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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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can these two extremes co-exist?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

| After School

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s see where 2026 takes us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kevin Arnovitz | Screenwriter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

| @iamjoonlee

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

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

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

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

Phoebe Ng | Hospitality brand strategist

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

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

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

Arden Shore |

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yasmine Moazami | Reddit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Cho | Postcard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I should’ve snapped a pic.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My mistakes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Wait, how did you make this?”

“Can I have more?”

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

There are few things more satisfying than watching someone you love unwrap a big box stuffed with something fancy and pretty that they can’t believe you knew they wanted. Last Christmas, I was gifted a Drake’s chore coat that I gaze at every time I open my closet. A few months ago, I bought my first Rimowa suitcase as a celebration for a work milestone. Even that personal indulgence makes packing for a trip feel more joyful than cumbersome. Material gifts are cool. Things are good.

But my instincts trend toward experiential gifting — a riskier proposition. You can’t return an experience. You can’t check calendar availabilities beforehand. There’s a delayed payoff upon opening the card. You’re claiming hours of someone’s time, which inherently raises the stakes. It’s dicey.

You know what universally hits, though? The exact right dinner reservation. People fucking love a good dinner. And that’s my one gift guide recommendation for the holiday season. Book your loved ones a table, handle the logistics, call ahead to fully cover their tab, and give them a night where the only thing they do is show up and enjoy the treat. If you pick the right place — somewhere they’ve always wanted to try, somewhere they love but can’t easily book, or even their regular neighborhood spot — you elevate a thing they could technically do themselves into a luxurious act of care.

Some people give gift cards, and that’s sweet. But there’s a gulf between “Here’s $200 toward a meal” and “There’s a reservation on Saturday at 8, corner table, the tab is handled, just live it up.” There’s ease and intention built in. It says you thought about the where, the when, and the how—not just the dollar amount. Plus, if the date and time don’t work, it’s easy enough to alter.

I like to coordinate these treats over the phone with the restaurant. (Email is fine, if necessary). Let the team know it’s a celebration. For most good restaurants, this kind of thing energizes the staff on an otherwise grueling evening. I’ll send a bottle of wine over to make the night feel even more special, but that’s optional. What matters is removing all the friction.

Get this for a couple. Get it for the person at work who kept you sane during all the year’s bullshit and tell them to bring a friend. Get it for your parents. It works in any scenario.

Based on past experience, here are my top restaurants in New York and LA to pull off such a move. A range of different vibes and executions, all guaranteed to deliver via a staff that takes this kind of ask seriously.

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Los Angeles

• Bell’s: Perfect for the young parents in your life who don’t get out enough. If you’re a really good friend, you’ll offer to babysit for the occasion.

• Wilde’s: The thing people keep saying about Wilde’s is that LA hasn’t had anything like it. That’s true. I went on opening night and simply … can’t shut up about how magical what owners Tatiana Ettensberger and Natasha Price have pulled off at this little British-inspired beauty in Los Feliz. It’s already a tough table. Sit on Resy and show someone how much you care.

• Baroo: Too many LA food obsessives concede they haven’t visited the new iteration of Baroo yet. Fix that for them. And make sure to book one regular and one vegetarian tasting menu, so they can try all of Kwang Uh’s brilliance.

• Etra: An intimate, mature restaurant with impeccable service. This is where the mere act of booking elevates what’s already a lovely meal.

New York

• Torrisi: I’ll pull the trigger on a Dorsia-supported, absurdly high minimum-spend banger here once a year or so for my favorite people.

• Estela: Falls in the “people forget how amazing it is and you need to remind them” camp.

• The full Frenchette restaurant group: These folks know how to go above and beyond if you make a heartfelt ask. Particularly good for your parents.

• Penny: Letting your friends raw bar their ass off on you is one of the nicest things I can think of.

• King: King is great, but it’s even better when you never see the bill. Take advantage.

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One more thing

My friend has a new romantic comedy 31 Candles coming out that I’m stoked about. Here’s the trailer:

It’s opening next weekend in New York (grab tickets) and I’ll be catching it in LA in December. There aren’t nearly enough good rom-coms out in the world — a genre I’ve always adored. Jonah is my favorite person to talk to about what works and what doesn’t in a modern love story. He lives and breathes this stuff. So we’re gonna do a Substack Live on Wednesday at 1pm ET to get into all of that, plus some food and film crossover topics. Tune in.

Tune in | Wednesday at 10am PT

I hosted a barbecue on Sunday whose theme could best be described as “Men in Echo Park explain the difference between VistaVision and 70mm IMAX.” (A real banger). A bunch of colleagues were in town, staying near the Vista Theater’s consistent lines for Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, and they had questions.

It also gave me an excuse to break out this $34 eBay find.

Here was the menu for the festivities of about 16 people:

Starters

• Caramelized onion dip and Cape Cod originals

• Crab claws — the frozen ones at Fish King are divine — with yuzu kosho aioli

• Black pepper and parmesan popcorn

• A snack spread of cheeses, compound butters, bread, radishes, flaky salt and cured meat

Mains

• Jerk chicken with a tamarind barbecue sauce

• Coconut rice

• Braised cabbage

Dessert

• Blueberry and peach cobbler (the recipe in the Superiority Burger cookbook is such an easy crowdpleaser)

• Six pints of various Salt & Straw ice cream flavors, with olive oil, honey and salt on the side for a small fixin’ situation

Drinks

• A medley of wine bottles from LA Homefarm

• Pacifico

• Big bottles of Topo Chico

This is becoming a go-to menu format for hangs of more than six. If I’m cooking for six or fewer, I’ll more deeply consider courses and timing. I’ll plate individual dishes and operate like we’ll be sitting around the dining room table for hours. The food is slightly more ambitious.

But I’ve found that the best approach for a bigger group is just to lean into a casual approach with family-style crowd pleasers. Like:

• Only one entree, ideally something I can prep ahead of time or set and forget. Jerk chicken is fun because it’s … involved — dry brine, wet brine, barbecue sauce, jerk seasoning — but on the day of all you’re doing is grilling.

• Sides for the entree that cook easily in one big pot.

• Way more starters and snacks than mains. Lots of dips. A simple bread with a great, flavored butter or spread.

• At least one raw bar element. I’m preferable to oysters, crab claws or shrimp cocktail, but go nuts. Serve over ice in any fun vessel you have around. (Also, collect fun vessels).

• I’ll challenge myself on dessert for a smaller dinner. That’s when the burnt white chocolate and soy panna cotta comes out. But I don’t want that kind of stress when there are so many other variables at play. I can bake well with time, energy and focus. It’s my most effortful form of cooking, so I know not to bother flexing here. You know what people like? Good fruit with lots of sugar. Ice cream. Chocolate. I find that this is often the course where the ROI in terms of time spent relative to increased guest enjoyment can sway the most.

• Always sparkling water.

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Beyond the menu guide, here are a few more observations, dos, don’ts and whatnot from a year of ramped up hosting in LA.

• Have some food ready when people walk in … but not all the food. Give an arrival time an hour before you actually want to eat. Slowly plate up more stuff from there.

• Make a prep list. Do it digitally or manually, whatever works for you. If you aren’t a complete, utter, maniacal control freak like me, let a friend or two help you knock out the easy tasks.

• Hand write a menu. Even if it’s just for you.

• Get organized. And clean as you go.

• Sharpen your knives the day before.

• Have a few house specialties. Mine include that caramelized onion dip, cornbread, chicory salads. It’s nice to have things you can knock out instinctually, and that regular guests come to look forward to.

• Always consider the timing. Not just to keep the food hot and the guests happy, but, you know, so you can actually hang out with them rather than hiding by the stove firing multiple components of every dish.

• And the plating. I was taught to plate with organic shapes in mind. Naturally occurring waves and lines. Lots of herbs, for flavor and color. Most things could use well-sliced chives.

• People can bring stuff. Especially drinks and ice. That’s fine. But they can’t Venmo you. I don’t believe in Venmo culture. With friends, everything evens out eventually. If it doesn’t, stop hanging with those people.

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Olivia, what’s going?

Olivia: I think New York dining has lost the plot. It is absurd how many new places are popping up literally every day, and as someone who prides themselves on being relatively on top of what is going on in the food world, I can’t keep up, nor do I especially want to. It’s created a fatigue that ultimately feels a bit like, I am actually too tired to risk going to this place and not loving it.

I keep prioritizing going back to my favorite spots, and each time I’ve branched out I’ve left feeling discouraged. I know we’ve both had semi-controversial experiences recently at restaurants that everyone loves (or at least talks about all the time) that missed the mark for us.

