Some of the day-to-day experience took an inevitable bend toward the banality of life in any other major city. On colder days, there were fewer runners. The fashion was consistently pretty good, though not impeccable. But I never felt the magic of Oslo subside. I’m glad I took my time.

I spent most of August there, which spurred plenty of “Why Norway?” questions from friends. The real answer was instinct. The same way I make most big decisions. It just kind of felt right. But for those who required specifics, I divulged:

• With a one-month break in between jobs, I wanted something new but easy. Preferably English-speaking or at least English accommodating.

• I didn’t have the energy for a food mecca with 25 restaurants I’d feel obligated to hit before leaving. Something about the calendar-circling reservation just … wasn’t attractive, and still isn’t. But I did want a place that allowed for some great food discoveries, which Oslo certainly delivered on.

• Access to and prioritization of good seafood also help.

• A little nature, but not too much. Warm-ish.

• And, yes, I’m a 33-year-old bicoastal man who loves the work of Joachim Trier, so that swayed me some.

I don’t know if I’d recommend Oslo for a five-day trip, at least not to everyone. It’s quite quiet and small. I’d go on long jogs from one end of the city to the other. There seemed to be one great version of everything — pizza, ramen, yoga — where you’d run into the same set of locals. Conversations with strangers seemed to always include:

• A kind of self-flagellation: “You’re American? And you’re here for a month? … Why?”

• “Just know it’s not always like this.” Referencing the idyllic August weather. Followed by: “We’re also not usually this happy and outgoing.”

• “Please let me send you my list of recs so you have a great time.”

But I loved it. In New York for the past week, I’ve found myself called over and over again to meals that leave me feeling good. The booking is easy, the food isn’t too heavy, the service has all the right touches. After a few days in Norway, experiences and entire days that made me feel good became something of a default. So if you feel called, somehow end up there, or are seeking a similar leisurely intermediary escape, here’s my hit list, following the standard Bangers & Jams City Guide structure. And here’s what I was listening to:

Bangers

• Palace Grill: My last meal of the trip, and I couldn’t have picked a better spot. Immediately joins my canon of perfect restaurants. They do one seating at 6:30 p.m., with a set menu of about 10 courses in a high-ceilinged but tight room. One of the courses is a slushie. It’s all vaguely Nordic. The wine pairing is essential. It’s not so much a course-by-course pairing as a never-ending parade of stunning glasses that keep getting topped off. They admit to being a little too rambunctious for the Michelin ethos, and happily don’t have a star, which is kind of my ideal tasting menu. I went to so many places I loved in Norway, but this is the one where I’d say, yeah, it’s a destination.

• The entire Credo experience: The other thing that comes really close to destination-worthy is Heidi Bjerkan’s whole operation inside the National Library. There’s a traditional tasting menu, an elevated snack bar, a rotisserie chicken and outdoor veranda thing, a cafeteria and bakery. There’s a precision but boldness all across this little compound. You can sense attempts at this approach popping up across America: an amazing restaurant group doing all kinds of concepts inside a single museum or hotel. But it either becomes unsustainable to run or the quality slips. Every visit to any part of Credo made me think these people could not have a better sense of what they’re doing.

• Solsiden: All I ever really want to eat is fresh seafood prepared well. And while this place technically has a menu, the thing to do is the $150-per-person raw bar tower of whatever’s good that day. The big pile of shrimp comes with free refills. It’s a seasonal spot in a converted warehouse by the water and feels celebratory even if you didn’t have anything specific to celebrate.

• Lorry: Kind of like a Norwegian Odeon. I always find myself at this kind of place, one that’s been around a long time and feels like a forever meeting point. Good for a light lunch or a bunch of fried food at 11 p.m.

• This whole city fucking loves aioli. Oh my god. It’s everywhere. Seafood, vegetables, dessert … they get me.

• Eff Eff Oyster & Wine Bar: I have such a high bar for a good oyster bar and this place more than cleared it.

• The Sommerro Hotel for the gym and rooftop sauna.

• Emanuel Vigeland Museum: This dark, barrel-vaulted mausoleum is my favorite fucked-up surprise museum experience … maybe ever?

• The Little Pickle’s Sunday roast, a wonderful British surprise on a dreary day before catching Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

• OSLOSLO: I’m so rarely impressed by a natural wine and small plates set menu with a narrative and theme like this … but man, these dudes can cook. Their carrot gnocchi was my favorite bite all month.

• Duken Bar & Pizza: Just stellar pizza and great vibes. I only went once but craved it over and over.

• Ekebergrestauranten: I posted this on IG and it couldn’t be more true. Hang outside at the bar and enjoy the view above the city.

Jams

• Rikkes Hage: Another perfect restaurant. These former fine-dining chefs running a little outdoor beer garden with a few rotating dishes give no fucks at all yet care about all the right things. They close randomly. They shrug at most questions. And they’re incredibly charming while serving nothing but hits.

• The Well: A large spa outside Oslo with multiple pools and saunas. Everyone recommended this spot and they were right. (Don’t eat here.)

• Villbrygg: I wasn’t drinking for most of this trip and threw back these Norwegian N/A drinks at nearly every dinner. They’re the only great N/A wine out there.

• Dapper, Hunting Lodge, Livid and Solitude Vintage for excellent shopping.

• Café Rouleur Oslo, for a bar to return to over and over.

• Just walking around. Maybe there are other European cities where this is also common, but I was struck by how rarely I saw anyone walking around with headphones in their ears or eyes on their phone. The few times I walked with my face deep in email and music blaring through my AirPods, I felt intrusive and out of place.

• Gutta på Haugen and Fenaknoken: You’ll always catch me in a city’s gourmet grocery stores, and these two were outstanding.

• Sagene Folkebad: So many good sauna options, but this is the one I kept coming back to.

• Klingenberg Kino: The main auditorium is almost exclusively love seats, and there’s a candy bar on your way in. Two details other theaters should copy.

• Becco and Kafeteria August: Neighboring wine-forward spots, and Norway’s answers to where hot, well-dressed people eat and drink well.

• The Twist, more for the architecture than the art.

• Of all the very good coffee options, I’d go with Fuglen.

• RE:FORM and Glød for workouts.

• Gressholmen Kro as part of a fjord day trip.

• Grotto: Kind of like if St. John were Norwegian and 15% less special (non-derogatory).

• Render Burger as an easy to-go order the night before a flight home.

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I called Austin last week to learn more about the agency. He told me, “The thing we’re solving for independent-ish media founders is the feeling of being overwhelmed operationally and then overwhelmed with the question of: ‘What levers can I pull to grow?’ Across subscriptions, brand partnerships, events, and (the thing I’m most excited about) new product launches, like the Feed Me job board and Lenny’s product pass, there’s no one-size-fits-all way to support that. We’re bringing enterprise solutions to the enterprise media businesses of the future.”

Austin, who left his role of Head of Business Development at Substack last year, said that at Substack, he and Catherine were the people responsible for consulting with the creators who made the most money and had the biggest explosions in growth. They also led brand moments through events like the annual New Media Party in D.C.

“Catherine ushered in the independent journalism era in Washington when Substack wasn’t known, helping many of the people you see atop Substack’s politics leaderboards quickly cross seven figures in revenue,” Austin told me. “We are confident we can take these kinds of media empires to the next level, no matter the vertical or platforms they use.”

And I had a blast talking to Julia Alexander of Puck in more depth about the product lab side of the business.

