Rotisserie chicken, reviewed!!!

Like Grub Street’s Tammie Teclemariam, I’m an avowed fan of Pio Pio, the Peruvian pollo a la brasa chain that serves achingly tender chicken with elastic, bronzed skin. And while quality can vary from day to day, Pio Pio will send you home, on a good night, with the type of masterful poultry you almost wish you could find at fancier restaurants. Except here, you can eat well for under twenty bucks.

And that green sauce is legit!!!

But like my colleague Luke Fortney, I also realize that rotisserie chicken is a beloved albeit undervalued foodstuff — something that Costco and supermarkets frequently undercut the competition on with deep discounts — distorting our collective sense of what a fair price is.

And even though New Yorkers are resigned to paying top dollar for something very different — crispy oven-roasted birds at fine dining institutions — I’ve always preferred slow-cooked rotisserie poultry, with its silkier meat and floppier, more gelatinous skin. It’s one of those culinary cases where technical brilliance and subjective deliciousness — for me at least — finds more overlap at our city’s affordable takeout spots.

So! That’s the backdrop against which New York Times co-contributing critics Mahira Rivers and Ryan Sutton (that’s me!) examine something that’s decidedly more rare: posh neighborhood rotisseries. The $40 chicken (with potatoes) at Gigi’s raised a few eyebrows when it opened — like, does everything need to be upscaled? — but Rivers makes a compelling case for her starred rating.

Just the same, I awarded a star yesterday to Cleo in the West Village, where Juliana Latif gives us something even more unique: a bird slathered in a warming riff on Levantine seven-spice (I say “riff” because Aleppo pepper and garlic take the place of the more traditional allspice and sweet cinnamon). Latif charges $32 for her half-birds, a lower price than Gigi’s, but adding on fries pushes things up to $44.

And here’s a nice touch: In deference to New York’s more approachable rotisserie zeitgeist, Cleo has a takeout program where half chickens start at just $20.

The 17 Best Dishes of the Year, So Far!

Scroll past the paywall for amazing dishes at Bistro Ha, Zoli, Stars, Frijoleros, Dean’s, Cleo, Kiko, Falansai, and elsewhere. You’ll also find some thoughts about the state of dining in 2026.

Read more

I’ll also have a quick take on three dishes I didn’t get a chance to dive into in my Bar Chimera review for the NYT!

But first…

On the need to recharge…

As some of my friends know, I’ve been recovering from being a whisper under the weather here and there. And while the good news is that I’m okay (for real!!!), the better news is that I’ve taken this as an opportunity to do something I’m less familiar with: Slowing down the pace. To give my Sutton self a chance to rest and recharge.

That has meant spending a little less time writing newsletters, and a little more time away from the computer. It’s been good for me.

Morning Spanish lessons have been a balm, as have evening swims in Cold Spring Harbor (as warm as the Gulf!). And instead of zone 4 heart-rate intervals on the indoor bike trainer, I’ve been taking slow walks in the woods to spot baby deer and friendly chipmunks. Just keeping things chill.

Keeping things chill also means less nightly news, more Yankees baseball, and more Steven Soderbergh flicks (Logan Lucky!). At some point, I’ll get through “The Bear,” but for now, it brings back too many memories of working in hospitality. These days, I’ve been leaning on comfort watches like “Legacy of Monsters” — a soapy series about three generations of kaiju chasers who cheat on their romantic partners (!!!). No food angles there, though there’s one very satisfying udon slurping scene.

I love a good slurp!

Writing brief reviews for the NYT continues to be an absolute delight — and a brilliant excuse for late-night dinners with dear friends — though I’ve been cooking at home as much as I’ve been eating out, which feels like a nice rebalancing. I make a mean brown butter caper sauce (a halibut hates to see me coming), and one of my finest new skills is resurrecting bad restaurant lobster rolls with beurre monté and cayenne.

My official breakfast of the summer has been a bowl of oatmeal with blueberries, a piping hot Colombian pandebono, and a cup of mint and chamomile tea. Sometimes, I’ll take a quick nap right after :)

And apropos of nothing: I could literally feel my body and soul convalescing during a 10:00 p.m. meal with a high school buddy at Dean’s. A little rare roast beef and NA Guinness can do wonders, apparently.

That’s not medical advice!!!

In any case, I’m eager to start sending out more newsletters now that my Sutton energy levels are on the rise again. And I’m equally stoked to report that I’ve been getting back on my trusty road bike for some easy outdoor spins down by the local salt marsh, home to lanky egrets, terrapins, wrens, and a family of hawks.

After a little more rest and a lot more training, I’ll head out West for a week and cycle up my favorite canyons in Boulder.

I’ll get there, slowly.

Our Country’s Great Mexican Restaurants!

My note about Colorado makes for a good segue: Since before the pandemic, I’ve maintained that Denver has one of the country’s most underrated Latin food scenes, and so it was satisfying to see my home away from home represented in this New York Times list of the country’s top Mexican restaurants.

Alma Fonda Fina (get the sweet potato with salsa macha) and La Diabla Pozole y Mezcal (order the tiny al pastor tacos!) both made the cut, and I encourage you to read the whole excellent guide, written by Brian Gallagher, Tejal Rao, Ligaya Mishan, Brett Anderson, Luke Fortney, Regan Stephens, Priya Krishna, and Bill Esparza.

Shout out to the two New York picks: Carnitas Ramirez in the East Village and Chalupas Poblanas El Tlecuile in Corona!

On scheduling matters: I should be back next week or thereabouts with a fun guide I’ve been chipping away at. Stay tuned, and thanks so much for your support as I get my sea legs back! I’ll be creepin’ on in to your inbox soon enough, as Dolly and Norah would say ❤️.

El Califa de León opens in Manhattan!

The Mexico City-ification of New York City dining continues.

El Califa de León, the first ever taqueria awarded a Michelin star, made its stateside debut yesterday in Flatiron. You probably know El Califa already for its gaonera, a slice of griddled tenderloin garnished with salt and lime.

A bare bones affair.

This is one of the year’s biggest openings, for sure. Food media — in both English and Spanish — collectively seem to be tracking El Califa the way entertainment reporters write about “The Odyssey.”

Not bad for a taqueria.

Most of this week, it’s reservations-only, according to the official Instagram. Starting on Friday, the restaurant will take walk-ins.

So yes, there will be lines.

My advice is simple: Give this place some time. Just as you didn’t need an opening night, center-row seat at the Lincoln Square IMAX to enjoy Christopher Nolan’s latest flick, no one gets a prize for booking an El Califa table during the opening days. After a week or two — or maybe a month — things’ll settle down. They always do.

Another reality check: The thinly-sliced, minimalist steak tacos that El Califa specializes in have been trending in New York for the past year or so. They may not be the same, but they’re in the same ballpark. You can find great versions at Soledad by Julian Medina and at the growing El Chato and Santo chains. As I always say, if one place is too crowded, go somewhere else.

So kindly also check out our Definitive Steak Taco Guide!