Austin: Oh yeah, here’s my little rant to about how sterile the experience was at Ha’s Snack Bar, a place beloved by both legacy institutions like the Times and food critic .

O: I loved Ha’s, but completely agree with you. I feel guilty for not being all that impressed by I Cavallini, but more on that Monday…

A: We don’t allow Nick Curtola slander on this blog. Find a new slant.

Every since my little freak out last week, things are picking up. The new, homey bar set up at Kato is a dream. Baby Bistro is life affirming. And I’m all booked for my pre-and-post New York Film Festival dinners. We’ll see what hits.

I’m heading from New York straight to Maine, with another string of dinners lined up, which means I’ll be commandeering restaurant menus consistently over the next menu. You and I both feel strongly that:

• There’s a right and a wrong way to order.

• Ordering poorly can be way worse than a restaurant not delivering.

• Other people shouldn’t try to order when we’re at the table.

O: And most importantly, don’t tell me a place sucks when it is objectively good, just because you don’t know your way around a menu.

The long and short of it is that people are bad at ordering. We have it figured out and can easily ensure a B+ or better meal.

right on Franklin

where to go for what occasions, New York +

By Olivia Weiss

The rules of ordering

A: I outlined my rules for ordering a few months ago and I know you have thoughts. What am I missing here?

• The No. 1 rule is do not order for the table if you’re bad at it. The most unattractive thing you can do at a restaurant is treat the service staff poorly. The second most unattractive thing you can do is bungle the order for everyone else.

• Ask everyone at the table, “Is there anything you want to make sure we get?” Order it unless you hate them.

• Ask the waiter if they have one rec. Just one. If they list more than two, ignore everything they said. If they recite the full menu, don’t return.

• I’ve had multiple friends point out that they’re thankful I always order a salad. Who are these people not ordering a salad at a big dinner?

• Entrees are usually meh, but sometimes, I concede, you have to order them.

• Let the restaurant handle when things arrive. Don’t suggest any coursing unless asked.

• Get every dessert, or at least as many as you can handle. Ask your dining companions if they want coffee or amaro.

• Do not order steak unless you know ahead of time that you’re eating with people who all like their steak cooked to the same temp. Haggling over meat doneness at the table is the quickest way to sink a dinner into oblivion.

O: I’m indifferent on steak temps, but trust you there. Couldn’t agree more re: coursing and overdoing it on dessert. Most importantly, if you are out to dinner with Austin or myself, please let us order. Here’s what you’re missing.

• Firm believer in ordering the salad. It’s the best litmus test for a strong restaurant. A perfect green salad, or an exciting house salad that adds a little crunch and color to your meal is a worthy addition every single time.

• Unless you’re CERTAIN that they’ll be piping hot and in your preferred style, don’t bother with fries. Sorry to be controversial but it is a huge risk if you don’t know what you’re getting into. Nothing worse than a lukewarm, soggy fry. A few worthwhile fries to order: Jeans, Cervos, Ingas Bar, Cafe Kestrel.

• If lychee or lavender appear as components on the cocktail menu, don’t bother with a special drink. I guarantee they will be slightly off and overly sweet. Go with your usual negroni or stick to wine.

• To preface: I love hamachi or a raw tuna as much as the next girl … but they all taste relatively similar. Unless the set is particularly enticing or you’re at a pointedly seafood restaurant, you can skip any crudo on the menu.

• When ordering, go with our gut or go with everything your well-versed friend says. Indecision and impulse ordering will ruin your meal before it starts.

• A special centered around seasonal produce, must order. A special centered around meat or fish, must skip. Sorry to bring Bourdain into this.

• As Austin and I have discussed before — don’t modify.

And a few perfect orders

A: Alright, let’s see this shit in action. You and I are both noted Penny lovers, a restaurant that operates in the rare air at which it’s impossible to execute a poor order. But there’s a difference between a good order and a great order. Why settle?

Olivia’s Penny picks

• Ice Box

• Sesame brioche + butter, add anchovies always

• Stuffed Squid

• Seasonal cold fish / veg adjacent starters. They used to have a killer eel and cucumber dish, now I’d go with the bonito and marinated beans.

• One fish main. I know that jimmy nardello set with the swordfish right now would rock my world.

• If you haven’t had the ice cream sandwich, get it. If you have, get the chocolate mousse.

Austin’s Penny picks

• I just want it on the record that I think it’s insane not to get both desserts or the lobster here. What a restaurant.

When it’s impossible to decide

O: I dine out alone quite a bit, which is especially difficult when I want to try 12 things on a menu. The first time I went to Sqirl in LA I felt genuinely uncomfortable as I stood, for 10+ minutes, in an empty cafe, trying to figure out what to order. The trick is to get whatever speaks to you, and not to think about it too much. I ended up getting the When Sally Met Sally and I think about it all the time. I stayed for long enough I felt like breakfast-dessert was in order, and got a croissant with Sqirl jam. I did a great job, despite the ordering paralysis.

A: Fwiw, my Sqirl order is to walk over to Courage Bagels and make the sorrel pesto rice bowl at home …

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When to break all the rules

A: I’m a horrible person to take to Mission Chinese Food. You’re not going to have a fun time. They have so many good vegetable dishes. And yet. I simply can’t stop myself from ordering the thrice cooked bacon and rice cakes, the chicken wings, the beef chow fun, the kung pao pastrami and the lamb ribs. It’s delicious and the experience sucks. MCF forever.

O: Superiority Burger. You’re legally required to order all the specials, no matter what. That stuff is coming straight from the Union Square greenmarket and you’re going to love it. Same goes for desserts! Your meal might be three sandwiches (must be TFT, Collard Greens, and Yuba Verde) and three desserts, and that’s OK.

How to order when you’re at a family dinner and you know the place fucking sucks

O: Keep it simple. I’m either ordering a plain ass salad, think caesar or lightly dressed arugula, or every single side dish they’ve got. Garlicky spinach and roasted potatoes just do the trick every time.

A: You also can often find safe ground in mediocre scallops or forgettable risotto.

One false move…

O: I fear there are places where with one false move, you’re going to leave disappointed. Not necessarily because all but three items on the menu are bad, but because you’d be doing yourself and the restaurant a disservice by not ordering their very best items.

• Cafe Kestrel in Red Hook is a place I’ve covered pretty extensively because it is my favorite kind of restaurant. I love how it feels to be sitting at one of six tables, with little bowls of olives and cold martinis crowding you. My first visit to Kestrel last June was one of my best meals I’ve ever had in New York. Admittedly, the second visit wasn’t quite as great, a review I’ve heard from others, too. So, to do your best to avoid that, here are your must orders: squash blossoms, if available, seasonal yellowfin tuna set, especially in summer, french fries, cafe salad, in any of its iterations. Most importantly, the apricot cake, which is basically a sticky toffee pudding draped in fresh whipped cream and butterscotch. Hate to say it, you can skip the mac & cheese.

• I feel similarly about another magical dinner I’ve had at Frankies 457 Spuntino. If you skip the cavatelli, caesar salad, and red wine prunes with mascarpone, I can’t help you.

A: No offense to the wonderful people behind Cafe Kestrel or, like, Pitts, but to me these are the Grok of menus. Punt this kind of Justin-Timberlake-as-art-director-in-Friends-With-Benefits word jumble into the sky.

And two favorites, with notes

O: Bridges is a restaurant where you can’t really go wrong. I also think it is a place to return to again and again as the menu changes with the seasons. If I were going tomorrow, this is the order for a table for two:

• Spot prawn and salted plum on toast

• Plums, snap peas, tropea onions, and lardo (YES DOUBLE PLUMS I am a freak for stone fruit)

• Grilled squid with mussels, fresh cheese, and romano beans

• Whole grilled sole with clams and rice, for 2.

• I’m skipping the comte tart because I’ve had it, but it isn’t an every time order for me. Worth having once, but not repeatedly IMO.

A: Bridges somehow gets away with never really caring about salads. My rec would be to go seafood heavy up top — spot prawn, uni custard, cured tuna and dates, comte tart (come on) — before hitting the duck and closing out with the vin jaune gelato. I’d take a similar approach with a four top at Crevette. The menu here is certainly too big. Stay light, varied and voluminous up top in the small plates before landing on two entrees.

• Sicilian sashimi (small)

• Red shrimp carpaccio (beyond this the raw bar is an expense account dog whistle)

• Bluefin tuna and potato

• Fennel salad

• Beans and squid

• Peaches, peppers and mozzarella

• Seafood rice

• Chicken

• Rum cake

• Soft serve

O: Ok I am going to remove the bluefin tuna and potato. It sounds like something I really want, but I don’t care for it all that much in practice. I also think one chilled mussel per person is worth it. They’re that good. I would put up a real fight to get the octopus and harissa skewer on that order, total menu highlight for me. I’ve also had the chicken twice now and was not impressed either time :) I want that fucking dover sole …

Moral of the story: There’s more than one perfect order, but you have to follow the rules.

