The joke is that restaurant years are like dog years. Like many jokes, if this one is funny at all it’s because it’s absurd, and because it’s true. My days are my own, I make six figures working 30 hours, and my office is a windowed room filled with fresh flowers and scented with smoldering white oak. That’s someone’s version of riches. Oftentimes it’s mine. But by night we are pounding our arches into the floor until they’re flat, grinding away at the cartilage in our knees, and testing the limits of a nervous system not built to withstand the relative constructs of what constitutes an restaurant emergency. Within these four walls, the truest problem is that I dropped a soup to a table that was mised with every utensil except for a spoon. A guest named Lola arrives for her 32nd anniversary dinner. Can you believe I work in New Jersey and got here on time, meanwhile my husband’s office is on the Upper West Side and somehow he’s the late one? This summer marks my 5-year work anniversary. I know exactly how she feels.

Some people drink or smoke or snort their way to calm after a long dinner shift. My drug of choice is scrolling. Thirty minutes of unadulterated mind melting. The economy of glorifying restaurant work has reached Substack, where it feels like everyone is exhuming Bourdain’s body only to desecrate it in longform. What Cool Industry People Are Eating Right Now. Hot Insiders Share Their Favorite Restaurants. Would you like to know what cool industry people are eating? Orange chicken over rice. Teriyaki chicken over rice. Chicken curry over rice. Because industry people are busy working, and dinner is family meal. Yesterday I bought into a craving and brought my own food: halal cart chicken over rice.

Two cooks and an expo— that is the totality of who is making sure your dinner gets to the right table at the right time, cooked the right way. I’ve lost track over the years how many teams I’ve expedited for, though I can recall my favorite pairs, the ones who made my job easiest. The best cooks are kind, don’t turn me into a broken record, work well with their partner, recognize that the luck is in the prep. I predicted someone would quit the moment I said out loud how reliably solid our cooks are; fruit is at its peak the moment before it starts to rot. Gabe took a job at a 3-star. On our last day working together, I thanked him for his focus and for never losing his buoyant attitude in the thick of the most brutal pushes. What I meant was: don’t let Per Se turn you into an asshole.

For we hear that some among you walk in idleness, not busy at work, but busybodies. I snoop on the priests mid-meal. They’re drinking Vespers.

When a walk-in asks my name, I tell her. Hers is Peggy. Hessie, now that is just the cutest thing! I politely, apologetically, correct her; it’s loud in here. Cassie, she repeats before heading to the bar.

A trail introduces himself at our pre-service meeting, and we invite him to sit with us during our break. He just moved from LA, an actor. We have our share of singers and musicians, actors and set designers, comedians and artists. What do you do, he asks. I tell him: I work in restaurants.

Brian bounds through the front doors with the stride and smile of someone powered by a handsome face and a hedge fund salary. We went to high school together. I know him from Mr. Long’s sixth period Algebra II, where, as the only sophomore in class, I sat in the back of the row next to his, the ideal vantage point for the shy transfer student who wanted more than anything to be invisible in a room full of juniors. I know him from the baseball team, from his acoustic sets during Battle of the Bands, from his reputation of being a Nice Guy. He knows me as Amy’s little sister. We do the small talk song and dance— how’s his brother Michael, has he been back home much this summer?— and I thank God he’s here on one of the nights I’m wearing a suit. The somm talks to him about his $300 bottle of red Burgundy as I try in equal measure to both hide from his line of sight and look incredibly, importantly, officially busy. Does he know, as he Ubers back to his Brooklyn high rise, that my days are my own, that I make decent money, that I value working in a beautiful room that smells like a Vermont bonfire? That I, too, could achieve more traditional success if I weren’t so satisfied in my alternative life? I want to scream it. As though saying it louder made it more true or me less unsure.

“You know there are people who control the weather patterns, right?” Mama asks me this while we’re in the locker room making small talk about the rainy summer. At that very moment, I’m mid-way through changing from my lacrosse shorts into my black trousers, which is to say, I’m not wearing any pants. Right. If Mama’s tenure at the restaurant were counted in dog years, she’d be a memory.

A man wags his wet umbrella in my face in lieu of asking me to store it in coat check. His wife looks mortified. Jenna silently slides a small bowl of summer vegetables in chili broth in my direction. Matt lets me cry in his office after some guy manages to make all 4’11” of me feel even smaller. Colton sees me as he turns the corner and yells, DIVA!

One Monday when everything that should go right goes wrong— food bouncing, communication faltering, perfectly seasoned chicken sent back, deemed “too salty"— I tell my manager, this is unacceptable. He tells me that he, too, spent the night doing things he’d rather not have to do.

The next Monday, conditions are both better and worlds worse. The entire restaurant is flat sat. Two cooks and an expo feeding twenty-six tables at once. My manager stops by the pass and asks if I need anything. Take me out back and put me out of my misery? Just then, a guest sends her bass back because she wants it split between two plates. Her opposable thumbs are on holiday. I’ll take her out back first, he tells me with a smile.

Peggy plods out the door after her meal, her heels heavy on the floor after anesthetizing herself with a few martinis. Goodnight, Casey!

Before Lola heads to her table, I ask her, how do you do it, 32 years?

Work, she says. More work. And forgiveness.

It sounds like a psalm, a salve, a song to sanctify the night.

In the time it takes a newborn baby to develop the cognitive skills to write their own name, a restaurant comes alive; staff is hired and trained in a loop of seemingly endless attrition; menus are developed, then printed, then reprinted; countless onions are diced, guests are served, dishes are washed, numbers are crunched. The margins are too tight. Those numbers then get mobilized, excesses are toned and trimmed, pressure is applied to trigger points until the day there is no more bodywork to be done. If you’re lucky, you get five years.

If five years is a lifetime, then the impending loss of some of New York’s more established fixtures sounds more akin to the asteroid that knocked out the dinosaurs than it does to some natural cause of death. Loring Place, Dan Kluger’s understated Greenwich Village spot, will close mid-July, just shy of its 10-year anniversary. Craft, the James Beard-award winning, 25-year-old flagship of Tom Colicchio’s Crafted Hospitality that served as training ground to the likes of Kluger, Jonathan Benno, Marco Canora, Damon Wise, Karen DeMasco, and David Chang, is set to close at the end of this month.

And while the reality isn’t the result of some freak astronomical event, the truth is, time comes for all of us eventually. That Top Chef’s top dog can no longer walk the fine julienne of economic sustainability in a neighborhood he helped establish as a dining destination reinforces that the most valuable currency in a restaurant is attention. Try to remember the last time you ate at a Colicchio restaurant. I had to dig through my Instagram tagged photos to uncover evidence of my last Loring Place visit, almost six years ago.

How does a restaurant continue? Beyond blending a point of view with the mastery of, well, craft, it must, above all else, be a place to which you return.

Subscribe now

While pedigreed chefs and big money investors provide the foundation of a restaurant, return guests steep themselves in the space incrementally, subtly, until they, too, are part of the recipe.

The restaurant where I work is older than most of its employees and has a roster of regulars to show for it. There’s Susan, who joins us the same night every week at the same table, which we always pre-set with a reading lamp. Arnie prefers seat 1 at the bar, unless he’s in a group, in which case he likes table 101, which is also Michael’s favorite table. You hope they don’t have overlapping reservations. Stephen likes sitting in what we call the Beam Room, but is too much a gentleman to insist. When Peter orders chilled oysters, we know to pick the twelve smallest Island Creeks we have.

Jody showed up to Thanksgiving service last year with $10,000 in cash in an envelope, a thank-you to the staff that have known him for decades. Chuck lives out of town but visits every few months for work and dines with us most nights of his trip. When I’m working the pass, I tell the newer hires running his food to try to remember his face; he’ll be back tomorrow and, if he sees enough of you, he might just show you photos of his dogs and invite you to stay with him the next time you’re in Santa Barbara.

Duane could somehow be both more and less predictably particular. With an apartment down the street, he typically arrived as a walk-in, wrapped in a colorful scarf and in search of his usual: a burger with onion, a Manhattan, and a sidecar of ice. If he cared that the onion that we tucked onto his plate was interchangeably red or white with no rhyme or reason, he never mentioned it. Bar seat or table, it didn’t matter. What he wanted was a place to sit for an hour, and we always did what we could to make that happen. He would sometimes threaten to give a lap dance to a table he thought was overstaying their welcome or, rather, infringing on his.

There was one particularly busy night where a solution to Duane’s unexpected arrival simply did not exist; I remember him howling at a manager as he walked out, still hungry. I’m an old man, I’m going to die soon! This is fucking ridiculous!

In the way that time seems to speed up at the poles of our lives, Duane aged rapidly in the five years I knew him. I didn’t need him to mention his death to wonder, as he appeared increasingly frail in body but sharp as ever in mind, how we would know when his time, inevitably, had come. Would it dawn on us when we realized he had simply stopped showing up?

I needn’t have worried because, when Duane passed last week at 94, fifteen years past the life expectancy of the average American, I read about it in the New York Times.

This is, of course, because there was nothing average about Duane Michals. Born in McKeesport, PA knowing that he was meant for something bigger, he was a self-taught photographer who settled in New York in the ‘60s and broke with the norms of the medium to tell stories. He created photo sequences to construct a narrative and, when that didn’t create a clear enough description of the scene at hand, would scrawl along the perimeter of his photos “to tell you what you can’t see [because] photos fail constantly.” Duane’s work circumvented death, exploring the theme from the place of the living. The Spirit Leaves the Body (1968) is one of those signature sequences, seven photos that utilize double exposure to summon a ghost. Duane’s The Journey of the Spirit After Death (1971), a contemporary, visual Bardo Thodol, witnesses a man navigate his own dissolution, reality, and rebirth.

If Pittsburgh had been the beating heart of the Rust Belt, then McKeesport existed in the crook of its elbow, nestled between the arteries of the Monongahela and Youghiogheny rivers. Duane returned as recently as 2023 to film The McKeesport Pipe Palace, a short featuring a hometown that was born of the steel boom and died twice— first during The Great Depression, then again in the ‘70s and ‘80s as the oil crisis morphed into the steel crisis. No city in the world produced more steel pipes than McKeesport, until it didn’t. In his photographic memoir The House I Once Called Home, Duane superimposed old family photos taken in his childhood home over photos of the house as it existed in the early 2000s, crumbling like the city around it.

As much as he wanted to get away from western Pennsylvania, it was as woven into his storytelling as it was woven into his clothes. I once complimented Duane’s Steelers jersey as I brought a burger to him at the bar; he responded by taking a bite of my forearm.

While many of his best-known photos exist in tones of gray, there was no regular more colorful than Duane.

We’re all going to die. That much is inevitable. And yet, as Duane seemed to sense, there’s life beyond death, a place where our spirits go and leave a lasting trace. McKeesport will live forever, because Duane continued through his life to train his eye on the city that he loved, capturing it in his imagination, in words, on film. Duane will live forever, in his work but also in the ways his misfit’s approach has inspired photographers to look not at a subject, but through it. Craft will continue if not on E. 19th Street then at Per Se and Hearth and Kabawa and Borgo and Penny and Win Son and in every kitchen its alumni direct their attention.

All things die. All things live forever. Return to them, and they will return to you.

As always, thanks for reading. Below is a short video of Duane discussing the work that inspired the title of this piece. It’s worth watching through the end.

No flesh-colored Band-Aids. Smell quart containers before filling them to avoid pastry cream with top notes of onion. Leaving a nearly empty 22-quart Cambro of almonds on the dry storage shelf wasn’t the considerate move I thought it was (“the receiver won’t need to find a new container when the Baldor delivery arrives!”), but a crime against consolidation.

In culinary school I had been instructed in the fundamentals — lean dough vs. enriched, ladyfingers vs. langue de chat— but mostly I had learned how to say Yes Yes Yes.

Amidst dizzying days of finding out the hard way which pots worked on the induction and remembering to perch the pint of brown butter glaze on top of the oven while I did the bake, ensuring it was glossy and pourable when the madeleine timer dinged, there was one takeaway that manifested on its own, the first realization about restaurant work that I came to without being told:

The women in charge were unlikeable.

Whereas the male sous chefs had an easy way about them, all charm and saunter, the women occupied the spectrum of misery.

Lauren, the sous chef in charge of lunch service, terrified me. She was cold and humorless, our only interactions occurring when she would come find me in the chocolate room each morning to ask the flavor of the tarte du jour. She’d wait while I dutifully set down my piping bag to check the walk-in, lifting the inverted shallow fish tub from the sheet tray labeled “Use First” to see which fruit was peeking out of the frangipane. She’d write my response on her clip board, give me a terse thank you, and move along. “A bitch,” my male sous chef would mutter after his interactions with her, and I’d agree, if not aloud, then with my silence.

I couldn’t figure out if the cooks didn’t respect Sarah, the other female sous, because her baseline seemed so half-hearted or because she was the chef’s niece. I didn’t blame them; sometimes she cried and sometimes she yelled but she did both with her mouth and not her throat, her emotions collapsing out of her in a way that made you wonder how she earned a role that required so much effort. That her hill of choice was the pronunciation of “farro” —“Pharoah is the ruler of Egypt, FAR-o is the ancient grain” — seemed trivial, a phonetics lesson distracting from the real work of cooking.

Jamie wasn’t a sous chef, though she did work plancha and therefore had the most senior position amongst the cooks. She wasn’t unapproachable in the way Lauren was chilly and Sarah was tepid so much as she was white hot, radiating an intensity that my self-preservation instincts responded to by never, ever speaking to her. The pastry station sat opposite Jamie’s; I’d watch her meditate before service, palms pressed together and eyes closed, while the other cooks stocked their stations and joked around. Then, hours later when the grill was covered in filets, she’d cry as she worked. Jamie’s tears never felt pitiable the way Sarah’s sometimes did. Rather it seemed she was hardening herself during service’s most chaotic moments, expelling everything soft from her body to withstand the pressure.

Share Fire the Board

All the while, I continued to learn. I continued saying Yes Yes Yes, accepting the realities that presented themselves as my dues to pay. The Executive Chef would appear in the bakery and ask as a greeting, “Where’s James?” Another partner, strolling through the kitchen during a dinner rush, liked to dip his fingers into my ninth pans of mise and take handfuls of Valrhona chocolate pearls, nodding at me as he ate them out of hand like popcorn. He spoke to me once; I was working the 6 a.m. bake shift when he materialized from the dark of the adjacent private dining room. Gesturing to the porter polishing the floor, he asked, “Do they do that every day?” I said yes and, looking skeptical, he disappeared as quietly as he arrived.

Meanwhile, a former Abercrombie model-turned-tournant laughed with the chefs as they cooked the last order of the night, a well-done steak, in the microwave.

Meanwhile, another line cook would take chef-sanctioned breaks to smoke his one-hitter in the walk-in freezer during lulls in brunch service.

Meanwhile, I kept learning and paying my dues and, when I was asked to be a sous chef a few years later, I said Yes to that, too.

With the title I got a salary and an invitation to the annual manager’s Mets game, though neither I nor any of the other women got invited to the Road Rally, when the men rented a small fleet of Porches and Ferraris for a day trip through the Hudson Valley.

And if the Executive Chef ever learned my name, I wouldn’t know, because I never heard him use it. At some point, when he came looking for my boss, he began to simply ask, “Is he here?” Not using my name felt more neglectful than personal; not using James’ name doubled down on the implication that there was only one person worth this man’s time, and it most certainly was not me.

Once, the chef on one of our wholesale accounts let himself into the restaurant, down the stairs, and into the bakery, where as an introduction he threw the flatbread I had baked him that morning onto the bench and bellowed, “Why is this not BUTTERY? It used to be BUTTERY! I can’t use this until you make it BUTTERY again!” I took the bread, the same as I baked it every day, into the office and cried. True to its Italian tradition, the recipe did not and never had involved butter. Later, when I relayed the story to James and he told me he’d send an email, my only request was that I be CC’d on it— to get a sense of how to handle an unhappy and unreasonable customer, yes, but to assert my own existence. To have my boss dignify me and my work by giving me a name. I never saw that email.

Shortly before I quit, I had a sit-down with James. I had recently reprimanded one of our bakers, a Frenchman nearly twice my age, for misscaling the bread so egregiously that it looked more like the gruel in a Dickens novel than a supple, usable dough. I stayed three hours late to fix the mistake, only to hear this man badmouthing me to another cook. What I expected was a conversation that would bolster my boss’ support of me as an authority figure. What James did was parrot what the Frenchman had said: that I was a bitch.

