1. High-quality analysis

2. Framing that converted hundreds of paid subscribers

3. Bold claims talking heads would yap about wildly on First Take

When done well, a good list exposes you to new ideas, new experiences, new ways of thinking. In exchange, the creator behind the list is rewarded with an increase in subscriptions or eyeballs on an attached brand partnership, since the only thing that reliably performs better than lists are paywalled divorce diaries.

A bad list inverts that list of priorities, starting with what will outrage and backing into the content. But we consume far fewer bad lists with bad intentions than we do ethics-based complaints about lists people simply disagree with. Here’s a good example via chef Tom Colicchio, commenting on an IG post promoting New York Times critic Ligaya Mishan’s 100 best restaurants list:

“Wondering why you call this list the best and not your favorite”

This is disingenuous. It’s labeled a best-of list for business reasons that Colicchio understands well. Colicchio’s comment will carry more weight when he’s judging Bravo’s Last Cook Standing As Determined By A Series Of Clock-Crazed High-Wire-Acts And Increasingly Inelegant Brand Integrations rather than … Top Chef. Words have meaning. That meaning doesn’t trump click-through rate for anyone trying to make a living.

And yet! This NYT list and the plugged-in food insider aversion to its high-profile exclusions is fascinating. Everyone from to Helen Rosner to Alison Roman has side-eyed this thing. Let’s dive into it:

• The NYT, as the monolith, consensus-building, travel-itinerary-influencing, and market-moving paper of record in New York dining, can reasonably be held to a different standard than, say, me, or even The Infatuation. If I use a dumb little points system for my top 25 rankings or The Infatuation baddha konasanas the definition of “best new restaurants” to mean “newly opened, popular and good for our SEO traffic monster” … I say fair play. To not understand the art of the dance here is to opt out of being a critical consumer of modern media. If you’re smart enough to identify the accuracy disparity and make the critique, you’re also smart enough not to need to be pandered to with literalism in headlines and SEO slugs.

• Does the Times have a responsibility to prioritize objective greatness on a best-of list? Probably not. Restaurant quality is rooted in a deeply personal alchemy of variables that go far beyond the cooking of the food itself. Any attempt at a universal scoring system would be both misguided and boring. Mishan landed on these criteria, which is entirely defensible: “I considered imagination, ambience, service, technique, passion, commitment and sheer deliciousness — but also, and most important, New York-iness.”

• Which brings us to Le Veau d’Or, a place I’ve gushed about over and over that Mishan chose to exclude. It is ranked No. 1 on The Infatuation’s own list. It is quite difficult to book for dinner without effort or connections. It has a universal greatness approval rating among both casual and seasoned diners — on service, vibes, only-in-New-Yorkiness, food, and all the rest — unmatched by its competition.

• LVD does not need recognition on this list. None of the food influencers you know are up in arms about this because they want LVD to become even more popular. This is not irrational stan culture outrage. It’s just … startling?

• Excluding Bong and Bridges is a (questionable) matter of taste reserved for the critic’s discretion. I know the Bridges Shrug well, the it’s-fine-but-I’ve-had-better malaise some diners feel after their journey through chef Sam Lawrence’s heady, esoteric small plates. Even if I disagree, I can oblige it fairly. I do not know of responses to Le Veau from living, breathing humans that fall short of elation.

• (By the way, how wrong do you have to be to rally a dissenting consensus around expensive, uptown, French food produced by some of the most successful restaurateurs in the business?)

• Food rarely has direct comps to sports like this, but a scroll through the NYT list feels like ESPN producing a best basketball players of the century ranking that leaves off LeBron James because, like, vibes? Consider the recent NYT Styles package listing the 30 greatest living American songwriters. Sports doesn’t have an objective measure of greatness, but the statistical and achievement oriented outcomes make it a more linear vertical to judge than food or music. In a podcast dissecting that songwriters list, the responsible critics said they spent very little time discussing a few obvious inclusions like Jay-Z, Taylor Swift and Bob Dylan. To not include them would upend the idea of the list, the credibility of their grasp on greatness, the clear magnitude of the artists’ excellence. In New York dining right now, that shortlist at least includes Kabawa (No. 1 on the 2026 list), Torrisi (No. 3), Semma (No. 9), Tatiana (No. 12), Penny (No. 35) and Le Veau (unranked). A bloodless list fills its entire top five with this group. But what’s the value in a list that goes 100 deep while quietly ignoring one entirely?

• Restaurants are extremely personal. A best of LA list excluding Baby Bistro is one I would begrudge yet understand. It’s not for everyone, it’s just very, very much for the people to whom it appeals. That’s part of its charm. It’s more Cameron Winter (excluded from the NYT songwriters list) than Stevie Wonder (included, of course). To nix a Stevie-level restaurant like LVD incites conspiratorial questions about quiet, long-simmering beef, fair or not.

• I’m all about solutions, so here’s what I propose: Simply address this directly with more content. I devoured that NYT music podcast. For the first time in eight years that LeBron didn’t finish No. 1 in our NBA players rankings at ESPN, we had a full week of meetings about it, which led to an entire package of pieces. If Mishan has commented on the Le Veau exclusion, kindly send it my way. I haven’t seen it. I have an enormous amount of respect and appreciation for her writing and critical sensibility. Making these kinds of lists is one part of a good critic’s job. But more than that, being able to find the big stories, put them into context and shift our perception of what they mean is what any art obsessive is really looking for from the best writers in the field. Every smart food person I trust thinks LVD is a top 100 restaurant in New York. The critic with the biggest platform does not. Cool. That’s a big story. Let’s chat about it.

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One of the best ways to spend an evening in New York right now is a Stars-to-Le Veau d’Or-to-Stars boomerang.

This is especially true on a Monday, when the crowd populating America’s best new wine bar is at its hottest and least inundated by TikTok-influenced East Villagers. has my favorite encapsulation of what makes this tiny room from the Claud and Penny team so special. I popped in six times over two weeks despite being on a drinking hiatus, making the stools at the U-shaped bar a temporary home, one where I could blissfully ignore how much sugar was in my N/A, rosemary-scented glasses of Villbrygg Fjell 01.

Wine bars like Stars work best during the romantic hours of a before-dinner pregame or an after-dinner refusal to go home. They are spaces of anticipation and denial. We left Stars around 7:30 to take the 4 uptown for a celebration dinner at Le Veau. When we made it back three hours later, the room had mostly cleared out. To our right was one regular with subtle, impeccable wine knowledge. To our left was a couple happy to drink anything at all. Then the staff snapped into gear, having heard a group of wine collectors were popping in ready to spend.

This is a big reason Stars works. It is accessible enough — both in some bottle prices and in the way the staff meets you at any level of wine interest — that it does not feel like a club for snobs. But it still knows how to serve these high-ticket collectors. Thirty minutes before the listed closing time, eight people slid through the doors, drunk and boisterous. I could not name what bottles got pulled, but I could feel the anxiety of whatever Amex was about to hit the bar. I got roped into a cheers with one of these strangers, a sommelier at a multi-Michelin-starred restaurant in the city. He asked what I did for work.

“Oh, I’m at an AI startup.“

“Bro! AI. I deal with that shit every day.”

“Oh, yeah? Are y’all using it for inventory?”

“No, bro. No one will talk to me.”

More and more, my guy finds himself walking up to a table before the tasting menu begins, ready to start a conversation. Instead, someone quietly points at a line on the wine list. Before he’s sent off to fetch, he looks down and sees a ChatGPT conversation open on a phone, recommending that exact bottle.

AI and agentic efficiencies are coming for most parts of our lives. I live this every day, working with a small team to push at the edge of what’s possible with frontier models. I’m far more AI optimist than alarmist. But these kinds of stories make me anxiously protective of one favorite thing to do in the world: go to a great dinner with people who matter to me, meet the restaurant on its terms, and let the night become more memorable than anything I could have orchestrated online.

For every bit of ease that brings a model-recommended, optimized experience closer to your fingertips, I find myself retreating from the impulse to inject these tools into the parts of life that are better with some mystery, some discovery and some much-needed romance.

I understand the urge to ChatGPT your way into a better meal.

Dinner in New York has gotten too expensive to approach casually. That’s compounded by reservation scarcity, social media hype, Substack guides, Infatuation lists, and the ambient panic of wanting to get all the must-order dishes at the newest, best spot. It no longer feels reliable to drop in, order whatever looks good, and leave the variables up to chance.

Technology has made it seamless to query the consensus best version of a night. This bottle, with this menu, at this restaurant, at this time. You can construct the right moves, at the cost of allowing for surprise and delight. If food tasted better 10 years ago, acceleration here is a big reason why.

I’m not above engaging in aspects of this game. I’ve got my Resy hacks, and that Le Veau d’Or table was only possible due to OpenTable’s private booking link feature — a reward that arrived in my inbox one day either due to crossing a minimum Substack subscriber threshold or spending years yelling about Frenchette having perfect pancakes. Most of my Torrisi splurges happen via Dorsia. But that’s basically my new limit: Technology can get me in the door for an occasion if nothing else will suffice, but then it disappears. Once inside, I only want my phone out to take a couple pictures of my friends or the food. And I want one or two recommendations from the people working the floor, not AI-compiled gameplans at which I’ve witnessed more diners glancing.

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Few establishments do restaurant romance like Le Veau d’Or. It does not matter if you are there on a date or a celebration with friends. The room hums. The staff is flirty and fun. Their spiels are actually good. The weirder avenues you trace the food down, the more you’re rewarded.

We started with a pâté en croûte compliments of the kitchen, baked in a lovely pastry and served with a thrilling mustard. We ended with little cocktail shots balanced on an vintage sardine tin filled with pebble ice, a sweet sendoff gesture for a friend toasting her imminent New York departure. These are perks that come from regular dining, industry background and just having good chat. But technology is working on closing that gap.

LVD is on Blackbird, a company using tech to help restaurants and diners engage more deeply in the loyalty that fuels staying power and bustling dining rooms.

Regulars are the backbone of good restaurants, but recognizing and rewarding loyalty at scale is hard. Not every relationship can live in a host’s head, an Instagram DM, or a text thread, even if that’s my preferred loyalty mechanism. Blackbird gives restaurants infrastructure for a better process while rewarding diners with points systems, cash back, concierge booking, and access to exclusive events. When I spotted the Blackbird tap-in on the host stand at Raf’s, I felt a simultaneous respect for the product and a physical rejection of the technology’s place in one of Manhattan’s best rooms.

A friend and Blackbird fan just called me out on this, saying I’m an abnormal diner. He’s right. I briefly worked in restaurants. A lot of my friends still do. I have this small food blog. I’m also an extrovert who loves restaurant people and makes it a point to remember and connect with them. I understand that if you live next to Raf’s and want to put it in regular rotation, an app like Blackbird undeniably makes that more feasible. It might help the restaurant find you and reward you with a prime seating or a complimentary crudo. This is a mutually beneficial, lightweight version of the earned, in-person intimacy that has existed for decades.

In the middle of that Raf’s dinner, I looked over at the table next to me and saw that three grown adults had each ordered the whole dorade as their entrée. Maybe it was a health-informed decision. Maybe an internet search told them it was the go-to order. Maybe all three of them really wanted the same fish and refused to perform family-style curiosity for an onlooker’s benefit. Still ...

I do not go to restaurants to protect my own perfect plate from the table. I go to share, pass, steal, negotiate, over-order, get talked into indulgences, and let someone else’s appetite change mine. If you arrive closed off, no recommendation algorithm can make the night break open.

When the dining experience is made more efficient through technology, what else creeps into the dining room alongside it? There’s some non-zero risk of further disconnection from the already tenuous romance that makes the best meals elevate beyond consumption or status. When you take the heart of hospitality and turn it into yet another exchange on your own terms, one that’s only a click or agent away, you’re more likely to end up in your own little world, getting exactly what you want, sharing three identical plates of dorade, predictable and satisfied and bored.

A reliable sign you may regret spending more than $100 a person at a New York restaurant is realizing that you and your friend are the hottest people in the room. That was the energy recently inside an impressive yet stilted new Manhattan tasting menu spot. Less dinner party, more restaurant-gap relationships capitalizing on eager reservation notify triggers.

A friend and I were sitting side by side in front of these gorgeous tables, polishing off a dessert that was too clever by half. A member of the staff came over and plopped a big Square reader in front of us with the high-priced bill staring directly at both of our faces. A small touch carrying resoundingly bad vibes.

The financial exchange at a restaurant is part of the choreography. Who reaches. Who pauses. Who insists. Who slyly handles it away from the table. A custom billfold enclosing a nice pen is not just aesthetic affectation. It’s part of the dance. And the glaring blue screen is an unwelcome blunt object.

Like the apps, there are clear operational reasons restaurants drop these things on your table. They’re efficient, they’re easy, they reduce friction for the staff. But at that price point, in that room, after that much vibe-conscious labor, the device felt like an affront to a desired fantasy. In a few seconds, any hope of transportation was turned back into a workflow.

I am an AI enthusiast, consistently blown away by the tasks I do not want to do that agents can now take on for me. There are parts of my job I never thought I would be capable of doing that I can now execute at an extremely high level. Exploring this technology is challenging and addictive in ways I find endlessly fun and fascinating. And it’s likely essential to having a thriving career in the near future. But I also think having a fulfilling, joyful, romantic life requires knowing when not to reach for it.

My current rule is that as little AI as possible lives on my phone. When I am away from my computer, I want to be away from this world. I want to go for a long run. I want to read a book. I want to be present when my friends are talking. I want to sit in a gorgeous dining room and let the experience come to me rather than projecting an LLM-recommended, probably very good, not especially indelible night onto the room in front of me.

Anthropic and Resy recently announced an official integration. You can ask Claude for restaurant recommendations based on your taste and location, and it loads a Resy widget with availability straight into the chat. The three suggested prompts are illuminating:

• “What are the hottest new restaurants in Austin with availability this week?”

• “Book a table for 8 at a steakhouse in Chicago for next Thursday”

• “Find a reservation for 2 at a romantic restaurant in the West Village this Saturday around 8pm”

You still leave Claude to complete the booking through Resy. And without a decent knowledge of AI coding tools, you are not yet able to set up agents that automatically monitor your hit list, grab the best table the second it opens, or learn your preferences over time. But you should assume all of that will be table stakes soon, and not just to Resy.

It will probably hit The Infatuation, which has a deep library of where to eat and what to order for every occasion. It may come through a personalized Blackbird AI concierge. The next great travel publication on this platform would be wise to gate a content-library-filled MCP behind a paid-subscriber-only authorization flow.

A lot of this will be varying degrees of useful. You should let agents remove the dumb little computer chores that keep you from the life you actually want. Moving all of my reservation booking from apps to agentic iMessages is my favorite tech innovation of 2026. But the more software gets better at solving the meal before it starts, the more I want to preserve the parts of dinner that require a little mystery.