As we enter the agentic era of A.I. aggregation, the wheel is turning yet again. And for the new class of creator-journalists building D.T.C. businesses, basic subscription packages are no longer enough. That’s the thesis proffered by Austin Tedesco and Catherine Valentine, two former Substack executives who are launching their own consultancy called Spur with a dire warning: As A.I. threatens to eat the web, the path forward must include higher-value membership perks beyond dinners or conferences or live tapings—benefits like apps, games, and services that too can be cheaply built with A.I.

When we caught up last week, Tedesco proffered that creators are increasingly going to use A.I. to generate personalized, interactive tools to engage with their archived work. The New York Times is already pursuing a similar capability, with an A.I.-enabled internal archive search tool, as Dylan reported the other week. But there are plenty of adjacent opportunities: think recipes from food creators, or Spotify-style playlists cultivated via mentions by top Substackers …

This is the kind of shift I’ve long thought the industry was ripe for—one in which creators don’t just reimagine how content gets delivered, but also what’s possible for independent media outlets to build in the first place. Now, in theory, small budgets and a lack of engineering experience are no longer constraints on creativity—and even the wildest product ideas no longer need to die at the brainstorming stage. That’s ultimately Tedesco and Valentine’s pitch to clients: “Let us build the tools to think about growth for you in what we think will be the highest-leverage way—not just the way that is generally recommended,” Tedesco said.

You can listen to Julia and Dylan Byers chat about what this means for the creator economy here on The Grill Room (around the 44-minute mark):

We’re just getting rolling, but I’m thrilled by the early projects we’ve started building. If you have an upcoming launch or crazy product idea you want to chat about, hit us up at hello@spur.partners.

My favorite version of this in 2026 happened on a chilly Saturday in April. met me at Demo last minute for drinks before catching Blue Heron, a small Canadian family drama we both knew little about. Ninety minutes later I was wiping away tears throughout director Sophy Romvari’s Q&A at IFC. Biz and I turned the corner from Carmine down to Bedford and settled into Zimmi’s for pasta, pork trotters and our thoughts on what knocked us out in the theater.

Most of my favorite movies from the first eight months of the year have been small miracles like Blue Heron. Intimate, surprising, scrappily budgeted. Few are true Oscar contenders. I’ll be updating the city guides next week for paid subscribers. But for now, as I gear up to spend fall in New York, here’s an NYC-specific movie and dining primer for you in the form of:

• My favorite new films from the year so far

• My top restaurants to hit after a great (or disappointing) watch

• My most anticipated screenings at next month’s New York Film Festival, an annual tradition that I recommend to everyone I know

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Best of 2026 so far

1. Blue Heron | Sophy Romvari

I’ll be pleasantly surprised if anything unseats this at No. 1. Streaming on Criterion.

2. The Invite | Olivia Wilde

I basically feel the opposite about this movie from everything stated in this Vulture review.

3. Fjord | Cristian Mungiu

No one comes out of this story unscathed, in the kind of harsh, probing social commentary I’ll eat up every time.

4. Maddie’s Secret | John Early

Such a wildly ambitious and successful swing. Sometimes when I’m cooking I’ll think to myself, “I just wanted to make my husband dinner, and now I’m in post-production.”

5. The History of Concrete | John Wilson

John Wilson, modern genius.

6. Fatherland | Paweł Pawlikowski

Fucking gorgeous. Sandra Hüller forever.

7. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma | Jane Schoenbrun

At one point in this movie Hannah Einbinder tells Gillian Anderson, “We’re living in the golden age of gummy candy.” Incredible stuff.

8. Miroirs No. 3 | Christian Petzold

I think the entire budget of this movie was spent in 20 minutes on production of The Odyssey, but it’s packed with beauty and complexity.

9. The Odyssey | Christopher Nolan

Would rank higher if they used this playlist.

10. Erupcja | Pete Ohs

Endlessly charming.

11. Everytime | Sandra Wollner

Spooky Austrian Aftersun (non-derogatory).

12. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie | Matt Johnson

This is just not really my kind of humor, but The Hangover bit is one of my favorite scenes all year.

13. The Drama | Kristoffer Borgli

I remain haunted by the idea that anyone in Boston has achieved this level of considered interior design.

14. Project Hail Mary | Phil Lord, Christopher Miller

I enjoyed The Beatles needle drop.

15. Send Help | Sam Raimi

Among the least believable “let’s make this beautiful woman schlubby” attempts I’ve seen. What a ride.

16. I Want Your Sex | Gregg Araki

More movies should be this mean and biting.

17. The Moment | Aidan Zamiri

Kylie Jenner for best supporting actress?

18. Tony | Matt Johnson
19. Paper Tiger | James Gray

Just fine. Won’t think about either much ever again?

20. Man on the Run | Morgan Neville

The best part of this doc is its compelling case for Ram.

21. Reminders of Him | Vanessa Caswill

Turns out I’m an absolute sucker for any Colleen Hoover adaptation. I’m scared of how high Verity will rank here at the end of the year.

22. Voicemails for Isabelle | Leah McKendrick

The best version of Netflix rom-com slop in a while. And a hilarious depiction of modern Austin and SF.

Where to eat and argue after a great movie

Here’s what I’m looking for in a post-movie restaurant: Good lighting, great food — sure — but a place where the food and the space aren’t really an overbearing star of the show, a dim hint of low-key music, and a place you can linger a while.

1. Bridges

2. The Grill

3. Zimmi’s

4. Superiority Burger

5. Borgo

6. Long Island Bar

7. Roman’s

8. Dame

9. King

10. Corner Bar

What I’m most excited to see at NYFF

These are the screenings I’ll be snatching up first:

1. All of a Sudden | Ryûsuke Hamaguchi

2. Club Kid | Jordan Firstman

3. Minotaur | Andrey Zvyagintsev

4. Behemoth! | Tony Gilroy

5. The Man I Love | Ira Sachs

6. The Devils | Ken Russell

7. The Debut | Jesse Eisenberg

8. Once Upon a Time in Harlem | William Greaves and David Greaves

9. South of Tehran | Kleber Mendonça Filho

10. La Gradiva | Marine Atlan

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I love quitting. Whatever contemporary, shame-based stigma that exists against quitting has never made sense to me. I’ll quit a book 15 pages in if I’m not feeling it. I’ll quit a city when it no longer feels like home. And, in a wave of restlessness like the one that hit me in July, I’ll quit a job. (Have you ever experienced the rush of relief when your Slack access gets revoked? It’s modern magic).

I loved my time running growth for Every, where I learned more in nine months than I did in any other stretch of my career. I’ll be able to talk about the new thing soon. I’m excited. But I think most of you are here for food and restaurant stuff rather than my professional circus, and historically this has been the time for an annual check-in on Bangers & Jams. So, here it goes as we pass the three-year mark:

• My favorite things I’ve written from the past year, listed below, generally overlap with what’s been the most popular stuff around here: Personal essays about cooking, hosting and dining out, insidery restaurant stuff, and compilations featuring friends whose opinions I trust. I’ll be leaning more into that. Plus we’re due for another collab with my friend , consistently the most-read things I publish.

• One of my favorite restaurateurs told me recently that a thing he likes about this blog is that I’ll write about things people who love food and restaurants talk about with each other, but don’t find covered in larger outlets. I don’t really enjoy compliments. Yet I found that to be very sweet and a good encapsulation of what I’m going for when this thing is at its best.

• This is an interesting platform on which to discuss AI. I’m fascinated by what’s coming for dining culture, recommendations and the reservation game. We’re in the very earliest stages of it transforming where you eat and how you eat. A few folks from the major labs with good dining taste (they do exist) are subscribers, as are restaurateurs who are thinking about how to use tools like Codex to drive sales. I also know a few who, in an effort to preserve what’s special about the dining experience, see this as a good time to retreat from technology entirely. We’ll get into this more in the next few months.