Subscribe now

There was one slow night working service when, head down as I peeled a crate of apples, I heard an unfamiliar voice. “Hey! Pastry.” Across the kitchen was Jamie, beckoning me over. I approached tentatively, not sure what I did wrong but certain that our first conversation wasn’t going to be a pleasant one. Instead, she asked, did I know how to temp proteins? She put my finger on the meaty part of her hand between her thumb and index, then proceeded to touch her thumb to her pinkie, then her ring finger, then middle, then pointer, the progression in tension under my hand mimicking rare, medium rare, medium, well.

It was a busier evening when Sarah stepped off the line just as Mike, the GM, brought two women in for a kitchen tour. They were wearing tight dresses and high heels, and the volume at which they scream-laughed made it apparent that they were drunk. When they asked if they could go behind the line, Mike didn’t hesitate to allow it. I had never heard Sarah scream as loud as she did when she returned, two intoxicated lawsuits-in-the-making pretending to flip pancakes in the air, inches from a blazing hot grill. I felt satisfied on her behalf when Mike returned, more than once, to profusely apologize. Even more satisfying was her refusal to accept his apologies.

And then there was the morning when, still a baby cook, I thought to peek underneath the “Use First” fish tub while unloading trays of cookie dough from the walk-in. A few hours later, Lauren was right on time with her clipboard. Before she could even ask, I said hello, and that we would be serving blackberry frangipane that day.

I saw her surprise settle into a satisfied smile, a look that told me she knew, one day, I would learn.

As always, thanks for reading.

One woman was upset that the bar seat she reserved wasn’t ready when she arrived. (You can’t reserve bar seats, though we do try to hold them upon guest request as a courtesy.) Another, a walk-in, was incredulous when I suggested that she please not approach seated guests to ask them when they were planning on leaving (“Well, you weren’t going to do it!”). My favorite, though, was the man who booked an outdoor table and then bellowed when I asked a host to seat him and his wife outside. “I’ll leave before I sit out there! I guess you’re all liars!” His wife informed me that she has brain cancer and can’t be exposed to the elements. Not having appreciated my truthfulness being called into question, I wasn’t going to question hers. I told her I was sorry to hear that she’s been suffering, that we were already overbooked indoors, but that I’d delegate the issue to my manager.

Silently, I wondered whether this woman ever fantasized about divorce, and whether Lenox Hill might be a better location for their dinner. To my manager, who seated them almost immediately because “they were courteous to” him (his emphasis), I suggested that perhaps the only tabling I needed to be doing was putting my integrity on hold when I clocked in.

If you’ve been a subscriber for some time, you may have wondered about the months of silence, why I stopped writing. It’s because this week was like many I’ve had over the past few years, where I’m left questioning why I work in an industry that can be so unkind; so quick to overlook, if not reward, bad behavior; so opposed to accountability and willfully blind to power imbalances; so stacked in favor of men in suits, men in white coats, people with money, women with beautiful faces, anyone willing to drink the craft Kool-Aid and kiss the ring. It’s because I didn’t have anything nice to say. It’s because I’ve feared what might happen if I said the not-nice thing anyway.1

Subscribe now

I never intended to have a career in restaurants.

Though I graduated from culinary school, I always envisioned that my first restaurant job— in a buzzy Noho café and bakery concept from an established New York City chef— would be my last. While baking was a hobby I’d nurtured since childhood, what I wanted to do was work for a food magazine. The way I saw it, I’d spend six months on the inside, gathering technical know-how and industry fluency, before applying at a legacy publication.

I’m not sure which part is funnier: the bogus idea that twenty odd weeks of overbaking the quiche would grant me any credibility, that I thought print media offered a more “practical” career path than the service industry, or that thirteen years later, I’m still very much an industry rat.

Through those years I’ve been a small-potatoes food runner and a Sharpie-wielding expo on 300-cover Saturday nights. I’ve had a comically short serving career, a more successful run as a maître d’, and, for a few months before March 2020 cut everything short, my title was “tour guide.” It was the type of niche job that could only exist in the moneyed bubble of fine dining, inflated by the air of exclusivity and sustained by the cult(ure) of unreasonable hospitality.

But first I was a pastry cook, later a sous chef, and, during one weekend brunch shift when the entire cold line called out, drafted to garde manger. A hot apps cook named Adhemar gave me a dull knife and a quick lesson in shucking oysters. And then it was just me and the extern we called Barbie, all platinum blonde hair and lips overstuffed like a turducken on Thanksgiving, gently cracking quail eggs the size of thumbs into our palms and watching the whites shimmy between our fingers before nestling the yolks onto pucks of steak tartare. Up until that Sunday, I had never had more fun in my life.

In many ways, I’m still having fun. I love the adrenaline, straddling the line between “getting fucked”2 and “going down,”3 wrangling the beast of the former to avoid the latter. I love the rules and their many exceptions. Serve from the left, clear from the right. Guests have the right of way, followed by hot food, then cold food and drinks, employees restocking, employees clearing, then everyone else, unless one of those people is a chef, in which case, get out of the way.

I love that everything is a priority and yet, at the end of a shift, so long as we didn’t harm anyone, we get a hard reset tomorrow. It’s lunch and dinner, not life or death. I love that it is physically and mentally and spiritually and literally demanding; I relish in the likelihood that people who see service jobs as lesser wouldn’t outlast a head of lettuce in a restaurant.

I love line cooks. The single most rewarding part of my job is the labor that makes life easier for our cooks, who sweat more and get paid less and rarely get the credit, while the servers make bank and complain about being double sat and, well, I love them too.

I love the ease with which certain types of men palm me money, the choreography so particular that I know without even looking that there’s a hundred dollar bill in my hand. It’s the mechanics that interest me more than the cash, the way they all seem to have gone to Frank Sinatra’s Finishing School for the Filthy Rich and aced The Art of Duking. Lithe, delivered not via handshake but a slide of their fingers up and over the meaty, pinkie-side of my hand, always after their meal. “Take care of yourself,” they’ll say. The grandfatherly tenderness in their tone grows more gruff if I tell them we pool all tips. So, instead I close my mouth around every word except “thank you,” picture the vintage Rabanne Sparkle bag in my eBay shopping cart, and let my eyes get all soft with want before nestling the bill, so crisp it might shatter down my blazer like a bite of puff pastry, into my pocket. Later, once the doors have closed behind these men, I’ll transfer the money into the lockbox, after which it’ll be divided amongst the team into fractions so small they’re barely perceptible on a paycheck.

I love restaurants. Over the years, though, I haven’t always been sure that restaurants love me.

It is a pleasure to take care of people for a living. To know their preferences and be privy to their quirks and vulnerabilities. To offer up—through a perfectly tapered quenelle, a water glass that never goes empty, a black napkin provided unprompted to a woman in a black dress— our time and discipline for the benefit of the people who choose to dine with us.

“Are we still enjoying ourselves?”4

It’s a question I’ve heard directed at guests hundreds of times. Until recently, it’s not something I’ve considered asking myself.

What’s the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth? I’m trying to be less afraid of the answer, and more afraid of swallowing it.

As always, thanks for reading.

Leave a comment

Alas, in the hands of Ms. Mishan, The List looks a little different this year. Is a food truck or a steam table a restaurant? She’s not asking so much as telling us. A church cafeteria and an open-flame grill, perched on a sidewalk and churning chalupas off of a comal, also make the list. What one giveth, one can taketh away, and the math is mathing here; with every seatless takeout joint that makes The List, there is one less spot for, say, the fine dining restaurant or the downtown date night spot that might typically see its name in print.

I speak for an industry (don’t mind me) when I say there can be something disappointing about devoting your life’s work to capital R restaurants— detailing a table so that the napkin, water glass, and candle create a perfectly unbroken 180 degree line; slicing a radish to create a crisp, unblemished cross section— and then seeing a ranked list that moves the goal posts of how a restaurant is defined. People are upset or, worse, dismissive in a “I guess she just really likes the 7 train” kind of way (see: the comments section). It’s easier to discredit the writer of The List than it is to interrogate one’s own purpose.

But despite the fact that my work is in fine dining and that my workplace didn’t make the cut after having a home on The List for years, I…love Ligaya’s list?? I see my own dining habits, if not my work, reflected back to me when I read it. Through her lens, I am reminded of what is sacred about the meals that we cook, serve, and eat, not just at work but in our everyday lives.

Despite (or perhaps because of) its proximity to vice — the glorification of overindulgence, devotion to false Michelin gods, the prideful ego of chefs, the inherent sluttiness of an oyster—restaurant culture is not unlike religion.

Like life, restaurant work is difficult. Like life, it’s sometimes easier to subscribe to an idea that gives your unforgiving line cook job shape and meaning, because why else are you choosing to sweat, slice, and be screamed at for a paltry $22 an hour? Joan Didion said that we tell ourselves stories in order to live; in religion and in restaurants, we tell ourselves stories in order to survive. There is nobility in scraping a half-chewed chicken thigh into the trash. The woman ripping into me because I don’t have a table for her? Well, that’s just my cross to bear. In some chef’s name we pray.

But religion-as-balm is only one part of the story. Religious historian Mircea Eliade most famously established the paradigm of The Sacred and the Profane, the idea that the human experience is structured as a contrast between the transcendent and the ordinary. The purpose of religion, then, is to bring people in contact with the sacred— through devotion, through tradition, through community. The sacred is not about finding God so much as coming in contact with something otherworldly, a tremendous emotional reaction to, say, hearing a song that feels like it was written for you, a Proustian moment where the smell of hot asphalt transports you to childhood summers, finding a heart-shaped shell on the beach. It’s not so unlike the restaurants that aim to make the act of eating a humble turnip a revelatory experience.

If devotion, tradition, and community are sacred, then what could be more transcendent, more full of substance than heading to Indo Java for nari surabaya? Anastasia Dewi Tjahjadi, on any given Tuesday, is preparing lunch in the back of a grocery, nestled between an accountant’s office and a pest control school, using a small burner and a family recipe. There are a few stools to sit at makeshift tables, but they’re usually taken by the neighborhood ladies, gabbing in Indonesian and treating the shop like an extension of their homes, because that’s what it is.

If you can reach the sacred through devotion, tradition, and community, drinking a glass of Nancy Irelan’s inky and bright Teroldego, produced in the Finger Lakes using cuttings from Elisabetta Foradori’s vines in the Italian Dolomites and poured for you into a Zalto by a certified sommelier, takes you one sip closer to the eternal.

Both examples are true, even if the physical spaces in which the sacred is revealed are socially and culturally worlds apart. Working in restaurants offers an intensity that may blind you to the fact that there is more than one way to have faith.

What I appreciate about Ligaya’s list is that it shortens the distance between the sacred and profane. There are fewer barriers to entry to a sacred space when that space is parked on your local street corner. Little is more ordinary than grabbing a clamshell of hot momos from the local food truck after a day of work, arms and mind too tired to cook. Little is more transcendently nostalgic than to find recipes passed down from Tibetan tradition all the way to a busy New York intersection, an emotional connection to home for the immigrants who make Jackson Heights “Little Tibet.”

Is it a perfect ranking? An oxymoron in this context. The Times’ rollout, with its interactive checklist and how-to articles coaching readers on eating their way through the list, is entertaining. But what is entertainment in the wrong hands if not the final frontier before propaganda and, eventually, clickbait slop (I still hate the NYT).

There, too, are some glaring omissions relative to the reader (e.g., this). But through its omissions and additions alike, we are reminded of the subjectivity of The List. Really, this isn’t The List so much as it is Ligaya’s List. I don’t know, maybe she is biased against the Frenchette Group and its restaurants. Which would be bad journalism but also maybe the most relatable thing she’s ever done. On principle I do not eat at Noho Hospitality Group restaurants and therefore Cafe Carmellini will never make my list, no matter how special it’s purported to be. We are the same.

But pointing out The List’s subjectivity is not to say that Ligaya’s work is less serious than what Pete Wells has published in the past. The opposite, in fact. I don’t mean to discredit her; that few industry folks would read a Pete Wells’ list and question its foundations speaks more to establishment bias in food media than it does to Pete being more or less “correct” than our current critic. Instead, what Ligaya has provided is a roadmap. To restaurants, yes, but to writing one’s own list. If hers doesn’t inspire you to write your own hyperspecific, spectral, biased, lawless list, then you’re missing out on the ordinary, everyday spaces that bridge the profane to the sacred.

Who’s on your list? Here’s mine, and yes, I really do like the 7 train.

Leave a comment

10. Joe Jr.

167 3rd Avenue, NY, NY 10003

Half of dining out is expectations. Going to a diner? Your expectations are probably low, which means that you’ll either have them met or exceeded. Joe Jr. always hits the mark. It’s a beautiful thing.

9. Souk al Shater

43-03 Queens Blvd, New York, NY 11104

I go for the fried-to-order falafel sandwich loaded with herbs and veg so lightly pickled they taste like fresh cucumbers with a bad attitude (complimentary). I stay for the ever-changing dessert selection; I’m partial to the kataifi nests filled with candied cashews.

8. Borgo

124 E. 27th Street, NY, NY 10016

I appreciate details, and Borgo knows details. The Instagram shot of the butcher paper-covered table personalized with the guest’s name has become ubiquitous; personally, I love that the candle holders housing beeswax tapers are heavy enough to be a murder weapon. Luxury! The service can be suspect. The last time I dined, I asked if I could do a half glass of wine, to which the server said, “We don’t really do that,” then poured me half a glass and charged me for a full one. Whatever. Adam Marca’s deft hand and editor’s eye remind me that pastry is, above all, an art form.

7. Indo Java Groceries

85-12 Queens Blvd # 1, Elmhurst, NY 11373

A few different women shuffle in to take over the kitchen on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and sometimes Saturdays to serve traditional and hearty Indonesian curries and braises. I’m intimidated by the ladies who perch at the tables, so I usually take my lunch to go and enjoy it at home, but not before stocking up on a small plastic tub of fried anchovies and peanuts. My esthetician likes to remind me how bad that is for my skin, but…

6. Mister Softee

A food truck is a restaurant, I don’t make the rules! Did you know there’s a Mister Softee app with an interactive map? I’m not convinced it updates accurately, but that’s largely irrelevant because I know the GPS coordinates of all Mister Softee trucks near both home and work by heart. In case of ice cream emergencies. Vanilla cone with rainbow sprinkles.

5. Elbow Bread

1 Ludlow Street, NY, NY 10002

I can eat a savory or sweet breakfast here, and thus it is a restaurant. Whitefish bialy into honey bun into loaf of black bread for “later.”

4. Gramercy Tavern

42 E. 20th Street, NY, NY 10003

All roads lead back to Gramercy Tavern. Growing up, my best friend’s family used to visit New York every Christmas to see a show, shop at Bloomingdales, and eat at Gramercy Tavern. It has loomed large in my head ever since, and there is no better seat in New York City than at GT’s bar with a chicken liver mousse and one of Karen DeMasco’s fruit-forward desserts. If you see me sitting there, please don’t talk to me. I’m healing.

3. Dawa’s

5118 Skillman Ave., Woodside, NY 11377

Dawa’s has a dual menu: one side is brunchy American, the other is traditional Himalayan. Let me save you some time and say: order the house salad from the American menu and then flip the page and don’t look back. Maybe the American food is good, I’ve actually never ordered anything but the salad. The momo, shabaley, and chatamari trifecta is fun to share— dip and dunk into their respective sauces, get your fingers dirty, then fight over the last dumpling.

2. Superiority Burger

119 Avenue A, NY, NY 10009

It’s seriously unserious, it’s fun, it’s (sometimes) accidentally vegan, and it’s abundantly clear that Brooks Headley and team worship the right god (farmers).

1. AbuQir

Don’t even look it up, don’t even think about going! The veil is thin at AbuQir. The house salad has WAY too much dill in it and I wouldn’t THINK of changing it.

As always, thanks for reading.

Share

• In other book news, the Penguin imprint Tiny Reparations announced it will be publishing a memoir from my former boss, Eric Huang. As they say, there are three sides to every story, and I look forward to reading his in 2027 and then filling in the gaps with my own. I pity his editor.

Review in Review: Ligaya Mishan Visits Alinea in Chicago

⭐️

I’ve been reading a lot of archival professional criticism recently. Pauline Kael on “E.T.”, Robert Hughes on James Turrell and Roy Lichtenstein, A.A. Gill’s restaurant reviews in Vanity Fair from the early aughts. I’ve sought it out, in part, because metabolizing criticism has become part of my weekly routine with Review in Review. The topic is always there, simmering away on the front burner of my mind. Reading other critics’ work is equivalent to adding a little more water to the pot—my laser focus on the NYT’s current brand of food criticism has led to more reductive thinking on my part, and so I’ve been giving my thoughts a little more nourishment, buying a little more time for the ideas to meld before I hit send.