Crossing into hour eight of Anthropic’s Code With Claude developer conference in San Francisco today, I tested out the Resy integration one more time:

Not quite. I closed my laptop and went outside to the rooftop reception. While servers passed out colorful mochi donuts, a Bay Area engineer expounded on the difference in grindset aura between SF and New York. He (maybe?) joked about wanting to have 10 kids to help curb the global fertility crisis and only having three years to build before getting stuck in the permanent underclass. He rejected the donuts. Then he turned his attention back to his phone.

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Los Angeles is beautiful, easy, and exceedingly good at curving toward the routine. Hit Silver Springs. Get produce from LA Homefarm. Work, cook, watch movies. Hang on porches and rotate through four amazing, homey restaurants. It’s easy living. An opt-in escape rooted in peace and comfort. But it can also leave less to write about.

In the hum of the past month, I’ve enjoyed a steady residency in my home kitchen, cooking as though I might cook again. I’ve had a few banger LA meals, including one at Sqirl I wrote about here. I’ve blitzed through Toronto, a lovely dining city. I’ve loaded up on New York reservations the easy way, perfecting a system that keeps me from ever having to leave iMessage. And I’ve launched a little app, a kind of Fandango for indie movie theaters called Ludlow, that was in beta for paid subscribers but I’ve decided to open up more widely. Check it out and send along feedback.

Here are the highlights. It’s good to be back.

Try Ludlow

Toronto

• Mhel: I loved Toronto’s small, sweet and stellar restaurants. I didn’t go into one establishment lacking a great playlist or considered acoustics, which carried a compounding effect I’ll miss. Mhel, a little Korean-inspired, seafood-forward small plates spot, was my favorite of the bunch. The menu of six snacks and four plates is paralyzing, loaded with interesting combinations that are driven more by culinary vision than cheffy ambition or social media virality. A white asparagus dish with baby squid and mirepoix will certainly finish in this year’s top 10.

• Côte de Bœuf: Perfect lunch of steak tartare, fries and salad. What else could you ask for?

• Dreyfus: There’s at least one version of Dreyfus in most major cities. A little French. Indebted to local farmers. A tough reservation. Part of a professional, successful restaurant group. Good wine. Twelve-ish dishes that rotate through different sets of crudos, salads, tartares, pastas and simple proteins with pristine sauce work. I’m a mark for exactly this kind of thing, with mixed results. Dreyfus nails it.

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At home

• I love ’s description of “getting bent over at McCall’s” — a grocery store where the quality is incredibly high and the sticker shock can get even higher. But for those of us who love cooking seafood at home, it’s one of LA’s great treasures. Alongside $50 per pound filets, there are always affordable, less broadly desired gems. Collars and Japanese sardines have been recent standouts. If you’re afraid of cooking fish at home or looking to expand your repertoire, find a reliable market, ask for their recommendations in the cheaper price range, as well as simple preparation techniques. The path from weird fish to something delicious with olive oil, salt and lemon is more accessible than you think. Just eliminate all fear and let it rip.

• If you’re going to do a long braise, like a Passover brisket, always, always, always get Martin’s potato rolls for sandwiches the next day. I like to heat the buns up lightly in a pan with good butter, and then top the meat with whatever sauce, herbs, and textural element is already around. Pickled onions are also nice.

• I got a small bottle of house-made riesling vinegar before departing Le Doyenné in January. If there are ever special vinegars around, grab one. A dab in a salad dressing, aioli, or anything else you’re cooking up is a good way to learn and layer different flavors. Hints of the vinegar have added a new shine to things as basic as staple celery salads. Don’t bother with a recipe here. Just play around.

• I usually avoid cakes but ’s Cake Belle Hélène is magical. Make it.

• Andrew Martin’s Early Work is a beloved text in my friend group, the kind of “young, hot people getting up to shit” novel with just enough wit, grace and insight to be crushed in a day while rattling your grasp on self-delusion and human intimacy. Martin’s second novel, Down Time, is a little more grown up and just as effective. Give me so many more of these. And I co-sign ’s Transcription rave. I finished Ben Lerner’s new novel on the plane on Tuesday, holding a strong desire to reread it immediately. Both books play around with how deception, shared history, and technology interfere with modern happiness and connection. Parul Sehgal has an excellent essay on the Lerner here.

• Christian Petzold’s Miroirs No. 3 is my favorite new film of the year so far, buoyed by this impeccably placed needle drop:

LA

• This new spring version of Wilde’s is an already great restaurant at its absolute best. Like a Los Feliz Rochelle Canteen remix with a little more oomf. Four months in, they’re operating like a mature, well-oiled machine. Don’t skip the artichokes.

• It unfortunately looks like Baby Bistro has rotated out the fried sweetbreads set, essentially slightly cheffed up blue cheese buffalo wings. They will be missed dearly. I love full meals at Baby Bistro, but more people should take advantage of hanging out on the patio with a glass of wine and trying whatever new dish they’ve cooked up that week.

• Quarter Sheets delivers now which is … crazy. Isn’t life in Los Angeles easy enough? Watching the Oscars with a spread of pies and Hannah Ziskin desserts like a chocolate gateau cake and banana cream pie. Nothing better.

• And, finally, I fucking love the energy behind the Bruce pop up. I hope they keep this up all summer.

No food news this week. I’m recovering from just now discovering there’s a Graza mayo line after catching up on Top Chef, a show that with each season finds new levels of shameless spon-con and bland personalities. There are three good mayos in the world:

• Kewpie

• Duke’s

• Whatever you make at home from scratch

This blog does not acknowledge any other contenders in the arena.

Instead, I’m swooping back in from a brief hiatus with a little treat for paid subscribers:

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Sure. I, too, have seen a Boston darty on an early afternoon when “Mr. Brightside” kicks in. It isn’t pretty. I’ve also spent dreary mornings on Virgil Ave watching a group of influencers stand atop tables taking identical pictures of the Famed Ricotta Toast. But conflating the culture around a thing with the quality of the thing itself is broken brain nonsense. Brandon Flowers’ band has been ripping 18-song, bangers-only setlists for two decades. And Sqirl is still full of dishes better than what you’ll find at 95% of all-day cafés.

There are three Sqirls: the idea, the place and the food. The idea became Los Angeles’ most influential restaurant export of its era. The food rocks. The place remains divisive. This week, I broke my “never spend more than $75 per person to eat outside” rule and tried Sqirl’s new dinner concept to see how all three still fit together. The menu leads with cute soft opening language in a classic Sqirl stamp, a welcome hug of the familiar with a hint of caution.

It was no shock that everything photographed incredibly well. Greens and yellows and purples on plain white plates. Wood tables. A lamp at just the right height and hue to highlight each dish.

Sqirl knows how to do aesthetics (non-derogatory). It worked on me like a beacon when I first moved to Los Angeles, settling walking distance from a sorrel pesto rice bowl, daily quiche or black sesame frozen coffeeccino. The cookbook wormed its way into my brain, taking over how I cook before 2pm but also how I pictured my new home. In the vision of Los Angeles where you’re hotter, happier and 25% less interesting than you were in New York, Sqirl basically runs the customs department. Before TikTok waves drove pastry lines and before marketinggg👏, the version of cool that founder Jessica Koslow established coalesced behind her singular vision, from the dish names to the website to the casually dressed celebrities sharing the small space with you.

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Sqirl dinner is an evolution, one you feel even before you arrive if you’ve been following the journey. The high-level menu items read so classic bistro that at first it feels like a bit. Crudo, tartare, bread service, Caesar, big green salad, fries, a couple pastas, an entrée run of steak/chicken/fish/pork/big veg. But as you scroll down to the italicized descriptions, you see a distinct point of view return in the form of cheffy, high-flavor accents. Jimmy Nardello chili jam. Dill-laden whey butter. Membrillo gastrique. A pickled cherry bomb. This is still spiritually the promise of Everything I Want To Eat, just served after dark.

I don’t have much interest in doing deep reviews of dishes so early into an opening. That kind of restaurant take is also not really my thing. I will say that I was not surprised by how much I loved nearly everything that hit the table. The Sqimps, the most classically Sqirl-named dish on the menu, with stuffed shrimp chorizo in grilled squid and aioli over a fennel salad, is a knockout. The texture on the beef tartare is my favorite in a long time. A fermented shallot vinaigrette perfectly dressed a heaping bowl of California greens. They get fries right, a rarity in LA. But Sqirl doing great food is fairly table stakes to me, an earned level of trust in quality even for something brand new. I’m more intrigued by the direction Koslow has taken this place and how it’s landing in Los Angeles at this specific moment.

“This is the restaurant I opened when I was 30,” Koslow told Eater of the original café. “This dinner part is the restaurant I want to eat at now.”

Last night at Le Chêne, a new-ish French restaurant in New York, a kind server sold me on a dry-aged turbot, flown in from Brittany and broken down from its 15-pound whole into servings ranging from 8 to 11 ounces. The final plate featured two filets over a seaweed beurre blanc with pickled ginger, veg and a few onion rings, priced between $220-$250. This is part of the New York dining experience now. Getting a good Friday night table is one level of exclusivity. Balling on their three-digit special is another. With so much demand, FOMO and cash flowing around, it’s exactly how small, upscale restaurants like Le Chêne should be responding. Star chef Alexia Duchêne gets to have fun with a rare product. Her team gets fatter tips. The diners get their show and social media status.1

Sqirl dinner is meeting a different kind of moment in LA, one that’s finally getting more adults out to eat in the wake of multiple blows to the local restaurant industry. You see the bistro bingo surfacing at Vandell in Los Feliz and Hermon’s near Highland Park, two places I’ve been quoted 90-minute waits on recent weekdays. There’s the spare dish names followed by italicized swerves — fresno chili condiment, cream cheese clouds, lots of yuzu. There’s often a liquor license and branding with the promise of a good date-night. Some combination of instinct and market fluency has pinned what gets adults off the couch. If everyone just wants to eat at Houston’s, bring Houston’s to them.

My favorite versions of this show up at places I’ve already written about plenty. The most expensive dish at Wilde’s is a $68 meat pie followed by a couple $38 mains. The clientele here might have the money for a $200 turbot, but it’s not what gets them excited to leave their bungalow. The cooking at Wilde’s rivals that of any New York restaurant reaching for the same flavors, with twice the comfort. At Morihiro you can stroll in for some of the time zone’s very best sushi, à la carte, paired with simple, high quality cocktails. A four-top at Ètra piled with pasta and vegetables is often me at my happiest. Even Baby Bistro marries peak dish creativity with perhaps the city’s most welcoming, homey mix of service and dining room. The roaming Bruce pop-up takes what these chefs did well at Horses and makes it lighter, brighter and more fun. The now controversial Substack pastina got described at my table as "the ideal version of something I'd make when stoned in my kitchen." Exactly.

After dessert clears back on Virgil, the check arrives with a little candy on a classic Sqirl plate bearing a quote from local architect Reyner Banham: “You might wonder what I’m doing in Los Angeles which makes nonsense of history and breaks all the rules.”

I’m not sure we’re breaking that many rules out here anymore. While New York leans into high-ticket grandeur, LA is settling even further into accessible ease. It’s a shift from the pre-pandemic surge of impossible creativity that made this the best dining city in America. It’s a stage of maturity that doesn’t so much concede such competition as ignores that any competition ever existed. A more apt inscription for the moment might be a dialogue.

“I feel sorry for you.”

“I don’t think about you at all.”

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Winter is my favorite season to cook at home. I love the produce and the seasonal seafood, the long braises and the crowded tables. I seek the same comfort out in dining rooms, which you’ll see here in my top 25 restaurant dish rankings, rooted more in comfort and reliability than ambition and creativity. That’s what’s getting me out to eat right now. Maybe my focus will change in the spring.

Only one rule: no repeats from previous annual top 100 rankings, which are linked below. Otherwise — some new faves, some old faves, and some must-visits from LA to New York to Paris to London. Let’s hit it.

Top 25 restaurant dishes | Winter edition

1. Fish ribs | Morihiro | LA
   Wrote about these in my end-of-year Bangers-Only wrap-up for 2025, and they have held up on repeat visits. Once or twice a week, Morihiro puts out a couple servings of a special I’ve otherwise never encountered. This is a rare place that breaks down all of their fish whole for sushi, which means they’re able to offer a small plate of fish ribs — prepared simply on the grill — that have an intense, wild flavor without much modification. The new location in Echo Park is a gem, especially since you can slide in and order a la carte sushi at this level of quality alongside an excellent bar. Maybe my favorite new thing in Los Angeles.

2. Ham, butter and cornichon baguette | Caractère de Cochon | Paris
   A perfect food done perfectly.

3. Snacks | La Buvette | Paris
   I stopped into La Buvette twice in five days. On each visit we fired off a round of great cheese, charcuterie, bread, their famous beans. Nothing you can’t do at home. But a welcome reminder of a beautiful way to eat: Out in the world with friends, the highest quality ingredients unadorned or fussed over, with wine picked by an expert who knows way more than you do.

4. Fresh madeleines | St. John | London

5. Breakfast sandwich | Amanda’s Good Morning Cafe | NYC
   I’d love to start more days in 2026 with this egg sandwich from Amanda’s pop up at Strange Delight and end more evenings with the freshly baked madeleines from St. John, both of which beam with a crowd-pleasing elegance and high level of care.

6. The entire entrée course | Bistrot de Tournelles | Paris
   Entrée are very much back. Maybe you’ve heard. Here I had a table full of steak au poivre, butternut squash ravioli, greens and fries. What’s not to like?

7. Nervetti salad| I Cavallini | NYC
   Cold beef tendon and onions are an ideal canvas for Nick Curtola’s Italian cooking. I ate an entire plate of this on my own with no help and could not have been happier.

8. Pastina and parm brodo | Bruce | LA
   I’m not surprised this dish has gotten mixed responses on different nights — that’s part of the tightrope walk of an evolving pop-up in a tiny kitchen. I’m just sad for everyone who didn’t share the version I received, seasoned just to the edge of saltiness and textured more like a luxurious risotto, paired with some astounding dealer’s choice wine from the Café Triste team. I hope the Bruce squad keeps this going.

9. Blinis, maple butter and country ham | Stars | NYC
   I’ll keep singing the praises of this ideal cold-night dish at New York’s best bar. Pair it with whatever white cellar pour is on the menu that night.

10. Crab salad | Baby Bistro | LA
    If anyone guesses the secret ingredient in this bad boy, I’ll gift them a lifetime paid subscription. (No cheating).

