sushi Yoshitake from chef Masahiro Yoshitake. I sat down to talk to Simon about the opening.

Melissa McCart: You’ve described this as the grown-up version of Cote. What does that mean to you?

Simon Kim: I matured a lot as a restaurateur. When we first opened Cote, I couldn’t raise capital, so I was underfunded, and I had to do what I had to do to basically open it. Whereas here, we had a proper budget and opportunity to open the fully developed version. If Cote was an adolescent version originally, this is the mature version.

Tell me about the food in the new Cote.

Our mission statement is: We delight our customers. The most exciting dish we developed is japchae — a traditional Korean dish that’s really common in Korean barbecue restaurants. We make a tableside japchae. I love going to steakhouses and getting a Caesar salad made in front of you — I find that such a joyful moment. I wanted to bring that delight in a Korean way. We have nine different ingredients that get mixed tableside, and we have an oil extractor, so we buy fresh sesame and extract it on premises. Think of japchae not as a noodle dish but almost as a salad — if Italians have panzanella, a bread salad, why can’t we have a noodle salad?

We also have yukjeon, which we call a steak omelet. Jeon, in Korean, is a pan-fried savory pancake. It’s a thin-ish slice of A5 Japanese wagyu, dusted with flour, egg-washed, and finished tableside. I love, as a New Yorker, the old-world cherries jubilee flambé — tableside moments are really fun.

Our main driver, the Butcher’s Feast — we wanted to upgrade that. We’ll have an amuse-bouche course of toro, served as a cube rather than flat, thin layers. Think of it as A5 wagyu from the sea. You start the savory course with the most well-marbled fish and end with the most well-marbled meat.

In Grub Street, you called this your Sistine Chapel. In the New York Times, you called Coqodaq a “fried chicken cathedral.” What’s with the places-of-worship throughline?

When I say Sistine Chapel, it’s not necessarily about religious notes — it’s that I’ve been working on this for five and a half years. I get to work in a Philip Johnson building, with David Rockwell, and chef Masahiro Yoshitake, who is a shokunin from Japan. I feel like this is the greatest honor I can have as a restaurateur: to serve New York with the team I have. In Korean, we say you blended your soul into it. I really put a lot of thought, a lot of time, a lot of everything into this — really attempting to create a masterpiece. In that sense, the amount of work and time that went into it — it’s our Sistine Chapel.

You said you want Bar Chimera to have the best martini in the world. What does that mean?

I approach this with great humbleness — I don’t think we’ll get there on day one. Whenever you go to a bar, even one that serves a really amazing martini, the bartenders are asked to make margaritas and whiskey sours as well. We wanted our bartenders to focus only on the martini. So we have three bars instead of one — each bartender is designated to focus on martinis, almost like a sushi shokunin, a chef who makes sushi every single day, month after month, year after year, until they reach the pinnacle of their craftsmanship. We may not open as the best martini bar in the world, but that is our humble pursuit. And as a proud New Yorker, I believe the best martini bar in the world should belong to New York City.

What about the whisky bar?

We have an ever-growing selection — we focus on the full spectrum, whether you’re looking for something peaty and smoky, something well-rounded, or just a nice stiff whisky sour after work. We have a section called “Once in a Lifetime,” with bottles that are almost impossible to find as a non-avid collector. We have a Macallan 18 that sounds mundane, but it was distilled in 1979. We work closely with Suntory, so we’ll have Yamazaki 25. American bourbons, Scotch — we want to cover all grounds.

If I’m at a table where one person wants a martini, one wants whiskey, one wants wine — how does that work?

You can order anything from anywhere. Each bar may have something specific you can only order there, but otherwise, you can order across all three. And [at the bar] everyone will receive a welcome drink, so you all have something to toast to while the rest catch up. The idea is that no one’s sitting there waiting.

Anything else you’d want readers to know?

We take what we do extremely seriously, but not ourselves. This is a great bar where you can have stiff drinks and a great time. My goal is really to welcome and delight our customers.

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A Moka Pot Moment

On April 21, Roscioli (43 MacDougal Street), the Roman import in Greenwich Village, will transform its after-dinner coffee service for a one-night event timed to Milan Design Week 2026. In partnership with Bialetti, the restaurant will serve coffee exclusively from the original Moka pot — the stovetop coffee pot that debuted in 1933 — turning the post-dinner ritual into a tableside moment across the restaurant. Diners get complimentary Moka-prepared coffee served in Bialetti's signature cups, while a limited number of one-cup Moka pots will be given away throughout the evening. Reservations are on the website.