For further reading, turn to the opening coverage over at El País, Edible Manhattan and Grub Street! 20 West 23rd Street, Flatiron

Artificial intelligence-assisted food writing about El Califa…

I reckon this is a good time to note that a non-bylined blog post about El Califa on a deep-pocketed tech-media platform — that comes up on the first screen of my Google Search results — was “created with AI assistance.”

It’s too bad. An opening post is a great chance for reporters to sharpen their writing skills by weaving together a venue’s story while trying to reckon with why the space is important to the community or the particular cuisine.

This is a platitude I can’t believe I’m typing out, but: A live person brings a unique and valuable point of view to writing, to journalism. An artificial entity doesn’t, at least not in my experience. And putting an actual byline on a high-profile opening also shines a proper light on a new (or established) writer, which is a good thing in an era when so many journalists are struggling.

I have no doubt that editors at sites like these are good people who are under enormous pressure to produce more and more…stuff, but I’d argue that this sort of thing is something we can do without.

Let’s have more journalism, less AI content.

Is Katz’s still worth it at nearly $40 after tax and tip?

The rising cost of beef — due to droughts out west and other factors — is pushing up the price of so many things we love. Prime ribs. Burgers. Korean barbecue. And, it seems, one of New York’s signature foodstuffs.

The Katz’s pastrami sandwich has jumped up by two bucks to $30.95 over the past month or so. After tax and a $5 tip to your carver (what I see most people giving), you’ll end up spending just under $39.

Katz’s hasn’t responded to our inquiry about the pricing move (they haven’t answered our emails in previous years), but consumer beef prices* have increased roughly 24 percent since the deli’s last price hike in December 2024, or thereabouts.

New Yorkers don’t eat pastrami on rye as frequently as slice pizza or tacos — Katz’s has always been an accessible splurge of sorts — but spending nearly $40 on a single sandwich makes it feel just a bit less accessible.

That said: Is Katz’s still worth it? You bet it is.

I dropped by on Friday.

The sandwich stands tall, at least four or five-inches. White rye, yellow mustard, and a fistful of meat, as red as a brick. That’s it.

Do you want to add melty cheese, like so many folks do?

You do not.

Open wide and squish it down to get a proper bite. Or more realistically: Remove a little meat, to cut down on the altitude.

If you ask for an “extra moist” sandwich, like I usually do (a carver once took offense when I asked for something “fatty”), you can expect thick-cut navel meat that pulls apart like tender barbecue — but that still has a little springiness to it. That’s especially true of the chewier burnt ends. The bark packs a strong aroma of fresh cloves, while the meat smells powerfully of pickling spices (I call it a hot dog perfume, lol).

This is a very good pastrami sandwich. And remember, you get more than enough to share. That’s not so much obvious advice as it is a benign warning. If you try to eat the whole thing in one sitting, by yourself, you will not feel well. 205 East Houston Street, Lower East Side

Hometown: My favorite pastrami sandwich right now!

I enjoyed the Hometown pastrami sandwich when I tried it a few months before the pandemic. But truthfully, I found it too salty, too rich. Still, not a bad deal at $17. It eventually went up to $28, and over the last month or two, it hopped up to $32.

That means the Hometown pastrami will now set you back $41 after tax and tip.

Yep, this one is still worth it too.

Bill Durney and his team have improved upon the sandwich since its early days, at least based on a visit late last week.

After 15 minutes or so of queuing up, I watched as a pit worker carved up the pastrami, added brown mustard, and placed it on rye like a ribbon spread of playing cards. It is the most aesthetically pleasing smoked meat sandwich I’ve ever encountered.

The first thing I notice is the aroma. The brisket packs a heavier bovine musk than at Katz’s, where the meat tastes more of spices. That is to say: You can really tell you’re eating beef here at Hometown. The pickling is gentler. The inky bark is more subtle too, without a strong clove or peppery punch. The smoke is there — this is a barbecue restaurant — but it never overpowers the rest of the sandwich, and a maple-like sweetness balances out the modest salts.

But my favorite part is the texture and the butchering: Unlike the wonderfully jagged shards at Katz’s, the slices here are more precise and geometric. The impossibly tender meat pulls apart like an accordion — it almost disintegrates under the weight of gravity when you pick it up — while the fats are as silky as marshmallows.

The buttery rye, more substantial than elsewhere, keeps things on an even keel. So does the mustard. The whole thing feels like a work of harmony, not unlike a perfect piece of nigiri sushi. Not words I usually deploy when talking about pastrami or barbecue, but that’s what we have here. We have balance.

This is my favorite pastrami sandwich right now. I ate half at Hometown, where Ziggy Stardust was playing through the speakers, and then I walked over to the Pier 44 Waterfront Garden and watched the sun set behind the Statue of Liberty. 454 Van Brunt Street, Red Hook.

The Hometown pastrami sandwich is available on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays.

How about 2nd Ave and other pastrami sandwiches?

New York pastrami isn’t about good versus better versus best.

It’s about you’re looking for. Just like with wine.

Thea Bakery is a very solid option. Tomer Blechman and crew cut their meat thick, like at Katz’s, and the beef is super smoky, with an intensely peppery kick. And a little homemade shifka — spicy pickled peppers — helps keep the fats in check…if acid balance is what you’re looking for in pastrami. You can read my full review here! Cost: $21.

For clarity of spices and a more modest portion size, S&P is my go-to for a solo pastrami sandwich. Cost: Just $19.

Sometimes, I crave the marbled, machine-sliced pastrami from 2nd Avenue Deli, which currently runs $28.95, but that Kosher establishment, famous for its ultra-thin meat, often raises its prices right before or after Katz’s does the same.

Pastrami Queen — where I had a not-so-good sandwich at its Penn Station location — is now $29.95 at the Kosher Upper East Side flagship.

“ICE Picked Up a Chicago Chef and His Wife On His Way From the World Cup Final. Now, He’s Imagining His Future From Inside a Detention Center”

Please do spend some time with this piece from Ashok Selvam over at Ravenous!

Bar Chimera: What to order, what to avoid

I had an absolute blast writing about Bar Chimera by Simon Kim — the impresario behind Cote.

You can read my full review over at the New York Times, but the takeaway is that Chimera is a P.J. Clarke’s all jacked up on wagyu, caviar, and expensive martinis. Sometimes it’s fun. Sometimes it’s not, depending on how you navigate the hit-or-miss menu. As always, there are dishes that I didn’t have enough room to cover at length in my review. So here are three of them:

Bresaola with Sugar Kiss melon: Prosciutto with cantaloupe is perhaps the most common Italian pairing of cold cuts and fruit, though bresaola with melon is not uncommon by any stretch. That said, I’m not sure I’ve encountered a version like this: Soft, heady, air dried wagyu sitting beneath cubes of Sugar Kiss melon, a proprietary fruit that, in this case, oozes sweet juices like a summer peach. Really good stuff!

Chicken paillard: I’m a longtime chicken breast apologist; I actually got into a heated argument about this with a date back in my mid-30s! Indeed, a good paillard can be a thing of beauty, be it pounded meat drenched in a luscious butter sauce, or grilled with olive oil and topped with peppery arugula. It’s something you’d expect on a breezy lunch menu, rather than a $95 prix-fixe, so I was curious what type of fireworks the Chimera team could produce. Alas, there were no fireworks. This was a bland slab of overcooked chicken with a side of ho-hum salsa verde. Blah.