I’m also trying to dislike Ligaya Mishan’s work less. It’s not fun to read her reviews and feel disdain week after week! It’s not fun to write about, either. I’ve been waiting for her style to grow on me. Unfortunately, the pattern persists that, the more times I read a given work of hers, the more up in arms I become over it. Three stars become two after a second and third pass. And even that feels lamely benevolent, since I’m doing her a favor she neither asked for nor realizes she’s receiving. Natural born hater that I am, I’m bored by hating her writing. And so I’ve sought a deeper understanding of what makes a great critic. Not just in hitting the marks that Daniel Mendelsohn lays out in his Critic’s Manifesto— knowledge + taste = meaningful judgment— but in style. Perhaps if I read other critics whose style I wouldn’t choose for myself but that I can at least appreciate, I can find a way to apply the same generosity to Ms. Mishan.

Pauline Kael is arguably the most influential film critic you may have never heard of. Before Siskel and Ebert were pointing their thumbs at the American consciousness, Kael eschewed the accepted mechanics of criticism for reviews that were without rules and full of personal narrative. Reading Kael might feel wordy and subjective, but it served a greater purpose: to demonstrate to her audience that they, too, can have oversized emotions and personal connection to film. Robert Hughes’ writing was lithe and lean. He could drop the hammer in a few hundred words and you’d never question how he came to the conclusions he did. Gill’s humorist approach reminds me of a restaurant aphorism I’d be well-served to remember more often: “It’s lunch and dinner, not life and death.” And don’t we all need something to laugh about?

Different as they are, there remains a vital theme in all of their work that is foundational to its success. If Mendelsohn’s arithmetic is Criticism 101, then the backbone on which all styles must rest is criticism’s First Commandment: Critique based on what the art set out to accomplish, not based on what the critic hoped it would accomplish. This is most plainly depicted in Gill’s 2004 review of the restaurant 66:

“Tell me, off the top of your head, what two attributes should hot-and-sour soup have? Take your time. It was neither. Nor anything else much.”

Subscribe now

Looking at criticism through the lens of art is timely, then, as Ms. Mishan published her review of the groundbreaking Chicago restaurant Alinea, intent to tell us if, 20 years after its opening, the modernist bellwether still matters to the American dining scene.

Alinea’s chef, Grant Achatz, is known for applying the avant garde to dining, harnessing molecular gastronomy to create abstracted and distorted versions of familiar flavors and foods. Green apple taffy filled with helium becomes a floating, edible balloon. Bacon is candied and hung from a clothesline like one of Dalí’s clocks draped over a tree branch. Perhaps most famous, their dessert course, the painted table:

On the spectrum of art to craft, Achatz’ food has historically pushed the limits of what diners typically expect from their dinners to the extremes of art. One of the restaurant’s dining spaces is called The Gallery, after all. Something as pedestrian as a grape supplants what we know about food in the hands of a chef like Achatz. At least, that was Alinea’s aim when they opened.

As Mishan herself states,

“In the last decade, Mr. Achatz has started to shift away from culinary provocations, making a more direct bid for diners’ emotions. No small part of Alinea’s triumph … is the razzle-dazzle that surrounds the plates, as much if not more than what’s on them.”

Mishan links a Times article from 2016 which outlines that very idea, quoting Achatz as saying that the food, following the restaurant’s then-ongoing seven-figure gut renovation, will employ “less shock value,” more focus on simplicity, flavor, and the emotions of experience.

Strange, then, that when presented with a vol-au-vent —that classically French case of puff pastry— Ms. Mishan feels startled. Something about the shrapnel of buttery crumbs down her shirt reminded her that, while Picasso could hold his own with the best of the High Renaissance painters if he chose to, she didn’t come for realism and balance from the father of Cubism. She came for a hot dog fractured into a shivering block of jelly.

Much of what she proceeds to receive throughout the remainder of her meal does meet those Expressionist expectations: that Chicago dog in gelatinous form, a prawn Zamboni-ed into a cracker, dessert “Jackson Pollocked” onto her table. It seems that Mishan largely enjoys the spectacle attached to those courses. Even after the taste of the apple taffy balloon disappoints her on her first visit, she and the floating candy quite literally kiss and make up on her return trip. Magic, she calls it.

It’s the show that comes with the more classic preparations that feels hollow. The paella is beautiful but inconsistent. You watch it being prepared on a tour through the kitchen. The lobster tempura, which guests grab by reaching sight unseen into an opaque tube, is too salty, an anticlimactic end to the theatrics. The Wagyu and the caviar are conventional if not cliché. The fuss suddenly feels goofy when the absurdity of the food doesn’t match the jazz hands surrounding its presentation. That is, she saves her strongest critiques for the food least aligned with subversion.

Why are the wackier courses treated more forgivingly? More egregious than a slab of pedigreed cow should be the inconsistencies in the cooking that she experiences. Prices average $430 per person, without beverages. I don’t care how bummed she is to be cajoled into eating caviar instead of, I don’t know, smoking a deep dish pizza-flavored vape. If someone is saving up to celebrate a special occasion at a restaurant like Alinea and the rice is not cooked or the edible balloon is rubbery, well, both are a real problem. Whether the food is a filet or a functioning bicycle made out of carrots, shouldn’t the standard be the same for both: are they well-prepared and delicious?

This review reads as though Ms. Mishan is applying her critiques not to how well Achatz and his team hit the marks they set for themselves, but how well they are meeting the expectations she brought to the table. That the showmanship of the service staff outshines the food in theatricality is an atypical goal for a chef to set. Then again, when has Achatz ever fraternized with the typical? Even if Alinea’s priorities appear turned on their head, the question is the same: does Alinea accomplish what it sought out to do?

Mishan does mention the kitchen’s “technical fumbles,” the at-times domineering directives from the servers. But at its foundation, the review keeps coming back to her disappointment that the food wasn’t the tool through which Achatz chooses to distort diner’s perspectives. That it didn’t accomplish what she came to Alinea hoping to experience, even though Achatz has long advertised that what she expected is at odds with his goals.

Her writing still frustrates me. Ms. Mishan attempts gravitas (“phantasmagoria” elicited an audible groan), then insists on poking holes in it by breaking the fourth wall to shout out Wylie Dufresne and some random couple she met while dining. Did the helium go to her head during her meal as she told the happy duo to keep an eye out for a belated anniversary announcement from the Times? Forgivable all, perhaps, if the review served the larger purpose of asking the right question in the first place. Most likely, she would have come to the same conclusion, or worse, either way— two stars or fewer, good but not great— however her credibility would have gone unvarnished if she had abided by that great commandment of criticism in arriving there.

In reviewing her review, I have to also ask myself: did Ms. Mishan accomplish what she set out to do? Does she sufficiently answer the questions of, does Alinea still matter? She seems uncertain, but the restaurant’s name is on the tip of her tongue. Good or bad, that must mean something.

Leave a comment

As is inevitable with a journalistic piece that is heavy on snark but low on reportage, the comments section is full of sharp opinions both for and against. Someone has to defend the servers guilty only of doing their jobs. Thank god somebody is finally speaking up against the industry's trend toward pedantry.

Professionally, I feel an allegiance to the former. Personally, I lean toward the latter.

My fluency in how to eat a meal out allows me to read a menu and know, without guidance but based on historical knowledge and context clues, how to proceed. There is a relative algebra that one applies when reading a menu, one that computes prices, precedent, preference, hunger level, and mood to arrive at an informed understanding of which items to order and in what quantity. Which makes it sound like we’re splitting the atom. It’s just dinner. If I have a question, I’ll ask. If anything, I say, “Here’s what we’re thinking. Tell me if you think it’s too much food.”

Not everyone is as practiced dining out. Not everyone feels comfortable asking. That’s where I see the true potential of the spiel coming into view, and the flaw in Sytsma’s article: the spiel should create an opportunity not to practice a monologue but to open up a dialogue. Sytsma’s one-sided whining is no better than the adrift thespian server hijacking your meal while they run their lines at you. Not everyone is the Food Editor of a magazine. Some guests do require a tour guide.

Aside from forgotten, the worst way a guest can be made to feel at a restaurant is like a moron.

If you're a seasoned diner and your server is explaining the concept of small plates, or how to eat a head-on shrimp, it’s going to feel not only like an interruption of your experience but a time warp to kindergarten. If you are a less confident diner, or feeling out of your depth in a restaurant whose cuisine or caliber you have only experienced on rare occasions, being left to feel like any question you ask is a silly one lends a shadow of shame on a meal that is meant to be enjoyed. The challenging work for the server is to gauge where on that spectrum any particular guest lies, and to provide the style of service necessary to leave that guest feeling empowered. Empowered to lead their own experience, to ask questions, to try something new, to opt out of the practiced spiel.

A few months ago, Ed and I had dinner with my sister and brother-in-law at Osteria, a critically acclaimed Northern Italian restaurant in Philly. Our server— let’s call him Dan— introduced himself, and then proceeded with his spiel.

“Have you dined before?”

The table laughed. According to my dining companions, the look in my eyes was ice cold. I course-corrected with a smile. I’m working on my face.

“I don’t mean on this planet. Have you dined here before?”

Some of us had not. Prompted, Dan then described to us the concept of Italian food.

There were two things that stuck with me about Dan’s slip of the tongue. For one, it helped me to articulate why, of all the Mr. Potato Head appendages that servers can plug and play into their spiels, I personally find this question the most egregious.

To seasoned diners, the question of whether we’ve eaten at that particular restaurant often feels like we’re being asked if it’s our first visit to planet Earth. Baked into it is the insinuation that, if we haven’t had that particular restaurant’s brand of xyz cuisine, well, we couldn’t possibly have well-calibrated expectations. While I hadn’t eaten Osteria’s chicken liver rigatoni before, I do, in fact, know my way around a plate of pasta.

Whether a guest has dined at that particular restaurant before is useful information. Surely there are first-time diners that appreciate a more thorough walk-through. And didn’t I just ask for more dialogue a few paragraphs ago? But by asking outright before any other engagement, servers risk making return guests feel forgettable, and comfortable diners feel like fools who can’t tell a pizza from a pork loin. In our ever-adapting Golden Age of technology, servers have at their literal fingertips the dining history of each guest at that restaurant. Check the iPad. The answer to your question is most likely right there. Talking isn’t the only element of good dialogue; listening to how guests engage and reading their body language while doing so are key tells in finding that information without gambling on your guest’s experience.

That’s my bitchy little screed.

If it sounds like service staff can’t win, it’s because winning has impossibly tight margins. This week, the NYT Food desk asked its editors and reporters for their takes on dining in 2025. What would you like to see less of, they were asked.

• Menus that don’t tell you anything about the food. — Brett Anderson

• “Welcome in.” — Brian Gallagher

• Servers who insist on explaining menus that anybody who’s ever been to a restaurant would understand. Menu descriptions that are more complicated than the dishes themselves. — Eric Asimov

• Dishes with three words of description that tell me nothing, like “fennel, grouper, rye.” — Kim Severson

And more of?

• Brisk menu intros from servers. — Brian Gallagher

• Servers who share less about themselves and more about the menu: details about the cooking, and honest advice on the best dishes and how much to order. — Patrick Farrell

• More trust in diners. — Tejal Rao

Menus are too wordy. Menus are too short. Servers talk too much. Servers aren’t telling me enough. I hate feeling welcome!

Which brings me back to Dan.

On the first day of my short-lived serving career, a kind table left me a note: “Sincere is better than perfect.” I still have the postcard taped inside my work locker. What I’ve found as both a guest and a hospitality professional over the years is that, life-threatening mistakes aside, so much can be forgiven if there’s a human touch. Dan misspoke, but instead of letting his humanity be a part of the conversation, he returned to running his lines. It felt robotic, self-serious, and not at all genuine, even as the table tried to engage throughout the meal. There seemed to be no attempt on Dan’s part to meet us where we were, but to drag us where he wanted us to go. Which was up and over the Alps, through a trough of ricotta di bufala, and into a puddle of bolognese. We were headed that way anyway, but it would have been a more pleasant journey if we felt like we had a choice in the matter.

In this week’s review, Tejal Rao visited Atelier Crenn in San Francisco. Upon receiving their Kir Breton amuse, Ms. Rao was spieled to “put the whole thing in [her] mouth and close [her] lips before biting down.”

“You’ve been eating your whole life and, what, tonight you need instructions?”

As it turned out, Ms. Rao found it to be a rare occasion where diners are “rewarded for relinquishing control and submitting to absurdity.”

And instructing an adult human how to chew is absurd. More often than not, the return on that type of directive for diners is not worth the humiliation of having your hand held through a motor skill mastered in toddlerhood. But there is something there, that idea of control and the payoff of loosening your grip.

What if, collectively, we all eased up? If we aimed less for perfection, or regulation, or a script, and more human engagement and true exchange? It’s easier to swim if you’re not fighting against the tide. It might even be fun.

What are your spiel pet peeves? As a guest, what makes a good one? Servers, how do you walk the tight-rope of setting expectations without rigidity, warmth without overstepping? It’s a dialogue, let’s hear it.

Leave a comment

And, as always, thanks for reading.

Review in Review: Tejal Rao Visits Vinai and Diane’s Place, both in Minneapolis

⭐️⭐️

What do you know of Hmong food?

For me, the answer is in direct relation to how much I know about the Hmong people, an indigenous group native to mainland China but long stateless. The embarrassing truth is, I can, in a single sentence, tell you exactly what I know and when I learned as much. It goes like this: it was 2021 and the Hmong’s most famous daughter was on the gold medal stand at the Tokyo Olympics, the Lee family Zooming in from Minnesota, where many Hmong migrated after being displaced throughout Southeast Asia.

Regarding their food, my answer to the question is that I could trace that geography to give shape to an educated guess. My answer to the question is, not much.

What a joy, then, to encounter access to a rarity in our age of information and oversaturation: a cuisine unknown. Against my will I can tell you what Daniel Humm wore to his wedding, or give you a six degrees of separation play-by-play of Kwame Onwuachi’s baby mama, but on Hmong food I have considerably less to say. If you’re not paying attention, and I wasn’t, it could be all too easy to be so distracted by what’s shiny and considered news that you miss what’s been there, more humbly, for centuries. Much like the gardens cultivated by Hmong Americans, a cultural practice that quite literally roots them to their indigenous tradition, representation of Hmong food in the US has been steadily breaking ground in the American consciousness.

This week, Tejal Rao visits Minneapolis and makes two stops: Diane’s Place, from Chef Diane Moua, and Vinai, named after the Ban Vinai refugee camp in Thailand where Chef Yia Vang’s parents met, and where he was born. And right on time! Just as I was starting to worry that I was calcifying into an impossible-to-please contrarian who feasts on the perceived failures of others.

In this piece, the food, the hands that make it, and the history that informs it are the story. There is no reaching metaphor, no literary gymnastics meant to remind us of the writer’s lyrical agility. We are given a 1,000 word glimpse into a tiny microcosm of the country’s restaurant scene— Google Maps will direct you on the six minute walk between Vinai and Diane’s Place— but receive a sum greater than its parts. That is the expansive nature of the specific. The closer you look at a place’s contours, the more likely you are not to feel confined but to recognize how much is left to learn. In that way, Ms. Rao is giving her readers the blueprint not only on how to view Hmong cuisine, but on how to aim that same magnifying glass to any three block radius in order to see the world.

That the daughter of immigrants is telling the story of the children of immigrants grants a sharp precision to Ms. Rao’s view, helping to translate a shared language for the rest of us. One passage in particular, highlighting a meal at Vinai, reminded me of this:

“Recently, I lingered over a little appetizer of smoked, confit mackerel and tomatoes, and when all the fish was gone, I dipped warm purple sticky rice into the sweet oil that was left, streaked with fish sauce and lime juice, until all of that rice was gone, too.

Mr. Vang learned to make a more basic version as a child, to feed himself when his parents were still at work, mixing up cheap tinned sardines with a few seasonings. It wasn’t a dish passed down by elders, but the kind of practical adaptation familiar to so many immigrant families. Now it was building on the canon.”

Through luck and time, adaptation as a survival mechanism in my family is a generation in the past. My after-school snack of choice when I was home alone was microwave nachos, cheddar from a bag glomming onto hot, floppy Tostitos. I may not read the language, but with a little guidance, I can speak it well enough to thread the needle of relatability.