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This is one of my favorite weeks of the year, as summer spontaneity transitions into a fall that’s deliberately full. I lose myself in July and August. There’s the heat and ease and carousel of contacts on endless vacations. Weeks flit away, weekends are at least 2.5 days long. Dining rooms are slow, quiet, shrugging. California produce is too enticing to ignore. Olive oil, lemon and salt are the beginning and end of most flavor profiles.

The moment that always snaps me out of it: the New York Film Festival pre-sale and a rapidly filling calendar of events in and around Lincoln Center.

NYFF is magical. I love the planning, mapping out which films to hit when, who to invite, where to grab dinner before or after. There’s the rush of a highly anticipated premiere knocking out a packed room in Alice Tully Hall. A surprise screening in Walter Reade sitting in your head for days. The perfect New York weather. And the long, postgame conversations across subway rides and Ubers and 9:15pm reservations.

Some movie years are better than others. But NYFF always delivers calendar-circling anticipation, like I’m having for Sentimental Value, No Other Choice and The Secret Agent in October. Typically it’s the same high I get looking ahead to a dinner reservation at a spot that just might be transcendent and transporting.

I’ve got two saved lists on Resy I flip between for instances like this. One long scroll of everywhere in a city I might want to eat, and then one tight set of more desirable though certainly less easy to book locations. I’m passively aware that the limited supply ups the desire. tolerating those shallow instincts.

Yet as I crawled Resy to fill out my upcoming New York stint, I felt one big sprawl of meh. Same for when I clicked over to OpenTable or Dorsia. I’m in a restaurant rut. Unable to quite crack what’s going on, it’s also contributed to my only real stretch of writer’s block since launching this thing. (I don’t believe in publishing if you don’t have anything to say). So I’ve spent the past few days trying to figure it out.

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About a year ago, I wrote this essay titled You don’t have to eat at all these restaurants, running through what peak reservations had done to me in 2024. Here’s where I landed;

I’m back in Los Angeles after spending the week in San Francisco. Before the trip, I instinctively poked around to see if anything new and interesting had opened up since my last visit. But then I stopped and pivoted plans. On Monday I joined a couple friends for a perfect evening at Chez Panisse. On Tuesday I slid into the bar at Verjus for a few snacks and an unforgettable pain perdu. On Wednesday I ordered all of my usual staples at Rintaro. On Thursday I ended up at a diner crushing chicken fingers and fries. And on Friday, back in LA, I popped into Stir Crazy since it was conveniently on the way to How Long Gone live. These were quiet, easy and delightful comforts. Getting in required zero hassle. Next time I’m in town, I might hit the exact same lineup. And that’s probably how I’ll approach a lot of 2025.

Reservation supply has not eased in 2025, but my own demand isn’t there in the same way, especially in New York and Los Angeles. I’m sitting around perfectly good tables with great friends, feeling a pervasive … curmudgeonliness. Like:

• The lovely folks at the newly remodeled Anajak Thai moving an indoor OpenTable booking to a street-adjacent four top outside. (OpenTable clients are regularly guilty of this in a way I have little patience for. Spending more than $100 per person to eat outside is basically surchaging yourself for delivery). When the waiter walked over and asked what we thought of the new space, I peered inside through the window then rolled my eyes.

• A well-meaning friend at a large tech company inviting me to an event at RVR and then pivoting us to Great White at the last minute due to a scheduling snafu.

• Totally fine DC meals at Minetta Tavern and Dogon, with, like, B food and B- energy in the room.

• Some bright Mexican seafood at Damian’s bar on a Friday night in a packed yet ho-hum room that felt like a poor knock off of eating at Cosme in 2015.

These are relatively silly complaints and problems. But this extended stretch of a specific kind of meal that appeals to restaurant obsessives — the kind where you lose yourself in the vibe and the company and the food for hours — becoming more expensive, harder to book, and much more rare was inevitably going to drive a malaise.

It’s not just me. Read through this trend round up of New York Times food writers following the release of their new 50 best restaurants in America list. There are these grumbles about what there’s too much of:

• “Rise of tech venture capitalist and billionaire-backed restaurants. Diners dressing down at tasting menus (i.e. flip-flops and sweatpants at a $500 tasting menu).”

• “Everything is a wine bar-steakhouse-tasting menu.”

• “Meal pacing dictated solely by the kitchen, rather than diners”

• “Gummy worms as cocktail garnishes. Gummy sharks are fine if the cocktail is shark-related.”

• “The exact same Epcot-ified French bistro menu in every city.”

And what’s lacking:

• “I’d love to see more courage. I get it: Margins are already slim, and there’s no room for error. But more restaurants this year compared with the previous year played it safe, especially when it came to introducing a new cuisine type or flavor profiles to an audience that might be unaccustomed. I’d welcome more funk, heat and spice on menus that are already halfway there on those fronts.”

• “Bolder, more imaginative seasoning of dishes. More really good neighborhood places.”

• “Simple foods broken down and made perfect, like a lamb shawarma with housemade pita, pickles and toum or pasta with butter and Parmesan.”

And, finally, these two haymaker from Tejal Rao:

Less of: Menus that might as well be written by A.I. Kids’ menus disguised as grown-up menus. Luxury ingredients standing in for creativity and skill. Dishes made more for the camera than to be eaten. Desserts that are very expensive, but somehow feel like an afterthought. Restaurants making so much of an effort to cater to what people already know, and like that their personality disappears and they become entirely generic.

More of: More investment in restaurants that take risks and believe in their own point of view. More restaurants that aren’t built to be replicated or scaled. More excellent vegetable cookery. More room for walk-ins. More trust in diners.

Food publications often do these trend roundups, but they rarely feel so existential. Something is up. To drill down further, the core issue is some kind of whiplash I’m also feeling that goes like this:

• Treat me like an adult and do the simple things well.

• But, like, please surprise me. Be ambitious. Have a distinct point of view.

• Can’t I just get into a beautiful room full of hot people where I can have a martini and fries and feel good?

• Don’t overdo it, though, because if the economics force every restaurant into being Hillstoned that’s so boring and I’ll stay at home. Shake it up.

• Wait, wait, you shook it up too much and now it’s a TikTok hotspot. Fuck.

• Okay. What if it were just 15% easier to slide in last minute somewhere special with two people at the bar?

With three-and-a-half months left in the year, the number of show-stopping American meals on my hit list is smaller than usual, especially first-time experiences. Lei was wonderful, chaotic fun. Penny and Le Veau d’Or remain sensational. Borgo and Crevette do the “I’m an adult here” thing well. Kabawa is a masterpiece. Fedora is cool. The new wave classics, while difficult to get into, still hit. There’s a lot to like in New York, even if little about the fall slate excites me, private clubs are taking over and playing the reservation game for this long makes you want to tap out for a while.

And then there’s LA, where the front-runner for restaurant year was described in that same NYT article by Tejal as, “Smart, scrappy and slightly eccentric, and the staff seems to understand hospitality on a really intuitive level.”

I could see on the iPad at Baby Bistro this Friday that there was a “seven visits” next to my name. That’s maybe an undercount, missing a couple drop-ins and patio hangs. Since it opened in May, if I’m not cooking at home, I’m probably here. It keeps breaking through my lull because of what Tejal described above, and because:

• Chef Miles Thompson’ food blends creativity, hyper-seasonality and comfort in a way that’s very LA. Some dishes are bold, big and shocking. Others are subtle, slow burns. Even though the menu evolves, I can recount every item that’s been in rotation. The cucumbers and squid, the chopped salad, the fish collars, those fucking beans that were around for a week. There are lots of vegetables and seafood and in-depth sauces. It’s how I like to eat.

• There’s so much care, but there’s no pandering.

• The hospitality really is that good, starting with wine director Andy Schwartz and extending to every member of the staff, all of whom might drop by your table for a bit over the course of a night. Inside of this little converted home, you feel welcome and whisked away. It’s the place I look at my phone the least.

• Have you seen how beautiful the windows are here?

• The small menu always gets me. Five savory dishes, one dessert, a special or two. The ability to mix, match and double up. It’s a delight. (Do you know how many people I’ve sent “here’s what to order and what to avoid” texts to above Crevette?).

• The four-glass, $50 wine pairing is genius.

• Until this week, it was relatively easy to book. (With the NYT praise, it’s become Resy red-walled. They deserve it.)