Oysters Dynamite: I’ve never really found myself seduced by Oysters Rockefeller — an old school preparation of bivalves beneath breadcrumbs, garlic, butter, herbs, spinach, Pernod, and such. You can find those here (I didn’t try them), but let me tell you about this here “Dynamite” dish. The kitchen torches West Coast Fat Bastards underneath a cloak of lump crab, gochujang, and kewpie. Onto that goes a layer of chives and vibrant orange masago. Everything is creamy, spicy, and rich, but somehow, amid all these ingredients, the oysters remain plump, with a clean, cucumber-forward flavor. Well done. 550 Madison Avenue (56th Street), Midtown East

What’s going on with Salt Hank’s?

Just the other month, I reviewed Henry Laporte’s Salt Hank’s for the NYT, long after the lines had vanished.

It serves a delicious French dip sandwich, though the same could be said about Hillstone, Au Cheval, and other institutions that aren’t engineered to go viral.

Well, it appears that the success of Salt Hank’s has attracted some serious money.

Wonder, the sprawling ghost kitchen network founded by tech billionaire Marc Lore, has purchased Salt Hank’s, Eater NY reports. This means the hefty sandwich will be available from Wonder’s Upper East Side location (for pickup and delivery) sometime this fall. Further expansion will follow, Nadia Chaudhury writes.

I encourage you to read Kristen Hawley on the Salt Hank’s acquisition over at Expedite, but here are some of her key musings:

“Still, I’m not convinced that even the most meticulous reconstruction of an iconic, viral sandwich can replicate the original. Will it taste as good if you don’t have to fight as hard to get it? What happens to the magic of an indie business when its essence (and IP!) is taken over by a highly capitalized corporation? We’ll see, I guess. But I hope everyone feels like they got a great deal.”

One last thing: I’m not quite sure I believe in proper omens or the Greek Gods, but I’m a fan of “Hadestown,” and this summer I’ve randomly sat next to Gary Dourdan (at a West Side bakery) and Ben Davis (at a downtown hotspot), the two most recent actors to play Hades in the Broadway production. What are the chances?

Honestly, in New York, probably pretty high.

I’ll take it as a good omen!

Ryan!!!

*I used uncooked beef roasts to measure rising consumer prices for beef. If you want to go further down the supply chain, producer prices for slaughter cattle are also up about 24 percent over the same time period.

Ryan Sutton is a contributing restaurant critic for The New York Times and editor of The Lo Times. You can read starred NYT reviews by Mahira Rivers and Ryan Sutton right here. And you can read “Where to Eat” columns by Luke Fortney and Becky Hughes over here.

Marcel occupies the old Flora Bar room, a fact that should not go overlooked. One of the most satisfying things about dining at Flora was knowing that chef Ignacio Mattos’s sharp creativity kept pace with the Brutalist digs.

Just as the building itself stands uniquely, with its reverse ziggurat facade (an upside down staircase that looks as if it’s about to topple over onto Madison Avenue), Mattos had his own tricks. He would hide raw shrimp under geometric squares of nori, sheets of seaweed that quietly hovered above the plate like avant-garde spaceships from a Denis Villeneuve flick.

The culinary sensibilities matched the architectural edginess.

And now, in a dining room with a Joan Mitchell hanging over one booth and an Ellsworth Kelly by the stairs, things are different. We have ourselves an elevated brasserie. “Rest assured, there is nothing sly or subversive going on here. The paintings, in all their force, are just the backdrop to a placid, rote, unexceptional meal,” Mishan writes as part of her zero star review for the NYT.

It’s Sunday, 2 August 2026, and if you’re near Park Slope, you might consider swinging by Vato. Perhaps you already had plans to do so, because the Norteño spot serves some of the city’s finest burritos; my order is always the vegan chorizo with mushrooms, eggs, and lime cream.

But starting today, Sofia Ostos and chef Fidel Caballero will offer Texas-style barbecue from noon until sold out. This will happen every Sunday, so realistically plan on next Sunday, lol. As someone who’s queued up for a half hour in the rain in front of Vato, I can assure you that things might sell out quickly. Among the offerings: kielbasa sausage, smoked beef rib, mole bbq chicken, and sliced Texas-style beef chuck. Vato is at 226 Seventh Avenue, Park Slope.

In other line-related news: As a critic and a reporter, I do my best to keep my hand on the pulse of our larger food scene, but let’s be honest, it’s a big [expletive-omitted] food scene. And so it was only yesterday when I witnessed, IRL, a frozen yogurt line.

A modern right of passage for folks with time to spare.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m well aware froyo has been trending (again!), and I’ve enjoyed reading Luke Fortney and Helen Rosner on this tangy subject. But I was en route to a review dinner the other night when I Citibiked past Australian-import Mimi’s and all I can say is….holy sh!t!!! It was like a Mama’s Too line and a L’Industrie line decided to have a dessert baby line. But the baby line was longer!

My two cents: I would not queue up! But if I did pine for a frozen treat, I might be inclined to try the following new dessert from Bar Contra: Guava sorbet and vanilla ripple ice cream with whipped passionfruit and fig leaf oil.

I love a good ripple!

Behind the paywall: An Amazing New $33 Steak!

• Reviews of the ox steak and mutton chops at Somssi

• A few words about the $73 Galiciana steak at Asador Bastien in Chicago

• A few more words about my NYT review of Stars and the design….

• A new dish I didn’t get a chance to write about at Stars!!!

Read more

Hopefully, you’ve already seen the big burger package that Nikita Richardson spearheaded over at the New York Times! This isn’t a classic best of list, but rather an effort to a shine a light on burgers that don’t always get as much attention as, say, the patties you’ll find at Red Hook Tavern and elsewhere. The guide includes shrimp burgers, lamb burgers, and one of my absolute favorites: The Frita Cubana. Click through for writeups by Luke Fortney, Mahira Rivers, Richardson, Becky Hughes, and moi!

Scroll past the paywall for a short essay about influencers and Salt Hank’s — followed by a few thoughts on some of my favorite French dip sandwiches.

Let’s get to it!

On staying cool…

It’s been a tough few weeks for New Yorkers who prefer sweater weather.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m as excited as anyone about Modelos on the beach and arepas in the Rockaways and sunsets at 9:00 p.m.

But you know what I’m more excited about? October.

If you saw me scrolling through my iPhone at your travertine bar this July, it wasn’t for the Aperol Spritz on tap. It was for the air conditioning.

Really, I’d pay $17 for a blue bottle of Saratoga — just as a cover charge to listen to your aughts revival playlist and stabilize my core temp. And I’d pay double that if it meant waiting for an open seat in a chilly foyer with a nice little bench, like the ones they used to have at my local Outback Steakhouse in Oceanside. The Tetris-like realities of New York real estate become all the more brutal when the host says you have to wait outside, where the air is as thick as creme anglaise.