11. Clams with smoked vinegar butter | l’Arpaon | Paris

12. Holiday apple pie | Kato | LA

13. Finley Farms lettuces | Bell’s | Los Alamos

14. Sticky toffee pudding | Wilde’s | LA

15. Skate wing with sauce blanquette | Clamato | Paris

16. Olive oil and hazelnut ice cream coupe | Folderol | Paris

17. Sea bass crudo | Le Rigamarole | Paris

18. Endive salad with Roquefort, pear and walnuts | Le Grand Cafe | Paris

19. Bento box lunch | Mokochaya | Paris

20. Ricotta omelette | Le Doyenné | Paris

21. Beef arayes | NOUR Comptoir | Paris

22. Steamed cabbage and butter | Rochelle Canteen | London

23. Endive salad | Estela | NYC

24. Corn husk meringue | Cosme | NYC

25. Tamagoyaki omelet with comté | RVR | LA

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My dining companion was DMing a restaurant via OpenTable to reserve a special that had to be requested days in advance. He apologized. It was urgent. So I quickly hit up my regular Horses crew to let them know the good news about Bruce. When they said let’s go, I fired off a text to book us a reservation:

A few friends are visiting Los Angeles this weekend. I needed to book dinner for us on Sunday. Usually I would reach for Resy, going through the ritual of pulling up a saved list, picking the day and party size and time, then scrolling to see what’s available. There were weeks in 2025 when my Resy screen time crossed two hours, topped only by a simple backgammon app.

Something broke this winter. I haven’t spent more than 10 minutes on Resy during any seven-day period in 2026. Backgammon is a thrill, the perfect blend of skill and chance. That balance in the hyper-competitive fine-dining game has throttled completely out of whack, causing me to tap out and find a better way.

My excitement to dine out isn’t gone, just my energy for the reservation rat race. Ètra felt like the right choice for this group, a wonderful Italian restaurant where I’ve had some of my favorite LA evenings. Instead of scrolling, I sent another text:

I’ve been texting Judd for the past week and there’s no way I’m going back. The future of reservations is agent-based and living in iMessage, even if the big apps haven’t caught on yet.

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Judd is a personal AI agent running on the open-source tool OpenClaw. It’s essentially a server with its own iMessage address hooked up to an LLM and every important digital connection in my life. (Lost for what to name this thing during onboarding, I conceded to being influenced by the Donald Judd tattoo on my forearm. I’m predictable).

I use Judd for a bunch of things. Tracking workouts. Drafting emails. Managing my calendar. Finding showtimes for the movies on my Letterboxd watchlist playing in theaters this week. But I use it the most for booking reservations. It was fairly easy to set up in a few hours on a Saturday. I just sat inside of Claude Code and Codex, telling it to walk me through every step to get to the outcome I wanted. “Treat me like I’m stupid,” is my favorite prompt in Opus 4.6.

I have no idea how any of the underlying code works. I don’t even really know how it hooked into my Resy account. I just asked and the models made it happen, guiding me through some simple copy-paste jobs along the way when it couldn’t take action itself.

It’s not seamless, of course. Judd hallucinated a day of the week. It made multiple test reservations at Baby Bistro that I had to cancel, which felt embarrassing. (Sorry, Andy). Occasionally it says it’ll do something and then doesn’t deliver, leading to me dropping a screenshot into Codex and saying, “Yo, fix this.”

Having to sit in a command line interface (CLI) to set up your own Claw is going to be a blocker for a lot of people. So is building up a reliable and reinforcing memory system for an effective personal agent. I resisted CLIs until early January, when the Claude Code wave really got me. But large corporations and small upstarts inevitably are going to make these kinds of AI assistants way more accessible directly where it matters most, and for most of us that’s iMessage. If I have something to communicate, it’s going to happen there. So that’s where my agent should be, too.

After braindumping a bunch of key context in an early back-and-forth interview and then sending it off to go through my writing archive and calendar history, Judd now knows when I like to eat, where I like to eat, with whom, plus 100 other variables that supercharge it into a $75K per year executive assistant running on a ChatGPT Pro subscription.

Playing around with Judd for the past week, I feel like I’m looking ahead to some kind of future, left in the wake of what this four-year reservation apocalypse has brought us.

Starting to show Judd to friends in food and media, I was surprised by how positive the responses were.

The quick, consistent refrain:

• I would absolutely use this.

• I don’t like always needing to go to the reservation apps.

• I’d love to just manage all my shit from one place (something that’s also been great for me at work).

’s sent me a particularly thoughtful email after I shared some Judd screenshots, writing in part:

I’m way more into this than I initially would’ve thought. But I’m also very bullish on AI when it comes to helping us use our time more wisely … I do think I’d use it because there is something appealing about just sending a text and having reservations handled through my reservation platforms, instead of dealing with those apps myself, which can be clunky.

I’m enticed by how it could help me in my goal of being better at being a regular, which is a practice I’m finally cementing this year. I’m into the idea that I could say hey, here’s a list of the restaurants I’m always down to eat at (and can keep adding to/subtracting from it as I see fit). Then when I have dinner plans to make with someone, and they’re letting me pick where, I could tell it to book at any of my regular spots.

During set up, my own personal concerns and fears included:

1. Is this incredibly lame?

2. Am I really going to text a bot named after my favorite artist like it’s a person?

3. How quickly will I turn into those finance bros I’ve met at parties who have an always-on Resy bot scanning for 4 Charles tables?

4. Will I do something very stupid that leaks all of my personal information?

5. Will Resy ban me?

6. Is this going to further remove the human touch from an increasingly sterile booking experience?

reflected on that last point well when I hit her up:

All technological advances bend toward making us less connected to each other. The ability to go on an app and book a table in a click inevitably makes you less connected to the people running that restaurant than having to call them first. It also makes calling feel so much more cumbersome. This shift overlapped with a moment in which where you eat became the most accessible way to display a certain kind of status. You can’t get into the most exclusive parties at New York Fashion Week, but if you refresh your phone right at noon and pray for a late table in 30 days, you can eat at Tatiana. That combination has warped how we approach where we eat and spend our money.

I’m not immune. A food-obsessed friend in LA asked me recently if I’d been to the new Babbo in New York. “Almost,” I said. “Then I saw that for an Italian restaurant in New York, it had, like, way too many available tables on Resy, and that triggered an instinctual red flag. If it’s this easy to eat here, is it good?” That’s a brain broken by reservation apps and the scarcity game they breed.

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The other real thing about technological advances: You do still have some control over how you engage. I don’t ask Judd where I should eat. Plenty of people are in the process of building tools for that. Cool. They’re not for me. A bot can’t give you taste or happiness. Judd has a list of my favorite places, and it actually can’t book anywhere else. I could program more robust abilities, but I’ve found that these self-imposed constraints drive a more rewarding dining experience. I tell Judd the outcome I want and it searches my self-selected lists, letting me know what’s available. It’s built to drive that regularity Emily is seeking.

No version of a Resy or OpenTable UX redesign is ever going to make up for the ease of all of this being handled by a great AI model in iMessage. The next time I take a trip, I’ll still go through my ritual of asking a few well-traveled friends for recommendations. But I’ll also probably ask Codex to give Judd the ability to search those spots for openings.

I’m molding the system exactly to my liking. That’s easy when I’m in a small percentage of diners OpenClawing their way to a Friday night at Sqirl. I nudged up on my own bot-based limits the other day, setting up a twice-daily check for a few hard-to-snag birthday reservations. When everyone is prompting AI assistants to book their meals, are we just speeding up the race to the same four Torrisi bar seats?

Resy and OpenTable will try to ship their own versions of Judd. The same probably goes for Apple, Meta, Anthropic and OpenAI. The big question is what these products look like.

My favorite version is the simplest: Give me easy, centralized connections to all the stuff I care about, plus a powerful model that understands how I want to use each tool. Judd is already pretty close to doing that. The problem is that for any of this to really work at scale in dining, the booking platforms need to cede access to their walled gardens so that your single agent can operate across all of them. Not your dining agent or your SevenRooms agent, but the one agent you text about bulk Amazon orders and checking into flights. I’m skeptical that these apps or their credit card partners go in that direction quickly. And as it becomes easier for restaurateurs to vibe code cheaper, working alternatives to many of Resy’s features besides partnerships and marketing, that tension is only going to hit harder.

I’ll keep using Judd as long as my backdoored Resy hookup doesn’t get shut off. And whenever the connection breaks or I get banned — a potential outcome I’ve accepted — I’ll be fine. I’ll keep the same five restaurants in rotation, sending a text to the hosts or walking in. I’ll try the next OpenClaw competitor. Whatever easily and reliably gets me out on a Sunday night with a whole fish and a couple of pastas at Ètra, surrounded by my friends and the people who make that restaurant so special.

GIFs of real texts generated with Remotion and Claude Code. Some dates/times are changed. Want more from the edge of AI? Get ideas, apps and trainings over at Every.

Hello from Los Angeles, where it’s my favorite time of year to be cooking nonstop. The winter produce here is fabulous. Plenty of prime seafood. On Friday night I had 11 people crammed around the kitchen table for braised short ribs, confit salmon bellies with lemon aioli, a riff on the Four Horsemen celery salad, chili crisp beans, wine, bourbon and a bunch of apps. For dessert, I ordered six pints of Salt & Straw.

Here’s a big Bangers & Jams roundup of what else I’ve been loving lately.

Bangers

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Quick note: Apologies for skipping a post last weekend. The whole new job and travel thing has made writing tougher than usual, but I’m back on it. The cooking app plus a couple other fun projects should be ready for release fairly soon. If you’re starting to disappear into Claude Code like my friend and want to chat more about what we’re doing over at Every to help out, hmu.

It’s difficult not to indulge at Amanda Perdomo’s Good Morning Cafe, a pop-up the award-winning pastry chef (and a close friend) is running at Strange Delight in Brooklyn. I swung by a couple weeks ago and stared down cheesy grits, a breakfast sandwich and the special for the day: this strawberry shortcake éclair.

Multiple members of the staff said the éclair was their favorite thing Amanda had ever made. It was up there for me, too. Like many expert pastry chefs, Amanda is at her best when she’s blending nostalgic memories and crowd-pleasing creativity. Desserts are supposed to make people happy. The little touch of shortcake-inspired crumble across the top did just that.

You feel a specific kind of pastry-chef inspired construction in the breakfast sandwich as well. The sesame bun is handmade, as is the complex pepper jelly spread across it. The egg, the true star of the dish, is baked gently in the style of soufflé. It’s better without the bacon, more balanced with more room to let each component shine.

Later that night, I swung by Nick Curtola’s I Cavallini. Nick is another chef it’s impossible for me to approach objectively. He wrote maybe my favorite cookbook of the decade, an inspiration for dozens of home meals since it was released. It feels like his second restaurant is finding a nice groove. I wasn’t surprised that my favorite dish was a simple winter salad, featuring folded up chicories in a mix of unidentifiable vinegars. That’s Nick on a plate. The dishes, like a cold beef tendon with onion and a farfallone with calabrian chili butter, are undeniably delicious. But there’s a subtle challenge coursing through each — sometimes for the cooks, sometimes for the diners. It’s never cheffy for the sake of being showy, but, yes, it’s still just a little cheffy.

The dessert menu was bigger than I expected. The tiramisu has received raves. I stared at gelatos containing apricot kernel or and cinnamon with prunes before deciding on a sage flavor with candied meyer lemon.

A friend has a go-to, specific comment for desserts like those on the I Cavallini menu when we dine out together: “Savory chef made this.” It’s been bouncing around my head more in the past few months of meals. It’s not necessarily a critique. Savory chefs make plenty of beautiful desserts, like Nick’s or the pine nut cookie with cucumber cremeux and pickled rhubarb that Miles Thompson has parked on the Baby Bistro menu since opening. But overwhelmingly they approach the final course differently from a dedicated pastry chef.

“We don’t have a pastry chef at The Four Horsemen. We never have,” Nick writes in his cookbook. “Honestly, we don’t have the space in our tiny kitchen for a dedicated section. But I like how that forces the team and I to consider and appreciate the sweet side of the menu.”

When creating sweet things, we look at what’s in season and see what feels right for the moment. We leave the strawberry and cherry desserts for those long summer days and save the figs and quince for times when you wish you could end your meal by the fireplace with a blanket over your lap and a glass of brandy; bright in spring to celebrate surviving another dull winter, and warm and nurturing around the holidays.”

Travis Lett echoes a similar sentiment in the Gjelina cookbook, writing:

“For the most part, I’ve found high-concept restaurant desserts fail to satisfy after an epic meal. Multiple purées, tuiles, quenelles of strange gelatos, and dehydrated crumbles all look cool, but generally don’t hit that soulful note I am after. Even the words ‘pastry chef’ tend to carry pretense that suggests an elevated style. In our kitchen, the word ‘baker’ is more applicable to the style of desserts we want to serve, desserts your grandmother or mother might have baked if you were lucky. It says something about our desserts that our most popular is, essentially, a pudding.

Understated, seasonal, but satisfying—this is what we aim for.”

The Gjelina cookbook was published more than 10 years ago, but Travis’ approach has only become more pervasive. It’s one reason the British invasion into American dining is hitting so hard. Done well, these puddings round out homey, comforting, approachable meals that so many diners are seeking in the wake of peak reservation. You’ll rarely find me complaining about butterscotch puddings, miso caramels, panna cottas with seasonal fruit, date cakes, semifreddos and savory gelatos with only a couple components.

Travis is also right about those cringe fine-dining desserts, a thing I’m thankful might be lost to time and Top Chef Season 13. At the unfortunately now-closed l’Arpaon in Paris, the kitchen of savory chefs closed out a gorgeous meal with a way-too-high concept riff on a hazelnut affogato. It included a table-side pour and textures just slightly awry. It was too cute by half.

After a few bites, I was overwhelmed by memories of the Torrisi affogato, a gift from former pastry chef Stephanie Prida before she left Major Food Group. This is a pastry chef’s dessert. Layers of vanilla ice cream are topped with a fudge sauce, mascarpone cream and coffee granita. It’s a classic elevated to the highest possible levels, something that looks straightforward before you actually try to make ice cream or granita with such excellence.

This is a part of dining out I don’t want to lose. Economics make having a dedicated pastry program challenging. So do basic restaurant logistics — there’s little space, and little time for the cooks on garde manger to prioritize a six-component cake plating. Meanwhile, true star pastry chefs often can find better lifestyles, incomes and demand free from being a cog in a restaurant machine.

Here are a few things that give me hope: Some restaurant groups are still willing to spend here. That can show up in the form of hiring a consulting pastry chef at opening, like Amanda did for JR & Sons, giving them a stacked lineup of on-brand desserts their team can continue to execute after she moves on to the next project. Crevette in the West Village is rumored to have a $40,000 ice cream machine that powers their unforgettable soft serve. (Future restaurant investors, please take note). Dessert still travels well on TikTok and Instagram.

If you care about great pastry, you’re most likely to get it after waiting in a line before 10am. That’s fine. But a real pastry program makes a restaurant complete. Pastry chefs think in different ways. You see it through Brooks Headley’s genius at Superiority Burger and both essential Natasha Pickowicz cookbooks, just like you see it at Quarter Sheets and Tandem Bakery.