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Hi there. Today, I am choosing the winner of the $200 a la carte dinner at Anbā. Please check your Substack personal accounts to find out if you’ve won — and thanks for your comments. Read on for a few items I’d like to spotlight: anniversaries, events, upcoming openings, and so on. Have a good weekend. — Melissa McCart, lead editor, Eater Northeast

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The newest cha chaan teng in town

Joys’ Cafe, a new Hong Kong-style cha chaan teng, opened recently at 60 Bayard Street in Chinatown. The 70-seat restaurant is the first cafe for David and Shen Chen. They’re also behind Wonton Noodle, a Mott Street restaurant that opened last year.

Joys’ arrives at a moment when the cha chaan tengs, tea cafes built around affordable comfort food, are still having a New York moment. A new wave of spots had opened across the city in the past few years, from Mabu Cafe in Chinatown to Sing NYC on Bleecker Street.

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The owners say Joys’ is pretty traditional, with more light and more space than most.

“It’s more modernized than a lot of the restaurants in this area,” the Chens tells me through a translator. “We want people to feel like it’s a community here.”

In addition to classics, look for Thai-style fried rice, Thai-style bean chow fun, pineapple buns, and Portuguese egg tarts. The desserts include shaved ice loaded with lychee jelly and tapioca, plus Hong Kong-style milk tea and lemon tea, too.

Joys’ Cafe is open daily from 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. most nights, and 10 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays.

Eddie Huang is throwing a collab dinner with the Russian & Turkish Baths, merch included

The idea for a collaboration dinner started, as many good ideas do: with a hat. What came out of it is a collaboration between the newly opened Baohaus (97 St. Marks Place) and the Russian and Turkish Baths, taking place on Tuesday, April 21.

Eddie Huang and his wife, Natashia Perrotti, noticed that “Baohaus” and “Bath House” look similar when you swap in the Russian Cyrillic “o” — so they made some shirts and sauna hats, and then figured they needed a reason to sell them. The Russian and Turkish Baths (268 East 10th Street) are practically neighbors with Baohaus, which Huang reopened last month, a revival of the original he opened in 2009 and closed at the start of the pandemic in 2020.

The result is a three-course dinner built around a simple premise: What does the food of the baths look like through a Taiwanese lens? The menu swaps smoked whitefish for smoked duck on an Apollo Bagel, replaces borscht with oxtail beef noodle soup, and brings back the chicken liver oyster bao alongside sticky rice stuffed cabbage rolls with shellfish shallot gravy. A fog machine will run throughout the night to mimic steam. Of course it will.

Everyone who attends gets a T-shirt. Sauna hats are available for purchase separately. Seats are available on SevenRooms.

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Bar Mercer is a year old. Here’s what’s working.

Chef Preston Clark — behind Lure Fishbar and head chef for Mercer Street Hospitality — wanted Bar Mercer (25 West Houston Street) to feel like a neighborhood joint. A year in, the neighborhood has obliged.

What are the hits? The saucy hamachi crudo is number one, he says. The chicory salad is right behind it. Then the filet au poivre, the pork chop, and the pigs in a blanket. The chalkboard moves specials like whole branzino, steaks, lobster dishes, and whatever Clark feels like cooking that day: The burger has migrated on and off the menu and is currently living on the chalkboard.

I’m a fan of sitting at the bar and grazing on those pigs in a blanket, clams a la plancha, and the pork chop with maitakes, black trumpets, and chanterelles, too.

“There is no more nightclub. It’s all about the food.”

Catch, the New York restaurant that, along with Tao, helped shape the lifestyle dining era of the early 2010s, is marking its 15th anniversary this week following a $4 million renovation and an overhauled menu. When I talked to co-founder Eugene Remm, he told me,“there is no more nightclub. It’s all about the food.”

The renovation at 21 Ninth Avenue covers the second and third floors of the original New York location, preserving the industrial brick bones while replacing every chair, table, bar top, and light fixture. The result is a more intimate 100-seat dining room with cozy booths and banquettes, a switch-up from the mega-restaurant that used to pack in giant parties.