During the last heat wave, when temps in Brooklyn hit 100F, my friend and I passed by our favorite Fort Greene hotspot and walked into a low-key Italian joint. Just because there was space. Just because the AC was strong. It was too hot for cacio e pepe that night, so we ordered wine and Phony Negronis. Dinner was a plate of wings from Alamo Drafthouse during a screening of “Disclosure Day.”

Extreme heat has a way of changing your culinary priorities quickly. Though I’d like to have a word with Alamo about switching to boneless Buffalo wings.

Boneless wings aren’t wings. They’re chicken fingers!!!

It’s Wednesday, 15 July 2026, and Argentina will face off against España at the Meadowlands this weekend for the World Cup final! Good luck snagging a Resy at Socceria for the match, but I’m happy to report that as the Copa Mundial winds down, it’ll become tons easier to get into the Greenpoint fútbol bar by the Ramirez crew. Bookings are more readily available when no big games are on, and I reckon the walk-in situation will start getting easier too. I’ll drop by soon to see how the tacos de chapulines hold up against the celebrated offerings from Carnitas and Taqueria Ramirez.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the Consumer Price Index yesterday, and while overall inflation is down, both grocery and restaurant prices continue to tick up amid the ongoing Iran war. New York restaurants — at least the ones I monitor — have been keeping the cost of dining out reasonably stable this summer, but here are two quick price hikes for you:

• Simon Kim’s fried chicken spot Coqodoq, which charged $42 early last year, is now asking $52 for the set menu.

• Red Hook Lobster Pound has pushed up the entry-level lobster roll from $39.50 to $41. Founder Susan Povich chatted with me last summer about the cost of lobster!

Three Really Good French Dips That Aren’t Salt Hank’s

Plus: A few words about Maison Pickle and influencers opining on French dips

Read more

Woodstock Cafe in Virginia was perhaps the biggest surprise. One of my favorite dishes there: masa gnocchi with salsa macha. More on that below.

Related: I should, in theory, be returning to more regularly scheduled programming now that things are settling down.

Let’s get to it.

Before I forget, remember that cold noodles are always a smart idea when it’s steamy out. An icy piragua is also a good plan as well.

And if you’re in the mood for some Japanese small plates, allow me to direct your attention to this NYT review of Odo East Village by ! My co-contributing critic finds a “clear through line of culinary skill” between the new restaurant and the kaiseki-original. Right on!

A few words about LaGuardia’s $13 cheese slice

Good New York pizza is expensive. Folks who patronize new guard spots like Fini, L’Industrie, or Mama’s Too will easily drop $5 or more per slice.

Are these places worth it? Absolutely.

But so the story goes that everyday pizzerias have also been hiking their prices. Gothamist reported late last year that the average price of a slice has crept up toward $4. And earlier in 2026, I told y’all’s about how a single cheese slice at Rose in Penn Station will run over $6 after tax and credit card fees. Things could get even spendier as steel tariffs put upward pressure on canned tomato prices.

And yet those prices all seem quaint by LaGuardia standards.

At Sunday Supper Trattoria, a restaurant whose name conveys all the creativity of an AI bot, you’ll pay $12.49 for your cheese slice.

“How many slices is that for?,” I asked.

It’s for a single slice, and the staffer added that the price works out to nearly $14 after taxes and fees.

I know what you’re thinking. Everything’s more expensive at airports. Once you pass through security, you become a captive audience to the concessionaires authorized to overcharge you. Just as no one drinks $5 Bud Lights during the Yankees-Red Sox games, no one gets a deal on USB cables at Hudson News.

But a $13 slice comes off as particularly brutal, even by airport standards. A quick survey of nearby concessionaires — a ramen spot, a sandwich chain — showed that other airport spots only charge about one or two dollars above regular retail prices.

This little scenario recalls a Hellgate inquiry into a $15, plastic wrapped turkey sandwich at JFK’s CIBO express. Reporter Christopher Robbins noted that the Port Authority has its own rules for how much restaurants there could charge, which was 10 percent above “street pricing” levels.

There’s something darkly humorous or even mafia-esque about regulations outlining precisely how much airport restaurants are allowed to rip off their own customers. And indeed, the Port Authority has since raised its overcharging limits to 15 percent above street prices (lol).

Yet the pizza from LaGuardia’s Sunday Trattoria, by my calculations, is over three times the average price of a New York slice, or more than double the price of a gourmet slice.

That’s pretty steep. And that’s no small matter. Pizza is something we eat every day in New York. And while different businesses all have different financial realities, there’s something distinctly cynical about charging folks — who are waiting hours and hours for their flights — so much for such a basic staple.

The $13 slice feels like an effort to charge travelers a shakedown fee for one of the city’s quintessential foodstuffs. Though I suppose the good news is that the slice kiosk was devoid of patrons. The more reasonably priced Potbelly, however, was packed!

OTG, the group that operates concessions at LaGuardia, did not respond to an inquiry from The Lo Times sent during regular business hours on Tuesday.

Oh, perhaps you noticed a particular corporate vernacular on the Sunday Supper signage! “Pizza slices,” is the term in question. Let this be a friendly reminder that in New York, “slices” or “cheese slices” is the more common usage.

“Regular slice” is also acceptable.

On eating while airporting

I’ve taken eight flights in the past month — six over the past week, often from regional airports whose interiors look pilfered from the set of “Backrooms.”

My impromptu takeaway is that I’m ready to be home for a while!

One of my longtime mantras is that, if at all possible, I avoid eating any sort of airline food that’s not a Biscoff cookie, and truth be told I don’t even really care for those! My preference is to avoid dining at airports too, especially with New York City at one end of my voyages and Denver or Los Angeles at the other end.

Alas, those sensibilities go out the window amid four-hour delays

So here are a few observations, following a week of eating in places where most folks rather not be eating:

Fast food in airports tastes about the same as fast food outside of airports. If that sounds obvious, the logical corollary is that an airport restaurant run by a high profile chef will almost certainly be much worse than their flagship restaurant in a major city. So if it’s Potbelly’s versus a celebrity chef, you know which one to choose!

Bubby’s at LaGuardia serves lard-laced biscuits — with butter and jam — that could outdo the bread service at quite a few New York restaurants.

You’ll find the quickest airport breakfast line at Auntie Anne’s. Perhaps that’s because most normal, level-headed folks don’t want what Jaya Saxena calls “horny butter” pretzels at 7:30 a.m. during a layover. They want caffeine, and they’re all welcome to wait on the DMV-style lines at Dunkin’ or Einstein Bros. But I stand by Auntie Anne’s — and Wetzel’s Pretzels — even if they don’t even technically qualify as pretzels; their chief product is more like warm, spongy bread doused in shiny, delicious ghee. I dig it.

The quickest and best airport coffee I’ve had was at Half Moon Empanadas, a Miami-based chain, at Reagan National airport. The kiosk specializes in baked, Argentinian-style empanadas. I tried one filled with spicy beef and a little hard-boiled egg; they’re light and well seasoned! Also, no line!

I maintain that airports are among the best places to watch the World Cup, Super Bowl, or any other major sporting event. Why? Because so many folks are drinking and spectating alone. They’re looking for a little community while that TSA barrier (or a few thousand miles) keeps them from spending more time with loved ones.