A few stellar desserts make a meal memorable. Whether you dine out a few times a month or a few times a year, you should close out the night with a sense of wonder. A moment of celebration and joy and indulgent comfort. You should order that extra amaro and have it come with one more dessert plate than seems reasonable. I guarantee that if it’s done right, it’s all you’ll be talking about on your way home.

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Yo, some news: I’ve been working on a new kind of cooking app, and I’m ready to open it up to some early testers. If you wanna try it out, enter your email below. I’ll follow up with the details.

This has been a fun little side project and I’m stoked to put it out into the world. If you’re a writer, creator or podcaster who wants tips on how to do this yourself, let’s talk. It’s getting easier than you’d think.

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The New Year doesn’t really start until you’ve gotten through this first back-to-work week after the holiday. I loaded up November and December with end-of-year pieces, so it’s been a while since I’ve weighed in on some new restaurants and dining trends — well covered by friends over the past few weeks.

Here’s what’s been on my mind before and after meals in Paris, London, LA, New York and Austin over the past two months.

LA dining, kind of back

, one of Los Angeles’ very best wine pros, was a part of the Baby Bistro opening in the spring, Anajak Thai’s re-opening in the summer and Little Fish Melrose Hill’s debut in the fall. Kae captured this bubbling moment happening in LA dining well here:

There’s been a lot of press dedicated to the exhausting game of Whack-a-Mole dealt to the city’s restaurants over the last five years, and rightfully so … What I haven’t seen discussed as much yet, however, are the ways that restaurants make consistency a part of their DNA. Even what is in many ways a tasting menu restaurant can be a neighborhood spot, it turns out, and Baby Bistro is proof. It’s hard to be a regular at what Max Shapiro dubbed the “Japanese fusion clubstraunt” and it feels like the people behind our most exciting new openings have watched and responded to the crises of the last few years with restaurants that make it easier for our guests to come every week, or at least often.

The last major LA dining boom felt big — Bavel, Majordomo, every Evan Funke space. We went cavernous, family style, embracing a pre-pandemic phase of seeming abundance. While New York restaurants were cramped, constrained and confused, LA was bursting with possibility. The abundance gap has flipped since then. New York dining came roaring back, powered mostly by expense accounts and clubs roped off on Resy. In the wake of stacked tragedies, LA just can’t compete in that game anymore.

But after 18 months of head shaking and sighs, we might be out on the other side. I look at Baby Bistro, Little Fish, Wilde’s, Hermon’s, Stir Crazy, Etra and I see what Kae sees — smaller spaces with greater ambitions to get regulars on their terms more than anything else. The menus are compact, the personality is vivid, but the touches are undeniably human. These are all restaurants designed to be twice as good if you go twice as much.

Intentional or not, these places feel particularly inspired to me by Quarter Sheets, the Echo Park pizza spot that started as a pandemic pop-up before taking over a brick-and-mortar in 2022. Quarter Sheets is open from 5-9, six days a week. The to-go operation is limited. The physical menu doesn’t even take up a whole sheet of paper. It’s a place where crazed newcomer demand is always teetering on the edge of making visiting unbearable. The traffic-starved West Siders in line here are often the worst of Los Angeles. But it’s also a place that refuses to let that demand break its continued resilience as a neighborhood gem, beckoning regulars to return.

If the next wave of great LA restaurants are children of the Quarter Sheets tree, I’m here for it. Maybe that makes the city less of a global dining destination. That’s fine. It might make it a better place to live.

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Paris, pretty good!

I’m not going to do a dedicated Paris post, because I can’t think of a better guide than what has up over at The Angel. Trust it with your life. Instead, here’s a short and sweet top five:

1. New Year’s Eve, notably the best night of the year, at Le Doyenné, an easy one-hour train ride south of the city. The tasting menu came with maybe my favorite wine pairing ever, and the breakfast experience the next morning is as good as everyone says.

2. Bistrot des Tournelles, pure magic in the form of a lightly modernized French bistro.

3. Bento box lunches at Mokochaya.

4. A surprisingly stunning meal up in the 18th at L’Arpaon, a tiny place with a nine-item, banger menu that would feel at home in this current LA dining scene.

5. Arayes and falafel from NOUR Comptoir.

An appreciation for the fancy stuff being actually very good and worth it

One more Paris highlight: A long, leisurely lunch at Le Grand Café, a gorgeous room sitting inside the Grand Palais. Steak tartare, crab claws, endive salads, soufflé, $25 cocktails and a well-dressed clientele throwing them back — that kind of thing. In 2026, when I’m not cooking at home or hitting my regular spots, I want to be blowing my money at places like this.

A meal at Le Grand Café or The Grill is best experienced like a trip to Vegas. You book knowing you’re going to spend a stupid amount of money, you set it aside as an investment in life being short and fancy stuff sometimes being extremely worth it, and then you go, get drunk and have a blast. These kinds of rooms have often been filled by restaurateurs who didn’t need the food or service to shine in order to run the business. The rich would show up and spend. But there’s something very real about the return on value when everything is fucking humming. (Meanwhile, I just can’t with this Tommy Bahama power lunch thing.)

Yes, it can be very expensive to dine out. I hear that refrain all the time. You can avoid feeling ripped off with intentionality. Return to the same spots that always deliver, and mix in a few baller excursions of the grand variety where you don’t consider the price tag. Give up the hype-chasing middle. That’s where you find disappointment.

What’s up with great restaurant pens?

Is this no longer a thing? I can’t think of one new restaurant that has opened in the past two years that came out of the gate with a fucking amazing pen, the best possible piece of merch. Am I missing any good ones? Please let me know.

Sure, in the age of tablets and tap-to-pay, this is an additional expense in a small-margin industry. I get it. And, okay, people like me will indeed steal a pen (but never two) when they look as good as the ones at Clark’s or King. But you know what isn’t cool? Doing the tasting menu at Cove and having a big Square reader come crashing down on the Grainwood Studio cherry and ash wood tables. I’m not demanding good pens, but I’m on the hunt.

I miss real restaurant cookbooks

In 2024, zero true restaurant cookbooks made The New York Times’ best of the year list. In 2025, there was only one, from the lovely team at King.

There are impressive restaurant chefs on these lists, including Calvin Eng from Bonnie’s in Brooklyn and Nok Suntaranon from Kalaya in Philly, but both are billed as more home-cooking-oriented, personal-storytelling-first books. The restaurants themselves don’t even appear with a reference on the cover.

I trust that these are the books these chefs wanted to make, and don’t begrudge that. Both books are very good. It also makes sense that these kinds of books sell better right now — personality-driven, accessible, under 30 minutes, weaving in more family stories rather than restaurant trials. But, damn, I miss a great restaurant cookbook. The King book absolutely rips — from real recipes I will steal to beautiful writing on what makes great salads from and .

I learned how to cook from books like these, and the great ones — like The Four Horsemen in 2024 — become household staples. Like with pens, even if these labors of love make little financial or emotional sense, I hope some crazy, ambitious chefs keep them coming. Here’s my quick wishlist:

• Penny

• Semma

• Baroo

• Torrisi

• Dame

• Birdie’s

• Compilation books from the restaurant groups behind Cervo’s, Hart’s, The Fly & Eel Bar, as well as Frenchette, Le Rock, Le Veau d’Or & Wild Cherry

• Bell’s

• HAGS

I can’t with these couples

The era of ordering 10 small plates may be dead, and that’s fine. I love a tiny menu with real portions. But, I’m sorry, if you’re a couple and you’re sitting in my vicinity at dinner, I’m going to judge your order. And I’m shocked by the number of couples I see out there ordering two of the same heavy entrée. Are you kidding?

A date next to me at L’Arpaon closed their meal out by housing individual bowls of a rather heavy, creamy and voluminous paccheri. I will never forget the time I saw a couple brunching at Chez Ma Tante with two separate orders of the pancakes, plus a breakfast sandwich, bacon and potatoes. I think this trend is only getting worse. Learn how to order or stick to Uber Eats.

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A few times a year, Bangers & Jams switches from a food blog to a movie blog. That’s certainly the case during Oscar season.

I love the Oscars. There’s not nearly as much to vigorously debate around dinner tables in Los Angeles compared to New York, but at least we have the spectacle of cinema combined with the vanity of awards.

I maintain that 2025 was a very good year at the movies. I can go 15 deep with films I loved, adding in another 15 I at least admired. The awards race this year features a heavy favorite (One Battle After Another), a few fun villains (Hamnet, Wicked: For Good, Frankenstein) and some very real debates. Like last year, I’ve compiled my list of what I think should be nominated for the major categories ahead of the official Jan. 22 announcement. The choices are ranked in order of how upset I’ll be if they don’t make the cut. I’ve also included my pick for winners as well as one seeming lock that I don’t think belongs.

This is much more of a leaning toward “best” rather than “favorite” — a requirement for the sake of awards recognition. January is a perfect time to hole up at home and catch up on movies. If you’re behind, use this as a guide for where to start.

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Best Picture

1. Winner: Marty Supreme

2. One Battle After Another

3. The Secret Agent

4. Sentimental Value

5. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

6. It Was Just An Accident

7. Train Dreams

8. Sinners

9. The Testament Of Ann Lee

10. No Other Choice

Doesn’t belong: Frankenstein

Wicked: For Good and Avatar are probably also getting in, but Frankenstein is the real shit-stirrer here — a pandering kids movie that happens to be filled with gratuitous gun violence. There was better dialogue in Regretting You.

Best Director

1. Winner: Paul Thomas Anderson | One Battle After Another

2. Mary Bronstein | If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

3. Josh Safdie | Marty Supreme

4. Ryan Coogler | Sinners

5. Jafar Panahi | It Was Just An Accident

Doesn’t belong: Chloé Zhao | Hamnet

The toughest list of five to make. But, yeah, give PTA his trophy.

Wesley Morris equated Hamnet to watching an acting class — not a masterclass in acting, but literally a training session with people learning how to act. No criticism has been more apt. In a movie that plays like it was designed to make parents cry and win awards, the faults fall primarily on the director.

Best Actress

1. Winner: Rose Byrne | If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

2. Amanda Seyfried | The Testament Of Ann Lee

3. Renate Reinsve | Sentimental Value

4. Emma Stone | Bugonia

5. Jessie Buckley | Hamnet

Doesn’t belong: Cynthia Erivo | Wicked

An absolutely stacked category that Buckley has wrapped up. That’s fine. Her performance in the final 25 minutes is legitimately great. But if Byrne and Seyfried don’t get nominated, no snubs will make me more annoyed.

Best Actor

1. Winner: Timothée Chalamet | Marty Supreme

2. Wagner Moura | The Secret Agent

3. Michael B. Jordan | Sinners

4. Ethan Hawke | Blue Moon

5. Leonardo DiCaprio | One Battle After Another

Doesn’t belong: Joel Edgerton | Train Dreams

The growing consensus around this projected top five is also the right top five, incredibly. Edgerton is a perfectly played piece in Bentley’s beautiful film. The Train Dreams momentum is so encouraging to see, but I hope it doesn’t knock out Hawke’s special turn as Lorenz Hart.

Best Supporting Actress

1. Winner: Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas | Sentimental Value

2. Teyana Taylor | One Battle After Another

3. Odessa A’zion | Marty Supreme

4. Mariam Afshari | It Was Just An Accident

5. Wunmi Mosaku | Sinners

Doesn’t belong: Amy Madigan | Weapons

Lilleaas slow burns for 90 minutes before shattering your heart in concurrent scenes. She’s the real muse for Trier in this film, the simmering heart of his broken family portrayal.

Weapons is a good movie. Zach Cregger is a great director. But I’ve yet to see or hear a convincing argument that Madigan’s performance was anything beyond replacement level.

Best Supporting Actor

1. Winner: Stellan Skarsgård | Sentimental Value

2. Sean Penn | One Battle After Another

3. Alexander Skarsgård | Pillion

4. Benicio del Toro | One Battle After Another

5. William H. Macy | Train Dreams

Doesn’t belong: Paul Mescal | Hamnet

I will ignore the pure category fraud for what is undeniably a lead performance from Stellan Skarsgård.

Best Adapted Screenplay

1. Winner: Ira Sachs | Peter Hujar’s Day

2. Paul Thomas Anderson | One Battle After Another

3. Harry Lighton | Pillion

4. Clint Bentley & Greg Kwedar | Train Dreams

5. Park Chan-wook, Lee Kyoung-mi & Jahyee Lee | No Other Choice

Doesn’t belong: Will Tracy | Bugonia

Few movies sparked more ideas or conversations for me than Sachs’ faithful adaptation of a real recorded conversation between the photographer Peter Hujar and the writer Linda Rosenkrantz. You watch the filmed version and are rattled by everything that’s not there — phones, concrete plans, social-media-induced artistic anxiety.

Best Original Screenplay

1. Winner: Joachim Trier & Eskil Vogt | Sentimental Value

2. Jafar Panahi | It Was Just An Accident

3. Mary Bronstein | If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

4. Robert Kaplow | Blue Moon

5. Ari Aster | Eddington

Doesn’t belong: Noah Baumbach & Emily Mortimer | Jay Kelly

Whatever is going on with Noah’s writing since he became happily married is really bumming me out.

Best International Feature

1. Winner: The Secret Agent

2. It Was Just An Accident

3. Sentimental Value

4. No Other Choice

5. Sirāt

The other major contender here is The Voice of Hind Rajab, a powerful story that tears you apart over and over again. It might break through for its strong mission, ambition and message. I just don’t think it really works as a movie.

Best Casting

1. Winner: Nadia Acimi, Luis Bertolo & Erika Boulic | Sirāt

2. Jennifer Venditti | Marty Supreme

3. Gabriel Domingues | The Secret Agent

4. Jafar Panahi | It Was Just An Accident

5. Cassandra Kulukundis | One Battle After Another

The non-actor ravers are the best part of Sirāt, the only truly shocking movie I saw in 2025.

Best Cinematography

1. Winner: Adolpho Veloso | Train Dreams

2. Christopher Blauvelt | The Mastermind

3. Michael Bauman | One Battle After Another

4. Autumn Durald Arkapaw | Sinners

5. Kim Woo-hyung | No Other Choice

Of all the movies on this list, Train Dreams is the one I’d implore you to try to see on a big screen. The 35mm print took my breath away. The cinematography is the true star and why it deserves this win.

Best Original Score

1. Winner: Daniel Lopatin | Marty Supreme

2. Jonny Greenwood | One Battle After Another

3. Kangding Ray | Sirāt

4. Ludwig Göransson | Sinners

5. Bryce Dessner | Train Dreams

The most heavyweight two-person race in the field comes down to Lopatin vs. Greenwood. It’s close, but Lopatin deserves it.