Whenever I walk out of a meal at Baby Bistro, I’ll chat with Andy about how they’re doing and plan a quick return. He’ll give me an update on the upcoming menu changes. It’s sweet, and gives me something to look forward to. But this week I’ve been wondering why I need that quick evolution so badly — why my broken restaurant brain keeps needing the allure of something new to stay interested.

I still don’t fully know, but at least I’m back in the game. See ya at Lincoln Center.

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A few times a month, I’ll roast a whole chicken, scattering vegetables around the cast iron pan, mixing the fat in with rice, and simmering the carcass into soup. I can’t get away from celery salads blending acid and cheese and nuts. Whenever I need to clean out my fridge, the straggling ingredients turn into fried rice.

There are a few base dishes I’ve repeated hundreds of times. Recipes, real and remembered, that I’ve spent a decade getting a little bit better at on each iteration. Despite all of that, the kitchen task I get complimented on the most is toast.

I’ve had a surprising amount of people that I cook for regularly ask me, “How do I make toast?” It always makes me think of this meme:

“Cook the bread again” is, indeed, enough to get you to perfectly passable toast. If you scroll through influential cookbooks, new and old, that’s oftentimes the only instructions you’ll get. Here’s Gabrielle Hamilton in Prune on the toast that holds together her sardine sandwich:

“Slice day-old bread on the thin side — as thin as your iPhone — then toast under the salamander, both sides.”

You’ll find that simple “toast on both sides” recommendation all over, especially in cheffier cookbooks. Chefs are used to having a salamander broiler and limited time. There’s no more reliable way to get a good enough final product than to quickly let the sally rip. It’s the professional kitchen equivalent of your at-home toaster. But I could not be more strongly anti-toaster. Here’s Ignacio Mattos in the Estela book, explaining his approach to his brunch toast with lardo and jam:

“You don't need to be a good cook or a cook at all to make good toast; you just need to be hungry. But when you're starved, you tend to take shortcuts. It sometimes helps to calm down and proceed with care. That is the case here, with a toast that glistens in a way that's almost improper.”

Ignacio pan fries his toast, a method that when done with care leads to an ideal texture of charred edges, crispy exterior and cushy interior. Mason Hereford demonstrates just how deep that level of care can go in Turkey and the Wolf:

Bread isn't just a vehicle, it's a component. Consider its crustiness and toastability, its density and size and flavor. Don't use wheat bread just because it seems healthier. Use it because you've thought strategically about how its subtle sweetness will bond with its cheese-sauce-topping family.

Whether you use butter, olive oil, or some other cool fat, [toasting bread in a pan] gives you the best-looking, best-smelling, best-tasting crust. It also rejuvenates day-three bread better than any other method, if you ask me.

After bread toasts, it must rest … going straight into the sandwich build after toasting creates suboptimum architecture — the bottom slice gets trapped between the toppings and the cutting board, sogging out and compromising the structural integrity.

The answer is to rest the toasted bread on a wire rack … That way, the bread has a chance to breathe so it can retain its crisp exterior and become tectonically sound sandwich toast.

Cooking is an escape, but one that activates my brain more than shutting it off. With a good playlist on, a drink in my hand and all the mise en place organized on a counter, I’m at my most present, paying attention to sounds and smells and instinct. That peaks when I have two pieces of toast going in a big bed of olive oil.

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Forgettable toasting methods can get you to an enjoyable dish pretty easily. You’ve got carbs and fats and crunch. It works. But every additional layer of care added can make it a more memorable bite, from ensuring full contact of bread to fat to the pan to temperature controlling the oil and butter. Toast is what I make for friends when they’re spiraling, and what I make for myself when I need to reset.

If I haven’t finished a novel in a while, I’ll track down some Sally Rooney-adjacent page turner to accelerate my reading flow state. If I’m out of a regular cooking rotation, I’ll swing by LA Homefarm for a $21, gluten-free, rice & teff loaf from Gjusta — one of LA’s most absurd yet worth-it indulgences — and start making toasts.

(Since I’m neither in the throes of a mid-pandemic breakdown nor a divorce, I refuse to bake my own bread. There’s so much good bread within minutes of you. Start there).

Next, I’ll get all the necessary ingredients together on a cutting board near the stove, like:

• Olive oil

• Room temperature butter

• A peeled garlic clove

• Cheese or a flavored aioli

• Anchovies

• Small, simply-roasted vegetables

• Cured meat

• Herbs

• Chile oil

• Fried shallots

I don’t believe in stuffed or stacked foods, but in particular I’m out on loaded toasts and sandwiches. It’s why burrito culture also has never made much sense to me. In that IG-approved glob of messiness, you don’t actually end up tasting anything, just a mishmash of textures. Instead, I prefer a well-prepared, well-seasoned base toast with no more than three things on top of it.

To get there, crank a cast-iron pan on high heat for about a minute and then lower down to medium-high. Once the pan is hot, put in a little more olive oil than you think you’ll need. Timing and tempering everything well is how you avoid tasting burnt oil. Drop in no more than two slices of bread at a time, move them around a bit in the pan, and then press down with some kind of weight.

From here, don’t use a timer. Sometimes you’ll peek too early, and know next time to be more patient. Or you might over-char one side. This is how you learn. When ready, remove the weight, then use a fish spatula to check the bread and flip. I like a slightly thicker than iPhone width bread, toasted about 20% past golden brown. You know your own preference when you see it.

While the bread cooks on its second side, drop one small rectangle of butter on top and let it melt. Then transfer the bread to a rack to avoid steaming and rub both sides with a raw, peeled garlic clove. I like to finish the bread with a little bit of Maldon, just to amp up the flavor a touch more.

You’ve got a great bite waiting for you already. My most common add-on is to spread room temp butter across the bread, cover with a couple anchovies and then finish with a lot of black pepper and a little additional olive oil. Play around with whatever you already have in the house that looks good. I don’t like buying ingredients specifically for toast. That’s not the point. Make the toast perfect and top it with something good, rather than accepting mediocre toasting methods supporting a pre-constructed idea.

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When you’re sitting in a fancy New York City dining room ready to drop $100 per person on a meal, you make a few assumptions. One is that the restaurant is fucking ready. Each component for every dish is properly prepped and bulked out. The line cooks are attentive and not hungover. The front of house staff knows the ins and outs of whatever is on special that night. Even if you don’t understand the kitchen orchestra, you trust that it’s humming and in sync.

That’s often not the case. Instead, there’s the clock. The best restaurants — the top 0.1% — have a system to keep the clock at bay. The rest are always teetering up against the clock breaking them.

In the first episode of Season 4 of The Bear, Brian Koppelman strides into the kitchen and hooks up a timer. When it hits zero, the restaurant has run out of money and needs to close. That’s a grand, symbolic, macro clock. And then throughout the next three episodes, you watch the staff fight the daily clock that makes or breaks your favorite spots.

At one point in Episode 2, Tina leaves the pasta station to help Marcus finish plating a punishing number of dessert orders. He’s in the weeds, and she makes the call that she can sacrifice the health of her station for a bit so that the clock doesn’t crush Marcus all at once. When a pasta order quickly follows, Sydney leaves the pass and backfills Tina, like an NBA playoff defense in instinctual rotation following a blow-by.

The Bear is a superhero story. You’re watching people accelerate to god-level abilities in impossible timelines to propel a narrative. Your mileage may vary on how well it all comes together. I enjoy it. But the reality I’ve seen play out more commonly goes something like this: A pastry chef is behind plating a new dessert with far too many components. Or, really, the cook working garde manger has let too many dessert tickets pile up while they bang out more urgent salads and crudos. There’s not enough budget to have a dedicated pastry chef working service. The expediter, having taken their eye off the clock for multiple tables’ final tickets, calls out an urgent fire for eight sundaes. And this is where things get rickety.

Maybe everyone stays put. In a kitchen, you’re responsible for your own station. If you’re working the plancha and sauté is going down, that doesn’t have to be your problem. So you might see the clock only hurt this inexperienced, under-skilled, under-prepared cold-side cook. But a healthy collection of cooks has each other’s backs. They’ll start rotating. The fry cook will drop a round of croquettes into oil, set a timer, and hop over to garde manger to plate two salads. Except he gets there and sees there’s not enough clean lettuce. Or lemon juice. And the station isn’t organized like he usually has it, so he can’t find anything quickly. The clock is now his problem, too. And if you ordered the salad, it’s also yours.

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I’ve been thinking about the clock more since and I talked about it on This is TASTE. It comes up when I watch The Bear and when I sit in dining rooms, especially newer ones. When you dislike a restaurant, sometimes it’s a core issue. The recipes are bad. The vibe is off. The service is distant. But more often than not, you’re the victim of the clock. In ideal conditions — enough prep time, a well-trained staff, reliable food deliveries — many restaurants can thrive. But that’s not reality. Good restaurants build systems to get as close as possible to that fine-tuned flow state, and great restaurants are staffed with killers who know how to slow down the clock when everything turns to shit.