Touch screens and QR codes are showing up at more and more airport bars and kiosks. And they’re still the worst. We all understand the cost-saving economics behind them, but the reality is this: a touchscreen is often much slower than a real cashier or server, and that’s not an unimportant factor when you’re rushing to catch a flight! Also, when I order an appetizer from a touchscreen, why do I have to hit eight different buttons and tell the algorithm that I don’t want cheese fries or dessert? When I ask a human bartender for a beer, they don’t ask questions; they pour my hazy IPA and they stand there until I pay them.

On Shake Shack: Just about any good bodega BEC beats Shake Shack’s bacon, egg, and cheese on a potato bun. That said, if you’re in a rush, Shake Shack is a strong second place in the morning hours (if only they had better hot sauce). And a burger from Shake Shack before a late night flight beats just about any meal on any domestic airline, even in business class!

On Ben’s Chili Bowl: This Washington D.C. institution, around since 1958, has long been one of the biggest holes on my resume; I finally got around to fixing that this past weekend! But I didn’t visit the U Street original. I dropped by the Reagan National Airport location, which has been around since 2014.

A restaurant outpost at a ballpark, a food hall, or any other high-traffic location is always a bit of a gamble, at least from a branding perspective. To wit: How excited can folks get about Wolfgang Puck’s chic destination restaurants if their first encounter with his name is at one of his airport kiosks?

But I can say, without hesitation, that Ben’s Chili Bowl at Reagan National served me one of the finest hot dogs I’ve tried in quite some time. The fat half smoke was snappy and burnished. The yellow cheese sauce was wonderfully gloppy. The chili was meaty and spicy. And yet the bun stayed intact amid all the drippy condiments. The space had the energy of a lunch counter; you could see the sausages sizzling. And a server even threw in a little extra chile and cheese for me, at no extra charge, as if I were a regular dropping by for my usual order.

Two more things…

Woodstock Cafe

I realize most readers aren’t going to book a flight to DCA, rent a car, and drive 90 minutes to Shenandoah County, just for a few meals. But if you did, you’d surely end up waiting in line for brunch at Woodstock Cafe, the type of casual yet ambitious spot — with all sorts of artisanal tuna jars and craft beers — that New Yorkers swarm in the Catskills after a writeup in Hudson Valley Magazine. Or what have you.

Anyway! This past weekend my college buds and I ate well at Woodstock Cafe, run by Nikki Grant and Jose Arevalos, a former Lettuce Entertain You chef. The kitchen sends out a helluva Cuban sandwich, and a splendid roast chicken — all crisp skinned and drenched in a powerful preserved mushroom jus. Really, it’s the type of fare that’s more characteristic of a high-performing brasserie than a suburban spot hawking steaks and grilled branzino.

But I can’t stop thinking about a particular special, a pile of masa gnocchi paired with crab, corn, and crimson splotches of salsa macha. The pale dumplings acted as a soft counterpoint to the warming chile sauce. It was the type of smart, creative dish that you’d expect at a chic Manhattan hotspot, but here I was in Virginia farm country. 117 South Main Street, Woodstock, Virginia

The vodka slice and pistachio doughnuts at Dough & Co!

Folks who live in the tri-state area know that some of the region’s best pizza lies outside the boundaries of New York City. New Haven has Frank Pepe’s and Sally’s. New Jersey has Razza, Bread & Salt, and Corner Slice.

And Long Island has its own crop of quality pie joints.

I grew up with Umberto’s of New Hyde Park and Gino’s of Long Beach, but one of the biggest newcomers is Dough & Co; it opened in 2022 under the helm of a 23-year-old Umberto’s alum. Make no mistake: Danny Rocca makes good pizza, based on a recent visit to the new Oyster Bay outpost.

The burrata slice is one of the signature offerings. Too hot outside for that, so I sampled a few other items. My pepperoni Sicilian square exhibited a uniformly bubbly crumb with a dense (but not too dense) chew. And the roni cups were crisp.

Not bad.

The vodka slice, however, was a thing of beauty; splotches of fresh mozzarella and pink tomato sauce intermingled and swirled like an abstract Mark Bradford canvas. And the thin, well-seasoned crust provided a pleasant chew and a solid crunch.

But the best part of my visit? A yeast doughnut stuffed with a swath of aromatic pistachio cream. The dough was light while the filling was as rich as nut butter. I’ll be back to try more soon. 25 East Main Street, Oyster Bay, New York

See you soon with some thoughts on steaks — but not the type of steaks you’re thinking of — and on other matters!

Ryan!!!

This column has been updated for clarity and humor, lol

Ryan Sutton is a contributing restaurant critic for The New York Times and editor of The Lo Times. You can read starred NYT reviews by Mahira Rivers and Ryan Sutton right here. And you can read “Where to Eat” columns by Luke Fortney and Becky Hughes over here.

Who just bought Eater?

Penske Media, the sprawling conglomerate behind SXSW, the Golden Globes, and Rolling Stone, will purchase Eater and the other remaining assets of the company once known as Vox Media.

It’s the end of an era for the publication that was my professional home for nearly a decade.

Terms of the sale were not disclosed, according to Variety, which is also owned by Penske Media. The other half of Vox, including New York Magazine, Vox.com, and the podcast network, had already been sold off to James Murdoch for $300 million.

The deal, which includes The Verge and SB Nation, makes Penske “the world’s largest digital publisher,” according to a press release. Variety reports that Eater and the other brands “will continue to operate autonomously.”

Penske Media also owns Robb Report, a luxury lifestyle publication that, in addition to covering Bentleys, Aston Martins, and lavish maritime travel (they literally have a yacht subhead on the homepage), also reports on fancy restaurants and limited-edition whiskeys.

Eater has undergone numerous pivots and multiple force reductions in recent years. The food and beverage site shed scores of journalists, including critics, feature reporters, and editors, as it reorganized to produce a variety of newsletters and short dining briefs for a smartphone app.

I’ll refrain from too much commentary since we don’t know what changes will come as of yet. But I hope — and I realize hope isn’t a strategy — that this new partnership builds a more stable home for all my amazing friends who still work at Eater. The good folks who keep that site running deserve so much more than a constant cycle of layoffs and restructurings. They deserve to do what they do best: produce breaking news reports, timely features, and informative videos. And Penske should realize that the most important thing they’re buying isn’t a brand, but the journalists who power that seminal food and beverage site every single day. Without them, without those journalists, there is no Eater.

It’s also worth being clear-eyed about these moves. Penske, like so many other digital publishers coping with the decline of search traffic, carried out its own series of layoffs at Rolling Stone, Variety, and elsewhere last year. Corporate parents typically strive to find efficiencies among acquired publications and existing brands when facing economic headwinds.

And finding efficiencies usually carries a human cost.

Which chefs and restaurants won at The James Beard Awards?

The James Beard Awards, a duo of annual galas for restaurants, chefs, cookbook authors, and journalists, took place in Chicago over the past seven days.

It was pretty fun!

I got to spend some time chatting with food writers I don’t see too often IRL — like Amy McCarthy, Jaya Saxena, and Ashok Selvam of Ravenous, Daniel Hernandez of The Los Angeles Times, and Hana Asbrink of Bon Appétit!