• We’re due for a big City Guides update in the next month or so. I’m in Norway for the next two weeks, and that’ll go into the collection. Then I’m in New York for all of September and October, bouncing between New York Film Festival screenings and late-night dinners. It’s my favorite time to be in the city, and when I typically find the best stuff to write about it.

If there’s anything you want to see more or less of, reply and let me know. My inbox is much quieter these days. I’m also bringing back last year’s Happy Hour discount sale for one week, dropping the annual price of Bangers & Jams by 80%. If you’re a free subscriber, you can redeem it here:

Get 80% off for 1 year

If you’re a paid subscriber and you’re having any trouble navigating how to take advantage on your current plan, hit me up. I’m happy to handle it in Stripe.

Thanks for being here. I’ll sign off with the best country music playlist you’ll find for enjoying the end of summer:

Some favs from the past year

“Oh, you know The Four Horsemen? They’re our inspiration.”

The chef-owners of this months-old spot had a life-changing meal at Nick Curtola’s perfect little Williamsburg wine bar, and decided to bring their own version back home.

“Does it seem similar?”

A little, yeah. More spacious, certainly. Room for curved wood around every corner. Scanning the tables, it could be Oslo’s answer to where hot people eat well. You see the familiar beats across the menu. A bold, recognizable dish or protein — hamachi, beef tartare, ricotta dumplings — followed by a clever little twist of accompaniments, like lovage, roe, ponzu gelée, pine nut puree. The Wildair- and Four Horsemen-ification of contemporary restaurants has reached its mature phase, both domestically and internationally. Twenty-five years removed from the original Paris bistronomy movement, it’s easy to see and hear identifiers from these two second-wave restaurants across menus and dining rooms. Less a trend, more a default proving ground for the young, ambitious and unconstricted.

I witnessed this in Paris in January at L’Arpaon up in the 18th, a stunning meal that began with a towering bowl of herb-butter clams. They looked familiar, yet tasted unlike any version I’d had before. L’Arpaon banged out vaguely North African flirtations with this now well-known genre. The couple next to me each ordered their own serving of a heavy, buttery, indulgent black pepper paccheri, cleaning their bowls. I don’t think they had sex. The restaurant closed for good a few weeks later.

There’s an inherent appeal and tension inside these children of the very best of the 2015 New York City wine-and-small-plates boom, rooted in how difficult it is to reach and then sustain such impeccable heights. You’re setting yourself up for the trickiest of tightropes. Follow hyper-seasonality. Play off your roots and inspirations. Reach for the familiar and then spin it around your fingers. Comfort and delight and surprise. Make your neighbors feel like it’s their spot but signal to visitors you’re a destination. Charm food media, influencers and tastemakers. Desperately hold onto cooks who are capable of executing such a feat day after day. Strive for grand ambition and then focus on step-by-step precision without ever slipping. Otherwise, it’s just a celery salad, rather than the celery salad. It’s mostly a feat attempted by kids who don’t know any better, before the safety of martinis and fries and pasta come calling.

This kind of teetering is evident on Eldridge over at Bistrot Ha, captured in a recent two-star review from Ligaya Mishan in the Times:

The menu keeps changing, and not just to accommodate what’s in season. [Owners Sadie Mae Burns and Anthony Ha] are stubborn and almost dogmatic in their insistence on the pleasures of improvisation and spontaneity. You sense an antsiness in the kitchen.

And yet: Isn’t boredom — making the same dish over and over — the path to mastery, or at least consistency? Each time I set foot in Bistrot Ha, I never knew quite what to expect. I was by turns charmed, puzzled, disheartened, then charmed again, and slightly wistful for all it could be and almost is.

Burns re-posted the review, responding, in part, with:

If cooking is about exercising the creative, personal and impulsive bits that exist between the two of us, then restaurant ownership is about giving all of these elements their opportunity to shine and about sharing this with our incredible staff. We have a constant desire to perfect, change, innovate, tweak and embrace all sides of what cooking and hosting can be.

We have always combined our personal with what we do at Ha’s (in many ways they are one and the same) and along with our guests who’ve come along for the ride, I think it’s part of what makes the spaces feel special, and above all: alive.

Amen. I like consistency. Sometimes it’s exactly what I need. Knowing just how the brouillade at Frenchette sets or instinctively repeating the same order at Cervo’s. But while traveling, I can’t avoid reaching for the potential in combustible palaces like Ha’s. When it hits, I want the only-here kind of magic that happens in these environments.

We’ll get into the NYT Food star-inflation conversation permeating my off-the-record DMs another time. wrote about it well here. But for now I’ve got some thoughts on travel, recommendations, and AI slop to get into …

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Technology, travel and slop

I ended up at Rodeo through the same methods I always use when traveling somewhere for the first time, which looks like:

• Make a list for the city on Postcard, a (not-sponsored) improvement to incomprehensible Google Maps compilations or Notes app lists.

• Get a general lay of the land by hitting up a few trusted, well-traveled friends and supplementing that with some raw Google searches. Everything from a Vogue list to a Michelin Guide to a random Substack newsletter with 200 subscribers is on the table.

• Start saving places to the Postcard list that pass the digital vibe check, and build it out with related spots that do the same. Instagram’s suggested accounts feature is good for this. Balance getting enough information without tipping over into such deep review readings and tagged IG scrolling to have the experience before you even arrive.

• In general, I’m looking for any post-pandemic restaurant or bar that has a chance to capture that Ha’s energy, established classics (even if it’s just for the room), excuses to hit multiple neighborhoods, some art, a tiny bit of nature, fancy grocery stores, a movie theater, shopping and a place to do yoga/pilates with one of those absurd first-month discounts.

• From there, I’ll book a few dinners if they look truly can’t miss. Otherwise, I’ve got this map-based list to reference while bopping around. I don’t like itineraries. When I land, I’ll go for a long run to get my bearings.

Visiting a new place is one of the quickest ways to encounter slop, a problem that’s always existed but feels exacerbated due to a combination of short-form video feeds prioritizing time-spent metrics, a decline in well-funded and well-gatekept travel journalism, and AI-generated content powered by unlimited volume with minimal friction.

• This platform has new tools for detecting specific kinds of AI writing slop through a partnership with Pangram. I share similar feelings about it to what wrote here: “I’m all for attempts to disclose AI’s role in the process as people get used to this new world … but I predict it will be a moment in time we’ll look back on, not something that endures. AI is just a tool. What matters is how you use it.”

• Slop proliferates when tools are used poorly, whether that tool is Cursor or a big dumb brain. No one has defined slop better than my former boss , who wrote, “Because everyone has access to the same models, and the models are all based on yesterday’s competence, by default the models end up creating work that ranges from ‘a decent start’ to ‘it’s just plain slop.’ Slop is not any one particular mistake. It is not the use of em dashes, or a certain sentence rhythm, or purple accents on a landing page. Slop is visible sameness, repeated ad nauseam. It is what gets produced by default when humans in many different circumstances use the same tool, trained on the same corpus, without thinking too hard. It is what happens when everyone has access to an expert who has the same default tendencies.”

• Slop is easy to spot because it’s boring. I pay for writers who give me some mix of three things: information I don’t already have, perspective I haven’t considered, and entertainment while delivering the first two items. Look at just yesterday on secret Keens chicken tenders as an example. Or what is doing at . Or every missive in . You can’t read their work and perceive any kind of visible sameness built on cheap competence, AI-assisted or not.