The menu gets 15 new dishes to match the anniversary: an angry lobster pasta, a tuna miso rice cake topped with caviar, chicken bao, and an ahi tuna pizza, among others. Fifteen new cocktails launch alongside.

Intel

• Get ready for Daniel Humm’s new restaurant — named Humm — opening this fall.

• One of NYC’s most storied steakhouses, Delmonico’s has a new chef and is opening a giant midtown location at 1330 Avenue of the Americas.

• On Friday, April 10 at 11:30 a.m., there’s a rally to save boxing bar icon, Jimmy’s Corner.

• Steve Cuozzo in New York Post reports that Serafina is opening a gigantic brasserie at 800 Seventh Avenue, a 28,000 square foot spot that’s allegedly going to be called Brasserie American by Michael Lomonaco. It’s taking over what had been Rosie O’Grady for over 40 years, that closed in 2023.

This week’s giveaway

Win a $200 Night at Anbā — and what you need to know about this under-the-radar sushi counter

An intimate omakase counter tucked behind a cocktail lounge on Ludlow Street, Anbā (92 Ludlow Street, at Delancey) opened in February, one of the few NYC sushi restaurants run by a woman, chef Ambrely Ouimette. Her omakase draws on classical Japanese technique layered with fermentation, seasonality, and global influences. She also dry-ages fish.

Born in Connecticut and raised in the Hudson Valley, Ouimette trained under Nobu Matsuhisa, and more recently, she led the omakase counter at Sushi|Bar ATX in Austin before the restaurant expanded to Miami, Los Angeles, and Montecito. Now she’s back in New York, where her culinary journey began.

Starting Wednesday, April 1, Anbā introduces an a la carte menu, available every Wednesday from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. Anyone seated at the chef’s counter or in the Lounge can order chirashi bowls, temaki hand rolls, crudo dishes, and nigiri, with prices from $8 to $50. Also available: Sake flights from sommelier Audrey Crowe and beer on tap.

Now, the giveaway: We’re giving away a $200 a la carte experience at Anbā — dinner for two on a Wednesday of the winner’s choosing.

To enter: Leave a comment below telling us your favorite new NYC restaurant or bar that’s opened in the past year, and why. We’ll pick a winner by noon on Friday, April 3.

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NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. VOID WHERE PROHIBITED BY LAW. Sweepstakes begins at 9 a.m. ET on 3/27/2026 and end at 10:00 a.m. ET on 4/3/2026. Open to Eater NY Substack subscribers (free) that are legal residents of the 50 U.S. states and Washington D.C., of legal age of majority and have access to the internet, and a valid email address. Odds of winning depend on number of eligible entries received. Subject to Official Rules, additional eligibility restrictions apply. Sponsor Privacy Policy. Sponsor: Vox Media, LLC, 1701 Rhode Island Ave., Washington DC 20036

Smorgasburg opens next week

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Vast outdoor market Smorgasburg returns for its 16th year, this time, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday, April 4, at Marsha P. Johnson State Park in Williamsburg, and Sunday, April 5, at Breeze Hill in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, in partnership with Prospect Park Alliance.

In addition to over 50 returning vendors, over 20 new ones join the list, including 82 Bowl from Hand Hospitality (behind Her Name Is Han and Atoboy ), focused on Korean barbecue. There’s also kolachi rolls from the East Village. Check out the others below.

82 Bowl - Ambo - Bingsoo - Bom Bae - Brasa (Palenque Parrila) - WB/PP Chenzi - Garoso - Humos BBQ - Jimchi - Kolachi Rolls - Madrina Vegana - Nano Burger - Palenque Empanadas & Arepas - Pizzeria Fantastica - Pretty Horse Workers Cooperative - Rogers Burgers - Secondz - Taco’s Taurino’s - The Aborrajao - The Pupusas Spot - The Purple Cup.

Intel

• After nearly 100 years, iconic Sardi’s is closing for a stretch starting on Wednesday, June 24. The New York Times reports the closure is temporary, so the restaurant can refurbish the dining room, upgrade the ventilation, and redo the plumbing; they’re shooting for a Tuesday, November 10, reopening. Former employee who rose from an expediter to the owner, Max Klimavicius, sold the Sardi’s name (as well as all kitchen fixtures and more than 1,000 caricatures) to his landlord, the Shubert Organization, a theater company. Klimavicius took over as full owner in 2007; before that, he was a part owner with Sardi Jr.