And I swung by Portillo’s and Asador Bastian for some Chicago beef!

Maybe I’ll write about those meals soon.

But back to the Beards, which I should contextualize, in case you’re not too familiar: While consumers look to, say, restaurant reviews or Michelin stars for decisions on where to eat, the Beards are more like the Grammys or Tonys. Things kick off with an annual call for nominations. Judges then suss through the selections. Everyone dresses up at the ceremonies. Big-deal presenters announce the prizes by opening up sealed envelopes. And the winners give speeches in front of their excited peers before music plays them off. Naturally.

Here’s who came out on top at the chef and restaurant awards on Monday:

• Outstanding restaurant: Kalaya, one of the country’s fanciest and most celebrated Southern Thai restaurants. Been dying to eat here for a while; I mentioned the famed tom yum soup in my Chalong review!

• Best new restaurant: Lei, Annie Shi’s very good wine bar in Manhattan’s Chinatown.

• Best chef, California: Dave Beran, who serves a $295 tasting at Seline in Santa Monica! I dined well at Beran’s more affordable Pasjoli a few years back!

• Best chef, Mountain: Yuan Wonton, Penelope Wong’s acclaimed wonton shop, born from a humble food truck.

• Best chef, New York: Meju, Hooni Kim’s Queens fermentation spot that earned a top five spot on my colleague Ligaya Mishan’s Top 100 restaurants list.

Julia Moskin has the full report over The New York Times.

The Lo Times is a James Beard Award-winner!

The Beard Foundation also hosted a separate food media ceremony on Saturday at The Art Institute — my favorite museum in America!

And The Lo Times took home a medal!

But first, a few observations:

I’ve always found the James Beard Media Awards to be particularly fascinating and inspiring. Imagine if the Oscars celebrated not just filmmakers and actors but the journalists covering them as well! That’s actually not a bad idea. Like, how about an Academy Award for Manohla Dargis’s epic takedown of “The Polar Express” by Robert Zemeckis?

Seriously though, it’s really quite amazing when the Beards end up highlighting the very work of critics writing tough (but fair) things about some of the restaurants regularly up for top awards. It reminds us that criticism and celebration can exist in the same world.

No, the media ceremony doesn’t necessarily generate the same type of attention as the chef and restaurant gala, and I suppose that makes sense. Folks tend to get more excited about eating at restaurants than contemplating the folks who write 1,200 word reviews about those institutions! But since I’m one of those folks who writes reviews, and since I do get super excited about reading that latest chef profile or personal essay, let me mention some of the media winners:

• Craig Claiborne, criticism: Ellen Cushing of The Atlantic for her column on Elon Musk’s Tesla diner, among other pieces.

• Personal essay with recipes: Hali Bey Ramdene of Bon Appetit on blueberry oatmeal and what it means “to become a mother while grieving your own mom.” It’s part of the publication’s ongoing “Fourth Trimester” series on postpartum eating, cooking, and living.

• Foodways: Ahmed Ali Akbar, for his Chicago Tribune story titled: “The hunt for the bean pie street sellers of legend, and how this dessert is a symbol of liberation for many Black Muslims.” Listen to his beautiful acceptance speech via the author’s newsletter, Rad Brown Dads 2.0!

• Jonathan Gold Local Voice Award: Stephanie Breijo of the Los Angeles Times for a series of columns, including one on the Eaton Fire and another titled: “These street vendors used their aguas frescas to fight tear gas at anti-ICE protests.”

• Dining & Travel: “Hong Kong Looks to Reinvent Itself,” by Francis Lam, for Condé Nast Traveler.

• Investigative Reporting: Robert Lopez of Capital & Main and The Los Angeles Times on the exploitation of child farmworkers.

• Profile: “No Papers, Just Peaches,” a profile of a Pakistani frutería clerk in Barcelona, which you can read here on Substack! By Sithara Ranasinghe, with editing by my former coworker Jesse Sparks!

• Columns and newsletters: Ryan Sutton of The Lo Times (!!!). This was for my column on the vulnerabilities of immigrant restaurant workers, my explainer on the SNAP funding crisis, and my essay on campus Iftar dinners and student deportations.

The Beard Foundation has been generous about recognizing the work of independent journalists and small-scale publications, with awards having gone to Tanya Bush’s Cake Zine, Hannah Raskin’s The Food Section, and Gary He’s self-published and self-funded McAtlas. And so it feels quite nice to see The Lo Times entered into that list!

Indeed, some of the most exciting and relevant food journalism right now is getting published not just from mainstream outlets — again, I’m so lucky to be part of that side of the equation — but also from independent publications that didn’t even exist three or four years ago. Some of the young publications that I’m thinking of — and that I mentioned in my speech — include Ravenous (by some ex-Eater folks), Beyond Buerre Blanc (by Kirstie Kimball), The Sweethearts (by Charlotte Druckman and Mia Winston), and Sweet City, by Mahira Rivers, my fellow contributing critic at the NYT.

It’s a wild time to work as an independent journalist, in this era when holding power to account during the day precedes long nights of figuring out how to pay for healthcare. But there’s nothing else I rather be doing right now, and it warms my heart when I see so many other journalists continuing to write and publish, no matter what we’re all up against.

The importance of nominations

I’ve riffed on this theme before, but I feel like this is a good time to do it again.

Nominations have always mattered more to me than whoever ends up winning at a given awards ceremony.

Sure, it’s thrilling to see M. Gessen take home a deserved Pulitzer for opinion writing on authoritarianism. But I like to think the prizes are entirely more meaningful when you see Nicholas Kristof and Gustavo Arellano alongside Gessen as finalists, opining on the dismantling of U.S. Aid and the carrying out of mass deportations.

Awards derive much of their legitimacy not because of who ends up on top, but because of which films, songs, or feature stories the judges put in conversation with one another. Awards matter not because of a single victor, but because of the collective themes that voters seek to highlight. Indeed, you can see one common theme emerge very clearly when you read Kristof, Arellano, and Gessen.

And so on that note, I’m so deeply grateful that my essays on the immigration crackdown and the food aid crisis were named alongside the work of Saveur and Civil Eats. You can detect one common theme in all our work, too. So please spend some time with Shane Mitchell’s writings about a mutual aid group delivering groceries to families impacted by ICE. And click through to the work of Rebekah Alvey, Brian Calvert, and Lisa Held, who published columns on SNAP funding and ICE raids targeting farm and food workers.

The true honor of awards like these is knowing that we’re all working on this together. We need to. Because these days, this is a lot.

More CDMX tacos! More steak tacos!

The steak taco is the quintessential New York taco of the current era. And Norteño fare — including lush flour tortillas — is booming throughout the city at places like Border Town, Vato, Cuerno, and elsewhere.

This all explains why the folks behind Tacos Domingo, a small Northern Mexican chain with locations in CDMX and Monterrey, have set up their first stateside outpost in Manhattan’s East Village.

The airy space sits at the corner of St. Marks and First Avenue. Light pours in through giant windows. Stainless steel counters function as standing-only tables. And ordering works more or less the same way as it does at Los Tacos No 1.