• The intention behind these binary, AI-or-not labels is valid, but I’d prefer to dig in a hair deeper, identify if something is boring, and then recognize that I can just mute people. Instagram used to serve me videos from one specific food creator who goes to every predictable New York restaurant, tries the most famous dishes, regurgitates popular reviews and wears bad golf polos. I’d always watch, in judgment, so then I’d see even more, despite not following. Is this creator using AI? I don’t think so. Is it slop? Yes. So I muted, which has been lovely. You aren’t in complete control of your experience online, but you often have more influence than platforms would prefer for you to realize. Substack, thankfully, keeps its pure Following feed sticky if you switch over to it from the discovery-oriented For You default.

If you want a look into the future of slop-filled travel, you can see it in posts like this one on X:

• The last point certainly resonates. I recently had Codex handle every aspect of listing my Los Angeles home on Airbnb, a task for which I simply didn’t have the time, patience or expertise. It was quickly booked while, instead, I went to Silver Springs. AI is amazing for these computer errands. But the best kind of travel is personal. Turning over your vacations to a cheap competence machine leads to a beigening that should incite Agnes Callard to produce a follow up to her excellent Case Against Travel.

• Here’s a practical example: A good friend is about to visit Maine for the first time and asked for my recs. I delivered a shortlist specifically tailored to what I know she likes, and she sent back a Claude-Code-generated itinerary produced by a prompt that directed the model to combine my recs with everything Claude knows about her. One of the first tips was to book a dinner at Fore Street, a fine but forgettable restaurant she’d find dull and stale. It’s also the most recommended restaurant in Portland, so despite the personalized prompt, the model can’t help but nudge a user there. And then nudge every other user there, for the same experience. This is coming for where people eat dinner, as wrote here in , and basically everything else.

Travel, like New Year’s Eve or Las Vegas, is one of the great tests of your ability to know what you like and make it happen. Some friction there is good. Maybe necessary. I’m not above using AI or other kinds of technology to make my life easier. It’s what I’ve dedicated a lot of my career to. I had Codex search Norwegian businesses Girl In Red follows on IG that I should consider checking out so I wouldn’t have to open 200 tabs, and I’d gladly increase my newsletter subscription price for a model to quickly query the , and archives I search manually before a trip.

I’m back on my couch in Sagene after spending a couple hours hunched over the snack bar at Credo. A local man dining solo — “All meals are half-price because my wife is out of town” — gifted me his butter. A young Italian cook explained to me how their gorgeous, old Swedish oven works. I’m still spinning over his cream cheese, strawberry and bay leaf dessert. And after I hit send, I’m going to hit a bar and dance to a Joachim Trier DJ set. I know what I like, and I’m open to liking more than that. It’s a good way to travel.

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These (faux) quarterly dish rankings have been rattling around in my head for weeks, before Jon Yao and Miles Thompson did their best to fuck up the list at the last minute. One of Jon’s creations from the Kato tasting menu appears below, but any of the 10 dishes coming out of his downtown LA kitchen would belong. The throughline I appreciate most in Jon’s food is a love of simple and impeccably cooked seafood, a boredom with texture for the sake of texture, and a respect for culinary influences without ever feeling beholden to their traditions. It makes for a worthwhile, fun splurge.

LA feels good right now. Back? No, not really. But also not all that concerned with being back from whatever pre-pandemic high we get compared to. Everything good here feels intentionally smaller, more intimate, stable. You see it in the new crop of thriving restaurants, and in the communities gathering inside of them.

I like to say that the whole appeal of Los Angeles is that everything is easy and there’s nothing to do. When friends visit, the plans are organized around pilates classes, grocery runs and movie showtimes. It’s a beautiful place, best embraced for exactly that kind beauty. I hope those interlopers from Austin know what they’re doing.

Top 25 dishes

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A simple reason for this is personal competitiveness, a reluctance to accept an inability to work my way into a room. The other: When this kind of thing hits, there’s nothing like it. Maybe you’re witnessing a head chef debuting their food for the first time. Maybe it’s a follow-up effort from a proven superstar group.

At least one piece of the puzzle usually is askew. The timing between apps and mains drags. The service is stilted. The desserts are too clever by half. It’s the natural order of a restaurant finding its stride. But, man, sometimes it’s just magic. My friends still rave about rushing to Bridges during its opening six weeks. There was The Chelsea’s reopening, especially the dapper Lobby Bar for a solid three-month stretch. The intimacy of candles flickering across wood on opening night at Wilde’s, or the playground laboratory feel of Baby Bistro’s early days. The stroll down Commerce Street and through the sets of drapes into the hum of Wild Cherry last October.

There is an allure to getting through the gatekeeping, and a charm in witnessing a restaurant while its identity is still forming. The other thing that’s pretty consistent in these fleetingly exclusive spaces: Hot, well-dressed people enjoying good food.

“An age-old question,” says Arden Shore, Editor in Chief at The Infatuation. “Where to see and be seen, where to SABS.”

Vibes define a restaurant — especially a restaurant where you sit down and order from a waiter — as much as, if not more than, the dishes. The crowd matters. And, increasingly, the crowds are torched.

Consider a recent return to Wild Cherry this summer. Seated in a corner two-top, I spent half the meal enjoying a parade of seafood and pasta with a friend, and the other half side-eyeing a man in a schlubby T, basketball shorts and raggedy flip-flops, manspreading across a shared banquette. At one point, he lifted his leg up to table level to show his companion something on his foot. My friend jolted her head back, spotting toes within striking distance of our oysters. The man turned his head, said sorry, and then kept his foot up to continue his demonstration.

Perusing the dining room, you saw the aftermath of a restaurant reaching its algorithmic escape velocity. Eight months ago, in the shift from soft opening to wide release, this space was primarily occupied by two cohorts:

• Friends of the Frenchette restaurant group, invited to dine early

• Hot, well-dressed, in-the-know New Yorkers ready to make the meal a kind of occasion

As any restaurant crests out of that phase where it holds slightly more power over who fills its seats, it also relinquishes some vibe regulation. You can rethink the technique behind your flat tuna crudo. You mostly have to accept elastic waistbands, obnoxious banter and bad footwear.

And here’s the tension: Early success begets TikTok clips and must-visit lists that turn admission into a badge of honor. More people wait their way inside. And once everyone hears that a place offers great food and a hot room, the crowd arriving for that promise starts to make the room less hot.

You don’t only find this at new restaurants.

“I don’t know, the vibe has been weird tonight,” said a friend working at Demo when we popped in for drinks and dessert following our Wild Cherry Send Help blunder. I looked around. This eclectic West Village wine bar is a bit more of an industry destination. The crowd never looks fancy, but there’s an intentional, effortless confidence behind the folks that come here for beef tongue with tonnato or mackerel and gribiche. The same goes for their style. It’s a hot room. But not tonight.

Another staffer revealed what was up: There was a credit card-backed promotion running, attracting a broader neighborhood sect popping in for 45 minutes, claiming their points, and bouncing. The bad sneakers, sweatpants and matching cheap polka-dot made more sense.

I think our dessert was good. I don’t really remember. We didn’t stay long. While Demo is a spot to linger, this was a different Demo. The worst place you can have dinner in New York is anywhere that you’re the hottest people in the room.

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After that night, I started posing this question to industry friends and reputable diners:

If you wanted to eat good food at a restaurant surrounded by hot, well-dressed people, where would you go?