Diane’s Place and Vinai have both had big years. Vinai was longlisted in the James Beard Awards’ Best New Restaurant category, while Chef Diane Moua was a nominee for Best Chef: Midwest. Both were featured earlier this summer in the NYT Food section in an article titled, “What is Great Hmong Food? These Chefs Have the Answer.” While reading this review, I had to wonder if the chefs grow tired of their names and restaurants always existing in the same breath. They share a cuisine and are informed by a similar history but, like the Twin Cities, they are not identical.

There is something inherently reductive in giving these places the two-for-one treatment. This BOGO approach to restaurant criticism— one without much precedent—perpetuates the idea that the value is in the deal you’re getting, not intrinsic to the thing itself. What of Vinai and Diane’s Place are not enough to stand on their own— is it the cultural capital of the cuisine itself, or the flyover state location, or something else? Ligaya Mishan mentioned in her recent review of Chez Fifi the New York resurgence of the French-inspired bistro; she mentions Chez Fifi’s peers, La Chêne and Zimmi’s, but she didn’t make her review a three-way, despite having visited both of those restaurants.

Maybe that something else was that it felt unfair to choose between two equals, or simply impossible to choose which restaurant to platform when both are worthy. Calculating the parameters through which to make that choice would rely on highly relative math. In not choosing, however, Ms. Rao did make a choice. It’s a choice that comes with its own set of complications: who gets the header in the archive search (Vinai), who gets featured in the thumbnail photo (Diane’s Place). Ms. Rao’s choice also runs the risk of devaluing not only the restaurants she’s covering, but her own discernment. It's not a critic’s job to say, “Go here! Eat this!” She’s not working for the Minnesota Tourism Board. Doubling down on Minneapolis reads like an advertisement. Opting not to distinguish either place with its own review is a choice to not make a thoughtful judgment. Which is precisely a critic’s job.

(On the Tuesday of the review’s publication and for a day after, the reviews appeared in the archive search as one entry, under Vinai’s name. As of this post’s publication, it has been rectified to list as two separate entries. The thumbnail for both is a photo of Diane Moua. They do it to themselves.)

American culture has its own redemption arc, in large part because American history is grounded in a penchant for evils that need absolving. The Hmong know that as well as anyone. The onus falls on the morally aware of the present to make amends for a morally dismal past. Perhaps in reviewing both Diane’s Place and Vinai, Ms. Rao is doing her small part to both acknowledge Hmong cuisine as long unstudied and to set in motion a course correction. Perhaps she enjoyed her time in Minneapolis so much that she forgot what her job was and just let herself feel, and share, joy. Sounds kind of nice, actually.

As always, thanks for reading.

In lieu of asking you to click a subscription link, I’ve linked resources to show support for the Minneapolis community affected by the school shooting at Annunciation Catholic this week. Verified GoFundMe pages for a number of the injured are aggregated here. When screaming into a pillow doesn’t feel like enough, find your senator’s information by clicking on your home state here, and scream at them, instead—let them know you demand a ban on the assault rifles killing our kids.

⭐️⭐️

Smithereens is having a big month. The self-described seasonal, seafood focused restaurant carved into the subterranean level of an East Village walk-up has been, not two weeks apart, the subject of glowing restaurant reviews from both NYMag’s Matthew Schneier and the Times’ Ligaya Mishan.

The name references Susan Seidelman’s 1982 film of the same name, which tells the story of an aimless scenester named Wren who comes to New York in search of a place for herself in the waning post-punk subculture. At one point, Wren plasters flyers on any hard surface she can find, an image of herself overlaid with a question fashioned in letters cut out like the building blocks of a ransom note: “Who is this?” It’s a question she hopes people will ask, even if she wouldn’t have much to say for herself if they did. It’s attention she’s after. Maybe her point of view will come later.

Dueling reviews make for educational reading. You can learn a lot about a critic when you have the rare opportunity to hold their work up to a peer’s and see where tastes align and diverge, what catches their attention. What causes a synapse to fire in their brains, sparking the chain reaction that travels down to their fingers and onto the page. Similar takes on dishes may offer a glimpse into a restaurant’s consistency; hearing certain sentiments echoed can help readers discern between a critic’s personal preferences and a pattern-based consensus. In this case, having two reviews to compare can also illuminate the strengths and limitations of the writers themselves.

The bulk of both reviews is dedicated to the topic most readers come for: the food. Mr. Schneier writes well if not without personality, as though he is following some unnamed rule book on how to be a food writer. Prior to getting the critic job in 2023, he wrote for the NYT Style section; slowly but surely, he’s making progress figuring out this food thing. Ms. Mishan is back out there flaunting that Poetry MFA; her writing is as expressive as ever, sometimes to her point’s detriment. Of the seaweed martini: “Even [it] tastes like a gulp of saltwater, the last memory of a drowning man.” I think it’s meant to be complimentary of the restaurant’s agile mastery of ocean flavors, but getting waterboarded by a dirty gin cocktail is, by any other name, still torture. I think I’d rather try a glass off of the hyperspecific wine list, to which only NYMag grants a curious look.

Both critics note the elevation of more humble fish— whiting for Mr. Schneier, bluefish for Ms. Mishan— from their pedestrian day jobs as fishing bait to a more dignified role as the main ingredient. Discussing the short list of desserts (many of which scream, “We have no pastry chef!”), both point readers in the direction of the doughnut as the sweets menu’s saving grace. The candied seaweed and licorice is “odd” (per Schneier); the celery root float “offers an austere clarity, if perhaps not pleasure” (Mishan). A shame, then, that Ms. Mishan’s reporting is out of date— while she’s exclaiming the juiciness of the apple cider doughnut, Mr. Schneier reminds us of the seasonal slant of the restaurant. It’s summer. The doughnut on offer is blueberry, and has been since late July.

Do critics know that they can write a review of a menu grounded in New England’s culinary tradition without referencing Moby Dick? It seems not. In the lede for both reviews, we are reminded of the white whale. Schneier describes the tight quarters of the restaurant’s footprint as more akin to being below deck on the Pequod than taking in the Cape’s salt air. Ms. Mishan sets the tone for the meal by declaring that Smithereens is as much a New England-style seafood joint as Moby Dick is a book about fishing.

Looking at the precise but provocative menu, the staff recommendations on the bottle list hand-scribbled like polite graffiti, the era alluded to in the restaurant’s name, it feels more natural to think of The Talking Heads opening for the Ramones at CBGB than Herman Melville. The restaurant has it’s own zine, for Christ’s sake. Ms. Mishan hints at this connection in her title, “New England Seafood with a Side of Punk,” but does very little in the body of her piece to define punk in the context of Smithereens’ food, beverage, and service. I’m not sure she can define punk in the context of punk. “Praising Smithereens in all its strangeness feels a bit like pointing out the sulky guy dressed in black in the corner of the high school cafeteria,” she tells us in defense of her three star review. “Who cares if the basement is grungy when the band is this good?” If punk or, worse, post-punk are just dark clothing and a bad attitude to our critic, how can she coax meaning from a restaurant that is clearly embodying its ethos?

At the risk of sounding greedy, upon reading the two reviews, I found myself yearning for a third. Specifically, the critical opinion of the late Jonathan Gold. Before he was a Pulitzer Prize-winning restaurant critic, he was a music editor who wrote for Spin and Rolling Stone. It’s his punk roots that he credited for his writing style— evocative and sharp storytelling grounded in wit and an eye for the yet untold.

“The whole thing about punk rock is that it is the combination of having really, really rigorous rules, but it also having the courage to just blow something up for the pleasure of blowing something up.”

- Jonathan Gold in Vice

Is that not what Smithereens is doing, taking a hard look at New England tradition but unabashedly lighting it on fire for the fun of it? The cooks might be plating with tweezers, but it’s still fish bait they’re plating. The celery root float has been on their menu since opening last fall; I get the sense that if the chef, Nicholas Tamburo, cared whether or not people “get” it, he would have changed it by now. That doesn’t mean you have to eat it, but it does warrant a second glance.

In its truest form, the punk era was a raucous, anti-establishment ball of energy imbued with art, literature, and politics. Its raw hostility provided a shock value that aimed to catapult its participants as far away from the conservative norm as possible. It held meaning behind all that noise. In Smithereens the film, Wren’s hollow quest to be part of a scene grounded in making a statement speaks to the cynicism levied at the punk agenda. Ironic, then, that these reviews of Smithereens the restaurant make plain in their stale perspectives why restaurant criticism is receiving its own cynical glances these days. Just as viewers wait for Wren to develop a point of view of her own, readers are left waiting for these shepherds of culture to distill the meaning behind the idiosyncrasies of what they’re tasting. To apply the establishment checklist (good food? Check. Good wine? Check. Surf and turf metaphors? Check.) and leave it there only tells part of the story. To miss the whole point? Now that’s not very punk rock of you.

As always, thank you for reading.

The restaurant industry let out a collective one this morning upon hearing the news that Daniel Humm’s acclaimed Eleven Madison Park would be reintroducing animal products to their plant-based menu. Well, not everyone is laughing— few are more zealous and humorless on the subject of meat than vegans, who have been called up for duty in the comments section of the restaurant’s Instagram. “Sad!” they exclaim. At the time of publishing, a medley of 1,380 animal lovers, trolls, and internet menaces have feverishly smashed the little heart next to one commenter’s “Disappointed button.” My personal favorite is the comment calling Humm a “d bag,” not because I necessarily agree but because the time feels right to bring “d bag” back into the cultural lexicon. Someone named Kelly seems to be reliving a high school breakup— “I thought you cared,” she says.

Now is as good a time as any for Kelly to learn, people lie. They’ll lie to you, and they’ll lie to themselves. For those of us letting out a self-satisfied “I told you so” giggle today, the truth isn’t always so hard to see. A chef of mine once taught me (somewhere between how to score a baguette and how to fix a broken heating element in a deck oven) the three greatest lies ever told:

“The check is in the mail,” “No, sweetie, that dress doesn’t make you look fat,” and “Just the tip.” I’d add a fourth: that you can trust an egocentric chef guy to stand for anything.

Subscribe now

Eleven Madison Park (EMP, if you will) did not, of course, begin as a vegan establishment. During the peak of its reign as New York and the world’s best restaurant, its signature dish was a duck breast lacquered in lavender honey. Celeriac was braised inside a pig bladder, lobster was baptized in a pool of butter, guests scooped caviar from an EMP-branded tin. Luxury ingredients were served alongside novelty experiences; for a time, the dessert course was revealed through a tableside magic trick, developed by professional illusionists using a custom deck of cards. It wasn’t until May of 2021 that Humm made the decision to go plant-based. At the time, he quoted the environmental impact of the meat and seafood industry, alongside a desire to redefine luxury, as his reasoning for the shake-up. Vegans and climate activists rejoiced at having such a high-profile advocate. Meat eaters scoffed. Industry folks either hitched a ride on the bandwagon and exclaimed that it was the dawn of a new era in cooking, or outwardly questioned how vegetables would pay the bills. Discourse ensued.

I worked for Humm from late 2017 to early 2020; any of us on staff could have recited his belief that you have to change in order to stay the same. That stagnancy and irrelevance are brothers, that innovation isn’t a novelty but a survival mechanism. There is a sign anointing the EMP kitchen, one that lists the eleven words the restaurant is meant to embody. “Endless reinvention” sits second on the list, inspired by the jazz sensibility of the great Miles Davis.

One could extrapolate, then, that a move away from animal products was just as much a business decision by a for-profit enterprise as it was an ethical stance. I’d also classify Humm as a Girlfriend Guy. Call me cynical, but I don’t find it a coincidence that his move away from animal products coincided with his romantic relationship with Laurene Powell Jobs— climate activist, erstwhile vegan, and billionaire widow of the man who created whatever iProduct you’re using to read this post. The same year that EMP’s menu went plant-based, Powell Jobs committed $3.5 billion toward addressing the climate crisis. Chatter from the restaurant group’s inner circle all but confirmed that Humm’s decision was influenced by LPJ’s views. Or, rather, that her views had become his. Earlier this year, Humm married actress Annabelle Dexter-Jones. Currently, the stools lining EMP’s bar appear to be upholstered with leather.

As my therapist has taught me, sometimes it’s okay to do the right thing for the wrong reasons. Say, use your considerable power to influence an industry towards more sustainable methods, all in the name of love or bottom line (depending on which ways your speculation leans). In today’s announcement, Humm acknowledges the restaurant’s finances as a motivator for the about-face. It’s more difficult to convince people of the value in a vegetable tasting menu than one featuring Wagyu or caviar at the same exorbitant price. And what about that key word, taste? Critics largely panned the vegan menu, with Pete Wells describing the scent of a beet dish as reminiscent of a burning joint. In November of last year, a friend and I waited over an hour in the bitter cold for EMP’s bakery pop-up, Bake It Nice. I went more out of morbid curiosity than enthusiasm; there’s not much I’ll wait in line for, but I’ll suffer to prove a point. The chestnut-flavored viennoiserie made with vegan butter tasted like plastic, as if Mattel melted down Christmas Barbie, then laminated and wrapped her into a pretty, if rank, gift.

What, then, of Humm’s original reasoning for going meatless in the first place, his commitment to the sustainability of the natural world? If we’re looking for the truth, the most telling is the way Humm is backing away slowly, his hands up in self-defense. Or is that a hapless shrug? Humm suggests that this reversal back to animal products is, in fact, an act of hospitality. “I very much believed in the all-in approach, but I didn’t realize that we would exclude people [by going vegan],” he is quoted as saying in the NYT this morning. According to his press release, he “need[s] to create an environment where everyone feels welcome around the table.” At a restaurant that charges $365 per person for a tasting menu, exclusivity is part of the schtick. It’s a feature, not a bug. Meat eaters and vegans and everyone in between are welcome, but first, how much is in your wallet? It seems what Humm is trying to pull off is another sleight of hand, an optical illusion to convince us that, despite backtracking on his proclaimed values, he still has some.

There is a theme to the greatest lies ever told: people are always trying to trick you into giving them something. Time, peace, opportunity. Don’t fall for the illusion.

As always, thanks for reading.

Leave a comment

Luckily, we don’t have to. We can very much exist in summer for the time we have left. The only real challenge is that to do so, one has to slow down. The season of jetting off on vacation and embracing the heat in search of a tan ends in July; August brings a certain stupor, a sluggishness that demands very little, but demands it nonetheless. You can’t freestyle through a swamp. For our last month of the year’s hottest season, we’re wading: shuffling slowly, feet firmly grounded.

I still haven’t made the time to participate in my most cherished summer tradition: driving the two hours to Milford, NJ to visit Phillips Farms pick-your-own. Sure, you can buy their berries, cherries, and peaches from their stand at the Union Square Farmer’s Market, and by the time you account for gas and tolls, it’s probably cheaper to do so. But then you miss the hunt for the ripest blackberry bramble, the pleasure of eating a sun-warmed cherry right from the tree, the satisfying exhaustion of trekking to the farthest reach of the property for gooseberries and leaving with a bucket heavier than you intended. I always pick more than I can eat, which roughly translates to a pantry full of jam jars and a freezer stacked with Ziplocs of frozen fruit.

My languid August self is letting someone else do the heavy lifting.

• This week, I ate an outstanding peach melba sundae at Hani’s: braised peaches, raspberry sauce with fruit from Phillips, crags of torn amaretti cookies, a dribble of fig leaf oil.

• I finally muscled open the jar of LBJ’s Chuckleberry Jam that I bought two years ago and have been “saving.” For what, I hadn’t been sure, until last week when it seemed the only correct way to continue through life was to slather it and salted beurre d’Isigny on top of seeded sourdough.

• Tomato toast production has been outsourced to professionals:

(I can never remember that a chuckleberry is a cross between a gooseberry, a red currant, and a jostaberry, which itself is a cross between a gooseberry and a black currant. I have zero problem, however, conjuring the feeling that whoever named it “chuckleberry” should be sued.)

The most effort I’ve been exerting is making a big batch of green juice every week. I like to drink it from a pint glass ticked with classic cocktail measurements, sipping a Cosmo’s worth of jalapeno/celery/green apple while rewatching an episode of Sex and the City and laughing at my own joke.

What does your August idle look like?

Leave a comment

• If you can bear to turn the oven on, this jammy coffee cake from Natasha Pickowicz will give you the biggest ROI from whatever forgotten summer fruit is starting to collapse in your fridge. I like to make a double batch of the crumble and store the extra in my freezer for next time. A longtime NP skeptic (decorating cake with lettuce is both sensationalist and upsetting), I am here to tell you that growth tastes sweet.