• Another location of the wildly popular Filipino fast-food chain Jollibee is opening at 14 East 42nd and Fifth Avenue March 31, starting at 9 a.m.

• The 35-seat steakhouse from Tilman Fertitta, Eugene Remm, and chef Michael Vignola, the Eighty Six, has been named no. 12 on the World’s 101 Best Steak Restaurants list, as well as the highest-ranked steakhouse in North America. (I did not know there was such a list, but now I’m down the rabbit hole.) Behind the Eighty Six is Simon Kim’s Cote at no. 21 and Daniel Boulud’s La Tete d’Or at no. 34.

Have you downloaded the updated Eater app?

Want restaurant recommendations you can trust? Download the Eater app to see where chefs and editors actually eat. If you’re into New York recs, be sure to follow at the very least Nadia and me (and Stephanie Wu, and so many more). Eaterapp.com is available on iOS.

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Hi there. We’re psyched for spring — officially tomorrow! The turn toward warmer weather means going out more. So today, we’ve got drinks expert Diana Pittet, just back from Tokyo, discussing a Japanese cocktail trend we’re hoping makes its way to New York. We also have news on the fate of a beloved steakhouse, a couple of openings, and more.

What did we miss? Leave a note in the comments. Thanks for reading. — Melissa McCart, lead editor, Eater Northeast

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The NYC Bars Channeling Japan’s Fresh-Fruit Cocktails

By Diana Pittet

Cocktail tourism is alive and well in Japan: Anyone who has spent time bending an elbow in the Land of the Rising Sun tends to come home talking about it — the meticulous bartending techniques, the legendary hospitality, and the distinctive cocktail bars where the drink selection begins not with a menu but with a display of market produce.

Often described as “fresh fruit cocktail bars,” these intimate Japanese spots build drinks to order around fruits and vegetables, such as citrus, strawberries, winter squash, and radishes. Customers pick a produce item and opt for a long (taller with more mixers) or short drink. With the selection, the bartender creates something tailored to the moment, often squeezing the fruit or vegetable a la minute.

The approach reflects the Japanese culinary philosophy of seasonality, akin to a kaiseki meal built around ingredients at their peak. While the tradition began in Tokyo, it has spread across the country. In Omiya, a city in Saitama Prefecture just north of Tokyo, many bars operate this way, showcasing local produce. (Some of them include Bar Adenium, The Bar Alcazar, The Bar Vieux Carre2, and Bar Saigetsuan.)

Despite the big impact that Japanese cocktail culture has had on New York bars, the produce-first model has never fully taken hold here. As seasoned bartender Takuma Watanabe of Martiny’s in Gramercy notes, the reasons are practical. The bars in Japan — even in a sizable city like Omiya — tend to have just a few bar seats, making it easier to juice to order, a tricky thing to emulate in high-volume establishments. Also, peak fruit is often more abundant and less expensive than in New York. Still, a handful of New York bars come close.

Odo Lounge

Perhaps the closest New York analogue is Odo Lounge, the intimate speakeasy (just four seats at the bar) tucked behind chef Hiroki Odo’s two-Michelin-starred kaiseki restaurant in Flatiron.

On Tuesday, March 31, the Flatiron bar launches a new program, Seasonal Cocktail, rooted in the Japanese concept of shun — the fleeting moment when an ingredient is at its peak flavor, aroma, and texture. Rather than relying on fixed recipes, head bartender Harry Kaufman builds drinks around fruits, vegetables, and herbs often sourced from the same ingredients used in the restaurant’s menu.

The cocktails evolve as the season changes: rare melon and citrus varieties, juicy berries, and root vegetables. The result is an ever-shifting bar program focused on drawing out the truest flavor from peak-season produce.

If Japanese spirits are what you are after, Odo’s recently opened sibling bar, Odo East Village, offers highballs stirred with shochu or Japanese whisky, often garnished with slices of seasonal fruit, such as kumquats.

Martiny’s

At Martiny’s, bartender Takuma Watanabe brings a lineage closely tied to Japan’s fresh-fruit cocktail culture. Before opening his Gramercy townhouse bar, Watanabe worked at Tokyo’s Code Name Mixology, run by legendary bartender Shuzo Nagumo, where displays of seasonal fruits and vegetables guide drink-making. He later spent years at the original Angel’s Share in the East Village, the pioneering Japanese cocktail bar that introduced many New Yorkers to the elegance and restraint of Japanese bartending.