Here’s an example of the kind of back-of-house perfect storm that ends with a diner having a middling experience at an otherwise very good restaurant, leading them not to return:

• An inexperienced cook clocks in right at 3pm, as scheduled, to start dinner prep for their station. Two hours until opening is probably not enough time for them to knock out every component and contribute to family meal, but having them clock in any earlier tanks the margins.

• The cook checks their prep list, left at the mercy of whomever worked the station the night before and how effective the early-arriving sous chef is. The restaurant got lit up yesterday just before closing. In that rush, no one got ahead on the sauces or knife cuts or measurements that happen during lulls. Worse, because the team didn’t prepare for the rush when placing orders, they’re down ingredients. Oh, and someone just called out sick, so their prep list is now on this undermanned crew.

• Service starts and it’s busier than expected from the jump. The absolute essentials are prepped but everything else is low or behind. Rather than working through pre-portioned components that are organized seamlessly across the station, cooks are taking extra time on knife cuts and sauce work that rattle the ecosystem. The food arrives late, overcooked and under-seasoned, and it gets worse from course to course.

I think that’s why is so enamored with watching how well Chase Bray from Eel Bar runs expo. People like him are stars, making sure diners don’t suffer because of the clock. They help their cooks focus and prioritize. They hop on a station and flawlessly execute a plate or backfill prep. They motivate and move. My personal favorite version of this: Watching a dude run expo at St. John on a packed Friday night and shuck every oyster in house. I ignored my table all night just to watch him work.

Eel Bar and St. John are good because the food hits. The rooms are humming. The service is warm and leaves you feeling taken care of. That’s what you remember. They’re consistently great, though, because their teams know how to beat the clock, something you only see when it all falls apart.

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“Here’s what you don’t understand about Cambodia.”

As they rambled on, ignoring their food and growing more animated ranking army sizes, I thought:

• Are men okay?

• Where did they get all of this information on stealth warfare tactics?

• Someone should really eat that skewer.

• How the hell did they suck me into this nonsense?

But then our fried chicken arrived and I successfully blocked out their noise. I’m a naturally oblivious diner, not hearing the couple fight behind me or missing a celebrity crossing through the bar. I get lost in the music if the playlist is good. I enter into a flow state as the food hits the table. I’m wrapped up in conversations with friends. Little else beyond our meal exists for those two hours.

There’s one main exception: Watching people react to food you’re about to eat.

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On Tuesday night, I sat in the front corner of Quarter Sheets, closing out a week-long bender of an LA food tour with a friend visiting from New York. We had swung by days before for a slice and some desserts at the standing tables outside. Now we wanted the real thing, placing an order of:

• Chicory salad

• Peaches and sweet peppers with feta

• A Hawaiian bar pie

• The red top and Sicilian corner

• Cheesecake and the strawberry ice cream sundae

A few minutes later, I watched as the bar pie hit a table directly in my eye line. Two couples started grabbing slices while keeping their conversation going. I was waiting to see how they’d react to their first bites, having never tried this version before. I wanted some insight. Would they freak out with eye-widening excitement? Express disappointed? Immediately dive in for more or leave a bunch of food behind?

And instead I got nothing. They ate, they chatted about other non-food things, they acted like it could have been any replacement-level dish on the table — a method of dining out I don’t really understand, especially with a difficult-to-secure reservation.

There’s a delicate dance to walk here, breaking the fourth wall away from your own table at a restaurant. Here are some rules I abide by:

• Okay: Waiting to see how diners at another table react to a special before ordering it yourself.

• Not okay: Seeing a dish walk past you and exclaiming, “We have to get that.” Chill.

• Okay: Chatting with people at the table directly next to you about their order, assuming there’s been obvious enough eye contact that they’re down to mingle.

• Not okay: Pointing at the table across from you where people are actively eating, then asking the waiter what the dish is and if it’s good. Like, I’m at dinner. This ain’t a zoo.

• Okay: Leaving your table to go squeeze in with friends if you spot them across the restaurant.

• Not okay: Occupying that foreign table for more than 10 minutes.

• Okay: Asking your waiter, “What’s in this?” Or “How did they cook this?”

• Not okay: Asking the waiter to go back to the kitchen to get you the recipe in full.

• Okay: Cajoling the nearby table or bar seatmates into ordering something — especially dessert — if you see them eyeing your plate with curiosity.

That back-and-forth energy is part of what I love about a good restaurant. It’s why catching a group sit through a mostly silent dinner is depressing. I don’t need or want each component to go through a Top-Chef-style judgement. That’s obnoxious. Nothing kills the romance of a good dinner like someone saying the word mouthfeel.

But at a spot where the food is the main appeal, I like to debrief on each course. And I especially like eating with smart, opinionated friends who will drop an animated, finger-pointing — “Yo, that’s bangin’!” — when a dish is a knockout. It’s all part of the experience. If we’re eating together, I wanna know what you think.

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Well, I’m here to help. I oversaw hundreds of rankings projects as an editor for a digital media company. We relied heavily on the format to drive traffic and subscriptions. One time, a famous TV talking head even went on the air and demanded I be drug tested for a ranking project I led. That’s a good ranking.

Rankings are amazing. Dumb and arbitrary. But amazing. A list is easy. A list is even kind of boring. But a good ranking — one with authority and taste, one with a bit of an edge, one that was excruciating to put together but one the author or authors stand by wholeheartedly — is the Internet’s best art form. It’s so much fun to laugh at a bad ranking and so rewarding to invest in a good one.

If you find yourself crippled by a restaurant list you simply can’t imagine turning into a ranking, here. Try this:

1. Do whatever you did to rank the first part of the list and then … keep going.

2. Have everyone involved in the list-making do their own, individual ranking and then average out a composite score. If someone only counts as half a ranker — yikes — weigh their scores with 0.5x points. Tough but fair.

3. Just re-order stuff until the vibes look right. (This is actually fine).

4. Turn it into a bracket.

5. Or, even better, use the Pairwise system, where a panel of expert voters are given two restaurants head-to-head and have to choose the better one over and over again until an aggregate ranking comes together.

6. Create a point system across different categories. Decide which categories matter for a stellar restaurant. Apply different weights to the categories. Argue over the category scores and then add up the weighted point totals.

7. Lock yourself in a room for the day. Accept that it’s hard and nearly impossible. Don’t leave until you have your list ranked from No. 100 to No. 1. (Always rank down to No. 1, not up to No. 1).

8. Make the list then do a fan vote. (Don’t actually do this. No one likes a fan vote).

A friend dunked on me the other day saying:

I laughed. I deserved that. And sure. They’re not wrong. You can’t rank 100 restaurants. Not really.

Like, oh, how do you compare a taco stand to a tasting menu? Are you ranking just the food or the whole experience? Unlike a movie or a book, a restaurant is constantly shifting under the weight of a thousand variables — how do you capture that? Also, won’t people … get mad? Is it insulting to rank a great restaurant where people work their asses off every day “last” at No. 100? Is that mean? Isn’t restaurant life hard enough? Wouldn’t it be better if people could make little social graphics about the wonderful places on this inviting list they’ve already visited and the ones they want to try? Wouldn’t that help celebrate this struggling industry? Wouldn’t that be nice? Then everyone can just share cute posts on Instagram with equal levels of excitement about being included?

Or would it be better to treat people like adults. Get over it. Have a point of view. And just rank the restaurant.

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It arrived today, and it’s beautiful. My old one was fine, nothing special. Not every kitchen tool has to be a treasure. I like a blend of pure utility, occasional indulgence and a system that ensures I cook every day. A well stocked bain does that.

During my first few months working in a professional kitchen, I’d spend 30 minutes before service running around, trying to grab the spoons and tongs I’d need to survive the next six hours. Finally, another cook gifted me a bain and showed me a better way. Then, for Christmas, our chef got me a collection of spoons that are still the workhorse behind a daily cooking habit. Having those essential tools in the right place — and eliminating all other clutter — is how dirty rice comes together in eight minutes on a weeknight after eight hours of back-to-back meetings. And it’s how I stay sane.

Here’s the rest of my kitchen set up, from the sparse appliances to organizing principles. It’s broken down into zones, with the most used items consolidated closest to the center of the action.

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The range

The kitchen is set up as an L that runs from a small counter to the range to more counter space leading to the fridge. There’s an island and sink behind it. Most of the work happens on the range and just to the right, so that’s where my regular tools sit.

On the range

• A Lodge dutch oven and a 12-inch cast iron skillet. About 80% of the cooking with heat happens in these two vessels, so they stay out.