I got a lot of, “Oh. Uh, nowhere … I’ve got nothing.” People were stumped trying to land all of the qualifiers. They knew where to eat well. They knew where they’d find hot people in good clothes. But one dining room where you could get it all?

“It’s actually a hard question,” said The Angel’s , after adding, “This is the most you text I’ve ever received.”

She was right. No one was surprised to hear I was pushing this poll. I love food and I love restaurants, but I especially love a great, all-encompassing restaurant vibe with food to match. And if the food is good, why does it matter if the people around you are checked out and wearing horrible pants?

“It’s distracting,” said one downtown server.

Yes, exactly. It’s distracting. When you’ve made the choice to dine well, to dine extravagantly or indulgently or just to dine out at all, a bad crowd is intrusive.

In the middle of the Le Veau d’Or dining room, chef Riad Nasr stood next to me assessing the scene. “Fun room tonight,” he said, satisfied.

Le Veau doesn’t always deliver on the hot and well-dressed front, but it often does. Its price point, uptown location and proclivity to regulars helps. I could hear in Riad’s voice that he values and feels the vibe when it’s right, just like his diners do. He needs his team to cook the duck and cherries to perfection, but he also needs the space to fucking bump like it did on this Wednesday.

There’s a comfort that comes in looking and feeling good, in getting a fit off for yourself and whomever you’re dining with. It’s different from the comfort of treating this gem on East 60th Street like an extension of your living room. Judging people for falling short on fashion trends or pilates sessions is mean-spirited. But I want the people with whom I share a dining room to bring the same level of care and consideration to where they eat with how they eat and how they carry themselves.

If you try hard enough, you can eat at basically any restaurant. An IG post from a tough table is our country’s most accessible status symbol. The real trend here is an increase in people acting like the work is done once they hit book at 12:01 am. They don’t approach this difficult-to-book table with a sense of romance or intentionality. They wear whatever is around, and order whatever they’ve read is good. If the meal falls flat, it might be because, well, flat is all they know.

It’s not exclusively a resource issue. Look at the tech elite attending Sun Valley, captured well here by Jacob Gallagher. You’ve either got the same embrace of pure, indulgent comfort you see across dining rooms, or status-chasing conformity. Notion’s Ivan Zhao gets NYT’s headline spot for eschewing both, rocking an excellent suit that says, “I thought about this, I care, and I’m glad I look good.”

A few folks I talked to zeroed in on places that reliably bring it on all fronts, including:

• Multiple votes for Bridges. Says : “Last time I ate at the bar with a girlfriend we befriended the couple next to us and they bought our dinner. I know what that sounds like but swear it was good, clean fun :)”

• Upscale date destinations: “I feel like I’m more typically sitting next to groups of identical businessmen at a steakhouse, but I once saw one of the most beautiful and elegant women I’ve ever seen on a date at The Grill,” says . “I personally really enjoy the people-watching at swanky date spots.”

• asks: “Do the hotties still go to Lucien? Or am I showing my age here?” (Sources confirmed that they do.)

• Bars with food, as wrote: “In New York, I see the hottest people at bars more than restaurants. I feel elevated anytime I go to Swan Room at Nine Orchard or Bemelmans Bar at The Carlyle, because the setting at both encourages good dress. For more casual spots, Lucien, Bar Oliver, and Colbo Next Door are almost always filled with hot people.” MK Hennelly backed that up with Clemente Bar. “Shit’s so fire. Everyone is sexy and mean. I am at home there.”

• , speaking the truth: “I think the answer is really Superiority Burger but you have to get down with the freaks.”

• Arden Shore identified the power of a single restaurant group: “A foolproof NYC move will always be Hart’s/Cervo’s/Fly/Eel Bar. Those guys know what they’re doing, but you probably know that already. My more spontaneous ‘what if…?’ place to look good and look around is Bunny in Bed-Stuy.”

• Maritza Lerman Yoes was the only person to invoke the Bay: “In San Francisco, my idea of hot is a bygone era of old school intellectual aristocracy (horn-rimmed glasses and grey bobs), so I’d say Spruce or Chez Panisse.” Agreed. I’ve had many meals in SF, and have only sat next to a hot, well-dressed stranger at Chez Panisse. Is there any hope for our country’s center of power, innovation and wealth?

Okay, then there’s whatever the hell is going on in Los Angeles, best encapsulated by these three quotes:

• “My life in LA is so boring and lacking all of this.”

• “Without Horses, we don’t have much.”

• “This is why my dating life has become non-existent.”

There were reluctant votes for Chateau Marmont (is the food here anything more than tolerable?) and Sunset Tower (well, there are the fries). Arden stands by Jones: “In LA, it’ll always be Jones. Call the day before and ask for a booth.” Carving Block’s Hannah Reed added RVR, Bar di Bello and Alba. (The judging panel determined Ètra is disqualified because most of the hotness can be attributed to their staff).

It turns out there’s only one great answer in LA right now, and that came via : LA Grocery & Cafe. The Melrose Hill grocery store threads the delicate needle of carrying very, very good food while never elevating into such a TikTok destination that it gets overrun by current or future Disney adults. The customers here are either wearing real, well-fitting clothes or high-quality athleisure like H-O-R-S-E. They shop with a little swag and plenty of confidence.

Respondents recognizing no time-of-day constraints had an easier time. Weekday lunch at All Time or breakfast at Raf’s were common, accurate answers. Richelle Rice chose Lovely Day, across from Elizabeth Street Garden. Everyone in Europe also was less troubled by the question. “It’s insane how many beautiful people are in Europe everywhere,” one said. initially told me he felt under-qualified, then took it back once he went to the vinyl-filled Pharaoh in Athens. submitted Shankeys, an Indian-Irish restaurant in an old Hackney betting shop. “More well dressed in a Brooklyn way than fancy.”

Then, finally, a breakthrough answer began to emerge: Roman’s in Fort Greene. There’s something to a specific kind of established, reliable spot for regulars in the right neighborhood. No one there is annoying. They have some money and know how to behave. Their sense of style is assured. Much like the food, the clientele know what they’re doing and they do it well. The glamor and culinary ambitions surf just below the threshold that would thrust it into vibe-killing destination status.

You might have your own version of this restaurant. It’s where you take friends who are visiting. It’s where you book after a long trip. You might take your parents. (It depends on your parents.) You nod at the bartenders upon arrival and flirt with the waiters who remember you prefer sparkling. You switch seamlessly between dining at the bar or a table. You notice when they rotate one seasonal dish for another. You’re comfortable giving feedback and they’re comfortable hearing it. The food is always very good and sometimes one or two things are great.

That’s how all of the real restaurant alchemy comes together. How a bunch of hot, confident, intentional yet spontaneous, well-dressed people end up in one room, sharing a meal and forcing a space to come to life. Making memories that go well beyond the plating style or sauce work behind any one dish you see on an Instagram story. It’s a mutual thing. The restaurant settles in and delivers every day. The crowd follows suit.

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My savory cooking is mostly instinctual. This fish at McCall’s looks interesting, the jumbo asparagus at Homefarm is undeniable, I can knock out a good fried rice based on what’s in the fridge. Cookbooks, recipes and Instagram might jumble a few new ideas loose, but the path is usually pretty clear.

That’s not the case with pastry, a thing I reserve for entertaining or transporting to a party. I scroll and flip and sit undecided. I don’t especially care about showing off with presentation or technique. Desserts are supposed to make people happy. But what shall it be? This past Thanksgiving, I committed to three desserts from Clare, the founder of Stissing House. In her writing, she knows how to guide inelegant pastry interlopers through accessible, high-flavor recipes.