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Hello from Paris. Last night, I popped into Folderol for rosé and a bowl with scoops of both olive oil and pistachio ice cream before dinner. Multiple neighbors commented at the bar on how nice it is to be an adult and pull such a move. Whatever TikTok craze temporarily torched this place seems to have passed.

Across the curved pass heading into the Folderol kitchen, there were three pieces of simple white paper labeled “Ice cream ideas” — lists with names like coffee & donuts, whiskey with lemon rind, avocado and plenty of liner notes throughout. You had to strain your neck a bit to spot it on the way back from the bathroom, but I enjoyed this little peek into the creative process at work.

That continued next door at Le Rigamarole, where Sam Schwarz and Alexis Bijaoui were closing out a month of pop-up dinners. They’re planning to open up their own spot in Paris next year, early or late summer, and this was a bit of a test run. Sam is from Baltimore and spent time at Fradei in Brooklyn, but has mostly worked in Paris at spots like Soces and Septime.

I love these kinds of meals, watching two young chefs play with ideas right in that moment where their creative energy is the highest. They’re the best versions of a restaurant pop-up, a way to see the first hints of brilliant inspiration and the path to something that just might be magic.

After opening with a salsify tempura that ate like a (very good) fancy onion ring, Sam dropped off a stunning crudo dish.

I’ve eaten a lot of first crudos. That new restaurant staple, where the chefs are convinced they’ve sourced or dry-aged fish in a way that’s unlike anything else. The dishes aren’t necessarily bad, but like a prestige TV show that opens with a dramatic flash forward, experienced audiences are trained to take a deep, here-we-go-again breath when it arrives. I’ve had three clunkers this quarter. Sam and Alexis delivered a rare exception.

Local bass gets seasoned 25 minutes before serving, and then it’s scattered in between a few pieces of radicchio and tossed in a light, subtle bergamot dressing. I would gladly go back for more of that fish tonight, but the real attraction was crossing over that threshold with a couple chefs where you just think — give me more of your food. I’m in. I’ve got season tickets now. Disconnected from reservation chaos and end-of-year lists or travel itineraries and trend debates, these kinds of discoveries are invigorating.

I’m in Europe for New Year’s Eve, the best holiday of the year. I’ll go deeper on Paris and London food stuff in the next couple weeks. For now, I’m rounding up some of my favorite posts from Year 2 of Bangers & Jams. Thanks so much for reading. Here’s to more great dining and debates in 2026.

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There’s something charming about a restaurant that only ever serves the same, single dessert. Typically this is pastry done by a savory chef, one low-lift but flavor-juiced hack for a small kitchen team looking to satisfy the sugar-crazed. You’ll often find herbs, salt, and olive oil. Plating during service is minimal if nonexistent. If you’re a regular, you might order such a dish three visits in a row, skip it for six months, and then have it nestle in your brain one day and demand a return.

At Drifters Wife in Portland, Maine, that was the malabi, a Middle Eastern milk pudding that eats like panna cotta without the gelatin. Chef Ben Jackson would occasionally change up the set with the seasons. At its best you’d get a cup topped with the freshest Maine blueberries and thyme. It was never the highlight of the meal. But it carried its own kind of history, hugging you through previous scoops in this same space.

I got a craving for that malabi dish in October, sitting over on Washington Street in Portland’s East End. It was one of the last impossibly bright Maine days before the cold starts to take over. Drifters Wife had been closed for five years. It only ever existed because owners Orenda and Peter Hale needed food around as a vehicle to get locals to try their natural wine selections at Maine & Loire, a wine shop they opened in 2015 after leaving behind Brooklyn restaurant life. Both turned into sensations during that wild, pre-pandemic, every food publication in America is obsessed with Maine boom.

But the restaurant half of the business couldn’t survive a COVID shutdown. Now Maine & Loire occupies the entire space, primarily as a place to purchase bottles, though you have the option to sit, drink and hang, like I was doing. Peter poured me a perfect, bright glass of sparkling while I finished Among Friends by Hal Ebbott. Echo & the Bunnymen’s Porcupine played front to back. Peter said business was good — tough, of course, anything in this industry is tough, but this setup works for their margins and their family’s day-to-day.

The ghost of Drifters Wife haunted my reading of this New York Times piece on the new Gilded Age of menus, outlining how restaurants are devising dishes featuring $600 suckling pigs, Wagyu flights and caviar bumps with martinis. In specific cities such as New York, Dallas, Aspen, Las Vegas and Miami, these opulent platters cater to the 1% looking to flex, the brands with big budgets and the influencers looking to post their way into another class stratosphere.

In many ways, this is just good business. You don’t get rich off selling 18 malabis a night, no matter how charming those little cups are. The owners of Drifters Wife also would not have been able to move many $1,000 bottles of wine or caviar flights with their clientele of Maine diners. I don’t think the tables could even hold a two-pound lobster dish.

Drifters Wife was a restaurant for dinner. It was a small, scrappy darling, pulsing life and memories into each visit. It had soul. It’s my favorite kind of thing. Carbone Riviera and Santi are something else — something closer to luxury real estate and curtained-off clubs, flinging uneaten platters into the trash while calling the night a success.

Can these two extremes co-exist?

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Pillion is one of the best movies of the year. Harry Lighton’s directorial debut had its relatively small budget financed by production companies in the UK and Ireland, some of which receive funding from the government to promote the arts. It’s a funny, honest and raw portrait of a gay sub/dom relationship between characters played by Harry Melling and Alexander Skarsgård. It has the most powerful makeout scene I’ve witnessed in years.

A recurring motif throughout the movie is Melling’s character cooking meals for Skarsgård’s as an act of submissive utility. He stands and watches Skarsgård eat, since the other seat is occupied by a dog. At one point, Melling asks to get one day off per week from their dom/sub dynamic to do normal couple activities, like go get breakfast together.

I’d imagine Melling’s character had somewhere like Wilde’s in mind. This new Los Feliz restaurant is a dream. A place to linger with a book and the California sunlight splashing through the windows onto your sausage roll during the daytime, and a place to fire nearly the full menu of British-inspired dishes on a roomy four-top moving onto its second bottle of wine during the evening. The bangers & mash, fish & chips and pork chop were three of my favorite dishes this year.

Co-owners Tatiana Ettensberger and Natasha Price imagined the space as a neighborhood spot, one that locals could easily pop into for a full meal at one of its 30 seats or just a quick bite and a drink. It’s proven much too popular to really allow for that, with lines forming well ahead of its 5:30 opening. By doing all the right things — like carefully building a beautiful space in the right location at the right time, firing knockout dishes with consistency, and handling every little fire that pops up with grace — Wilde’s has entered that echelon of restaurant where a flood of diners not only want to eat but want to be seen eating.

You might look at this demand and think: Shouldn’t Wilde’s follow the Carbone model down this gilded age trend? The other day, a building issue forced the team to close for one dinner and one breakfast service. You could feel the gut punch in the tone of the Instagram announcement — this stuff really matters when you’re building something small and special. It’s not going to sink them, but every moment counts in restaurants like this.

So if there’s demand in such an affluent LA neighborhood, why not add a $400 whole fish set? Why not roll out a regular Sunday roast in exclusive partnership with Dorsia with four-figure tickets?

Well, lots of reasons. Mostly, these two worlds don’t blend well. You can’t have 20 diners popping into their local for rarebit and sticky toffee pudding while the other 10 stack seafood towers to the ceiling. You lose your spirit without capturing the real financial upside.

Teams behind movies like Pillion always call them small miracles. Just like with Wilde’s and Drifters Wife, it takes a tremendous amount of work and one hundred lucky breaks to make the thing at all and then get people to spend money on it. Pillion is being distributed in the US in February by A24, the indie studio with growing ambitions. This week, A24 is putting Marty Supreme into wide release, throwing one of its biggest budget bets behind star Timothée Chalamet and director Josh Safdie.

Marty Supreme is weird, fucked up, incredible. It’s how a bigger budget should be used, taking a stellar cast and breaking them open into a chaotic jaunt across New York and the globe in the 1950s. The only real meals in the movie happen inside of international Ritz-Carltons or similar high-ceilinged spaces built around luxurious statements. You don’t catch anyone eating. Following a big win, Chalamet’s character Marty orders the two most expensive things on the menu, simply because they have the highest price tag. He’s giddy and proud, an outsider in this room desperate to be its epicenter. He commands waiters, picks up another table’s bill, shares loud stories and talks past his tablemate. He passes off the tab to the table tennis association, leading to a fine that threatens to derail his career.

Very few people will ever have access to these kinds of rooms, and Marty knows that. It’s why he’s so determined to get in and stay in. He’s not alone. Right now, there are thousands of hopefuls with Resy notifies on for The Corner Store, 4 Charles and Torrisi. They want to ball like the 1%, while the real 1% would never need Resy to get the table.

A small portion of these gilded-age restaurants are actually quite good. Torrisi is one of them. It’s a big-budget blockbuster that delivers on its promise of dry-aged duck ($56) and cavatelli with Jamaican beef ragu ($32) for the people who are there for dinner, and $500 Snake River steak sets for the affluent looking to stunt.

I’d love to see the Wilde’s version of Torrisi. A boisterous second concept providing a rare reason to get dressed up in LA. The Hollywood system is broken and showing few signs of improving, but I see filmmakers graduating from small productions like Pillion or Good Time to bigger-budget swings like Marty Supreme as a reasonable food world comp. Maybe there’s a way to get both the precious neighborhood gem and then the Amex Platinum destination from this new wave of great chefs and restaurateurs.

Because there are only going to be more gilded age menus coming, just like there are going to be more big franchise IP plays in theaters. Occasionally a regular diner will snag a 5:15 res at one of these spots. When they arrive they’ll realize that, yes, money and access makes a lot of things better. But it doesn’t inherently make your meal more delicious.

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This is the first full year I’ve lived in Los Angeles since I escaped for New York in 2022. It’s also a year ending with a lot of change, which I love. Change is essential. I go a little crazy when there’s not enough of it.

But in putting together the annual Bangers Only list—the rankings of my 25 favorite restaurants, 25 favorite movies, top 100 songs and five books you’ll find below—the experiences rooted in consistent, reliable joy rose to the top. So many of the standouts from this year felt lived-in, timeless and deeply considered. The exercise reinforced what a lot of my friends wrote last week about their year in dining: a bend toward comfort, discovery without the chase, and a gravitation to the personal touches rather than the latest trends.

That’s what you’ll find here, along with a bunch of recs to get you through the holidays and into the new year.

Food

I make up different rules for what’s eligible here each year. This round, I’m going with the 25 places where I spent the most time, garnered my loudest recommendations, or just consistently broke through the noise. Some are old and some are new.

I wouldn’t have expected this list to be so LA-heavy. But there’s a simmering sentiment that LA dining is back on the rise — an energy around heartfelt, scrappy stars that force you out of your home. That applies especially to the No. 1 pick.

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My favorite restaurant takes happen in texts and emails. That’s where the smartest diners I know let it fly about what they’re gatekeeping, what food media lists make no sense and where the crowd is so insufferable they skip dessert.

As part of the Bangers & Jams 2025 year in review, we’re making those takes public. I got some of my favorite dining companions, cooks and writers to share their most memorable thing about the New York and LA food scenes this year — loves, hates, whatever they wanted.

There are recommendations to bookmark, of course. But I was struck by how many people are ending 2025 out on the other side — of the reservation battlefield, of the hot and trendy, of dining out as status symbol rather than point of connection. It’s a long one, but it’s juicy and worth it. Open it up in a browser and dive in.

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I’m finding it unusually hard to think about the year in any sweeping way, mostly because it’s been one of real personal upheaval. So instead, here are a few dining-specific comforts I’m clinging to lately.

My old boss Ben Leventhal has a theory that every restaurant in the world is either a diner or a club, and for the reason I’ve already expressed, I’m only wanting the former. Places like B&H Dairy, Long Island Bar, and Anton’s — spots where I can set the tone and get exactly the experience I need that day. It’s grounding. I’m loving sipping on satisfying nonalcoholic beverages, because, sue me, I’m drinking less booze, whether that be the matcha-lima soda at Cafe 2001 or the flawless Arnold Palmer at Union Square Cafe. And I’m very into the creeping in of the British Invasion in food, from the opening of Wilde’s in Los Feliz to King duo Jess Shadbolt and Annie Shi’s soon-to-open Dean’s, plus the fact that sticky toffee pudding seems to be on every other menu. Mark my words: this will amplify in 2026.

Speaking of Annie, my favorite restaurant that opened in New York or LA in 2025 was Lei, which took me by surprise in its utter originality, cleverly exceptional food (by chef Patty Lee), cozy-chic atmosphere, and slay of a wine list. My favorite dish: Lee’s hand-rolled cat’s ear noodle with lamb braised in cumin and tomato. Lei signals how far the wine bar has come, that it’s no longer a trend we’re tired of, but a diverse, evolved restaurant category that’s here to stay. I’m all in.

| After School

I used to live a half a block away from Leo in Williamsburg, and when it came time to relocate — less than two miles away, but still — I was pretty distraught about the prospect of no longer having easy access to their perfect pizza (and perfect caesar, and perfect soft serve, and perfect wine list, etc.).

Early on into our move, my husband and I stumbled into 21 Greenpoint on a Wednesday and learned that every Wednesday, the restaurant makes pizza — and not just any pizza, but some of the best pizza I’ve had in the city. You can’t go wrong with their market pie, which is topped with whatever Homer picks up from the farmer’s market that day, but our usual order is the chevre/arugula/ mortadella pie and the Meg Ryan, a riff on the restaurant’s pasta dish of the same name. It has extremely pungent confit garlic on top, and the spicy tomato sauce is, blessedly, actually spicy. If you go with a group, you should get the nachos, too, which are legendary in their own right. The wine list is always fun, and while they don’t have homemade soft serve like Leo, you can (and should) end your meal with a sprinkle cone.

Over the last year, this has become a Wednesday routine for us, to the point where I often decline other dinner or event invites just so I can get my weekly pizza fix. I recently had a flight canceled that was supposed to get me back just in time for Pizza Wednesday, and I cried at the airport thinking about missing that confit garlic (and also my husband).

It’s the kind of experience I am genuinely tempted to gatekeep — I would be so sad if it went viral and I could no longer walk in and get a seat at the bar — but at the same time, the team is incredibly nice and talented, and they deserve the success.

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Restaurants feel scrappy again, and I love it. Maybe scrappy is not the right word. I’m trying to describe some kind of grass roots movement of restaurants made by passionate people, built from the ground up serving some of New York’s best food out of little restaurants with tiny kitchens. Restaurants like Bong, Sunn’s, Chrissy’s, Ha’s Snack Bar, Los Burritos Juarez, have all graduated from pop ups to real life restaurants in the past year. It’s been so heartening to watch them become some of the most important restaurants in the city. The kids are alright. There’s still room to dream in this absurdly expensive city of ours. But please save me a reservation.