At my fingertips

• A unicorn peppermill. During the LA fires, I determined this would be the third thing I saved from the house if there was an emergency.

• Two salt bowls — one flaky and one Diamond Crystal. (Most salads need two salts).

• There’s always a kitchen towel on me, and a drawer nearby with a lot more.

• I don’t keep olive or neutral oils here because I read in too many cookbooks that the heat turns your oil rancid and that made sense to me.

In the bain-marie

• Like eight spoons of varying shapes, sizes and types. I love them all dearly.

• Fish spatula

• Microplane

• Brush

• Regular spatulas

• Two whisks (one large, one small)

• Tweezers in varying size, but these 12-inch bad boys are a top-five most important kitchen tool. Try it out and you’ll end up using them for everything.

The counter

In the corner of the L I keep this round, walnut Boos cutting board. On it there’s a bowl of garlic (don’t keep your garlic near your shallots and onions), a kitchen timer and a little plastic bench scraper to move ingredients around quickly and efficiently.

The rest of the counter remains unoccupied until you hit a small knife block abutting the fridge. I like to use this space for prep and organization, so a default empty state helps the mise en place come together fluidly.

Here’s what I told about my knife situation, which I stand by.

You only need one chef’s knife, one slicer, one bread knife and one paring knife. Do you need a slicer? No. But few things are more fun than nailing a Sicilian crudo set up at home, and a slicer is your best path to that goal. So go for it. Treat your knives with care. Gently push and pull, letting the sharpness of the knife do the work. If you’re pressing down firmly, you should sharpen that bad boy. The bread knife should not be nice. The paring knife doesn't have to be nice … the nice ones are just so cool.

High-utility drawers

These are the three stacked drawers right next to the range, compiling:

• Some overflow tools not in the bain-marie, like a Japanese mandoline, ladles, a real bench scraper and other baking tools

• Mixing bowls and measuring cups

• Extra cutting boards

Three cabinets of pantry staples

It’s helpful to have this stuff just above and to the right of the range for quick ideas and flavor boosts. When I go to cook something, I like to just pop open these doors and see what looks good.

• The nearest cabinet has salts on top, for restocking the salt bowls when necessary, vinegars in the middle and spices on the bottom.

• One cabinet over has canned goods, dried pastas, nori sheets, chips & crackers, a bunch of oils and squeeze bottles and any necessary overflow, since it goes deep into the corner.

• And then the third corner cabinet is mostly a few vases but there’s a bottom shelf for baking ingredients.

A lazy Susan I never rotate

I’m out on kitchen appliance abundance, like an air fryer or slow cooker. For some people, it facilitates more cooking, and that’s great. More at-home cooking is always good. But for me I find it to be a space-wasting crutch. So I’ve got these few exceptions in a low, corner lazy Susan.

• Rice cooker (necessary)

• A food processor. I’m a firm believer in cooking food that will make people happy, and good dips make people happy. My food processor is primarily a dip machine.

• A blender for smoothies

• Salad spinner

• Kitchen scale

• A few colanders

• A Kitchen Aid stand mixer for special occasions

• A couple whetstones to sharpen the knives on weekends

• And there’s a Breville countertop oven in the office because it’s ugly and embarrassing

Medium-utility drawers

Just to the right of the lazy Susan. Nothing so important that it needs to be near the range, but in some kind of weekly rotation. This is also intentionally where I start most plating, so the serving utensils are on the top drawer.

• Top drawer: Serving utensils and some additional tools, such as a citrus press, Y-peeler, can opener, corkscrew, kitchen shears, oyster knife, meat thermometer and matches (used as cake testers).

• Middle drawer: Roasting trays, cooling racks and steak weights. More people should be using steak weights at home for even, effective cooking. I also use these roasting trays to transport stuff to the grill in the backyard.

• Bottom drawer: Pots, pans and sieves. I’ve got one, nice All-Clad, 14-inch stainless steel frying pan with a lid. The rest are fairly whatever.

Lower-utility drawers, serveware cabinets and the island

The last drawers before the fridge, for everything else, including:

• Top drawer: Zip-locks, parchment paper, aluminum foil, paper towels

• Middle drawer: Bulk containers of things such as rice, sugars and flours. Also storage central for room temp items like onions and breads.

• Bottom drawer: A consolidated set of containers

I like the way this all flows together. I don’t do much moving back and forth from the fridge to the range, instead getting everything arranged around the cutting board and the counter before I start cooking.

The cabinets above the counter are full of serveware and glassware, but there’s also a stack of small-to-medium bowls that end up just being mise en place vessels. Anyone who has watched me cook has rolled their eyes at how many dirty dishes I create this way, but the organization helps the system. Plus, I clean as I go.

There’s a sink on the island, on the side nearest the range. I try to keep the rest of the island clear, so it can be a final place for plating without clutter.

Clutter and mess is the enemy of happy, regular cooking. Dirty dishes, tools too far from your grasp, ingredients that you can’t literally see and get inspired by. It’s how you end up conceding to Uber Eats. This set up matters to me because it works. I like how much it works. Cooking, especially for others, brings me more joy than anything else. And maintaining this system is a worthwhile investment in that joy.

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After spending seven years on the East Coast, I started visiting LA with more regularity in 2018. Work and a general distaste for New England pulled me West. A love of food took over my life, inspiring trips to Maine and Providence and New York to feel a part of whatever the Bon Appetit extended universe deemed cool at the time. I was 25 and aimless. LA immediately began to feel like home. The dining scene was a big reason why.

That summer, Bill Addison published a piece for Eater titled, “Sorry New York, California Is Just Better Now.” In it he wrote:

Now, with a reach that spans the continent, California holds the space for both deep tradition and wild experimentation. It is the most powerful force in food today. I know this in my marrow. As Eater’s national critic for over four years, I wander some corner of this land nearly every week. But constantly I find myself wanting to return to California, not only to revel in the obvious (but still radical) freshness of its food, but also to witness the unbridled creativity coming out of its two major cities.

There’s a big, beautiful picture of Bavel’s bright dining room topping the essay. Bestia’s sister restaurant was the hottest opening of the year, and my introduction to LA’s dining moment. The bar filled with hanging plants. The big menu and impossibly staffed kitchen. The Nebuchadnezzar old fashioned, lamb neck shawarma and unmatched dips. The blend of incredible highs and impeccable consistency. A system set up to always deliver.

After recent trips to the now LA institutions, a friend sent me this text a few days ago:

Took a friend to Bestia last night for his birthday (his choice). I can’t think of many places where the food and execution are every bit as strong 13 years into a run as it was 1-2 years in. Same with Bavel.

Consistency like that is miraculous … They should have an award for endurance like that. They can call it the LeBron James of Restauranteurism Award.

Here’s Looking At You was never going to be that kind of restaurant. The globally-inspired small-plates spot opened in 2016 by Jonathan Whitener and Lien Ta was always a little too experimental and evolutionary by design to prioritize endurance. But its Koreatown dining room has hosted most of my favorite nights in Los Angeles by being more Bulls-era Derrick Rose than King James, more heart-filled whirlwind than relentless machine.

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On my first trip to HLAY, I took the wrong train home on the LA Metro and accidentally ended up a block away, deciding to swing into the bar rather than reroute. I stayed for hours, throwing back tiki cocktails, getting lost in conversation with the staff and wondering how the hell they put together dishes like their famous heirloom tomatoes and lap cheong or frog’ legs with salsa negra. From the jump, HLAY blended innovative flavors that could push you out of your comfort zone with the warmest possible service, led by Lien, an essential and beloved figure in LA dining. I’m slowly accepting I’ll have my last meal there in just a few weeks.

On Tuesday, Lien posted about HLAY’s final, for real closure, adding that this also marks the end of her restaurateur era. HLAY kept pushing through the pandemic, Whitener’s tragic death, the closure of its sister restaurant All Day Baby, the fires, LA’s weird dining out malaise and the day-to-day constraints of trying to make it in California.

I’m not sure when I first met Lien. She’s one of those rare people in any industry — but most often someone you meet in hospitality — who immediately remembers your name, looks you in the eye and gives you a hug upon each return, asks about your job and your friends, carries an obsession to make your couple hours in her presence the best of your week. Not because it’s good for business but because it’s ingrained in her bones. For seven years I’ve told every friend who comes to town to go straight to HLAY. I knew they’d love the food, but more importantly I knew Lien and her team would take care of them.