• Tammie Teclemariam is singing over at Grubstreet about Bread & Salt’s caffè Lecchese, to which I would like to say: welcome to the fan club.

Review in Review: Ligaya Mishan Visits Dōgon by Kwame Onwuachi in D.C.

Another reason for my dragging feet this week—have you noticed I’m a day behind schedule?— is how little of my time has been spent outside of work. Sadly, that means something’s got to give. That “something” has been, in no particular order, sleep, gym visits, my instep, my tolerance for nonsense, and the brainpower required to write thoughtful criticism. In the spirit of fairness, I’m withholding stars and an in-depth analysis. Instead, consider with me the questions that came to mind upon reading this week’s review.

Does Kwame Onwuachi need more press? In 2024, Pete Wells named his restaurant Tatiana at the top of New York’s 100 Best Restaurants list. In 2025, it sits solidly at number 10. In April, he threw out the first pitch at a Mets game and was named to the Time 100 list. This is the man hand-picked by Anna Wintour to cook for the most recent Met Gala celebrating the opening of its titular exhibition, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.” Las’ Lap Miami, his culinary collaboration with the team behind New York’s rum bar and Caribbean restaurant of the same name, opened yesterday in South Beach. A Vegas project, titled Maroon, is slated to open in late 2025, which most likely means sometime next year. I went to a Golden State Warriors game at the Barclays Center in March (not to be confused with going to a Nets game); I wanted to see Steph Curry drop a three in real life. And I did, a few times over, but not before seeing Kwame on the Jumbotron, right after Adam Driver, in the celeb-spotting segment. The man is talented, ambitious, and unafraid for you to know it, and he has the publicity and success to match.

Let me be clear: good for him. Good for the industry. Most strikingly, good for the diners who will either be introduced to Afro Caribbean, African, and African American cuisines through Onwuachi’s food, or who will see familiar culinary traditions mirrored back to them in energetic, sleek spaces whose interiors are thoughtfully designed to enhance a story that has long been silenced. Three years in, Tatiana is still impossible to get into. The post-COVID city had been itching for a restaurant that could maintain both its buzz and its pulse for more than a New York minute. Alongside Unapologetic Foods’ Adda, Dhamaka, and Semma, Onwuachi adds to the quiet argument that the New York dining scene is still king.

Here’s where I get stuck. The Times wants to expand its purview nationwide, and so it sends Ligaya Mishan to D.C., where she eats at a restaurant from a New York-based chef whose spotlight is currently calibrated to its brightest setting. Is this truly an expansion of breadth, or simply supersizing the square footage of the paper’s echo chamber? Certainly there’s benefit in reviewing a chef already so well-established— his name alone has become a draw, and so a review acts as the filter between hype and value, perception and reality. I do think, regardless of how a restaurant from a celebrity chef fares in reviews, that people will follow star power, and Kwame, where it and he leads. The hype exists at inception. Does an honest review from the newspaper of record help some curious diners decide whether or not to visit? Sure. But chefs like Onwuachi can get butts in seats regardless. Savvy diners don’t need a starred NYT review to know where to find him.

In a similar scenario, do I think that Pete Wells’ infamous and eviscerating 2012 review of Guy Fieri’s Times Square restaurant kept Fieri fans away? Probably not. Millions of diners showed up anyway, and I imagine it was their own perception of the food and its value, not Pete’s, that prevented them from returning and streamlined the restaurant’s 2017 closure. That piece was more performance art than review, more of a lazy way for Wells to get a few jabs in than a useful piece of criticism. It was a reminder that the Times critic has power, and a responsibility to wield it wisely.

How many restaurants are there outside of the country’s dining capitals whose names we don’t know, whose chefs we have yet to meet, whose stories add color to our county’s cultural tapestry but simply haven’t had the spotlight to share them beyond their own limited reach? Last week’s review of Taquería Frontera is the type of story I imagined we would read more of as the critics leave the borders of the five boroughs— the independently owned taco spot, the small town family-owned restaurant, the transplants breathing new life into once-dying steel cities. Thanks to the Times, I already know that Onwuachi wears Comme des Garçons, prefers Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos, and listens to Steely Dan. I love Steely Dan. Help me find the restaurant, the chef, the story I’ve never heard of, help me love them, too.

As always, thanks for reading. Don’t forget to eat a peach while you still can.

Lately, though, I’ve noticed a fresh trend when I ask new, young hires at work what interests them about working in a restaurant. More often than not, they say something along the lines of, “Well, I love throwing dinner parties at home,” or, “I just love going out to eat.”

“I’m really into wine.”

“I'm a big foodie.”

I smile. I try not to visibly shudder. And I think to myself, let’s see how long this lasts.

I started baking professionally for the same reasons I began baking at home: I was a criminally shy and careful child, and baking with my mom allowed me to express myself without words, to apply my meticulous nature to a recipe and know, through the miracle of science and the magic of precision, exactly what I was going to get in return.

Subscribe now

But how I got to restaurants isn’t nearly as interesting as how I’ve managed to stay in restaurants. As with most self-pathologizing, mine traces back to my parents. Growing up, “sleeping in” was something other parents let their lazybones kids do. I’ve been washing dishes since I had the fine motor skills to hold a fork. My dad is stubborn; I am stubborn AND competitive, which means he once described me as his “punishment for everything [he’s] ever done wrong in life.” Neither of my parents ever let us forget that they cared for us, each in their own way. It feels natural in my adulthood, then, to be a caretaker of sorts. And, if the body keeps the score, mine would give me 10s across the board for feeling at ease in unpredictability, my compulsive urge to fix, and my confidence that I will always come out the other side of discomfort if not the same, then functional.

No love of food, of cooking, of eating, of entertaining alone sustains a person’s holistic self when a restaurant year is more akin to a dog year. Baking blueberry crisps for my dad every Sunday and working the line on a Saturday night are about as similar as being a pet chihuahua in a Louis Vuitton Speedy and being one of Michael Vick’s favorite pit bulls. If that reference doesn’t age me enough (or, worse, you have to Google it), I’ll say directly that I've worked in New York City restaurants for the last twelve years. There's a grit and a grind required, a certain je ne sais quoi that may or may not rhyme with a mental health diagnosis that differentiates someone who wants to work in restaurants from someone who can last in restaurants. Sometimes you’re born with it, occasionally you can learn it, but you absolutely cannot fake it for long.

So you think you should get a restaurant job? Lucky for you, I've written a handy quiz to help determine if you’ve got the mental muscle to back up your inner Wishbone Kitchen, or whatever dream got you in the door.

Substack’s platform doesn't support a quiz format, which is good because I probably wouldn't be technologically adept enough to utilize it. Instead, we’re going analog. Grab a pen, use your Notes app, count on your fingers— tally how many times you answer “yes” to the questions below.

1. On a scale of one to ten, is your level of comfort with discomfort a seven or above?
-yes
-no


2. Can you be in the constant vicinity of yummy little snacks without thinking that you are entitled to eating said yummy little snacks?
-yes
-But I’ve been running around all night, I'm hungry!


3. If you want to work front of house, do you consider yourself a personality hire? If you want to work back of house, are you prepared for your personality to be squashed out of you?
-yes
-I think it’s a little more nuanced than that, Cassie.


4. It’s Thanksgiving, and your family is together at home fighting over the last slice of your aunt’s famous pumpkin praline cake while you are serving some stranger’s family their turkey. You don’t have to like it, but can you do it, year after year?
-yes
-no


5. Do you have the disposition of a bomb squad technician with a heart of gold— a cool, calm, kind adrenaline junkie with a warm regard for suffering?
-yes
-no


6. Are you constitutionally capable of standing for eight + hours at a time in hideous shoes?
-yes
-no


7. Can you solemnly swear that you will take every label off of every container before passing them through to the dishwashers?
-yes
-I’m too busy for menial tasks.


8. Your guest asks for their sirloin to be cooked “medium plus.” You say:
-yes
-That’s not real.


9. Are you emotionally prepared to make your guest or coworker’s oversight your personal emergency, often and on the fly?
-yes
-no


10. When your parents ask when you’re getting a “real” job, you can shrug it off.
-yes
-no


11. Can you put in the work of being a perpetual student, without receiving any formal degree for your effort?
-yes
-So then what’s in it for me?


12. It’s raining, it’s pouring, the grease trap is overflowing and your manager asks you to help mop up the shit water. You say:
-yes. Also ew.
-That’s not my job.

Now count your yesses.

Twelve

Stop being such a doormat.

Nine—Eleven

You're hired. While it certainly helps on the more thankless days, a love of food and beverage aren’t requirements to do well in a restaurant job. Some of my most reliable coworkers are those who have a dream for themselves bigger than what can happen within the walls of our workplace. If you know how to hustle, how to find humor in both the mundane and the insane, and can commit to discipline, come and stay awhile. You’re already well-practiced in the one refrain you need to know: yes, Chef.

Five—Eight

One more question: are you willing to take feedback, adapt, and humble yourself to the challenges outlined here? Because right now, your coworkers might like you, but they don’t like working with you. If yes, see above. If not, see below.

Zero—Four

Some people are not built for restaurants. This can be a credit to their boundaries and highly sensitive nature as much as it can be commentary on their flimsy work ethic and even thinner skin. Trouble is, there’s no time to whittle down to the whys— you’re fired on the third course for an eight-top, service bar needs drinks run, we only have one polisher tonight, and can you bring an extra chair to table 130? As we the sisters of Kappa Kappa Gamma would say if this were Panhellenic recruitment, better suited elsewhere.

Share

Review in Review: Tejal Rao Visits Taquería Frontera in L.A.

⭐️

Sometimes even I forget when I’m writing these reviews that my critique is on the reviews themselves. That it says nothing about the restaurant. I feel a tinge of guilt every time I’m stingy with my stars in such close proximity to hardworking, talented industry folks, in this case the tromperos and tortilleras, plancha masters and cashiers who make up Taquería Frontera in L.A.

Tejal Rao reviews Juan Carlos Guerra’s Taquería Frontera in that she eats the food and gives them two stars, but largely this review is better categorized as a personal essay mixed with some professional reporting. Ms. Rao gives it a promising start—I very nearly become the woman with a baby strapped to her, risking disrupting the fraught equilibrium of a happy infant in exchange for one more taco al pastor. Anyone who’s been in a ten foot radius of a crying baby knows that a willingness to take such a risk is high praise. Her description of the “rubble of onion” piled atop the taco made me smile. But nothing good lasts forever.

Ms. Rao mentions that Frontera’s al pastor “deviate[s] slightly from the local archetype.” I assume that is because of the dueling sauces, one hot and one white, that adorn the taco. I’ve not had a taco al pastor with a white sauce, but Ms. Rao makes you scroll to the end of the article, then hopes you read the photo caption, crossing her fingers that you will then use context clues to determine that one sauce is the house salsa, the other a cilantro crema. I don’t want to have to try so hard.

The rest of the menu gets the wholesale treatment: “all of the tacos are compact…each type coddled and proportioned a little differently, according to its specific needs.” Which are..? Ms. Rao does elaborate a little when discussing the characteristics of different tortillas as transportation devices for various fillings, but the subject-verb disagreement in the sentence was all I could think about. “Corn tortillas…is structurally sound”? Copy editing nut that I am, you can imagine how incensed I was to later scroll to the summary at the end of the piece and see that the proofreader had allowed the information meant for the Recommended Dishes section to be copied and pasted under the Reservations heading. NYT, be serious. I wondered which drawer the fine-tooth comb I’m certain the editorial team uses to examine, say, a four star Le Bernardin review, got tucked into and forgotten for the review of a lowly taquería. (These copy errors have since been corrected; I’ve linked the original above.)

Ms. Rao uses Taquería Frontera’s delayed opening of a second location as a segue into the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration, legal and otherwise. We are no longer discussing Frontera, but the city at large, the masked cowards kidnapping people off the streets and the mutual aid networks humming in the background to make sure that community life carries on as safely as possible. It is an important conversation. As Nina Simone said, “An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times.” You cannot talk about a business in Los Angeles selling Mexican food, owned by a Mexican American, run by Mexican Americans, serving a diverse population, without reflecting on the disparity between a country that relies on immigrants but also hates them. Criticism is an art, and I can imagine Ms. Rao’s sense of responsibility to further illuminate the fear permeating the Latino community. I’m glad she used her limited word count to do so. I also wish she hadn’t used so much of it. As she says herself in the piece, “Everyone knows that immigrant labor powers restaurants across the country, but immigrants are more than their labor.” Aren’t they also more than their suffering? Aren’t tacos more nuanced than what lumping them together implies? It’s like describing the food at a French restaurant by saying, “All of the food contains butter,” then leaving it at that.

It’s so easy to look at the world and feel helpless. And really, for the majority of us, what can we do? They tell us not to stand in the corner and boo but to act, to vote, but look where our votes got us. Ms. Rao is in the privileged minority in that, by helming a column in The New York Times, she has power. She uses that power to note a sign running like a banner over the facade of Taquería Frontera: “More tacos, less borders.” To her, it reads like a prayer. To me, as a review this piece reads like “thoughts & prayers”: not particularly useful, no matter how well-intentioned.

You can’t judge a person for how they grieve. I think it’s imperative, if I’m being critical of Ms. Rao’s work as a reviewer, to note that I don’t pass criticism on her grief, on her imperfect, human attempt to do what she can against a horrific and hellbent system. I see it, salute it, and hope she continues.

If you are able, consider contributing to the National Day Laborer Organizing Network’s Immigrant Defense Fund here. Donations collected help to hire immigration lawyers, pay litigation costs, and increase advocacy to protect immigrants from arrest and deportation.

As always, thanks for reading.

Review in Review: Ligaya Mishan Visits Chez Fifi in New York

⭐️

It seems as though Ligaya Mishan is listening. Sadly she’s not a Fire the Board subscriber, but I’d like to think she hears me when I tickle my keyboard into the abyss. I’d like to think she clocked the one piece of critical feedback out of thirty glowing Instagram comments on her first review that asked, “Lot of words, but what about the actual food?” Three reviews into her tenure as chief critic, Ms. Mishan is starting to work out the Ivy League-shaped kinks in her writing that have distracted and distanced discerning readers from what they come to her for: the dining experience at hand.

One way to breed goodwill among a readership that might find your obvious MFA in poetry alienating? Begin your review with a quote from Anthony Bourdain, straight-shooting chef of the people. In yesterday’s review of the Upper East Side’s Chez Fifi, it seems as though maybe Ms. Mishan decided not just to quote him, but to attempt to embody him. Gone are her seven layer dips of adjectives, the air of manufactured otherworldliness previously packed amidst her clauses and commas. Here her tone is more conversational, practically proletarian compared to her past writing. Reading through the review, my feet stayed firmly planted on the parquet flooring of the neighborhood bistro as I imagined the barely-set omelet of Royal Red shrimp, the conspiratorial tone of the servers.

In many ways, this is a good review. Good, in that Chez Fifi’s one star aligns with the Times’ rating metrics for a “good” restaurant. Good, in that its mixed nature makes me trust our critic more— all glowing praise and it would seem overly fawning, whereas a full take-down would feel personal. Good, in that its stark shift in tone displays Ms. Mishan’s game attitude toward relinquishing her quill for a more readable approach to writing, her capacity for change.

The thing is, Ligaya Mishan is not Anthony Bourdain. That’s not a criticism, it’s just a fact as true as I am not the boozehound, gun-slinging Ernest Hemingway. I, too, like adjectives. Directness is a skill, but so is lyricism, and they both have their place. While I wasn’t hate-reading this review, I found that instead I was simply bored. Ms. Mishan’s beautiful prose was pared down, but there were no sharp insights to bulk it up. She follows that ever-true foundation of creative writing to “show, don’t tell,” but here I found myself missing her predecessor Pete Wells, who didn’t show so much as invite you along for the ride. And while God certainly has a sense of humor, I fear that Ligaya does not.

She tells you she knows the neighborhood by name-checking the most cliched wealth signifiers— the butter is Birkin-status, some old guy wears the same watch beloved by John Lennon and Drake alike. Anyone in the dining room too young to collect Social Security is embracing their “main character” energy. Ms. Mishan is too smart to be dealing in tropes.

That’s the trouble with working on your weaknesses: it often leads to overcorrecting until you fail upwards to the perfect balance. Either that, or she is trolling us. I wouldn’t blame her.