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When I was asked to contribute to this piece, I tried to write something positive about my experience in restaurants. But the truth is, 2025 was a tough year.

I grew up watching cooking shows back home in Ecuador. When the time came, I went to culinary school, worked in restaurants since I was sixteen and I never looked back. I love the chaos, the adrenaline rush that New York City kitchens offer. It’s always been a demanding job, but this past year, something shifted. The exhaustion wasn’t just physical anymore; it was emotional. I was tired of standing up not only for myself but for the Latino workers who felt they didn’t have the right to ask for something as basic as a break during their 10-12 hour shift. This reality wasn’t new, but in 2025’s political climate, everything felt heavier, more unfair, more targeted, more unsustainable.

It’s no secret that New York City restaurants depend on immigrants. With all the ICE raids, everyone was afraid to go to work. Seeing my team truly scared was devastating. How can you care about serving the most “Instagrammable” desserts when fifty percent of your team doesn’t even know if they will get back home that day?

But it wasn’t just seeing Latino workers experience the daily fear of deportation. It was the culture in general. You rarely see Latino managers in the industry, not because we are under-qualified. Despite having a reputation as the hardest-working people in restaurants, we’re overlooked for managerial roles far too often. I learned early on that if I wanted to be considered for leadership positions as a Latina woman, I needed to make myself visible, because how hard you work won’t always be recognized.

I spent 14 months at my last job, I quit when I realized they were all talk when it came to caring for their workers. I needed a break from this industry that everyone loves and fantasizes about, but that was simultaneously more politically upsetting than ever.

Still, I felt a wave of hope after the mayoral elections. NYC restaurant workers, who have felt so targeted and unfairly treated, now have a leader who recognizes their value. As Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani said, “New York will remain a city of immigrants: a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants, and [now] led by an immigrant.”

Let’s see where 2026 takes us.

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This year I dined most frequently at the Chelsea Hotel, mostly the Cafe Chelsea, sometimes the Lobby Bar. It wasn’t a particularly prolific year in restaurants for me, at least on the American coasts, but the Chelsea has become a sort of safe space since it reopened a few years ago. Despite it becoming more of a spot for Lower East Siders recently, I can usually count on a crowd of rich clueless Europeans, horny out-of-town couples on dates and people with zero culture in their hearts and jobs that make a lot of money. I find this mix comforting and conducive to creativity.

I don’t think the food is particularly memorable, though I always get the Chelsea burger (a photo of it is my icon on WhatsApp), the steak frites or the beef tartare (the poor man’s bistro trifecta?), so there might be something extraordinary lurking on the menu that I’ve not tried. The Chelsea Hotel is, however, a good place to make memories, which is a characteristic I highly value in the places I choose to spend money or time. You can really channel the Chelsea’s bygone bohemian past when you’re drunk and swishing past the front desk and through the lobby between bars (lean into it why don’t you). As we prepare for the new year, I challenge you to find a restaurant that is good for your creative spirit!1

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This year I decided I was done fighting my way into new restaurants. No 5pm or 10pm dinner reservations. No Resy Notify. No paying more than I would have on Dorsia. Absolutely no waiting in lines. So I went to restaurants where you don’t have to do any of that — old ones. Luger’s and Locanda Verde and King. I got lunch at Yura on Madison and drank wine at Stafili and ate steak frites at Orsay and grabbed chicken salad from Lassen & Hennigs. Even years, and decades, and in one case, a century later, they all still sparkle like new. Restaurants are better once their dining rooms are full of regulars. I did have a great meal at new Babbo, which is not really new, so I think that proves my point.

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Superiority Burger is a perfect restaurant that doesn’t give a fuck about the way you think restaurants are supposed to act. Chef Brooks Headley (what a sexy first name) was a drummer in punk bands; that counterculture informs the creativity, the DIY sensibility, and the confidence that SB has in spades. I enjoyed SB several times when it occupied an East Village space barely larger than a telephone booth — you went, you ordered, you got the hell out of there. It felt fun, zany, and delicious, but the space clearly defined just how much wing spreading there would be.

When it re-opened in its larger space in 2023, I returned and fell in love all over again. Brooks feels like he has inherited the mantle that Gabrielle Hamilton left when she shuttered my beloved Prune. Like Gabrielle, Brooks is whipsmart, of a singular vision, and does not buy the bullshit most restaurant owners and chefs are sold about what you must do to run a viable, popular concern. He shops the market, sure. But he also serves his grilled cheese on Ezekiel bread. Sometimes store-bought is better — fuck your fancypants ways, poser.

There is an anti-consumerist, hippie vein that runs through his restaurant and I find it, quite frankly, exhilarating. The specials are scrawled on a piece of paper and taped to the wall, also adorned with stickers, illustrations on post-it notes, and random ephemera. It all might feel slapdash if the food wasn’t so good, so consistent.

In an era when operators are consumed with slickness — how will it look on Instagram?? — Superiority Burger has what might be the most poorly lit, put-it-on-a-plate-and-take-the-goddman-picture social media energy ever, and I AM HERE FOR IT. The real fans will know it doesn’t matter what it looks like, what matters is how it tastes. It’s always satisfying on a very primal level, despite some of the very fun swings his kitchen takes, and it’s a widely known fact that Brooks makes some of the best desserts in NYC.

Now that the restaurant is a couple of years old (a decade in NYC restaurant years), it has settled into a rhythm. The hypebeasts have moved on, and while it’s still busy, it feels like what it was clearly meant to be: a great neighborhood restaurant. Busy but accessible. And while I don’t live in the neighborhood, or in NYC for that matter, it’s one of the restaurants that remains on my constant rotation when I’m in town.

Kevin Arnovitz | Screenwriter

There’s a genre of Los Angeles restaurant that isn’t really about eating. You know the places: San Vicente Bungalows, the Tower Bar, the Soho Houses, an old-guard spot like the California Club. The menus read like cover letters — all affable proteins with logical accompaniments — and yet nothing on the plate warrants conversation. The food isn’t always bad. It’s just irrelevant.

I found myself in these places more this past year than I was inclined to be, because middle-age produces friendships with people who have zero patience for the jockeying required to snag a competitive reservation at a Restaurant of the Moment, and next to no interest in a jaunt to Alhambra for Bornean cuisine.

Several of my friends prefer the Bungalows or the Tower Bar as a default, not for celebrity-sighting or even exclusivity, but as a standing answer to where we should go.

There’s an easy explanation for some: Stickers dutifully affixed to phone cameras offer Jon Hamm and Jason Bateman the rare public space that functions like private quarters, where nobody’s angling for a selfie, dinner without the psychic overhead. But celeb sightings are pretty rare at these places, which are actually populated by media-class mandarins and upstarts, mingling across generations, not eating so much as occupying. They’re not there for a camera-free experience. They just like the room.

Maybe the appeal is that these places demand nothing. No reservation gymnastics, and no guided tour around the menu’s graduate-level compositions. The courtyard at the Bungalows is all bougainvillea and string lights, indoor-outdoor Los Angeles at its most inviting. The Tower Bar is a deco jewel box where Old Hollywood glamour hasn’t curdled into kitsch, which renders the joyless Caesar Salad and the $58 market fish (a most tragic piscicide) beside the point. The Soho House’s virtues? Maybe the comfort of being pre-vetted into a network of people who like what you like.

The last time I ate at the Bungalows I thought about Robert Altman’s The Player, and the industry lunches at The Ivy, studio execs and talent animating through spinach salads. The restaurant was never the point. The restaurant was the stage.

This is what the clubhouse restaurant offers: the comfort of being inside, the meal as backdrop to the room. Meanwhile, actual restaurants — the places where chefs are trying to create and where margins are impossible and survival unlikely — struggle to stay open. Since I prefer not to dine on forgettable, exorbitantly priced food at a club that would have me as a member, I’m always a guest, one who orders a burger.

| @iamjoonlee

2025 felt like the year the New York slice — specifically the artisan slice — evolved from Charmander to Charmeleon. It wasn’t just about new openings, but the density of them, especially in and around downtown. In late 2024, Chrissy’s opened in Greenpoint after operating a half space in the East Village and the hype around L’Industrie and Mama’s Too did not settle at all. It felt like a tectonic plate shifting underneath the city’s pizza map. Suddenly the Village wasn’t just a place where tourists grabbed Joe’s, but the epicenter of this new wave of sourdough driven slices.

What’s striking is how quickly gravity formed around the alums of these places. L’Industrie alumni are popping up everywhere — Andrea’s in the East Village, Slice Haus down the street from the Manhattan L’Industrie. Fermentation and ultra-hydration have become buzzwords in the local pizza scenes. Ceres, too, feels emblematic of the moment: a place that treats pizza like plated dishes. This all feels downstream of COVID, when people were stuck at home making breads. It’s rejuvenated new life into the city’s pizza scene.

But the flip side to the renaissance: the prices. As much as I love a slice that took 72 hours to ferment topped with some hot honey, I’m still stunned when a piece of pizza creeps up past $7 or $8 and a whole pie is more than $40. It’s made me appreciate the institutions a lot more. John’s of Bleecker feels increasingly vital and a reminder that excellence doesn’t need to announce itself with a premium. I love that getting a slice at Scarr’s doesn’t require standing in a 45-minute line anymore. The new Dumbo L&B Spumoni Garden makes the best Sicilian slice in the city more accessible to folks who don’t have a car. On the other end of the spectrum, seeing Di Fara essentially franchised onto Wonder — and the dip in quality when ordering from the ghost kitchen — was a real bummer.

I’m still choosing to be optimistic. New York is once again a place where the slice isn’t stagnant. It’s fun. It’s competitive. It’s evolving. And even with the price creep, I’ll take the wave of ambition over the complacency that defined the scene a few years ago. And yet, I still find myself yearning for a good New Haven slice every single week.

Phoebe Ng | Hospitality brand strategist

My most memorable meals in NYC and LA this year were at places that had some age on them. New can be cool and fun — I professionally play a small role in facilitating their lore — but there’s something deeply fortifying about relinquishing yourself to a place that has truly lived. My husband was diagnosed with testicular cancer this summer. The days leading up to his surgery were unimaginable. Usually, restaurants are our escape. But the idea of going to a place that could still be in flux, when we too were standing on such unstable ground, felt wrong. So we chose to dine at places that have stood the test of time: Grand Central Oyster Bar (1913), ABC Kitchen (2010), Balthazar (1997). These tenured grounds offer different things to different people; regardless of the moment, they know who they are. In Los Angeles a couple weeks after Chase got the all-clear from his doctors, I sipped a lychee martini while watching Suzanne Tracht dressed in chef whites and aviator frames work the room at Jar (2001). It was fabulous.

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2025 was — fortunately for my wallet and unfortunately for the vibe — my year of being “over restaurants.” Despite living between NY and LA, arguably two of the most coveted dining destinations, this year I became physically and spiritually over-saturated by the small plates and late-night etiquette of dining out. (I prefer to be in bed by 9pm). Pessimism aside, I did fall back in love with the small ritual of going to a restaurant for a “treat” (sweet or savory), or easy, cozy meal (typically more often ordered-in than out).

My favorites are as follows: Doubting Thomas passion fruit pie (Echo Park, LA), Amara Kitchen bison burrito (Highland Park, LA), Beverly Hills Juice Banana Manna Almond Shake add Apple Strawberry Coconut, add turmeric (Beverly Hills, LA). Bricolage chicken pho (Park Slope, NY), Maya Congee chicken ginger soup (Bed Stuy, NY), Myrtle Thai rice ginger soup, add chicken (Clinton Hill, NY … I’ve had a cold if you can’t tell), Roman’s chocolate sorbetto (Fort Greene, NY), Sailor’s french toast and thick-cut bacon (Fort Greene, NY). My one stand out, will leave the house for anytime, meal was at Cove (Tribeca, NY). They had an excellent selection of not-too-sweet N/A bevs (my pref) by Otis. What they’re doing is different and energized and always delicious with great portions in my opinion.

Arden Shore |

People are crying at restaurants. This year, I’ve seen a pad see ew go cold under a proper ugly cry at Night + Market in Venice. Mascara smear during a milestone date at Osteria Mozza on Melrose. Group tears fall over a mezze-loaded table at K’far in Williamsburg. I even saw damp eyes blinking hard amid the fish sauce frenzy at Ha’s on the LES.

When I told a friend I was writing about crying at restaurants, the phone went silent for a moment and then, “This is spooky. I just got home from crying at Gallagher’s.”

Crying in restaurants isn’t new. I’ve done it over the years, and maybe you have too. But this sheer volume feels new and profound. So does crying at a steakhouse bar in Midtown Manhattan.

Maybe it’s that we spend so much of the day sealed inside our screens that by the time we get to a restaurant and slide our devices into bags and pockets, we’re forced to face each other. To bump knees, knock elbows, and catch ourselves in the mirror behind the bar. Even if we live or work among people, we procrastinate our feelings in the churn of scrolling and to-dos. There aren’t many spaces left that are safe from the internet. The table might be the last one. And at the table, there’s nowhere to hide. Unless you’re one of those couples, you have no choice but to talk. Or even harder, you have to think!

So restaurants have become a default venue for real conversations. Breakups, breakthroughs, revelations, repairs, you name it. They’re sacred in a way we don’t discuss enough. Actual human hands cook the food. Actual butts sit in the seats. The whole system depends on physical presence, on strangers existing in close quarters. Maybe that physicality — the clatter of plates, the hum of people, the spicy soup — gives us permission to let it all hang out. I think it’s beautiful.

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I think we can all agree on one thing: 2025 was the year of lamb haneeth. Slow-roasted, bone-in lamb shoulder — a Yemeni speciality — is a delightful, nourishing dish under any circumstances. Many of my haneeth orders this year came from my enduring neighborhood locale, Yemen Cafe, which hits the spot every time. But in the depths of winter, I took the Q train to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, to scope out an upgraded version of the dish I love so dearly. “The haneeth to end all haneeths,” some were saying.

I strolled into Yemenat for a late lunch on a Sunday afternoon with sky-high expectations. And somehow, they were not high enough. Yemenat’s lamb haneeth is special; roasted overnight in a tannour oven, the meat is impossibly tender, rich, and fatty, but with an unmistakable crust. It’s a textural marvel. The lamb is served over a plate of fluffy, aromatic Hadrami rice, along with a stack of freshly baked nigella seed-coated Rashoosh bread. Take a pinch of Rashoosh, a pile of lamb, and a liberal scoop of tomato-feta sauce, and you’ll be on your way to a transcendent bite.

I liked Yemenat’s haneeth so much that I rode a CitiBike 5.2 miles south down 5th Ave to eat it again this summer. It’s easy to get caught in the NYC hype cycles — extremely-limited-quantity burgers; another new French spot with beautiful sconces and an $78 half-chicken; a winding line to eat an indulgent-looking sandwich prepared by a Tik-Tok star, a movie-star, or a Tik-Tok star-turned movie star — but ultimately, my favorite dish (and favorite meal) this year came from a humble, yet impressively proficient Yemeni spot in Bay Ridge.