If this is truly the end of Lien’s run, LA dining is a lot worse off. Click through the results of ’s survey of local food culture for , and you’ll see a city in a state of flux, far removed from that 2018 peak. Most respondents said they only visit new restaurants once a month or once every few months, but there aren’t regular neighborhood joints filling in those gaps. To the question of, “Which LA restaurant is most intriguing you right now?” one respondent said:

Honestly, none … As a person who has always been industry adjacent with good friends and my partner opening and working in Michelin star restaurants-I just can't find a sit down restaurant that feels satisfying both cost and experience (food and service) wise.

Yet all this ebb might be heading toward a new kind of flow. Those questions and concerns faded away as soon as I sat down at Baby Bistro last night, the now-permanent location for Miles Thompson and Andy Schwartz after operating as a roving pop-up. The room is transporting, like its own blend of Olamaie and Birdie’s inside of Chinatown’s Alpine Courtyard. I love this menu:

While you don’t have to order the whole set — there’s a pretty patio for drinks and snacks — you absolutely should. The limited options are a relief, and make for a groundswell of creativity on the plate. In trying to recount favorite dishes this morning over Courage Bagels, I ended up spewing the whole spread — squid, cucumbers & yuzu kosho vinaigrette; turnips, tofu & raspberries; pine nut cookies with a cucumber cremeux and rhubarb; a bass and steak better than most entrees I’ve had this year; beans; toast; terrine. A four-glass, $50 wine pairing that’s a no-brainer addition. Chatting with friends one table over while paying the check, we raved about the execution and maturity despite it only being night two.

This is exactly what I’ve been looking for. Great vibes and even better food, with a strong point of view that feels specifically LA vs. a Hillstone copy or everything going on in New York. Raving about a place this early is a little dumb. But Baby Bistro gets me excited to enter back into a flow state of LA dinners outside of the house. They plan to switch up parts of the menu every few weeks, following the market and Miles’ passions.

HLAY forever has been a rallying cry for Here’s Looking At You for years. Perhaps saying it so often was a sign that the people who loved it knew it would burn bright but eventually find an end. I’ll miss it all the time. If it has to go, at least it’s leaving as LA’s ebb starts to break. HLAY forever.

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I’m mostly too stubborn to double back on a take, but, uh, I think entrees are back. The restaurant ordering pendulum is shifting, informed by creative kitchen execution and diner demand.

A year ago, I decried ordering entrees, a long held belief for about a decade:

If you pass the sandwiches and pasta sections of menus — very much not entrees — you end up paying between $40-$120 for some fairly predictable preparations. There are the steak frites. The au poivre with a nontraditional protein. The roast duck. A butter poached fish. A large maitake or lion’s mane mushroom presented like a chicken. Something, somehow, still being topped with bone marrow. A return to simple cooking framed as a transgressive act.

In his review of Horses for Taste, Jason Stewart has my favorite, recent recounting of entree slander:

I admire how Horses pays homage to an era of cooking that was popular when many of the kitchen staff were likely in diapers, such as with the aforementioned veal sweetbreads or pork rillettes with cornichon and grain mustard. But not their Cornish hen, a dish I never reach for in restaurants, as I roast a weekly chicken myself. Mine is not better than their poultry playbook, but when I drop $250 on a Wednesday dinner, I want to eat things I don’t cook at home.

And just last Sunday, I watched as a couple next to me at Chez Ma Tante each ordered the pancakes. One of them also got the breakfast sandwich and bacon. (I don’t think any post-brunch sex was had). I rolled my eyes. One entree per person, and especially the same entree, is an insane way to approach a meal. It’s even worse on a date. As the regular orderer at the table, I’ve typically strung together meals by rounding up the very best dishes from the top and middle of the menu, and then only conceded an entree or two if the table size and hunger level requires it. That, simply, was just how it’s done.

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But, man, I think things are changing. I had a lovely dinner in the West Village on Thursday night at Crevette, the new spot from the team behind Dame. Friends recommended a few small bites that I had to get. More than anything, though, I kept hearing about the entrees. So as I was putting together the order for our four top, I told the waiter:

“I kind of want the bouillabaisse, the rice and the chicken. Is that crazy?”

He paused.

“You mean, like, just for you?”

They arrived after some clarification, plus a stellar mix of raw bar snacks and a couple smaller dishes.

The seafood rice with razor clams and lobster rivals the fried arroz negro at Estela. The sauce and fish work in the bouillabaisse is perfect. And the chicken frites … simply the best chicken dish I’ve had in New York. If I had filled us up on 12 small iterations of chilled mussels and octopus skewers, it would have objectively been a worse meal. It’s also feeling like a less fun way to dine.

When I’m at Penny in the East Village, I’ve started finishing every meal with their 1.5 pound Maine lobster, cooked impeccably and simply with butter and herbs. I’ve never gone to Torrisi and not ordered the duck. When I look back on my favorite meals in the past year, I’m surprised at how much I think of entrees:

• The duck and potatoes at Bridges

• Fried catfish with blue crab rice at Olamaie

• Snapper in mushroom sauce at Birdie’s

• Lobster au poivre and fluke with a sauce meunière at Demo

• Tuna frites at Queen St.

• Sichuan filet mignon at Mission Chinese

These dishes don’t give me that disappointment Jason referenced of, “Oh, I can basically cook this at home.” They remind me of why I’m so obsessed with restaurants when they reach great heights. Perhaps one reason LA is in a bit of a dining out funk is that it’s still too deep in being small plates or Hillstone-pilled. I’m sensing something different in New York. These entrees stand out for a few reasons:

• The quality of the protein is incredibly high, and you can taste it. has a great breakdown of how chef Ed Szymanski prepared the Pennsylvania Sasso chickens at Crevette here.

• The sauces are magical.

• The presentation is exciting but not stupidly inventive or cheffed up.

• The goodies deliver, often in the form of fries, rice or well seasoned vegetables that round out the dish.

Friends have started to look at me funny as I lean more entree-heavy in my dinner orders, but I’m enjoying this shift. It makes dining out feel special again. And it’s a good vehicle for chef creativity that isn’t rooted in tweezers or TikTok-baiting gimmicks. I’m headed to Cervo’s soon, where I’ll house the fried skate wing and the lamb burger. And as I peak at the menu at Le Veau d'Or ahead of my first visit before leaving town, my eyes keep gravitating to the bottom of the page. Duck magret aux cerises. Homard macédoine. Onglet frites. Gigot of lamb coco beans. Yes, please. Bring it on.

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I had a few friends over for a small, celebratory dinner party in Los Angeles on Friday night. We went back-and-forth briefly over text asking if we should go out for a drink, make a reservation somewhere, or just stay in so I could cook. Like on so many other LA nights over the past six months, everyone hopped on the at-home option.

“Bro, did you go shopping or is this just a pantry raid before you leave?”

I was plating the last savory course of the evening, a big bowl of steamed mussels with leeks, garlic, parsley, fried shallots and toasted baguettes topped with yuzu kosho aioli. The rest of the meal included:

• A platter of ritz crackers, soft goat cheese and pickled shallots

• Sesame toast with a horseradish cream and anchovies

• A snap pea salad with hazelnuts, pecorino and chiles

• A celery salad with dates, walnuts and piave vecchio

• A trail mix of comté, dates and candied nuts

• Double fold vanilla Salt & Straw ice cream with Maldon and sherry

(I remain deeply Four Horsemen pilled).

Yesterday morning, with today’s redeye flight to New York inching closer, I started my habit of making a grocery list using the Todoist app. I did a quick lap around the kitchen, seeing what I had and what I needed to get rid of. This was my last chance to cook at home before hitting the road for three weeks, with dinner booked most nights across New York, DC and San Francisco. There was a mix of sauces and garnishes floating around, but very few staple ingredients to tie it all together. That’s intentional.

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I love to grocery shop almost daily. It’s rare that I go 36 hours without a stop at LA Homefarm, McCall’s, Fish King, LA Grocery & Cafe or Whole Foods. Working from home, it’s a nice break from calls, emails and Slacks. But it also helps fuel a regular routine that keeps me motivated to cook every day and get a little better at it each time. My best home-cooked meals happen when I wake up with little to nothing in the house.

Before working in a restaurant, I’d do big grocery hauls intended to last me the next two weeks. There was this perceived benefit of stocking up on all of the essentials, having a few dishes in mind, and then being able to bang them out without needing to run to the store again. Instead, I found that:

• I got less inspired by the ingredients a couple days after purchasing them.

• I was maniacally dedicated to following recipes exactly.

• The full fridge actually made me more likely to get overwhelmed by an abundance of choice and just order Thai food.

Regularly cooking family meal for the 20 restaurant colleagues whose opinions mattered the most to me helped shake this rut. Every day, I had a ticking clock and a single shelf’s worth of ingredients. I had to spin that up into everyone’s dinner for the day. There was no opening to think through what I wanted to cook, what I knew how to cook, or what exactly a cookbook might recommend. Instead, the task was quite simple: What’s the simplest way to cook what I’m looking at while quickly building a lot of flavor?