There’s been a lot of discourse in the past week about the validity of restaurant criticism. Best Food Blog held a roundtable with critics Tejal Rao, J Lee, Helen Rosner, and MacKenzie Fegan titled, “Does Restaurant Criticism Still Matter?” Sarah Morrissey’s diatribe/“love letter” to Priya Krishna, a self-described petty rant against Priya’s review of Le Veau d’Or, went viral enough that I couldn’t escape it for three full days. (And God did I want to escape it.) Here I am, talking about Ms. Mishan’s work. You want easier reading? See how you like this! You want more food? I’ll give you food! Anthony Bourdain is like catnip to foodies. What better way to shut them up then to invoke their hero and then phone in the rest.

Perhaps my biggest gripe (if you can even call it that), then, is not that Ms. Mishan is trying but missing the mark, or that she may be frustrated by a band of detractors fussier than Goldilocks. It’s that, from her review title onwards, she misses an opportunity to talk about a changing city from the vantage point of restaurants. “Can This Buzzy Bistro Make the Upper East Side Cool?” she asks. A better question would be, “The Upper East Side is cool again. What does that mean for the evolution of its dining scene?”

There are signs that the neighborhood is getting a refresh from an influx of younger inhabitants. As an investigative journalist might, let’s follow the money. That is, follow the shopping. The Row opened a shop on E. 71st Street in 2016; Toteme followed more recently in September 2024, while Khaite opened its UES doors in January of this year. To put this all in perspective, 30-something fashion reporter and purveyor of cool, Laura Reilly, runs a shopping Substack 42,000 subscribers deep. Each year she builds a brand ranking based off of a data-driven index of how often brands get mentioned in her posts and chats, how often those mentions equate to clicks, and how many clicks lead to sales. In her recent Summer 2025 calculations, The Row, Toteme, and Khaite all cracked the top ten of a ranking that accounted for 5,000 different brands. Cool brands are following their cool shoppers all the way to cool uptown.

Just about a month ago, Cultured Magazine profiled ten Upper East Side tastemakers on their favorite UES haunts, hangs, and inspiration. All those profiled are millennials or younger; Chez Fifi is mentioned more than once. Otherwise, most of the dining mentioned were storied favorites: Bemelmans Bar, JG Melon, Cafe Budapest. The neighborhood reads like a coffee shop and dining desert. As the demographic changes from old and monied to younger and slightly less monied, how will restaurants meet the moment? When Ms. Mishan mentions that Chez Fifi seeks to be a neighborhood restaurant, and she in turn asks who the neighbors are, she gets close to the heart of the matter. That she assumes the younger crowds nabbing Chez Fifi’s highly allocated dinner reservations are making the pilgrimage from downtown plays into yet another trope. It seems, instead, that these diners are subverting what we have long known about the cultural borders to New York’s neighborhoods. Let’s see for ourselves how restaurants respond.

As always, thanks for reading.

⭐️

Mori Nozomi
A woman wields a sharp knife
The custard trembles

No toro weeps here
Did I mention the woman?
She slices your fish

Mouth machines chewing
Petals of squid received, changed
How, I won’t tell you

Bros just want a flash
Women unveil the darkness
And arrange flowers

No cliched cooking
She’s not like the other girls
Watch her in 2-D

Speaking of women
The chef here is a woman
Can you believe it?

Though I’d been meaning for the last seven years or so to start writing more, it wasn’t until an April visit to Cafe Mutton that I felt the sudden jolt past inspiration and into action. The below is based on an idea I feverishly typed into my notes app on our way home from dinner that night. For those local to NYC, Cafe Mutton & The Meat Hook are doing a collab tomorrow starting at 5pm at their Graham Ave location, cash only. Go.

Finding the Yes, Embracing the No

This spring for my birthday, Ed planned a weekend trip up to Hudson, NY. We would go antiquing in the morning, set our city dog loose on wide trails in the afternoon, and it would all be a prelude to dinner: a Friday night reservation at Cafe Mutton. To call Shaina Loew-Banayan’s offal-forward brunch and dinner spot a meat restaurant would be both oversimplifying and accurate. Yes, they serve vegetables, and there seems to always be a seafood entree on menu, but the food leans savory, stinky, molded, and, well, meaty. Squid is stuffed with blood sausage; mushrooms give pig gelatin a little smooch, a classic pairing trapped in an amber jello embrace; the borders of land and sea meet inside a sausage casing filled with chicken gizzards and eel. There's pig head, shoulder, ears, and toes encased in pastry crust, and Roquefort for dessert. It’s not for everyone (vegans, specifically, and the humorless, more generally), but that is what you get when a chef is brave enough to cook with an uncompromising point of view, and talented enough to pull it off to delicious effect.

That combination is rare, which is in part why I, inured to a New York restaurant scene subsisting on vibes, was so giddy to be there. It’s also why I was so keen for the meal to never end. Or at least to last until the morning. Listed first on their menu on the day of our visit was, for $5, a “broth of many things.” It takes real editorial talent to be so alluringly vague. I imagined myself in our rental the next morning, sipping a nourishing broth of mysteries out of the Cafe Mutton-branded mug I planned to add to my morning rotation. It was an experience-expanding trick I’d used the year before, when Ed took me for a birthday dinner at Clare de Boer’s Stissing House (Ed is good at birthdays): upon leaving, I had ordered off their menu both “a cup of broth” and a slice of their ethereal coconut cake to go, which I savored the next morning in our Airbnb kitchen.

My fantasy of making a tradition of breakfast bone broth was not to be, however. When I asked our server if it was possible to order broth to take home, they simply said, “No, we can't do that.” No explanation, half apology, just kind enough and right to the point. No! How…refreshing?

I hear you saying, Cassie, did you miss the Brooklyn of the 2010s? Williamsburg restaurants and beyond have been saying no since before Miranda Hobbes bought a Prospect Heights brownstone in 2003. To which I will say, I was there. I remember. It’s possible I’ve been working under a Manhattan-shaped rock for too long. It’s more probable that this was not some arbitrary no for the sake of commodifying counterculture. Instead, it feels like “no” means something different now, not a statement of stubborn unwillingness but an intermission while we rewrite the code for what hospitality needs to look like today.

Subscribe now

Sometime in the early 20th century, either an American retail magnate or a Swiss hotelier to kings coined the phrase, “the customer is always right” (historians can’t agree on the specifics, and really, who cares). It wasn’t until the 90s that restaurateur Danny Meyer decreed an updated mantra of “enlightened hospitality,” where the guest (never “customer”) is not always right, but they should always be heard, less transaction between guest and employee and more symbiosis. In this model, Meyer centered the employee, a sort of trickle-down economics of care where emotionally intelligent workers, prioritized by their business leaders and inspired to see their service as noble work, would reinvest that attention into the guests themselves. Instead of right and wrong, the mission became to “find the yes,” to go to the extra effort to accommodate, to “create raves.”

In many ways, it’s common sense wrapped up in digestible, catchy packaging. Most of us learned at an early age to treat others the way we want to be treated, to be kind, to listen, to share. Maybe Meyer’s genius, then, wasn’t so much in creating a novel way to look at the world, but applying the best instincts of human nature to an industry that was long overdue for a perspective shift to meet the contemporary moment. In the hundred years that the customer reigned supreme, much had transformed. An American middle class with disposable income emerged, advancements in technology and transportation broadened the scope of what food was available, immigration laws brought new cuisines to the American consciousness, and diners became more interested and educated through the advent of cooking shows, celebrity chefs, and yes, restaurant reviews. The industry needed a new approach to meet guests where they were and, by the early 90s, Meyer’s unprecedented willingness to rewrite the playbook was met, as evidenced by the zealousness of his apostles, with a god-like reverence. Fitting, then, that behind the scenes we call him Daddy.

Much has been written about the relevance of enlightened hospitality in the present day. By creating raves, have we really created monsters? Has the guest’s expectation that we will bend to accommodate them knotted us into a servile pretzel, a kink our medical insurance certainly does not cover to iron out?

It’s not just too much “yes.” A lot can happen in thirty years. The internet, for one. When I was in the second grade, I was collecting Beanie Babies; nowadays, a seven-year-old could make a dinner reservation on their iPad faster than I could. Not only has enlightened hospitality spread (and mutated; see Will Guidara’s virulent “unreasonable hospitality”), access has been democratized so that diners have accrued their 10,000 hours of self-accredited restaurant expertise not in the trenches but from the cushy booths of restaurants and the glint of a phone screen. Everyone’s a mixologist, everyone’s a foodie, anyone can walk into Williams Sonoma and buy a sous vide machine, then they go out to eat and want to know why their food is taking so long. People want pleasure on their own terms, not translated through the care of a seasoned hospitality professional. To them, what’s the difference? If the guest is the final arbiter of taste in a restaurant, the fate of the actual experts, those with the hard-won vision and skill, becomes less clear, yes-ed from a supporting role into one of an extra.

Socially, culturally, and quite literally, we’re not in 1993 anymore. Continuing to exclusively defer to a few white guys on the playbook ignores everything we know about power and privilege. The Me Too movement didn’t change restaurant culture the way most of us hoped it might, and the effects of COVID are more lasting than we care to admit. But as Sarah Morrissey said in her recent love letter to millennial restaurant rats, it’s boring to harp on about the ways that the pandemic led to a mass exodus of seasoned restaurant professionals from the field. The industry is still here, we’re still here, where the rules haven’t changed, but the goal posts have shifted.

Which is perhaps why Cafe Mutton takes such a hard stance in protection of their vision. I wasn’t surprised that I was told no; if you walked into the restaurant knowing nothing of it, the beverage menu would be the first hint that things are done differently there. In a world where bar menus aim to offer something for all tastes, Mutton’s house cocktails lean in one direction: bitter. You can order a daiquiri off of their Classics menu if you must, but it is obvious that the house recommends amaro to balance the rich, fatty <insert animal> you are about to eat. They are right to do so. Maybe, too, they are protecting their limits. Their back bar is smaller than my New York City-sized shower; to give us all the options in the world would be to run themselves into the ground.

If we the industry want to know who will reboot the rulebook for our modern times, the answer is lurking right there, behind a “no” and a bar stocked with Braulio. We’re a more agnostic breed now— we aren’t looking for a god, only to recognize and honor our own human limitations. What that looks like is different for every restaurant, during every service, in any given moment. As Daddy himself so rightly says, “One size fits one.” If we the diners want to know what that asks of us, it’s to extend the same “yes” that has long been extended to us, to allow hospitality professionals to do what they can with what they have. To trust that behind any human limitations is a deep well of expertise and an instinct to make our day.

While I was disappointed that my effort to stretch time through broth was cut short, I was pleased to see a small restaurant with a small staff drawing a line as to how far they were willing to stretch themselves to make me happy. There is no way they didn’t have an old plastic quart container that smelled faintly of onion to ladle some liquid into for me. That they didn’t have the staffing resources or desire to set that precedent mattered more, and no amount of insider scoop made what I know about restaurants more relevant than what the Cafe Mutton staff knows about theirs. And so I sat back and I let them take me on the ride they had in mind. It was more playful, more indulgent, more unapologetic than anything I could have dreamt up for myself, and so I savored it, knowing it wouldn’t last forever.

There was one more thing I wanted, though. Maybe I was high off the fumes of no, or maybe I felt that, having been shut down once, there was no harm in setting myself up for it to happen again. Was it possible to try, for a price, the Alpeggio hay liqueur? So little surprises me anymore, but hay liqueur was something I didn’t know a thing about. When our server offered that “we don’t really do tastes,” I thanked them. I was happy to relent into the soft cushion of my brown butter cake.

We finished our dessert, and asked for our bill. With it, our server dropped a snifter glass filled with a kiss’ worth of straw-colored liqueur. It tasted of alpine meadows, tiny white flowers, honey, and, there at the finish, a whisper of yes.

As always, thanks for reading. And if you know anyone who might enjoy being a part of the conversation on the culture, economy, and our own personal worlds of food, please feel free to share below.

Share

Do you know how humiliating it is to wake up on a Tuesday morning, search “nyt restaurant reviews,” and then spend the next two hours refreshing the website of a publication you don’t respect just so you can be proven wrong?

That is a snapshot of me yesterday, feverishly awaiting what was to be Ligaya Mishan’s second review as the Times’ co-chief restaurant critic. As I made plain a few weeks ago, her first review bummed me out: “a love letter to New York” (her words); all glitter and no meat (mine), in the way that glitter sparkles, then sticks to you for the next week, offering nothing but an annoying reminder of its throwaway brilliance. I was, cynically, expecting more of the same. This week, some sustenance.

Review in Review: Ligaya Mishan Visits Kabawa in New York

⭐️⭐️

At some point in her review of the East Village restaurant Kabawa, Ms. Mishan states that the chef, Paul Carmichael, is a master of texture. The same could be said for the critic who, in this review, creates a composite of the Caribbean restaurant by weaving together the elements that make the place: the dead-end alley address that leads you there, what you’re drinking, the food, the way the people who cook and serve it to you make you feel. There is not one of the five senses that goes unstimulated.

Of course readers aren’t tasting the “hot teardrops” of fermented Scotch bonnet peppers, or feeling the warm breath of the coconut turnover on their skin, but the language is so evocative that, reading the lede, I couldn’t help but be transported back to the kitchen table in my first New York apartment, just a few blocks from where Kabawa sits now, my fingers sticky with the pulp of the first tamarind I ever tasted. If Paul Carmichael’s food is meant to be Caribbean food filtered through the lens of his memory and lived experience, Mishan’s writing carries a similar sense of wistfulness, nostalgia tinged with the feeling that something is just out of reach.

Words are like water in that way. They can reflect and soothe, just as they can carry you to a place you’ve never been. They can also be more powerful than you realize. In writing so poetically about Kabawa, Mishan makes readers yearn for the food, while simultaneously, unintentionally carrying them away from it. There were moments where I was so transported by the 400-level lyricism of her writing that I forgot what I was reading about. “The slow unlatching of muscles, a dishevelment in progress.” Am I reading an Ellen Bass poem, or a description of goat shoulder? I love Ellen Bass, I just sometimes wish she’d come back to earth.

Earlier in the week, I had listened to The TASTE podcast, hosted by Matt Rodbard, featuring Ms. Mishan. Responding to a question about her use of history to paint a picture of the present dining scene, Mishan states that she had “started to run out of words” to talk about the food, at which point her editor Nick Fox advised her to “stop writing about” it. That advice, she says, “has guided [her] for years” to include less food, more historical context. We saw this in action in her first co-chief review. In this review, however, I don’t see any signs of struggle to find the words: “ice shaved diaphanously fine,” “monument[s] of pork,” slippery shrimp flesh. Perhaps the caveat here is that she struggles to find the words when the food doesn’t have much to say for itself.

At Kabawa, the food starts a discourse that our critic is more than keen to contribute to. It’s a scenic ride. What I found wanting was more of a conversation illuminating not just the gorgeous results of Carmichael cooking his own version of Caribbean food, but the tradition from which he is pulling, and bending, his interpretation. She states that Carmichael cooks “ without apology,” but what is there to apologize for? Beyond her description of the less-than-traditional preparation of blaff, I wasn’t so sure.

So give us, then, information with which readers less familiar with Caribbean cuisine can contextualize the story. A little history, if you will. I thought that Tejal Rao did this well with Mexican cuisine in last week’s review of Acamaya; similarly, Besha Rodell’s write-up of Carmichael’s cooking at Momofuku Seiobo felt complete (even if the photos and video accompanying the article are hilariously bad).

It’s a tricky spot for a critic of Mishan’s experience to be in. Prior to being the co-chief, Mishan wrote reviews for the Time’s Hungry City column, which traced a line through New York’s “great unsung restaurants.” Often, these unsung restaurants are helmed by New York’s unsung populations, that is, its immigrants, people of color, and mom-and-pops without big name investors, bringing us their own version of tradition. Not only did Mishan spend nearly ten years of her career spotlighting these stories, she is well-acquainted with the myth rooted in racism that these underrepresented, less familiar cuisines aren’t worth the same money as the more whitewashed establishments that typically land a review from the Times’ chief critic. Over-explain, and you risk telegraphing that this food is an outlier, an outsider, that it showed up to the ball in sneakers, even if they’re Margiela. Say too little, and you leave a mystery where there should be enlightenment.

Mishan touches on this struggle briefly in Kabawa’s review:

“How do you introduce a cuisine at this price point to diners who may know it only in its cheaper, more streetwise forms — who may not recognize its value?”