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I believe everyone has one restaurant in New York City that is coated in nostalgia. An institution that almost serves as a beacon as to why they moved there in the first place. Please let me be a bit cliché. (I did just move back home to LA after a stereotypical three year stint in the city.) This place for me? The Odeon. Forever and always.

I was eighteen the first time I dined here. New to the east coast, a college classmate invited me to her Thanksgiving. We stayed with her fancy aunt in her fancy three-story Tribeca apartment and she took us to a fancy restaurant around the corner. I don’t remember what I ate. I do vaguely remember the servers gave us champagne without carding. But what lingered was the energy of the dining room. White clothed tables so close you’re brushing elbows and harmonizing conversations with the patron next to you. The crowd oscillating between “wanting to be seen but also, very much, not to be.” This felt like New York City. Red neon painted the street as we stepped back into the cold. All I knew, one day I will live here.

Fast forward over 10 years later, I unexpectedly found myself finally residing in NYC. As a single woman in her thirties, dining alone is one of my ultimate hobbies. I love sitting at the bar. I love wearing a cute outfit. I love writing in my journal with a drink next to me. (I don’t care about the potential of being perceived performative.) And The Odeon became one of my reliable spots. Dirty gin martini. Burger and fries. Maybe some flirting. Maybe a story from a neighborhood regular. The bartenders are always attentive and chatty, especially anytime I was solo. It is a classic for a reason! It’s OK to love places that everyone does!

This past April, the night before I moved out of my tiny studio, I requested dinner here. My Sicilian neighbor drove us on his motorcycle. Carmine down to Varick to Broadway. We decided on a table outside which I had never done before. It was an unseasonably warm evening. Dirty martini. Burger and fries. Typical people watching. And yapping with the servers. The red neon sign still persistently shining. And once again, I was struck with the feeling: This is New York City. We ended the meal with a giant fudge sundae. Got on the bike and drove back to the West Village. This was one of my most memorable meals of 2025 and the perfect toast to my departure.

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The best part of New York dining is a sense of discovery we are constantly at risk of losing. This year’s highlights rested in the spots and experiences that made me need to get to the source. An off-menu glass of a Cuvee Weiss so good, I had to ask the waiter to bring the bottle back to the table so I could find it again later (2022 Dominik Held, FYI). A dessert spoon so perfectly round at Cove I take a picture of just my plate set up to remember them by. Espresso cups at Bridges that, with the link from their GM, now sit under my Breville. Butter so exceptional and plain at The Four Horsemen I have to ask my brother what brand they bring in (it’s Rodolphe, of course).

This year has been one of indulgence, of leaning into the sense of magic that comes from restaurants when all the facts aren’t predisposed, written out for you and shared digitally before you’ve even passed the threshold. The magic of the restaurant is back in its ability to create a sense of sleight of hand, some magic that creates nothing more than a curiosity to peek behind the curtain. Who did this wine list? Are these cups imported? Can I take the butter home? I want banchan with pickled vegetables I can’t discern and a bathroom candle I’ve never seen before. Mystery is so back.

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The greatest neighbor I’ve ever had in my life finally opened up her first restaurant and it’s a complete breath of fresh air. Back in 2021, when I picked up the keys for my new spot in Echo Park, I was shocked to see a big day party in my neighbor’s garage. People were drinking wine, eating Venezuelan hot dogs, and everyone was raving about this Passionfruit lime pie. I was immediately introduced to my future neighbor Karla, who graciously handed me a hot dog and pie without even realizing we were going to be living next to each other. Since then, I’ve been fortunate enough to see the rise of Chainsaw first hand. I helped taste test recipes (even though my unqualified opinion liked everything), I helped store pies in my freezer, and got free invites to every single garage pop up she hosted. I got to meet a whole new community of chefs and artists through her events, and witnessed restaurants like Little Fish and Bridgetown Roti go from the garage to their own brick and mortar. There was something special not only about the food and desserts Karla was making, but also this bubbling ecosystem and cult-like following she grew organically. Some of my favorite meals of all time happened in the backyard and it’s hard to beat those memories.

But flash forward to today, where Chainsaw is finally out of the garage and experiencing a new version of itself built on the hard work, love, and passion that made those events so iconic. As Karla describes, the new spot is a hybrid cafe slash bakery slash restaurant serving a rotating menu of delicious savory foods. At the grand opening, I witnessed 200+ people crowd the block of Melrose Hill to celebrate the moment. It felt like a bigger version of the garage parties with people buying tickets to purchase empanadas, arepas, fried pork milanese, and a perfect tres leches cake. I couldn’t help but feel like it was a full circle moment from the day I first got my keys — except this wasn’t the end of an era but the start of a brand new one. The restaurant felt like a neighbor inviting you over to try what they’ve been cooking up, and if my personal experience was any indication, you’re going to love every second of it.

Yasmine Moazami | Reddit

Getting a reservation in New York City has become the culinary equivalent of getting into an Ivy League University — a high-stakes competition where only the most strategic and privileged survive.

Just like college admissions, there are three ways to hack the system. The first is the model applicant: you’re disciplined, you’ve done your research, and you know exactly when the reservations open up. You set your alarm for midnight, like it’s an early decision deadline, ready to click “reserve” the moment slots open up, only to learn the harsh truth that the slots don’t open up for those who followed the rules. Being a 4.0 GPA student doesn’t guarantee admission.

That’s where the second strategy comes in: gaming the system. Students hire SAT tutors and college guidance counselors to help them hack the system. People are deploying bots like they’re running a cybersecurity company to secure a 7:30 PM dinner reservation; there are even some companies that have monetized on the madness. Others rely on charm and connections; befriending a restaurant manager becomes the equivalent of having a legacy parent or an influential recommendation letter. Your goal is to get on the fake “text me anytime” list.

Then there’s the third path, reserved for the financially blessed (or those who like to accrue debt): buying your way in. Exclusive social clubs promise premier dining partnerships the way admission teams guarantee college spots. Pay the membership and suddenly you never have to see the words “no reservations available” ever again. It’s the fundraising wing of the admission office, just repacked for elite foodies.

These restaurants have stopped serving meals and have begun serving taste. Everything is a bite, a moment, and a pretend shared experience. We’re paying $40 for a shrimp cocktail to only receive a shrimp per person, which we must delicately split and parcel out like we’re negotiating the peace treaty. We leave $200 poorer, and with growling stomachs — unless you’re on Ozempic, which, in this case, congratulations, the system was designed for you.

The truth is, we’re tired. Just like students who simply want to learn without performing for admission committees, New Yorkers just want to eat. We want to sit with our friends, have nice conversations over satisfying food, without needing the Rick Singer of reservations to help feed our children and us.

We’re going back to the basics. We’re throwing in our napkins. We’re saying goodbye to the game of reservation hunger games. Bring back meals, dinners where everyone orders their own food, just like you would if you were in Italy.

If I’m spending hours securing a reservation like I’m applying to Harvard, then feed me like a champion if you’re going to charge me like one.

David Cho | Postcard

Too many people are too reliant on rating aggregation systems (think Yelp, Rotten Tomatoes, etc.) and for subjective things like food and art that is just dumb as hell.2

I’m going to try to go through this quickly:

• Everyone is just different. There are so many people whose opinions I trust with great taste with preferences and standards extremely different than mine (and with each other). Which is why averaging their opinions of how good something is on a 1-to-5 or 1-to-10 ranking is just insane to me. Not to mention, what “3.5” means to everyone is just different!

• Even the best restaurants are just extremely inconsistent, not even the food or service, but just how the diner experiences the meal. Who else is in the room? What did they have for lunch? How did they sleep the night before? All of these things play a real part in how a person feels about their 90 minutes in a restaurant! And so, again, how are you somehow averaging all of these completely random numbers together and saying that anything can be gleaned from that? Don’t even get me started on ratings that also ignore seasonality and are just … all time???

• I have a very rudimentary knowledge of data sciences, but I do know that the working premise is that the more data you have, the signals will eventually outweigh the noise, but I just think that’s way less relevant when it comes to art/subjective and personal experiences. Plus, if the internet has taught us anything, people en masse just have shit taste. You know what the most popular TV shows in (both in the US and THE WORLD) were in 2010? CSI, Big Bang Theory, and Two and a Half Men.

Which really drives home the other main point, a point that goes against everything that the internet has unfortunately led us to believe: there is no such thing as the best restaurant.

Even if a Substack writer tries to come up with an elaborate, multi-faceted scoring system that ends up with Cervo’s (a very good restaurant!) being the best restaurant in New York or LA, it’s just not going to be true to everyone!

There are thousands of pieces of content being made every day, every second, to tell you that “this hidden gem is the best whatever you’ve ever had”, and while it may be that for some people, there’s a ton of folks for whom that’s not true at all — and that is all ok! It’s totally ok for things to be just good or great! Many things are! Life is beautiful! (Roberto Begnini voice).

And, really, the main reason I bring this up is because I think all of this is just a real net negative for restaurants (and art).

I think it’s bad(/sad) when a perfectly good restaurant is hyped up to be “THE BEST” (by ratings, by the internet, by whatever) and it doesn’t live up to those extremely unrealistic — and probably impossible(!) — expectations, resulting in a disappointing experience for the diner. Let things be good/great! Or even just your favorite!

So, yeah, go everywhere! Try things! Listen to your friends (or Substackers you trust), and just keep an open mind and enjoy the many good and great restaurants!

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I’ve never seen more head shakes in a professional kitchen than during a very specific kind of line cook boast. During a moderately busy dinner service, our sauté cook was down in the walk-in refreshing ingredients. A ticket came in for an order-fire steak frites, and a new hire hopped over from the fryer to execute it. This is good etiquette. Don’t let your teammates fail.

Everything for the pickup came together perfectly. A great sear, baste and rest on the steak. Fries ready in the window. Side salads arriving at just the right time. Gorgeous plating. A picturesque medium rare. And then the sauté chef hopped back on their station, orchestrating a seamless transition for this new cook back over to the fryer, where they bragged intermittently about the beauty of their successful celeb shot.

“I should’ve snapped a pic.”

Something about it felt off to me. Our sous chef muttered under his breath, “That’s not how we do things.”

Breaking down the kitchen after service, he went deeper. Here’s the gist: there’s nothing impressive about nailing a single dish once under perfect conditions. Anyone can do that. The best cooks can work under the worst conditions, with whatever ingredients they’ve got, under any time or labor constraints, and do it with remarkable consistency. More than anything, they can roll with the flood of bullshit that comes from the daily grind in a kitchen. Great cooks know how to adjust.

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That stuck with me. I think about it every Thanksgiving. I love a lot of the food writing here on Substack, but when it comes to cooking advice and recipes, I find there are two dominant approaches to mistakes.

• The first is an embrace of a no-fail method. Easy, approachable, you-can’t-screw-this-up guides — the third prong in the modern cookbook bestseller list alongside influencers and dieters.

• The second is a call to take dinner less seriously. A prompt that even if everything goes horribly wrong, you can order Chinese or pizza. The stakes are never as high as you aggrandize in your head. I mostly agree with this.

But much like in unproductive corporate environments, there are not a lot of blunt retros of fuck-ups in food writing. And that’s often where cooks actually learn and improve. What mistakes did you make for the first time? What were your repeat mistakes? Why? Was there a way to implement a fix on the fly? Should you have conceded sooner? What do you need to try again until you get it right?

I like getting into this stuff, so I kept a log of all the new and repeated mistakes I made during my Thanksgiving cook of this prep list:

My mistakes

• I always think I’m going to begin cooking sooner than I actually do. I planned to be organized and ready to attack my prep list by noon on Wednesday. Actual start time: 5pm. I still found myself with an empty block from 2:30-4pm on Thanksgiving to rest a bit, but that’s after waking up at 6am to bake. Factor in a few hours for external life factors, especially when family is in town.

• I’m in a battle to the death with my HomePod speakers, trying to get them to sync across rooms. A new cooking and hosting playlist was all set, but then these bad boys just collapsed on me on Thursday. Only one room had music. Brutal. Sort out your tech issues early.

• I’m at my most control-freaky on days like Thanksgiving, refusing help even when I’m drowning. Many guests often have a better time if they’re even somewhat involved. In moments of frustration, I’ll concede cheese grating or potato peeling. The meal isn’t actually any better or more satisfying if I do every task myself. Next year, perhaps I’ll tag some extra hands into the prep list.

• The mashed potatoes had a few bite-sized potato chunks in them. They were still cooked through and edible. But the oversight was unintentional — a byproduct of multiple steps coming together at once and me getting sick of toying with the electric mixer.

• When knocking out a 12-dish menu, my back-of-house instincts overtake my front-of-house sense. I planned to have a charcuterie platter ready when guests arrived — always have food out when people come through the door — and then use the last arrival as the fire time for warming par-cooked sides and executing proteins. People mostly mingled around the meats and cheeses without diving in fully, and then politely ignored calls to start eating the rest of the spread as I took a few minutes to finish up the dover sole and pork chops.

• This is a level of polite deference I can understand. It’s not all that pleasant to indulge while someone is still working across the range. An occasion also warrants a real toast, eye contact, some acknowledgement of the connections and love in the room. Two better ways to facilitate that: A considered, sit-down appetizer moment where the cooks actually pull themselves away from the kitchen before going to plate the final courses. And encouraging a close-friend-as-plant to unabashedly dive into serving themselves so others follow.

• Big holiday meals are the most tempting times to overcrowd a pan. I tried to fit five large pork chops across two medium-sized searing surfaces. The pan with two chops cooked well, but the trio trailed behind, not generating enough heat across a limited surface area. I intervened, pulled the third pork chop off the pan with its partial sear, and set it aside in case it was needed later. It became wonderful leftovers.

• Smart, considering tempering is your friend in these moments, and so is knowing your blind spots. I instinctually temper and season any large-format proteins. Those pork chops got a 48-hour dry brine and came out of the fridge with enough time to only need a hard sear on each side. But I never, ever remember to bring enough butter to room temperature. Even though I take pride in my more minimal prep lists, next time I’m working in reminders about what needs tempering and when.

• I don’t do turkey on Thanksgiving, which I feel good about. But if you’re skipping the bird and the carving, still make the mains a moment. This is a special occasion. Treat it as such. I liked the way I plated the sole and the chops across large platters, but they were merely added to the kitchen island spread, and I encouraged folks to handle the bones of the sole themselves. (I don’t like to baby guests). Making the entrées more of a showstopper and serving the first pass around the table enhances the enjoyment.

• People go crazy for pasta. I almost cut the baked rigatoni, but I’m relieved I kept it on the menu. It’s so easy to par-bake earlier in the day and then finish with no effort. And it’s a favorite post-dessert, late-night snack.