Those harsh constraints on time and ingredients honed my cooking abilities, but it also took the food to greater heights. Now, it’s the only way I cook at home. A subscriber encouraged me the other week to do a What’s In My Fridge post. I’m not trying to be that kind of influencer, so I passed, but it also wouldn’t be all the fun. On most days you’ll find:

• Lots of sparkling water near a few bottles of wine

• Eggs

• Lemons

• Plenty of bases for building sauces or flavor (tahini, butter, capers, yuzu kosho, chili crisp, miso, shio koji, etc.)

• Herbs

• Small components from previous meals, like pickles or a salsa verde

• Everything I need to make this smoothie

Every day or two, I’ll go grab whatever vegetables and protein are calling to me, trusting that I have enough goodies at home to make a meal come together. Then I’ll flip through cookbooks for light inspiration — like, oh yeah, let’s slow roast the salmon or, right, crispy chickpeas with lots of cheese sounds nice — before putting them away. Most of these go-to cookbooks encourage this constraint-filled, recipe-as-loose-guide approach to home cooking, but it took me years to grasp. It feels like a risk, and running risks with dinner is anxiety inducing.

How do I know what goes together? How do I know exactly when it’s seasoned and properly cooked? How do I know people will like it?

Since moving back to LA, I’ve loved embracing that the answer is just to try and sometimes fail. Last week, I made roasted chicken thighs with crispy, sesame butter chickpeas. I had dry brined the chicken the night before after picking it up from McCall’s. The sesame butter was leftover from another meal. Canned chickpeas are almost always in a cabinet. It wasn’t a dish I had ever fully tried before.

When I went to plate, I realized the chickpeas were soft and the chicken was unevenly cooked. I was feeling a little sick and rushing and just mistimed everything. A few years ago, with a full fridge and eyes darting to a cookbook open on the counter, I probably would have just served something mediocre or given up and ordered delivery. I had a real perfect on the first try or it’s totally wrong mentality. But that’s not really what cooking is. This time, I popped some of the chicken pieces into the oven for a few minutes while giving the chickpeas one more hard sear in a pan of duck fat. It all came together well. Not perfectly — it was a little light on acid and herbs — but that’s okay.

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My oven wouldn’t go above 205 degrees from September through February. (Stay away from Electrolux). During that time, I got really good at boiling, broiling, pan frying and grilling things I otherwise would have roasted. I cranked out way more raw dishes. I made Thanksgiving duck confit in a little countertop Breville. The forced constraint was powerful.

And even during that time without a real oven, I didn’t eat out in LA more than a few times a month. That desire to stay home has only gotten more pervasive since and I talked about LA’s quiet restaurant year in November. Something is going on out here. No one I know is all that excited about dropping $100 per person on dinner at a restaurant in one of the best, most interesting food cities in the world. Maybe it’s the perfect storm of COVID, two Hollywood strikes, the fires and harsh regulatory hoops making it an impossible market for restauranteurs. Maybe it’s a post-Ozempic, decline-in-drinking reality. Maybe we’re all too focused on vibes.

I have a lot of thoughts, but no fully formed thesis, so I’m excited to get into it again with Emily during a Substack Live convo on Wednesday at 10am PT. You can tune in here when we get rolling:

Substack Live with Emily Wilson

I don’t talk a lot about fast food on here, but it was a staple of growing up in Texas without much home cooking. Ices and tots from the Sonic down the street and a rotation of Chick-fil-A orders dominated my first 18 years of eating more than any of the establishments I write about now. It’s where I get my love of fries & aioli, sugary drinks and late-night snacking. My ideal highway is out in West Texas, with competition at every exit for a reliably mediocre and quick indulgence. It took years to get used to the winding conservatism of New England roads or the vast emptiness attached to California freeways. While I don’t always need to give in to a 10-minute burger break, I prefer to have the option.

So my eyes lit up while stuck at Centinela and La Cienega this week. High school me could have lived on this block. Simply by swiveling my head a few times, I spotted:

• Burger King

• Chick-fil-A

• Chipotle

• Dave’s Hot Chicken

• El Pollo Loco

• Jack In The Box

• Jersey Mike’s

• McDonald’s

• Panda Express

• Popeyes

• Subway

• Wendy’s

• Wingstop

This isn’t a thing you really see in Echo Park, where the nearest Chili’s is 13.3 miles away in Pico Rivera. My LA food consumption is mostly made up of daily stops at LA Homefarm for vegetables, McCall’s for protein, Maru for coffee, the occasional nice dinner and a Din Tai Fung to-go order when all of that feels impossible. It’s a good and necessary routine for a former fat kid who gets addicted to new habits quickly. I’m not built for a monthly, drunken McDonald’s run. It’s all or nothing.

Right across the street from the Dave’s Hot Chicken, a Taco Bell sat empty during its final hours. A colleague hounded me on Friday night about having never tried their food. There’s little urgency to eat these Mexican-adjacent concoctions in Texas. The holdout began much more as apathy than protest, then it became too late to take the plunge. I’ve stood in a Taco Bell on 23rd and 7th shortly after midnight on New Year’s Eve in New York. It reeked of Baja Blast, frozen lettuce and Svedka. I think I’m good.

Yesterday, I grabbed lunch at Altro Paradiso, catching up with a friend over fennel salad, crudo and chicken milanese. Later that night, I sat in front of an overflowing Gage & Tollner spread featuring ribeye, a medley of sauces, creamed spinach, onion rings, hashbrowns, fried chicken and hushpuppies with honey butter. When I get home tomorrow, I’ll start a bone broth for the next day. This is how I prefer to eat. A light and easy meal in a beautiful space. A big swanky indulgence. And lots of simple dishes at home. But at heart I see that loaded list of spots back in LA and think wistfully of Frostys and Egg McMuffins that could spiral me out of any sort of recent health kick.

Here are my subjective rankings of the offerings. If you catch me conceding all self control, you’ll most likely catch me here:

1. Popeyes

2. Chick-fil-A

3. McDonald’s

4. Dave’s Hot Chicken

5. Wendy’s

6. Wingstop

7. Chipotle

8. Panda Express

9. El Pollo Loco

10. Burger King

11. Jersey Mike’s

12. Subway

13. Jack In The Box

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I’m taking on the unwieldy task of ranking my 25 favorite restaurants across Los Angeles and New York. The goal here is to capture the essence of Bangers & Jams in one place. Recommendations, wild judgments, subjective taste, coastal elitism — all in a post that inspires texts people are too afraid to include in the comments. I’ll publish my first round of top 25 rankings next Saturday behind the paywall, update it quarterly, and start recruiting some friends to do their own lists over here as well. It should be fun, besides the next seven days when I struggle over what gets cut (Found Oyster?) and what ends up at No. 1 (I swear it won’t be Bridges).

Starting to put together this list has made me think more deeply about what I value in a restaurant in these two cities where I spend the most time. LA was already a little sleepy before the fires, but lately I’ve felt a resurgence in energy across dining rooms. New York remains in an unnerving state of peak reservations. The dichotomy makes this kind of cross-city ranking fun.

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The long list for consideration here reached about 150 restaurants. Inspired by my guy Zach Lowe, I’m making up a few sub-categories to create the final 25 rankings, based on a weighted 100-point scale. The categories reflect how I think about what makes a great dining destination that I’m compelled to recommend. It’s not a thing I ever consider in the moment, but it’s a useful reflective guide. Here they are:

• The vibe (40 points): How you feel inside of the space, the service, the music, the decor, the crowd, the originality or the nostalgia — everything that makes a restaurant singular and transporting rather than a cafeteria. When I remember my favorite meals ever, this is what I think of.

• The food (35 points): Important! But as I’ve written before, it’s okay to like restaurants more than food. It’s become a bit of a tenet of this blog over time.

• The repeatability (15 points): I’m just simply not eating at Yoshino more than once every two years, no matter how good the food is. A place that facilitates weekly returns gets a bonus.

• The vision (10 points): I have a longstanding approach of judging films based not on how good or bad they are but how successfully they accomplish the thing they set out to do. I have more respect for Challengers being a near perfect execution of hot people getting up to shit than I do for All We Imagine As Light stumbling over its grand ambitions. I feel somewhat the same way about restaurants. Palace Diner gets credit for doing the diner thing better than anyone else in the country. Your execution of a vision matters to me, even if that mission is nonsensical and weird. This could also be renamed the “Tom Colicchio just make me a good burger” category.

This is sure to cause some disagreement, so hop in the comments or DMs to tell me what I got wrong. See you next week for the full list.

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