The Fourth is one of my three favorite holidays, along with Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve, an excuse to cook extravagantly and Southernly. Clare’s strawberry cobbler was an easy choice. I grabbed fruit and heavy cream on my ride home from LAX, letting the berries macerate overnight.

While the cobbler baked the next day, I stared at a bowl of extra shortbread dough. One thing I’ve been pushing myself to do is riff on desserts in real time. Trying anything sans guidance, with real potential for failure, is the best way to learn. What could I use this for? And what would people like? Probably more cobbler.

I dumped the remains of a bag of frozen blueberries into a pot with sugar, honey and vanilla, not bothering with measurements. Once the fruit broke down and went juicy, I scraped it into a little baking dish and topped it with the leftover dough, plus some sugar, salt and heavy cream. It came out ugly and great. I called it a blueberry surprise.

Later, I strolled through a Los Feliz backyard and began preheating my friend’s oven. Once the cobbler and blueberry surprise were warm enough to be irresistible, I spooned them into plastic cups, added scoops of Straus vanilla ice cream and started ordering folks milling around the kitchen to pass them out. The red, white and blue was unintentional but appreciated.

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Bangers

• Bridges: Incredible how well chef Sam Lawrence’s spot has matured from a white-hot 2024 opening into one of New York’s most reliably great dining rooms. I’ve spent the past year enjoying Bridges at the bar, a couple dishes and drinks at a time. It doesn’t quite compare to the brilliance of three hours in one of their banquettes. The current version of the savory custard, featuring cuttlefish, is a masterpiece. The seafood cooking is consistently excellent. In a bangers-only meal with no skips, the comté tart, while still great, fell back into being a bit player. Whatever the fuck they’re doing to this Zerbinati melon sorbet with crème fraîche and caviar is … not fair. If you haven’t been back in a while for a full meal, do it soon.

• It’s fig leaf latte season again at Canyon Coffee. Basically all seasonal lattes are muddled, sugary nonsense. This is my one exception.

• RIP to Olamaie, my favorite of Austin’s mid-2010s wave of fine dining spots and the first American Southern restaurant to earn a Michelin Star. I guess the town’s flood of Oracle sales reps never developed a taste for Hoppin’ John. Chef-owner Michael Fojtasek told the Austin American-Statesman his plans include developing the food and bev concept for a championship golf course. After a decade of margin-crushing grind, I don’t know why chefs in similar positions wouldn’t make the same move, even if it’s a bummer for those of us who love restaurants like Olamaie. Damn.

• Penny remains my favorite restaurant in New York. Every time they change over the menu I get a little bummed — I long for the stuffed squid and the iceberg + mimolette salad — but I respect chef Forrest Florsheim’s commitment to the new. You simply need to visit while this melon and raw snapper dish is available.

• I’m on an absolute dessert binge, one that probably warrants its own ranking. A couple recent favs: the crème brûlée tart at Bistrot Ha, and the strawberry-filled mochi pancake at Morihiro.

• It’s a Slayyyter summer:

Jams

• People should be louder about the wonders of the Lawry’s in Beverly Hills, a place where the median age hovers around 68. Los Angeles is a tough town to find a luxurious, birthday-worthy restaurant. But a booth here loaded with shrimp & corn fritters, a thick-cut prime rib dinner, good cocktails and a See’s Candies Sundae for four … that’s heaven.

• Maybe they’ve always offered this, but the fine folks at Courage Bagels topped my hottie — a fresh bagel straight out of the oven doused in Jersey butter — with drizzles of honey for the first time. Try it.

• My expectations could not have been lower for a late Saturday night reservation at Marcel, the newish restaurant in the old Flora Bar space that now lives underneath the uptown Sotheby’s building. Critics have side-eyed everything about the food and the price. But I don’t know. It was all pretty good! I’ll be back for the $54, PB&J-inspired, obnoxiously large Paris-Brest.

• A delightful New York surprise: Starting a night at Colbo Next Door and finding hosting a pop-up. Her roast beef, followed by a slice of chocolate cake, delivered some of my favorite bites in June.

• Next door to Bar Cecil, the same team’s new spot Beaton’s is everything I want when I’m going out in the desert. What a room.

• The deconstructed lemon cheesecake and the off-menu ribs at Bad Roman Beverly Hills are worth the visit alone.

• Some more music I’ve been enjoying:

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There’s no better time to dine at Via Carota, and no better place to eat at this time of day. I mean, look at this:

One of the city’s toughest tables becomes a fairly easy bar seat slide in this window, especially if you’re hiding from work on a weekday. Daylight splashes in through the big windows. The whites and woods of the restaurant pop. Order one vegetable — probably whatever is on special — one seafood main, and one dessert. The olive oil panna cotta is portioned just right for one. The music hums at a soothing volume. Get a drink. Bring a book or flirt with other solo diners. Turn your phone off.

I’ve done Via Carota at every hour. It’s good at 10am and good at 8pm. But this afternoon indulgence can’t be matched. Restaurants are ever-changing organisms, morphing with the seasons, the crowds and the hangover level of the cooks. The best ones maintain consistency in chaos. Like Klay Thompson in Game 6 or Jalen Brunson with a French alien in his way, they also transcend in specific peaks.

Here are my favorite restaurants for every hour of the day. The only places I want to eat as the clock ticks, and the best times to enjoy their charms.

• 1am | Northern Thai Food Club | Los Angeles: Thai is my favorite late night food, and Los Angeles is my favorite city for Thai food. As the night wears on, I’m convinced the pad see ew here gets a little saucier and bolder.

• 2am | The Commodore | New York: Fried food and frozens in a booth. What’s not to love?

• 3am | Joe’s Pizza | New York: The only good decision you can make at this hour.

• 4am | Magnolia Cafe | Austin: Unfortunately, the Lake Austin Boulevard location was a pandemic casualty. But if you want a good, post-bad-decision diner, doing one with Tex-Mex staples is the move.

• 5am | JuiceLand | Austin: Objectively the worst time to consume food of any kind. Heal yourself with a smoothie.

• 6am | Tacodeli | Austin: I have a strict no prepared food at airports rule that only gets broken for the occasional Tacodeli counter pickup if I’m about to board a long-ass flight out of Texas. They’re pros.

• 7am | Courage Bagels | Los Angeles: I most regularly arrive at Courage when I happen to wake up at 6:40 with a craving. This is the only time of day when the folks in line have considered what they want to order before reaching the window.

• 8am | Republique | Los Angeles: LA’s best breakfast, and perhaps the best breakfast in the country. Before 10am, there’s a peacefulness running through this high-ceilinged palace that’s more restorative than any yoga class within a 10-mile radius.

• 9am | Raf’s | New York: New York’s best breakfast meeting location. (Don’t ruin this for me, please).

• 10am | Palace Diner | Maine: At 10am, you reasonably can order any combination of pancakes, breakfast sandwiches, tuna melts or burgers without worrying about what meal you’re technically eating.

• 11am | Gjusta | Los Angeles: A dumb time to eat, frankly. Gjusta solves this with its medley of California-infused deli cases. Load up and lounge out in the sun.

• Noon | Rochelle Canteen | London: Noon is best for simplicity, vegetables and sun before getting on with your day.

• 1pm | Mariscos Jalisco | Los Angeles: My single favorite bite of food in the world. Good at any time, but this is my pick.

• 2pm | The Shop | Maine: Get drunk on wine and loaded on oysters, then go nap before rallying for dinner.

• 3pm | Via Carota | New York: After teasing this concept on IG yesterday, a friend messaged me, “Like why are the vegetables so good there on a hot day lol.”