• Speaking of which: If people are still hanging around the table hours after dessert, re-plate some of the savory food, especially the dairy and the carbs. It’s a hit.

• I’m so bad at plating desserts. This year I made three recipes: pumpkin pie, roasted apples, and a pecan tart. Flavors were all there. And they looked … fine. But I rushed through fine-tuning the crusts and didn’t fully consider serving vessels. Flavor matters plenty with dessert, of course, but a wow moment when it hits the table dramatically amplifies the experience. I’ll map this out better next time. (Clare is a genius. Let her take the wheel).

• Homemade whipped cream is a banger. Last year, I forced myself to whip by hand like a masochist. It put me in an awful mood for an hour. This year, I used a stand mixer. No one knew the difference. Cut the right corners.

• Dear god, clean as you go. Or assign different folks to work the sink and dishwasher for you. Don’t make your guests eye a dirty kitchen while they eat.

And then there’s the thing I always forget while wrapped up in my holiday-infused cooking nonsense.

On Wednesday, I was gearing up for my big prep push. The fridge was in that weird, liminal state where 95% of the food was specifically allocated for the Thanksgiving meal. But I could sense people were milling around the kitchen looking for something to eat.

Over the weekend, I had made a batch of garlic confit to flavor-boost a yogurt sauce for a Friendsgiving. The oil and potatoes included in the confit were still sitting in a container, so I let them reheat in the oven before tossing in a McCall’s compound butter and finishing with Maldon plus a squeeze of lemon. The response was rapturous.

“Why don’t you just do this for the potatoes tomorrow?”

“Wait, how did you make this?”

“Can I have more?”

It was the simplest, quickest and easiest thing I cooked all week. It was also the most beloved. I cook to make the people around me happy. That’s all that matters. Sometimes it’s too easy to let that slip.

I left my job at Substack last week. You can read about why I’m now over at here, here, and here.

I love Substack, and I loved the work. A little more than two years in the weeds with a great team, helping turn a tool to send text via email into a cultural destination. I devoured ’s essay this week on stardom, a perfect use of the platform.

More than anything, I’m grateful for the deep list of talented people I got to work with, many of whom became real friends: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and a bunch more people who genuinely change how culture is shaped today. One reason I dipped to run growth at Every is that watching these writers do their thing inspired me to go build stuff.

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On to business: This weekly food blog shouldn’t change much. Next week I’ll do a deep dive on Thanksgiving cooking — menu planning, prep lists, lessons, mistakes. The following week, a bunch of friends will join me in giving their takes on the year in LA and New York dining. And then we’ve got the big, annual Bangers Only rankings. (I will probably go live less).

Frankly, I like camping out in this little corner of food media too much to give it up. There remains a real dearth of smart, informed, tasteful, honest and entertaining coverage of restaurants, as well as the money, status, personalities and shenanigans that surround this world. Some of the folks I mentioned above do it incredibly well. and Helen Rosner are always essentially reading (and listening). Same for Chris Crowley, Tejal Rao and . How Long Gone is often the best food podcast around. I’m intrigued by what Max Tcheyan is building next. There’s good shit out there, even if the best shit mostly remains in text messages.

We’re past two years of Bangers & Jams. Thank you for subscribing, whether you’re free or paid. If you’re a paid subscriber, you’re the best, seriously. I’m going to keep making this thing as valuable as possible.

If you want to stay at the cutting edge of what’s happening in AI and supercharge whatever kind of work you’re doing with a suite of productivity apps, head over to Every. If you just want hot takes on the best and worst places to eat in New York and LA, stay right here.

Love y’all.

I’m not an instinctually simple cook. I grab for one ingredient too many, I consider what will impress just a hair above what will be satisfying, I put one or two too many things on a dinner party menu. It’s annoying, and it gets in my head.

That’s probably why so many of my favorite bites from the year are stars due to their simplicity. Fewer things on the plate, considered sourcing, cooked perfectly or not cooked at all, rarely a buzz-worthy combination that travels far on a vertical scroll. We love what we lack the most.

Read on for my top 100 restaurant dishes in 2025. The only rule I followed in making this list was that there are no repeats from last year’s edition. Otherwise, anything goes. The top 10 is open for everyone, and the other 90 are for paid subscribers only.

Top 100 restaurant dishes

1. Squid, cucumbers & yuzu kosho | Baby Bistro | LA

   Last year, I just knew the confit oyster from Penny had to be No. 1. It was a knockout on first bite that never relented on repeat visits. A perfect blend of restraint, creativity, peak ingredient and texture. For the second year in a row, there was no real competition.
   
   This is the dish that made me fall in love with Baby Bistro. It became infamous in my texts, developing its own whisper campaign. Miles Thompson takes segments of aged squid and pairs them with matching smashed cucumbers, dressing both in a bright combo of citrus, soy and Japanese spice. You alternate between spurts of “wow” and “what the fuck” as the bowl disappears sooner than you’d like.
   
   More of Miles’ dishes show up on this list. He’ll certainly have new creations here next year, too. But for now this is the one, the little slice of brilliance that transcends into something else. He takes a known nigiri reference point and lets weird, instinctual interpretation take over. There’s a wine description on the Baby Bistro menu right now for a French cab that reads “quiet voice with quite a lot to say.” That’s Miles on a plate, here and everywhere.

2. Sweet shrimp sashimi | Anjumaeul | Seoul

   

   In the morning, these shrimp travel from the sea between Korea and Japan to an unassuming shop on a Seoul side street. They’re sweet, yes, but they’re also pristine. You taste the precious few hours from departure to arrival.
   
   The amount of shrimp on the plate feel egregious when it lands. The idea of ever eating any other shrimp feels even more ludicrous minutes later.

3. Dad’s sardines | Bar Kabawa | NYC

   Chef Paul Carmichael pulls from one his father’s reliable post-work snack growing up to deliver this showstopper. On the plate there are tinned sardines, avocado, shallots, oil and a pepper sauce Carmichael has been messing with for years. Build up a bite on a cracker and follow it with a boozy daiquiri. Order a second round of each. Leave the world behind.

4. Duck and cherries | Le Veau d’Or | NYC

   Here’s a nightmare scenario multiple poor diners have recounted to me. They finally get into Le Veau d’Or. It’s sexy and dark and fun. The cocktails are flowing, the first course is a delight, and then the entrees come. They devour a beautiful lobster or chicken or lamb. And they watch as someone else takes down this impeccably spiced duck solo. Sucker shit.
   
   My best LVD meal came over the summer, when my guy announced to the table you don’t turn French food like this into a small plates, sharing experience. I said, respectfully, no.
   
   There’s this moment that happens with the right group at LVD. You’re passing big plates of mains around a four top that barely holds all of them on one table. The third person to receive the duck leaves just enough for the final turn, an act of grace when selfish gluttony might otherwise be forgiven. Palms exchange now-dilapidated proteins like hand-me-down Christmas gifts, criss-crossing friends and dates, new and old, indulging in one of New York’s greatest displays of love.

5. Iceberg + mimolette | Penny | NYC

   The best dish at the city’s premier seafood counter starts with a wedge of iceberg face up on a plate. Next comes thick squiggles of a mustard dressing that leans way closer to balance than it does a flavor bomb. It needs to, because a true mountain of mimolette cheese is coming next.
   
   This is the salad of my dreams. Yes, there’s something to be said for Jody Williams’ bright, fresh, herby acidity or the secret, layered complexity of Ignacio Mattos. I’m here for all of that. But Joshua Pinsky had a burst of “fuck it” on this one that’s admirable. Lettuce. Dressing. Cheese. When it’s done this well, just let it shine.

6. Beef noodles | Kato | LA

   

   Okay, I’m going to try to recall what I know about this dish. Jon Yao takes inspiration from the niu rou mian he grew up eating in the San Gabriel Valley, a Taiwanese beef noodle soup that screams comfort. He incorporates American wagyu beef cheek from a New Mexican cow that I’ve been assured is quite special. I don’t know. By the time this bowl arrives at the Kato bar, I’m at least three drinks deep and merely nodding along to the spiel. This dish inspires a “let me at it” sensation. They’re the country’s best version of takeout noodles, elevated by a singular Los Angeles talent.

7. Bansang | Baroo | LA

   

   The entree course of Baroo’s vegetarian tasting menu is Kwang Uh’s time to cook. Yes, your carnivorous dining companion will be treated to a luscious pork chop or beef short rib. Steal a bite if you can. But you’ve made the right choice. On one visit, the bansang platter read: dried radish leaf soup, baby corn, artichoke mushroom, burdock perilla pancake, dooboojang.

   
   This is head-spinning stuff. Each small dish is served in baroo, the titular Buddhist bowls behind this LA gem. Monks dispel material possessions, yet they’re allowed baroo as a vessel for meals.
   
   I don’t find food to be a spiritual experience. Inspiring, invigorating, communal, emotional, yes, but I draw the line somewhere. I left a March birthday dinner at Baroo among the happiest I’d been all year. Plastered, I ignored the card they slipped me on the way out. The next morning, I finally opened it. The header read, “Yang Earth Yin Water” and featured a translation of a Korean poem:
   
   The will of earth is to maintain balance among the elements
   The nature of water is to sprout life
   
   Like soil with ample waters, One can grow
   Something immense from something small
   
   And, you know, fuck. Fine. They got me.

8. Lady Edison ham with Asian pear | Lei | NYC

   Once a year I eat something and think, “Oh, yeah, I’m blatantly stealing this.” This salty as hell cured ham is paired with sweet, crunchy Asian pear. Does the kitchen do anything else before sending it you? Do they need to? I didn’t ask or think about it. This is charcuterie at its finest, from a delicate little corner in Chinatown and now on my table at home.

9. Bangers & mash | Wilde’s | LA

   Wilde’s could do excellent business on B+ food given its A+ vibe in what has turned out to be an irrationally ravenous Los Feliz location for this kind of crowd pleaser. Natasha Price isn’t bothering with that. This sausage. My god. Natasha cranks up the sweetness just to the point of you wondering, like, is it too much? It’s not. The complementary notes of funk and umami round out what has quickly settled into drop everything, destination dining.

10. Steak tartare | Here’s Looking At You | LA

    Here’s Looking At You was a fighter. It survived, over and over again, until it was finally time. On a dreary night in June, I stopped in for my final HLAY meal. It’s a rare, disorienting experience, knowing you’re eating dishes for the last time. I’d ordered this steak tartare with regularity for nearly a decade. It was a constant as I decided to move to LA, then leave, then return. It was the truest example of a global, small plates approach that went on to proliferate across America. You’d catch little nods, both knowing and subconscious, at Jonathan Whitener’s masterpiece in Austin and Portland and Atlanta. But then you’d come back to this weird dining room in Koreatown and find that, yeah, this is it.
    
    Midway through that June meal, the tartare hit the table, alongside the tomato bagna cauda classic. Owner Lien Ta stopped by to check in and I choked up. I couldn’t find any of the right words. It’s just food, right? It’s just a space, it’s just another passed app. There are millions of these. That’s what I told myself, trying to shake out of it while Lien put her hand on my shoulder. Because no, in brief moments when a few wild, crazy, creative people push hard enough on their vision because they can’t imagine doing anything else, this is my favorite thing in the world.
    
    The words hit me eventually. It was all simpler than my brain would let me believe. I realized I just needed to say thank you.

11. Silken tofu salad | Flavourtown | Seoul
    

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I enjoyed the pilot enough to crack my standard aversion to new scripted television. But I left it convinced that if this show really wants to use driving culture to portray how inconsequentially cumbersome and preternaturally self-indulgent Silver Lake’s surrounding area can get, then there’s only one spot to location scout:

This is where Stadium Way meets Academy Road in Echo Park, sandwiching Dodger Stadium and Elysian Park. If you venture these streets with any frequency, you know exactly where this is headed. Few things disturb LA’s chill like bringing up the absurdity of navigating this space during both peak and random hours.

The trouble hits if you’re trying to go south bound on Stadium Way and turn right onto Academy Road into Echo Park. This is my morning commute to get a drink at Canyon Coffee. It’s technically a local-traffic-only area. Often, cars will pile up 50 deep in the far right lane of Stadium Way waiting to make the turn:

They saunter along slowly, nudging their way toward what may or may not be a yield to the cars coming from an adjacent stop sign, before hitting a short decline and another four-way intersection right here:

Traffic headaches are part of everyday Los Angeles life. A DJ quickly became the most viral celebrity in town earlier this year for torching the city planning on IG. You pick a neighborhood in this city by accepting what five-mile radius is worth never having to leave. But this little hellscape is about as wild as it gets, and here’s where it becomes nuts.

This intersection below where the arrows all meet is only a three-way stop. A southbound car on Stadium Way should theoretically be able to right turn down the ramp — maybe yielding to a westbound car on Academy that just hit a stop sign, the only reason for any slowdown — and continue on unabated.

Plus, there are no other traffic backups in sight. If you’re coming in from any other direction, you can pass through unencumbered by bullshit.

Of course, that’s not how it works. About half of the westbound cars treat the intersection as a four-way stop, and the others do a cautious, jerky jaunt, all of which leads to that southbound Stadium Way crush. A rare aggressive driver coming from one of the other three directions will refuse to concede the right of way, knowing that if they book it into the intersection everyone else will just wait.

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I don’t have much patience for lines or inefficiency. There’s no world in which I would sit behind 50 cars groundhogging one mile per hour. So I’ve embraced a hack that started as a whisper and has spiraled out of control in its adoption. Since so few cars are coming westbound on Academy and the right two lanes remain wide open on Stadium, you can bypass the traffic, hit a left at this stop sign, drive just far enough up Academy to avoid suspicion, hook a questionable U-turn, and then cut the line by waiting out a single beat back at that very same stop sign.

Last Thursday, I went to make this now-instinctual maneuver and trailed 15 other cars doing the same thing. A parade of cheats illegally U-turning their way into saving 10-20 minutes. Later that night, I met a fellow Echo Park resident at a party and quickly dove into intersection chat. She said my shenanigans warranted bad karma. But then she added, “Why don’t you just keep going and turn right? That’s what I do.”

If she were trying to get to Canyon, she’d skip the U-Turn and take Boylston to Scott:

Better for karma, sure, but to me it’s a half-measure.

I love Los Angeles so much. I don’t want anyone to try to “fix” this intersection, especially not the city, though I do need people to drive when they have the right of way. That would be a good start.

If I show up next week and there’s a traffic cop waving folks down, I’ll turn around and try to become a Quat guy. The incongruity of a single lane being backed up while every other one flows steadily is head-scratching, but that’s LA. New York has higher highs and way more real obstacles to reaching them. LA is easy. And when it doesn’t work, when the selfish, kind of broken and lazy side comes out, you can either hack your way out of it or sit there and let it happen to you. Either one is fine.

Last thing: If you missed my Substack Live on Wednesday with talking rom-coms and his new movie 31 Candles, you can catch a replay here:

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