You pay first, then hand a receipt to the taquero.

Domingo only offers two tacos at the moment: carne asada or bean & cheese.

How are they?

Well, steak tacos are a competitive category in New York these days, and I’m sorry to say that Domingo’s aren’t quite ready for prime time, based on an early visit.

While venues like Esse or Santo offer high-quality beef with impressive marbling and proper Maillard char, Domingo’s steak had a distinct commodity twang. The cubes of meat, scooped out of a metal tin, packed under-rendered fats and little beefy char. Really, there’s not a lot of flavor happening here.

But the good news — again, from an early visit — is that the bean and cheese tacos are quite special, thanks in no small part to the warm tortillas, all splotched over with handsome leoparding.

Domingo, like other Norteño spots, uses lard in its dough, and the result is another very good flour tortilla for our city. It’s a burnished affair that’s much puffier than the diaphanous specimens at Border Town, but not quite as thick as the naan-like varieties at Los Burritos Juárez. The texture is springy and flaky, like a good paratha. A layer of griddled cheese fuses itself to the dough, while an orange layer of spiced frjioles sits atop.

Modest portioning and smart ratios are what makes this taco so good. The beans don’t overwhelm the tortilla any more than a schmear gets in the way of a bagel. This is a taco de frijoles as a study in balance; all the ingredients — including a proper hit of chiles — come through cleanly. This is a delicious and crushable taco. Cost: $5.

I’ll be back here soon to re-try the carne asada, available for $7.95 alone, or $10.95 as a pirata — which sports same layer of griddled cheese you get on the bean taco. Quesadillas and fried baby potatoes are also available. 131 First Avenue, East Village

Also check out Robert Sietsema’s New York for his own early review of Tacos Domingo! Siestema likes the steak tacos more than I do, but we agree on the deliciousness of bean varieties!

Ryan!!!

Ryan Sutton is a contributing restaurant critic for The New York Times and editor of The Lo Times. You can read starred NYT reviews by Mahira Rivers and Ryan Sutton right here. And you can read “Where to Eat” columns by Luke Fortney and Becky Hughes over here.

p.s. Here’s a nice post from the good folks at Cake Zine about their Beard Award!

Anyway! It’s a great time to be eating vegetarian tacos in New York.

On a semi-related note, here’s something I wrote last month about finding great vegetarian eats on Ligaya Mishan’s epic 100 Best Restaurants list for the New York Times. Mishan, the chief critic, also had a great two-star take on Lungi this week, a vegetarian-friendly Sri Lankan and South Indian spot (with halal meats) on the Upper East Side!

Looking Beyond Beef, in Our Steakhouse City

Sometime soon — perhaps in the coming weeks — Mexico City’s first Michelin-starred taqueria will open its first stateside outpost in Flatiron. Its name is El Califa de León. And its calling card is a thin slice of beef filet on a tortilla.

There will be lines.

New York, of course, already boasts a burgeoning cadre of spots that serve modern steak tacos. Among them are Santo, El Chato, and Cuerno. We’ve been a Steakhouse City for over a century, and now we’re a Steak Taco City.

That’s a good thing, if you eat steak. But not everyone does.

So today, let’s talk about something else.

Let’s talk about the city’s new class of meat-free Mexican dishes. They’re some of the best reasons to eat tacos in the Big Apple right now. And they pack the type of intoxicating seasonings, textures, and char that could keep pace with succulent pork shaved off the trompo or fatty ribeye seared over the binchotan.

Yes, I suppose that’s a meat-centric take on meat-free tacos.

So let me take a step back. Vegetables and fungi aren’t delicious because they remind of us bacon fat. Vegetables are delicious because vegetables are delicious. Most folks get this. I mean, you wouldn’t order a plate of spaghetti al pomodoro e basilico and tell your buds it wasn’t as tasty as sautéed veal wrapped in prosciutto, right?

But like I said, we live in a Steakhouse City.

And so the story goes that meat-free tacos have long served as a weak point in New York’s Mexican scene. Some of our most beloved chains and taqueros still treat vegetarian offerings as a perfunctory concession to folks with dietary restrictions, the taco equivalent of a “plate of sides.”

That’s changing.

At Carnitas Ramirez and Taqueria Ramirez — two of the city’s top Mexican spots — options for vegetarians are slim. But preview menus for Socceria, the group’s new fútbol bar, show what appears to be a solid selection of meat-free fare, including tlacoyos de nopales and epazote quesadillas.

Also: All three of Brooklyn’s new Norteño burrito spots offer lard-free tortillas upon request. Or here’s another fun fact: You’ll now find some of the city’s finest vegetarian tacos at the same exact places that offer some of our best carne asada. That’s a win for everyone, especially because these meat-free tacos aren’t consolation prizes; they’re ambitious, technically-minded snacks that could serve as marquee offerings at any prominent New York restaurant.

So there you have it. It’s summer. It’s time to grill. It’s time to eat tacos. And since eating meat is becoming even more of an inane litmus test in certain political and cultural circles, let me end with this: A corn tortilla with shiny green nopales — or a burrito with eggs and cheese — isn’t any less Mexican or American than a slice of strip steak. New Yorkers know this. And I like to think my good friends in Texas know this too :)

New York’s Top Meat-Free Tacos, Reviewed!

Plus: Meat-free gringas, vampiros, quesadillas, and Norteño burritos. Bonus: A few quick notes on a certain vegan taco spot….

Also check out our Steak Taco List and our full guide to New York’s best tacos.

Read more

And I’m making another exception for Zoli, an artsy new seafood spot on a warehouse-y block in East Williamsburg. Ned Baldwin, the chef, is doing some tasty and creative stuff with shellfish, and his anchovy-topped bison steak is most definitely worthy of attention.

“We don’t have rules at Zoli, but we also don’t serve beef,” Baldwin wrote on Instagram. I respect that sentiment, and I talked with the chef — via email — about that ethos. Scroll past the paywall for that one.

But first…

On Unions, Alamo Drafthouse, and French Textbooks

Well, the Long Island Rail Road strike is over!

If you’re not from around here, let me fill you in: The country’s busiest commuter rail network shut down for three days while the MTA and rail workers struggled to come to an agreement over annual raises.

This was a big deal.

The LIRR is Long Island’s cardiovascular system, shuttling nearly 300,000 folks into the city on any given weekday. Without the LIRR, getting to that Broadway show or Knicks game gets very, very inconvenient.

Here’s how my own Monday morning commute went:

• Step 1: Car ride from Oyster Bay to Great Neck

• Step 2: N20G bus from Peter Luger in Great Neck, toward Queens.

• Step 3: Take local 7 train from Flushing to Court Square

• Step 4: Long transfer to the G in Long Island City

• Step 5: Impromptu transfer to Citibike in Greenpoint because I got tired of being inside a metal tube.

• Step 6: I arrive in downtown Brooklyn nearly three hours after I left home. I generally prefer NA drinks these days, but when I got to Alamo Drafthouse to meet my artist friend, I had a beer. And then, I had another.

Then again, being inconvenienced — which a lot of us certainly were — is a very small matter considering what’s at stake.