• 4pm | Clark’s | Austin: There’s a high-top bar in the center of this seafood spot built for a happy hour featuring a crudo plate, shrimp cocktail, shoestring fries and steak tartare.

• 5pm | Birdie’s | Austin: No one cooks bright food like the team at Birdie’s. Acid and vinegars, soups and herbs, zest everywhere, soft serve. It’s ideal for an early dinner.

• 6pm | St. John | London: This gives you enough time to enjoy the atrium bar before taking the stairs up to a meal that extends into the rest of your evening.

• 7pm | Estela | New York: This is, like, the quintessential dinner time. So go to the quintessential dinner spot. Bonus points for Estela being regularly bookable during this hour with a small amount of planning ahead.

• 8pm | Bridges | New York: The most romantic time to eat, so you need a big banquet, a hot crowd and a nice pace of creative wonders.

• 9pm | The Grill | New York: This is one of my go-to post Film at Lincoln Center moves, when The Grill populates with sugar daddy dates that give it a particular kind of New York haughtiness.

• 10pm | Torrisi | New York: After a party dancing at Jean’s, five of us slid into a back booth at Torrisi having not eaten much all day, drunk and ecstatic. This is really how to Torrisi.

• 11pm | Stars | New York: For cellar pours and bar snacks.

• Midnight | Lobby Bar at The Chelsea | New York: My favorite food is fries and aioli and they’re best consumed in a beautiful hotel space. Here it is.

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Half reclined in a Regal Union Square seat an hour later, the combo of the tart, the music, the buoyant staff and the just good enough New York summer weather hit me. Seth Rogen was complaining about his back pain and the imposition of strangers in his apartment. His character in The Invite is miserable, delusional about his willingness to be unhappy. The movie is one of my favorites of the year, behind only Blue Heron. It’s funny and cutting about the lies we tell ourselves to avoid a reckoning that might blow up our lives. It’s about both the biggest and the smallest problems. How inertia gets dangerous when it goes unchecked. You can wear the same clothes and do the same routines and blame the same external factors for your issues, secretly hoping some comet will come snap you out of it.

Places like Stars in those moments of bliss, with stacked, little details all done as well as possible, are a reliable salve for this kind of malaise. It’s a thing I love about the very best restaurants and bars. The spots in Chase Sinzer and Joshua Pinsky’s East Village empire take a thing you know well and ramp it up with the highest level of care, consideration and craft. Red shrimp at Claud that leave the kitchen raw, hissing in a hot pan so they can arrive at your table perfectly cooked. A poached Maine lobster at Penny, with every piece lacquered in melted butter via a bundle of herbs. A wine list where you can ball out or save your bankroll.

Of course, when you leave this dining room excellence, you might end up back at a cold San Francisco apartment like the one in The Invite. One with all of the right Scandinavian design touches and vintage rugs and restored tile. Whatever qualms you left with bubble back up. But I don’t know. An evening in the throes of gorgeous restaurant alchemy is where my brain and my soul find a bit better balance. After jumping through the hoops of logistics and reservations and transportation and expectations, you’re in this room, surrounded by friends and strangers, getting the full sensory experience of greatness and care and hospitality. Blending gossip and joy and surprise and comfort. I think only restaurants can do that kind of delight. New York restaurants, in particular, do it in a way restaurants in no other city really can.

Some more of my recent favorites in this mode:

• The geniuses over at Bistrot Ha serve their beef tartare topped with onion rings, replacing the traditional chips or bread. Each ring in the tower is just a tad smaller than the one below it. The seasoning on the batter goes right to the edge. You scoop a bite and think, oh, yeah. This isn’t the only way to eat this classic dish. Certainly not. It’s not how I always want to eat this dish. But is it the best way? Yeah, it probably is.

• Whatever simple vegetable set of the moment is on the Wilde’s menu is becoming an absolute must-order. Chef Natasha Price just runs circles around her access to good Los Angeles produce. Right now, there’s raw zucchini with strips of pecorino and a heavy sprinkling of almonds. A friend asked me the other night what’s the first thing I’m looking for as a green flag at a restaurant. It’s always salads like this. Do you do this kind of simple thing with care, from the sourcing to the layering to the plating to knowing when it’s time to swap in a new seasonal component? It’s much harder and more rare than you think.

• I thought Marcel was going to be a dumb, fun, extravagant time with mediocre food underneath the old Met Breuer space. Turns out, the food is pretty good! Especially the Les Grands section of the dessert menu, where the prices exceed $50 and the portion sizes get comical. Go with at least four. Get dressed up. Order a bunch of tall-stemmed cosmos. And embrace an over-the-top way to do the best course of a meal. I think our simmering days of tamped-down pastry ambition and luxury may finally be over.

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I got drinks the other week with a friend who does restaurant consulting, needling her about an Instagram carousel one of her clients had posted. Overlaying real photos of the space and the food were combos of graphics and text clearly generated via a basic use of Claude Design — drop in some photos, summarize the general message and medium in a chat, post what resurfaces, and move on to the next task.

The post did pretty well. Lots of likes, about 90% positive sentiment in the comments, and then a few stray callouts like, “Rooting for y’all but holy hell look at this AI slop.”

Small restaurants are exactly where we should expect to see even more AI writing in the form of marketing copy deemed slop, a term that has already been used on X 21% more in 2026 than in all of 2025, according to a quick API query.

It’s worth defining slop, so I’ll pull a quote from my boss, Dan Shipper, in his recent After Automation report:

Because everyone has access to the same models, and the models are all based on yesterday’s competence, by default the models end up creating work that ranges from “a decent start” to “it’s just plain slop.”

Slop is not any one particular mistake. It is not the use of em dashes, or a certain sentence rhythm, or purple accents on a landing page. Slop is visible sameness, repeated ad nauseam.

It is what gets produced by default when humans in many different circumstances use the same tool, trained on the same corpus, without thinking too hard. It is what happens when everyone has access to an expert who has the same default tendencies.

There’s little point in judging the restaurant behind that IG carousel, one where a GM with no other marketing support is doing everything possible to drive more sales. That’s how this happens. You’ve got an impossibly long to-do list, limited resources, immense pressure, and access to a tool that can quickly knock out tasks that, yes, produce artifacts with visible sameness, but are also better than what a front-of-house expert could construct themselves given several dedicated hours.

We’re on the precipice of an AI writing reckoning as these frontier models become more pervasive. made the compelling case for murder. and dive into the taste and AI discourse extremely well. No one covers this space better than my former colleague , who shared this the other day:

I live these questions daily inside of Every, a frontier AI lab for the future of work. We’re a small company mostly made up of writers and creatives pushing these models to the limits. We use AI in our writing all the time, just like I use it for this blog. It undeniably has made me more productive, clearer-headed, strengthened my insight and curiosity, and improved the final output of what you’re consuming as a subscriber. I have specific, refined workflows depending on the type of writing I’m doing, just like I have hard boundaries for what I am and am not comfortable turning over to the machines.

After a friendly nudge from , lemme show you what that actually looks like in practice across internal company documents, marketing copy and the kind of creative, heartfelt, argument-driven writing that’s truly at the crux of this debate.

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Strategy, planning and boldly sharing agent-written docs

I was at an retreat the other week and led a workshop on using AI agents in the writing process. One of the things I walked through: how different kinds of writing carry varying stakes and quality thresholds.

