It is actually not too late for some new year dining trends

LA dining, Paris recs, bad couple orders and restaurant pens

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

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

LA dining, kind of back

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paris, pretty good!

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

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

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

3. Bento box lunches at Mokochaya.

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

5. Arayes and falafel from NOUR Comptoir.

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

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

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

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

What’s up with great restaurant pens?

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

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

I miss real restaurant cookbooks

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

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

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

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

• Penny

• Semma

• Baroo

• Torrisi

• Dame

• Birdie’s

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

• Bell’s

• HAGS

I can’t with these couples

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

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