While New York’s ingredient costs and higher-volume service make a pure juice bar model difficult to replicate, Martiny’s retains much of that spirit. Drinks emphasize clean, ingredient-driven flavors and meticulous technique, often served in delicate Kimura glassware.

Like most bars across Japan, Martiny’s also offers a strong selection of Japanese whiskies. In Saitama Prefecture, for instance, bars feature an impressive number of expressions from the nearby Chichibu Distillery, home of Ichiro Akuto’s celebrated whiskies. The same ethos applies at Martiny’s: guests may order a seasonally inspired cocktail, such as a scotch-based Porcini Risotto, or simply savor a carefully poured dram.

Sip & Guzzle

Located in Greenwich Village, Sip & Guzzle also has a strong Japanese pedigree. Shingo Gokan, one of the most globally recognized Japanese bartenders, and Steve Schneider, a New York City industry veteran, teamed up to create a bi-level bar where (downstairs) Japanese cocktail refinement meets (upstairs) New York exuberance. The cocktails aren’t bespoke, but the menu frequently rotates with drinks that showcase East Asian ingredients. In colder months, Sip has poured the Strawberry Hotpot, a warm cocktail with mezcal, strawberry, sesame, and chile oil. The approach reflects the same attention to ingredients and technical finesse that have made Japanese bartending so influential worldwide.

Golden Ratio

Opened less than a year ago, Golden Ratio isn’t a Japanese bar, but its minimalist aesthetic and produce-forward cocktails echo the same sensibilities. The Clinton Hill spot keeps things simple: a restrained interior, a curated selection of New York spirits displayed on a single shelf, and a cocktail program built almost exclusively around seasonal ingredients.

Where Golden Ratio comes closest is its dedication to highlighting produce at its peak. Drinks often revolve around ingredients such as persimmons, mandarins, or parsnips, prepared to emphasize the natural flavor. The menu changes frequently. Nearly every cocktail also appears in a nonalcoholic version, allowing the produce to shine either way.

Attaboy

Attaboy may be New York’s purest expression of the conversation-driven cocktail experience that defines the bars of Omiya and other Japanese cities. Since the bar at Attaboy doesn’t have a menu, customers tell the bartender what they’re in the mood for, and they’ll make up a drink on the spot.

The bar occupies the former home of Milk & Honey, and continues the bespoke philosophy championed by its founder, Sasha Petraske. That philosophy was shaped in part by the influence of Angel’s Share. The result is a similarly intimate experience where cocktails begin with dialogue rather than recipes. Depending on the season, fresh watermelon or apple juice is available, a touch of that produce-driven approach that defines Japan’s celebrated fresh fruit cocktail bars.

Diana Pittet owns Night Owl Hospitality, a cocktail catering and education company in Asbury Park, N.J., and leads walking tours in New York City about Prohibition and the birth of the cocktail. Certified in WSET Level 3 Spirits, Diana is the current president of the Central Jersey chapter of the United States Bartender's Guild and writes about cheese, cocktails, and whiskey. She's traveled to over 50 countries and has enjoyed cocktails in almost all of them.

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Intel

• Say it isn’t so! Donohue’s Steakhouse in Midtown is on track to close after 76 years. When I called to check in on the final day, they said they don’t know yet, but it’ll be by the year’s end.

• In the vein of other three-in-one spaces like Cote’s 550 Madison, another is on its way, this one at 345 Park Avenue, at East 56th Street. Celebrity chef Cyril Lignac, the Paris-based restaurateur behind most recently Bar des Prés, is opening a trio of New York restaurants in 2027. It will include French East Asian Bar des Prés (which has locations in London and Paris, among other places), along with a bakery and cafe. It’s in partnership with D.ream International, the group behind Zuma.

• Georgian restaurant Chama Mama has opened two new bakeries, one next to its original location (149 West 14th Street, at Seventh Avenue), and the other next to its new Bushwick location (81 Morgan Avenue, at Ingraham Street). Open 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., Let’s Chama! seats 14 and serves khachapuri, mushroom pie, chocolate cigaretti, and more.

• Thai restaurant Kru (190 North 14th Street, at Wythe Avenue) has a Women in Sake pop-up on March 25 for their Laab Bar. Food is a la carte and comes with a menu of rare and limited sake pours from women producers. Tickets on Resy.

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