I’ve worked in growth, GTM and partnerships for a while. The job involves a lot of documentation in the form of strategy plans, retros, data analysis, and cross-functional comms. Until about a year and a half ago, I wrote most of those docs from scratch, over and over. Here’s the process now:

• I needed to revamp my team’s Q2 plan for a final-month sprint, documenting it so that the priorities and goals were clear inside our group and across the company. I also needed that plan to be informed by the larger company goals, the upcoming launch calendar and real metrics. This happens constantly among knowledge workers. It’s useful. And it’s also a silly thing to sit down and write from scratch.

• I start by going to an ongoing thread for this kind of work in OpenAI’s Codex app, which is connected to all of the tools I use for work. Then I start a speech-to-text brain dump session with Monologue, offering a rambling breakdown of the problem, the outcome I want, and the open questions I need a fleet of agents to help me sort through. My colleague Kieran Klaassen calls this the AI sandwich. AI work is done best when humans are the bread in the sandwich, framing the issue, judging the results and then deciding where to go next.

• Through trial and error, my workspace is streamlined enough that Codex generally knows where to look to tackle the meaty tasks inside of the sandwich. Notion for meeting notes, PostHog dashboards for metrics, Slack channels for relevant discussions. The goal here is not for GPT-5.5 to come up with the Q2 growth strategy. It’s to synthesize the discussions we’ve already had across multiple surfaces, fork it into a new plan based on my suggested framing, and test that plan against real data.

• The Notion strategy doc I get ~10 minutes later is usually about 70-80% of the way to being shareable, fitting into a pre-set template. I do a line-by-line review while looking at the doc via Codex’s in-app browser, so I can quickly ask an agent questions or work through revisions.

• When I then go to share it internally, I’m transparent both about the fact that the doc was written with AI and that I stand by each claim. As said in an interview with Dan, most people are really bad at writing these kinds of documents. The bar is low. When directed well, GPT-5.5 or Opus 4.8 is actually just producing a better result much more quickly while depleting less of my energy. Which means I have more energy for higher-leverage work, or to go outside and touch grass.

An increasingly common occurrence across contemporary workplaces is seeing a colleague get asked a question about a point in one of these AI-generated docs, then realizing they’ve never seen that sentence before. This embarrassing exposure isn’t an AI problem. It’s just process, effort and critical thinking, things we can and should continue to value in any kind of writing.

Brand-approved marketing copy and assets

As more slop hits our feeds in the form of marketing copy and content, a quick way to earn praise and engagement is to loudly announce where you aren’t using AI:

has covered this well, especially the demoralizing effects of top-down AI psychosis on marketing teams. When I read this reporting or see those Claude-created restaurant IG carousels, I see pressure and confusion turning the helpful structure of the AI sandwich into a crumbling tartine.

Let me tiptoe off the ledge and suggest another approach, because the same principles that lead to effective internal strategy docs can apply externally.

• When people recoil at marketing slop, what they’re really saying is: I’ve seen this before. This isn’t moving or specific. This isn’t attached to a real point of view. There’s no expertise or differentiation in the form of human creativity. But what about when you already have that differentiated, expert work, and you need to package and promote it across surfaces through writing?

• The clearest example is happening in podcasting. Once you’ve recorded an episode, AI can look at the transcript of that original, thought-provoking, human conversation and come up with display copy for YouTube and promotional posts for LinkedIn and Substack. Without much framing, the writing is fairly flat, even when pointed at a real transcript. Most podcast software now features these kinds of tools. I wouldn’t recommend using them in such a plug-and-play way.

• I rely on a combination of Codex and Spiral — like Monologue, another Every product, in full disclosure — to solve for this. Spiral lets you empower agents with detailed writing styles trained on approved work, and combined with Codex or Claude Code it can weight past post performance to inform the AI-produced marketing copy. You get an okay enough YouTube description for your podcast by dropping the transcript into Claude. You get a much better one by running it through a brand-approved writing style via Spiral. Then you can have Claude Code look at your YouTube analytics and borrow from the formats that are already working. Is that slop, or is that marketing leverage designed to enhance algorithmic performance and reach, a shared goal among many creators?

We’re past the early stages of adoption for many of these AI tools in writing and marketing. But learning how to wield them is still fairly nascent. Thus, slop. Consider the effects on dining out decisions. Am I less likely to go to a restaurant that uses Claude Design poorly vs. one that set up a brand-friendly harness? Would I prefer that the owner-operators hired a social media consultant? Or devoted more time to being original? Is a lack of rigor in the marketing review process a sign that less care happens inside of the space?

I don’t know. I can’t imagine opening a restaurant and turning over my dining room playlist to a consultant. As someone who values vibes, experience and hospitality so highly, a personal touch matters to me. But that niche industry has existed for years, bending the acoustic experience to a more pervasive sameness. Sound familiar?

AI as researcher, partner and editor in creative writing

Sam Kriss is likely less committed to inciting violence over AI writing in internal strategy docs and YouTube descriptions. That is writing as utility. The writing that flourishes on this platform, the essays and arguments and reported narratives that drive subscriptions, the words that come from deeply felt compulsion and rewire your brain — that’s something else. Something much more important. As a former longform editor, it’s a thing I’ve spent a lot of my career working on. And, perhaps controversially, it’s also a thing I’ve found AI quite useful for.

So let me walk through how I write essays like this one with a mix of Monologue, Proof, Codex, and the usual, hours-long agony of figuring out what I actually want to say and how I want to say it.

• My writing is at its worst when I don’t have the goods. When I’m sitting on a disparate, disconnected series of takes and observations that lack scene or structure or real insight. Over the past year, I’ve found a better way to give myself the confidence that I do have the goods, and then turn that into writing I stand behind.

• This starts as a running series of text messages between me and an OpenClaw agent. I get my best ideas during long runs, lazy drives or heated conversation. Before I know what a piece is going to be, I’ll text this agent ideas in the same way that many writers might write in a notebook or brain dump into a Google Doc. Sometimes I’m actually writing those text messages. Sometimes I’m using Monologue for speech-to-text.

• Those ideas get organized in Proof, an open-source document editor for human-agent collaboration. The agent runs on a writing style for this blog through Spiral, takes my ideas from these text messages, cleans them up a bit, and organizes them into an idea bank. Through a back-and-forth poking at what feels interesting or wrong or underdeveloped, I get a clearer shape of the high-level idea.

  

• When prompted, the agent can pull past pieces I’ve written or scenes I’ve left on the cutting room floor. It can help with research. It can spot contradictions. It can act as both writing assistant and editor. And when the structure starts to make sense to me, I’ll tell the agent the outline I want and which details from the idea bank belong in each section.

• Now, when I actually sit down to write, I have something to reference that inspires the confidence to do it well. I start with a blank page in one window and the notes in another. Because so much of the notes come from direct texts I sent or words I spoke into my phone, I’ll sometimes grab that text, move it into the main doc, and tweak after close review. If I hit a wall, I’ll Monologue a paragraph to help me break through. I typically write from beginning to end in one sitting, not moving on from a sentence until it feels perfect.

• Then I read, and I edit, and I read, and I edit. I ask an agent inside Codex for copy edits, for places where the argument is weak, for ideas I said I wanted to hit but didn’t actually weave in.

This entire process falls apart if I listen too closely to the model’s advice. A good flow relies on my own experience and expertise to know what to consider and what to ignore.

Sometimes my writing is very good, and sometimes you all let me know when it’s not. The degree to which technology touched the process has little to do with that variance in outcome. Instead, it comes down to the same things that have always informed great writing: Have I done enough living out in the world to have something interesting to say? Do I have a compelling way to say it? And have I gone through the painful process of sharpening the words on this page to the point that it’s ready to hit publish and send to you?

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Bangers

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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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