By glossing over the topic, Mishan gives the bogus argument against Caribbean food’s perceived value the attention it deserves: very little. But by dedicating so many thesaurus words to the food and very few to the tradition that informs it, she does her readers a disservice. Maybe not the readers who followed along during her Hungry City era, but certainly those who look to the chief critic to teach them what and how to eat. Since 2000, there have been thirty-one reviews dedicated to Caribbean food published in the NYT. Of those, only seven have been written by a chief critic; the rest were covered in Hungry City, $25 and Under pieces, or other less prominent or regular columns. Dating back to that same time period, ninety-seven reviews have been published on French restaurants, with only a handful falling outside the purview of the chief critic. That is 25 years of the Times influencing its readers to think a certain way and to value certain cuisines over others, all by how they devote their word counts. It’s not a reality that Mishan created—in fact, it’s one she has historically worked against— but it is one that she inherited.

I finished reading Ms. Mishan’s review hoping to visit Kabawa, taste Mr. Carmichael’s food, and to answer some of the lingering questions myself. With a review that elevates a dining experience so proudly with its words, I imagine getting a reservation just got that much more difficult.

As always, thank you for reading.

A space with the ideal acoustics for echoing their lovely prose into song? Beats me. What I do know is that the slip resistant kitchen clogs on the ground are hungry for a more comprehensive story. Not one that sings their praises unduly, but cares deeply about getting it right for the sake of restaurant culture. It’s what curious diners across New York and beyond deserve, too.

If “the review of The View” was a mouthful, perhaps “Review in Review” will be a tidier bite. Introducing a new weekly short-form feature I’m beta testing, where each freshly published NYT review gets a critical eye mirrored back to it. If it’s fun for me, of interest to you, and not a constant sauté and flambé of the critics themselves, I’ll keep it running. To keep things even-steven, I’ll borrow the Times’ rating system—the metrics for the stars awarded are identical to those the NYT applies to their reviews.

From The Times: “Ratings range from zero to four stars. Zero is poor, fair or satisfactory. One star, good. Two stars, very good. Three stars, excellent. Four stars, extraordinary.”

Review in Review: Tejal Rao Visits Acamaya in New Orleans

⭐️⭐️

Ms. Rao begins her exploration of chef Ana Castro’s coastal Mexican restaurant by evoking the culinary canon of the New Orleans in your mind, all gut-busting muffulettas and beignets leaving a powdered sugar trail down your shirt. When she states that the influences on Gulf food from centuries past— French and Spanish colonization, Indigenous tradition, the city’s history as the hub of American slave trade—continue to “bop[ ] together deliciously” in the city’s current dining scene, and that Castro “insists on the connection between Louisiana and Mexico,” she tees you up to think you’re about to read a review of a restaurant serving, I cringe to say it, fusion cuisine, some forced amalgam of Mexican and Creole tradition. I was pleased to find that lead-up misleading.

Acamaya doesn’t read to be a melding of cuisines so much as a contemporary Mexican restaurant that applies the bounty of the Gulf to a Mexican sensibility. Castro displays her commitment to Louisiana ingredients by driving 30 miles to Higgins Seafood for crab, and by leaving crab off the menu entirely if she can’t make the trip to Lafitte, LA to pick up their catch. Rao does the same not only by sharing insight into the ingredient’s provenance, but through her use of real estate; she dedicates three paragraphs to the family business and the ways in which labor shortages, global warming, and crustacean fraud (really) can upend the delicate balance of the Higgins family’s livelihood, and that of Gulf Coast fisherman.

I found myself wishing that Rao gave a more descriptive treatment to the heirloom corn she mentions being used to make the restaurant’s chochoyotes. In a world where diners are becoming interested and informed enough to seek out the standard-bearer of heirloom grains, Carolina Gold rice, I think there is good reason to capitalize on that momentum away from GMOs and towards farm-grown grains that prioritize flavor and tell the story of the foodways of the American south.

Speaking of chochoyotes, I went into this review unfamiliar with the masa dumplings and left hungry for them. The food is the star of the review. Sometimes, Rao explains rather than educates; the difference can feel like she is underestimating her readers (“nasturtium leaves, a garnish that’s meant to be eaten”). At her best, and most often, she introduces and defines menu items in a way that neither assumes what the reader knows nor robs them of the joy of reliving the dishes alongside the writer, bite by bite. By treating the beverage offerings like an afterthought, Rao leads me to assume that maybe the restaurant does, too. By leaving out any mention of dessert, I start to think that it’s because the dessert is forgettable. Until I can find out for myself, I suppose I will never know.

Perhaps Rao’s biggest strength is her most subtle one: that she can weave throughout her review a thread that ties together small family businesses kneecapped by climate change, the lasting imprint on American culinary classics left by our grotesque history of slavery, the cultural imperative (and difficulty) of creating and sustaining a community. “Food is political” as a liberal slogan is hollow and an easy means of getting a pat on the back. The Times itself used the catchphrase in the subtitle of a recent interview with Sweetgreen’s founder, while also giving him a platform to promote Infinite Kitchen, his automated robot kitchen that kills jobs to boost margins. Rao says it not by donning a statement tee and moving along, but by digging into the specific politics of Louisiana food in a way that paints a vivid, if sometimes alarming, picture for readers. She does it with an encouraging ease, her journalistic obligation to ugly truths seemingly second nature. Whereas the NYT’s previous restaurant critic would quote Nietzsche on Wagner to make a point, here Rao quotes Ana Castro on Acamaya’s progressive approach: “The idea that everything must be available at all times is a capitalistic construct.” It’s a lesson New York audiences might not want to hear, but need to.

What I liked about this review were the same qualities that Rao appreciates in Acamaya’s service: that it is “composed, but approachable.” There’s a sense of humanity underneath her culinary and literary expertise. Whereas last week’s review left me feeling deflated, Ms. Rao’s first contribution under her new co-chief title has breathed some hope into my expectations for what’s to come from her national coverage. If only she could take her talents to New York next.

Subscribe now

Fruit Salad

Between the weather and the impending holiday, I don’t have much endurance for thinking, let alone thinking critically. I certainly don’t have the fortitude for cooking. Which is why, this time of year, I try to do as little of the above as possible.

A few summers back, my chef friend Maddie and I dreamt up a pop-up called Fruit Salad. She, a Salad Girl, would handle, well, the salads. Meanwhile I, Fruit Girl, would make ice creams and sorbets that featured both fruit and an infused leafy green. Think herbs, peach leaves (for almond flavor), fig leaves (coconut-y vanilla), blackcurrant leaves (taste like…blackcurrants), the greenery that is more often the overlooked byproduct. Sadly our dragging feet were quickly overtaken by Superiority Burger, who opened a pop up in their old 9th Street space while waiting on renovations to be completed in their new lease location. They called it Salad Days, it featured salads and ice cream, and we, Superiority Burger Fan Girls above all, knew our dream would stay just that.

My fixation with eating your greens in your ice cream is still very much intact, however. I think it’s connected to my commitment to Catholic torment, to both camp and austerity. Riches are nice, but I need the rags for balance. Cream is good, but it’s better once it’s been steeped with the leftovers.

I salvaged a bunch of Mexican mint from some tisane testing happening at work a few weeks back, and churned it into ice cream for a Rothko-inspired slab. The mint is from Halal Pastures, shares the anise-like qualities of tarragon, and layers perfectly in an early-summer fruit salad with strawberry ice cream and pistachio caramel crunchies. Maybe it’s because this is all I talked about for a week straight, but even Ed got Rothko-slab-pilled at work.

‘Tis the Season

I created a spring/summer produce calendar for work in an attempt to stay ahead of the ephemeral nature of east coast produce. One day apricots appear, and the next they’ve been replaced by nectarines, not to be seen until next summer. That a perfectly ripe stone fruit might slip from your grasp until they’re back in season in eleven months makes them taste that much sweeter to me, and that much more worth chasing.

(Fruit salad synergy: If you’re shopping for peaches at the farmers market, you may be able to ask the vendors to throw in some of the errant leaves in their crates to make your own infusions. I stand by my peach leaf proclamation, but be sure to do your own research before consuming any old leaf.)

I’ve linked the sheet here so that you can share in it, too. It’s not open for edits, but comments are enabled in case you’d like to drop your favorite source for peak summer raspberries. It doesn’t have to be exclusive to New York, either; wherever you are, ‘tis the season to share in summer’s bounty.

Speaking of seasons, I hate to rush you through summer vacation, but now is the perfect time to plan ahead for your holiday menu. If you get green walnuts soaking in a vodka bath now, you’ll have the ideal nip of nocino ready to help you digest your Thanksgiving dinner. Pickled sour cherries make for a tart foil to a rich duck breast, and soon enough plums will be turning up and begging to be preserved and sauced over your Christmas goose.

Leila’s Shop, & Keeping Community

Leila’s Shop, off London’s Arnold Circus, is a must-stop for me on the rare occasions I’m in town visiting my friend Anna Higham, who introduced me to the greengrocers and café. Maybe I found the specialty produce and orange-hilted Opinel butter knives so charming because I’m an American, but I don’t think that my susceptibility to the shop’s quaint patina is so easily written off. The café serves simple, knockout British lunches, and offers cooking and baking workshops. Importantly (to me, at least), the shop is one of London’s few stockists of La Grotta Ices pints. Somehow the prickly service feels like a feature to be experienced. In a world of shoppy shops, tiny jewel box stores selling $14 French butter, Tsurumaki gardening shears, and a superficial gleam, Leila’s is both the prototype and the mold breaker. Archestratus in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood is the only peer I’ve found, offering well-sourced groceries and a sense of meaningful community in equal measure.

Due to an egregious rent increase, Leila’s is under threat of closure. There’s a petition here you can sign in an effort to save the shop. Whether or not you travel to London or sign the petition, now feels like as appropriate a time as any to champion the small businesses that keep our farms afloat, feed our communities, and offer enriching food programming. Maybe that’s by eating out at a restaurant like Acamaya, signing up for a guided neighborhood foraging walk, or by finding your town’s own version of Leila’s. I’d love to hear in the comments the small businesses you love that feed your neighborhoods and make them feel more like home.

As always, thank you for reading. I hope to see you here again.

Leave a comment

The “we” here, of course, is restaurant folks. If you’ve worked in a New York City restaurant at any point since 2012, the chances are astronomical that you’ve interacted with a photo of the “anonymous” Pete Wells. Maybe he haunted the employee entrance, a grid of grainy security footage stills and his enlarged NYT bio photo affixed to the wall with blue kitchen tape. There was likely an entire section of your training manual dedicated to critics: how to spot them, the hierarchy of people to alert once they’ve been made, all the dos and don’ts of service when a critic is in the building. Wells himself lamented in his farewell announcement the “unflattering [critic] mug shots” that adorn restaurant walls. That we are highly trained in the art of identifying critics is about as big a secret as the critics’ identities themselves, so why all this fuss over the death of anonymity?

Another non-secret: that, despite the 20,000-odd restaurants in this city alone, the restaurant industry is a small one. Which is how I've come to learn on good authority the alias that Ligaya Mishan is making reservations under (more on that below). Because, despite the proclamations that the Times critics are releasing themselves from the shackles of anonymity, they will continue to use fake names on their reservations and credit cards in an attempt to go undetected. Suddenly anonymity isn't quite dead yet, but it’s flatlining and its caretakers can't seem to agree whether or not to resuscitate.

While showing their faces may be a means of both “connecting with readers,” as Rao states in a tepidly-produced Meet the Critics-style video, and doing away with the futile efforts of hide-and-seek (“playing the game,” she puts it), even critics know anonymity is the magic ingredient to ensure their own dining experience will mirror that of the common diner.

Most criticism centers around already-finished work. Jerry Saltz passes judgment on Amy Sherald’s portraits long after the paint has dried; the patterns have been cut on Phoebe Philo’s return collection before Cathy Horyn watches the pieces sail down a runway. Theater happens live, but critics and the everyman in the audience receive the same performance. Food criticism exists in a liminal space between finished product and live, equal-opportunity performance, where the prep work (purees, sauces, staff training) is largely in its final stage, but those a la minute details (the greet at the door, the knife work on the garnish, the experience) are unique to each guest, and thus can be adapted and perfected for a critic. If a restaurant is going to bomb, there is no amount of critic recognition that can save them; if we have the technical skills and the heart, allow us to dazzle you.

When Priya Krishna dined recently in preparation for compiling the NYT’s 100 Best Restaurants list, she wasn’t recognized until her order was already in at the bar. This means that she passed through the maitre d’, the host, and at least one bartender undetected. Not ideal, but also not too late to make sure that only a select team of the most capable and confident staff would touch her table, that the freshly-trimmed carrot shavers on her salad sat jauntily on their bed of lettuce “like they had floated down from the sky,” that when she ordered one burger, we cooked two to ensure a perfect medium rare. The hands of three chefs touched a single plate. At one point, a manager took a passion fruit sundae directly out of the hands of our most seasoned food runner and handed it to me, simply because I was on the critic team and he was not.

Ever since Pete Wells sent a decoy to Daniel on the same night as his own visit in order to compare the critic’s experience to that of an average diner (four stars reduced to three, the same downgrade Ruth Reichl gave Le Cirque when she used a similar tactic in 1993), restaurants have been keenly aware of making sure that not only the critic’s table receives the best of the best, but that all of the guests within glancing range are having the meal of their lives. But it doesn’t always happen. An accomplished chef, my friend Maddie was seated at the booth next to Priya at a different restaurant a few months ago. She ID’d her immediately— even a dinner out for a chef can feel like work. Maddie, diplomatic to a fault, called the meal “not good.” Priya deemed it “wonderful,” one of New York’s 100 Best. Most likely, all the cooks in the kitchen were laser-focused on only one table that night.

Herein, the paradox. Readers rely on the critic’s word to give them the tools to eat well, discover value, and avoid traps hidden behind the glimmer of a restaurant’s Instagram identity or viral hype. Restaurants rely on both a critic’s positive encouragement to get guests in the door, and on the guests themselves. A good critic aims to paint a picture for the common reader, but their own perspective is inevitably, inextricably colored by the elevated service they know they are receiving. It’s a love triangle of economies, of art, and of trust, and I don't know many love triangles that have had a tidy resolution.

I think Ligaya Mishan knows this, which is perhaps why she makes reservations under the name Justine Darley. Lawrence Durrell’s 1957 novel Justine is the first in his four-book collection called The Alexandria Quartet. The book, set in 1930s Alexandria, Egypt, is narrated by a struggling writer called Darley. In it, Darley recounts his love affair with the alluring Justine, a once-impoverished Jewish woman who happens to be married to his good friend Nessim, a wealthy Copt. Darley fears Nessim is plotting his murder as a result of the romance. Messy! Metaphors abound. I hear the book has a cult following but I haven’t read it. I want to say that a journalist taking their pseudonym from the character of a struggling writer in an esoteric literary work feels both pretentious and obvious, but saying so feels pretentious and obvious, too. What I know for sure is that Durrell’s titular character has been crafted to contain the multitudes of the city, that the novel is not really about a love triangle at all, but the city of Alexandria itself.

This plot-as-mission-statement is speculative on my part, but it is reasonable to presume that Mishan’s goal is for her catalogue of NYTs reviews to ultimately tell the story of the city. This theory is supported in the Times’ Meet Our New Restaurant Critics video, where Mishan states that, as restaurant critics, “We’ve got to learn the whole language of the city…How can you understand a restaurant unless you understand the whole landscape it’s in? You’re telling a story about everything that surrounds it.” What I hear her say is: You’re telling a story about New York.

In Mishan’s written review of The View, her first in her new role, she skims over the food. The steak is “serious” and the sides “forgettable.” Apparently they serve a burger. Barely a breath is reserved for the beverage program, and tell me more about the service, please. Mostly, she writes lusciously about the city. The history of the big building boom in the Theatre District, the constellations of lights emanating from the glimmering metal and glass landscape, restaurants spinning on their axes. Her prose is gorgeous.

In Daniel Mendolsohn’s A Critic’s Manifesto, he writes that a serious critic teaches by example, not by telling their reader what to think but by showing them how they arrived at their own thoughtful judgment. By providing the reader the tools of discernment, and implying that they can use those tools to make their own judgments, good critics teach a reader how to do the thinking themselves. Mendolsohn also states that the serious critic is one whose love for their subject surpasses their love for their reader. Only when their intent is to honor their subject with attention and intelligent critique can they serve their reader, and the subject itself, fairly. In this line of thinking, a bad review is as much an act of service as a glowing one— all the more to better the field that they love.

You can talk about a city by talking about its food—the cultural context in which it exists, the politics of its production, the people who cook it, serve it, and clean up after you eat it. But to write about a city and think it speaks to the food is to misjudge what the subject of a restaurant review is meant to be. I don’t need Mishan to love The View, or the restaurant where I work, or her readers, or me. I need her to love restaurants. I need her to give us the tools to discern for ourselves. Maybe what Mishan is trying to convey by politely glossing over the hospitality— the food, the wine, the service— is a restaurant not equal to the sum of its parts, that The View’s view is its sole redeeming quality. I would welcome the candor, but that's not what she says. Instead she looks not at the ridiculous revolving restaurant she’s in but out its windows to the city she loves, and she can taste her heart in her mouth. She gives The View one star. The formula for arriving there is about as straightforward as commuting when the MTA is doing its erratically scheduled maintenance.

Which brings me back to the question of anonymity. Why is the Times chattering away about casting off their disguises, when disguises have long been useless? For the same reason why we get a restaurant review not about a restaurant, but about what’s happening outside that restaurant’s walls. The New York Times has a credibility issue. See here, here, also here. They claim to want to earn their readers’ trust, but doing so by framing their move away from anonymity as groundbreaking is lazy and misleading. Instead, gain their trust by pulling back the curtain on all the ways in which a critic’s experience is a privileged one. They want to talk about the city in their restaurant reviews— it’s the New York Times, after all— but so far they’ve done it the easy way, by looking down from a restaurant in a skyscraper instead of looking up from the sidewalks that lead there, the hands that cook the food and pour the drinks, the corporate offices that define the culture. Do that, and I won’t start paying for a Times subscription again, but I might just start to listen to what they have to say.

In Mendolsohn’s piece, he lists knowledge, taste, and a sense of humor as essential qualities in a critic. I know I’ve linked him before, but J Lee masters all three in his restaurant criticism. He contributes over at Feed Me, Interview Magazine, and on his personal Instagram page. Know of any more independent journalists making thoughtful contributions to the critique of restaurants? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

And, as always, thanks for reading.

The binary on my mind while in Sicily was this: are you a Man About Town, or a Man, What a Town type? (Haigney calls the latter “helluva town guys,” but I misremembered and am sticking with my knockoff.) Men About Town have a full calendar, bopping from one new hotspot to the next to try a little bit of everything. Man, What a Town folks are the self-identifying regulars. They are the people content to have their ceremonial Wednesday beers with the boys at the same old dive, but whose consistency is a social currency that buys them insight into the best undiscovered <fill in the blank> in the city.

I had planned a Man About Town vacation: lunch reservations made months in advance, a hierarchy of ricotta-filled sweet treats to try, indistinguishable Baroque towns to visit. Which is maybe why, with our grand plans suddenly curtailed to include only what was local, accessible by train, or within Ubering distance, I felt relief. Because, man, what a town!

Dessert First

I had an agenda to push when Ed and I were making the decision of where in Italy we wanted to vacation, and that agenda was Caffè Sicilia. Notably featured on ‘Chef’s Table: Pastry,’ Corrado Assenza’s pastry shop in Noto is a must-stop for Men About Town, helmed by a Man, What a Town guy. In the episode, the agri-hero credited with saving the Romana almond sounds like a play-growling Golden Retriever when he sweetly decries the industrialization kneecapping Sicilian farmers. IRL, our server at the caffè seemed less enthused and I constantly felt like I was doing something wrong (existing). Pilgrimage fatigue, aptly diagnosed by my friend Echo. Three visits does not a regular make, but that we were effectively marooned in Noto without a car meant that I could perfect my order over time (and win a smile from Il Signor Grump), and did I ever.

Early in the episode, Assenza himself presents a dichotomy that divides Sicilians: do you start your day with lemon granita, or with almond? And sure, you could go to the caffè and pick a side. On my first visit, I staked my flag on almond territory, and it was predictably delicious. But I found myself looking for…more. On our second visit, I found it in the almond milk, a slightly pulpy blend of almonds, water, and sugar that tastes like fresh dairy spiked with marzipan. All the joys of the granita but distilled, no utensil or manipulation coming between me and the purest taste of almond. By our last visit, I’d cooked up the ideal breakfast for two, confirmed by the envy I felt as I overheard another couple order exactly this as we got up to leave one last time:

• (2) flavors of granita (wild strawberry or bust)

• Brioche

• Panna

• Cannolo di ricotta

• (2) Caffè macchiatos

• Almond milk

No more, no less. I liked to give my macchiato cup a little almond milk rinse to catch every last drop of espresso. It approximates the stellar caffè lecchese at Bread & Salt in Jersey City, which I think about not infrequently.

Talk about dichotomies: you could ask Italians to choose between chastity and lust, it’s just that they will break the rules and choose both. The bedrock of Catholicism brought us the mommy of all sex symbols, Sophia Loren; Italy’s favorite chaste woman is commemorated with a titty-shaped pastry. The lore is that Saint Agatha, famously prude, had her breasts torn off with pincers. As a result, minne di sant’Agata can be found all over her hometown of Catania in a cloyingly sweet gesture of veneration. A mound of sweetened ricotta sits on a layer of sponge cake, gets wrapped in a veil of pistachio marzipan, and is topped with a perky candied cherry nipple— a Princess Cake with mob wife muscle and a wink. It’s absolutely too much, but sort of touching to see A-cups get the respect they deserve.

If that sounds like a cassata cake, it’s because they are essentially the same. For cassatina, I got takeaway from the Caffè Sicilia counter. Unlike other versions, you taste the sheep’s milk in the filling, the pistachio in the marzipan shell. Even in the most experienced hands, cassata is a lot of sugar for one sitting, but well-suited as a little snack you can sneak a bite of throughout, say, the train ride from Noto to Siracusa.

I was going to do a cannoli power ranking but I only ate three, and nobody celebrates a default winner. I’ll say that our Catanian Uber driver Giuseppe only eats cannoli at Pasticceria Savia, Cannolia in Scicli fries their shells to order, and eating a cannolo anywhere inevitably turns into scooping sweet ricotta with a shard of shell like you’re three margaritas in, going after chips and guac.

Subscribe now

Returns & Trending Topics

We walked the sense-stimulating Catania fish market on back-to-back mornings. The first time timidly, as I wore my jelly sandals and spent the entire visit with my eyes darting between the bounty ahead and the fish guts underfoot. I wished I could tell the man kissing a raw squid that he’d have sold me on it after the first smooch, if only I had a kitchen in which to cook it. Fishmongers called songlike into the morning air, beckoning customers in a rhythmic cadence reminiscent of North African souks. I drank freshly-squeezed Sicilian Gatorade. We returned the next day to have another round of the Twinkie-sized panini being sold for €2 by a man at an oyster stall— small torpedoes of fresh anchovy and shaved ricotta salata, flakes of tuna steak studded with jewels of tomato.

Also at the market, I dusted off my college Italian to coyly ask for a taste of the Bronte pistachios. Instead, Ed and I both received a handful and were encouraged to drop the shells at our feet. So sweet and rich they were almost juicy. I went home with three pounds’ worth, which I spent an afternoon shelling until my thumbs chafed. One stall over, it delighted me to buy a few apricots and my first-ever loquat; it thrilled me even more the next morning when the vendor tucked an extra apricot into my brown paper bag in a gift of recognition.

My motives for visiting Sicily were twofold: to visit Caffè Sicilia, and to see Caravaggio’s The Burial of Saint Lucy. If Caravaggio was at the receiving end of the Church’s patronage, then the clinically depressed (me) are the beneficiaries of Caravaggio’s mastery of dominating darkness and striking, contrasting light. (Committed to the bit: the Basílica Santa Lucía al Sepolcro is largely windowless, but for €1 you can buy your own tenebristic four minutes of tepid spotlight on the painting.) Saint Lucy was a self-described Saint Agatha hypebeast also punished for her purity, only she lost her eyes in the tussle. Gratefully no one saw fit to make sweets in honor of her missing organs, only to commission the most influential artist of the Baroque period to paint her. We’re all culture-starved; feed yourself.

Every house negroni that we ordered defaulted to Punt e Mes in their build, and while I’ve never called a vermouth preference in a cocktail before, I’m going to start. The less bitter of the sweet vermouth options play a more deferential supporting role, but there’s a confidence to Punt e Mes’ intensity that is undeniably attractive, and unapologetically Italian. On one occasion I tried to get the skinny from our server as to why the norm is to crank up the bitterness, but he looked at me like I was American and said, “But it’s vermouth ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.” Live footage of me running to Leon’s to drink one with their Hanger Steak Frites.

The most memorable of what we ate and drank was the most simple: penne wallowing in melted anchovies and capers, finished with toasted breadcrumbs; spaghetti tightly dressed in a pistachio sauce and topped with three barely-cooked gamberi rossi; craggy hazelnut biscuits made with ancient grains. So good that when we returned to Lemon for more perfect pasta on our last night, we were validated by sitting next to the same couple we sat adjacent to on our first visit, also returning for more. Panificio Maidda in Noto might be down the block from Sicily’s most famous pastry shop, but if forced to choose between a sweet or savory snack, I think I’d go back for a third slice of sfincione al zucchine (and buy another bag of biscuits for the road).

I said something clickbait-y in my last post about yearning while wearing vintage as a recession indicator. Yes, I dug out my vintage Moschino capris for the trip, but shopping my own closet was the only maybe-sign of the economic times. Really, they’re just great pants. Really, I wanted to tell you how much I missed the feeling of longing for, then savoring, something.

Early in our trip, my friend Christine, who was on a Hudson Valley birthday escape with her husband, sent me a photo of her Mel The Bakery haul— one of everything from the pastry case, and I imagine at least one loaf of bread that didn’t make it into the shot. To prove I don’t think I’m a real journalist I did not fact-check this statement, but I counted seven pastries and I’m no fool. A real Man About Town order, I thought. “The correct amount of treats!” I replied.

And it was the correct amount of treats, for her. I went to Mel in March and relished the fact that, with so many options, I had to decide what it was I really wanted. I stuck with my signature order of a classic croissant. Most everything in the case appealed to me, but there’s something in the lost art of choosing that I find meaningful, the feeling of savoring more powerful than the having-it-all that makes me take more thoughtful bites. Not in a French Women Don’t Get Fat, “mindful eating” sense, but in the same way that Sicilians have so little, and yet their lives are rich.

Sicily is an island of ingredients. Romana almonds, Bronte pistachios, fresh sheep’s milk and it’s ricotta, ragusano made from Modicana cows, citrus and grapes, wheat and wild fennel, sardines, eggplant, tomatoes. To tour the region is to trace a line from the sea or the land on which you’re standing to your plate and, due to the virtue of the ingredients and the island’s lineage of limited resources, with very little intervention in between. Ed often describes my home cooking as “making ingredients”— turning fruit into jam, confiting Sungolds, capturing a moment in time. It would be insulting if it weren’t accurate. In a place where “cooking” means to humble yourself to what is being grown, caught, or harvested locally, eating in Sicily is to be truly present there, in that moment.

Traveling can create in me a certain pressure to do the most, to take in the macro view, to leave no cannoli unturned. In Sicily I was reminded that I prefer a smaller snapshot, pixelated to granular detail. I, too, want less so that I can have more.

We’re playing Dichotomies. Are you Zoomed In, or Zoomed Out? I know which I am.

Admittedly I was distracted in the week leading up to our trip— my car was involved in a minor accident, Catholic guilt was very much alive and well in me (the world is suffering and I’m going to… enjoy myself?), and my travel anxiety manifested as a very specific and incredibly arbitrary compulsion to consume. Leading up to my 2019 sabbatical to London, it was an aching need to find the perfect tortoiseshell hair clip. This time, it was a late-onset obsessive yearning for zipper pouches, for which I logged hours of Youtube recon and two trips to Pacific Trimming the week before our departure in order to sew my own.

It’s anxiety, it’s not supposed to make sense.

But I wasn’t so distracted tending to my holy host of pathologies, religious or otherwise, that I forgot to slip my license into one of my freshly sewn coin purses. Truth be told, at one point while packing I looked directly at my license, thought, “Don’t need that!” and tossed a fourth pair of brown sandals into my bag, just in case.

All of which is to say, there was the itinerary I had planned for Sicily, and then there was the itinerary available to us once we got there. Because I did, in fact, need that. The original plan involved a few days in Catania/Etna and then in Siracusa, between which we’d travel by train, followed by five nights at a remote, renovated oil mill-turned-rental-cottage outside of Noto, with loosely planned day trips throughout the southeast in the automatic Citroen C3 I’d reserved. A charming urban-to-rural switch in gears that was now not so much impossible as it was completely reliant on the limited railway network and Uber economy of one of Italy’s most neglected regions.

I discovered my mistake a few days into our trip while we were still in Catania. By then, we’d walked the morning fish market twice, spent an afternoon getting tipsy at a Benanti wine tasting, and had a geriatrically early 4:30pm dinner of caciocavallo, anchovies on toast, and a few vermuttinos at Vermut. Life was good, even if I was still fending off pangs of guilt that it was my life that was good. I loved watching a leathered old Catanian man in a souvenir apron squeeze juice from a lemon, top it off with seltzer, then dip the tip of his knife into a jar of salt and use it to stir the whole bubbling, mineral mix together. I also paid only €2 for it. Even in a tourist town, can you really make a living wage pouring seltz limone e sale? That man should be retired on a beach somewhere, putting the finishing touches on his transformation into a handbag, not laboring for a few euro. Gaza is still starving. Our trip was off to a humming start, and I felt terrible about it.

When you realize you may have ruined not only your vacation but that of your overworked boyfriend, the feeling isn’t as strikingly catastrophic as you might think. It was more of a slow dawning, the replay of how you got there like watching a drop of ink in water, the ribbons of color mesmerizing until suddenly they’ve diffused into concentrated darkness. We could easily get to Noto proper by train, but then what? What of the spontaneity we had left room for? What of the farm lunch at Agriturismo Giannavi, the beach trip to Marzamemi, the chocolate we were meant to eat in Modica and the vintage linens I was determined to hunt for in Ragusa?

I sulked. I tried to keep my chin up— we would just pivot! I punctuated our nicest moments— laying like lizards in the sun at the base of Ortigia, the Ionian Sea lapping at our feet— with profuse apologies to Ed. I dove into my phone screen and came back to the surface with a master plan involving Trenitalia, car transfers, and a detour back to Siracusa for our last night, paid for with credit card miles. I thrive so fully in chaos that I had to question if I’d subconsciously sabotaged our plans just so my survival skills could shine. I was mainlining the adrenaline of problem solving. I cried at what we’d miss.

Then, the next night at dinner, a pigeon shit on my head. Just completely unloaded onto my slicked-back knot, narrowly missing the red scrunchie I’d splurged on ahead of the trip. Anyone who counts Under the Tuscan Sun as formative in their romantic views of Italy knows in equal measure that Diane Lane is just so, so hot, and that being a pigeon’s personal dumping ground is un segno di Dio, as auspicious as it is foul. Our server said maybe I’d turn the corner and discover a bag stacked with €10.000; even that wouldn’t buy me a dilapidated villa to throw my sorrows into. I hoped instead that I’d find the license I knew I didn’t pack tucked into a pocket of my suitcase. I spent the next day waiting for my luck to kick in, some slime-induced absolution for my mistake that would allow our plans to return to their original form.

But my luck remained largely the same. We ate arancini al ragu while walking winding Palazzolo stone alleyways, and swordfish panini while sitting in the sun; in attempting to reserve an Uber from the Noto train station to our Airbnb, we got a crash course in just how few drivers wanted to take a winding 30-minute drive to nowhere (one, tentatively). At some point in the reckoning, though, the guilt of happiness and the torment of making such a silly, substantial mistake coalesced into a wary pluck. Okay, our plans changed, and our options became more limited. Didn’t we still have plenty? Wasn’t the fact that we had less and yet had enough my good fortune?

Sicilians have known this for millennia. It’s easier to ask who they haven’t been conquered by, what hasn’t hobbled their economy and public infrastructure, than to get into their lineage of kings and rulers, earthquakes and Cosa Nostra corruption. And yet.

Time to get out of my head and into the world. Coming in Part II:

Man, what a town! The bedrock of Catholicism is obsessed with boobs! You’re probably ordering wrong at Caffè Sicilia, yearning in vintage Moschino as a recession indicator, and more!

See you there.

Subscribe now

Worth mentioning is that the long-awaited reveal of the NYT’s new restaurant critic(s!) dropped today. The editorial board has already established with it’s 2025 100 Best list that it’s giving the Food section the group project treatment (read J Lee on this), but, “in a break with Times tradition,” also doing away with critics going to lengths to disguise their identities. The Times has been delusional for a long time but this one made me audibly laugh. Let’s discuss soon xx

Leave a comment