No one likes transit strikes. Not politicians, who try to be good stewards of our taxpayer dollars. Not restaurant workers, whose livelihoods depend on folks grabbing oysters and beers before hopping on the train to Port Washington. Certainly not commuters, who end up spending hundreds on Ubers to get to jobs they can’t do from home (I’ve heard about remote surgeries, but you can’t cook a steak via Slack).

Even the transit professionals would’ve preferred taking us all to Montauk on diesel trains instead of picketing in front of Penn Station. They would’ve preferred working, instead of watching their rent money disappear during an unpaid work stoppage.

Ideally, at least.

But here’s the thing: Forgoing a few bucks today to earn a few more dollars tomorrow is a sacrifice that unionized folks are willing to make. It’s a sacrifice that sets the bar higher for other industries when it comes time for them to bargain. It’s a sacrifice that gives non-union workers in other industries a little inspiration to organize themselves. Maybe.

I don’t have much insight into the right balance between fair pay for LIRR workers, fair taxes for New Yorkers, or fair ticket prices for those who ride.

But regardless of where you stand on those issues, the sheer breadth of the LIRR strike — impacting hundreds of thousands of commuters — is testament to the power of unions to get our collective attention, and to effect change in a very real way. This is why New York housekeepers will see their average pay rise to over six-figures. This is why Starbucks baristas keep fighting for recognition. This is why investment banking associates, AI workers, Atoboy’s bartenders, and others have sought to unionize as well.

Normalizing union activities — including strikes — is one of those lessons that never gets old.

I started studying French in the ninth grade. We learned basic verbs of motion and other fundamentals, like how to order a medium-rare steak frites in Paris. The kind of stuff I expected to learn.

But in the tenth grade or thereabouts, our public school teacher tested us on the modern vernacular of going on strike (“se mettre en grève,” or something like that, was a key phrase in our textbooks). Our teacher regaled us with stories of Gallic truckers blockading highways and farm workers dumping tomatoes. Not the kind of stuff I expected to learn.

I never encountered those tomatoes in France. But during a trip to Spain in 2018, I watched thousands of Barcelona taxi drivers protest ride share services by parking their vehicles along the city’s grand boulevards. Not even municipal buses could make their way through!

Sure, it was aggravating; I almost missed my flight back to JFK. But the drivers were doing what they were doing because this was their time. This was their leverage.

I had a reason to be sympathetic. We were in the early stages of bargaining our first contract at Vox Media that summer, and we ended up organizing our own one-day walkout — a mini-strike of sorts — when negotiations got tough.

But looking back further: It was a Long Island French teacher who planted that seed in me — as a fifteen-year-old — that unionizing was part of life. That striking, while never the first option in collective bargaining, was a normal reaction to rectifying the imbalance of economic power. And perhaps more than anything: That Europeans absolutely, positively do not mess around when it comes to this sort of thing.

Our teacher wasn’t trying to be political. She was just using French to teach us the language of resistance, an inconvenient but vital lynchpin of any democratic society.

You know what they say; start teaching kids languages early :)

Remember that Alamo Drafthouse theater I mentioned earlier?

I was there to see Curry Barker’s “Obsession,” a cautionary courtship horror tale that, for reasons I’m not entirely sure of, sneaks in a few lines about being a food critic.

But I should also point out that Alamo — which serves very good Buffalo wings — is a unionized workplace. Last year, staffers at the Manhattan and Brooklyn locations went on strike for nearly two months to secure the reinstatement of roughly 70 workers who had been laid off.

They all got their jobs back.

And since there’s often a bit of (understandable) talk about what unionizing does to restaurant prices, let me state that my beers cost just $9 and $10 apiece at Alamo. Not a bad deal in our exorbitant city.

But allow me to suggest skipping the truffled popcorn. Not everything needs to be gourmet!

Folks covered by union contracts generally earn 12.8 percent more in wages than staffers in non-union workplaces, according to The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning, non-partisan think tank.

Restaurant workers have one of the lowest rates of union membership of any industry, at just 1.8 percent, according to BLS data. Folks who work in construction, by contrast, enjoy a higher rate of union membership, at over 16 percent.

Kindly spend some time with Mahira Rivers’s Sweet City Roundtable with Jaya Saxena, co-founder of the worker-owned food media site, Ravenous! My beloved rice roll spot, Yi Ji Shi Mo, makes an appearance, as does a bakery I’m curious to get to: Elbow Bread by Zoë Kanan!

Saxena also talks about blondies, which I think I might need to eat more of in 2026.

The Lo Times is a James Beard Finalist!!!

I can’t tell you how grateful I am to the James Beard Foundation for recognizing The Lo Times with a finalist nod in the newsletter & columns category!

This was for a trio of stories on the SNAP food aid crisis, on fasting during Ramadan, and on the vulnerabilities of restaurant workers amid the immigration crackdown.

I’m so honored to be named alongside respected journalists from Saveur and Civil Eats in this category. And I’m so thankful to all of you, my good readers, for sticking with me during the opening years of The Lo Times — as I switch between topics as diverse as restaurant criticism, food prices, the ICE surge in Minneapolis, and the ongoing relevance of M.F.K. Fisher’s “Consider the Oyster.”

As I always told my CUNY students: Food journalism is journalism.

Three Dishes to try at Zoli in East Williamsburg

Notes on the surf clam, the stuffed chicken wing, and the very good anchovy-topped strip steak!!! Also, a few thoughts about the art…

Read more

Penn Station will shake you down.

You know that’s true if you’ve been following the NJ Transit plan to charge World Cup fans $105 to travel to the Meadowlands this summer. Normally, the train would cost $12.90 round trip.

The smarter move is simply watching the matches from a local pub.

Those price hikes, of course, are temporary. What’s more concerning is what everyday commuters are up against. Like higher pizza prices.

Rose Penn Station, a slice shop that has served New Yorkers for decades, reopened the other year with a pricing scheme that felt more in line with a gourmet pizzeria. Cheese slices jumped up to $4.29 when the new location debuted.

Bu this year, those slices shot up even higher, to $4.95.

Add on tax and a credit card service charge, and you’re at $5.65 for a single slice.

And indeed, things go up from there.

Vodka slices, another New York staple, now run $6.45 before tax. Add on a bottle of water and you’ll be out over $10. For a single slice and a drink.

Five dollar slices are common enough among the city’s upscale pizza parlors, but the average price of a slice still hovers around $3.71, according to a Gothamist analysis from late last year.

Rose, to be clear, is not an upscale pizza parlor. It’s where you go for a quick bite before catching a train to Syosset to visit your uncle. It’s where you go for tasty slices — with a curiously sweet sauce — in the style of an old fashioned dollar slice.

This pizza doesn’t want to inspire you, it wants to feed you, and that’s why I still love it. Kind of. But really, spending nearly six bucks on an everyday slice is a tough reality.

On a related note: Tomato prices are up 22.6 percent over the past year, largely due to tariffs on Mexican tomatoes. But keep in mind that canned and processed tomatoes — the kind used in pizza — are “somewhat” insulated from those trade policies, CNBC reports. What canned tomatoes are not insulated from, however, are higher energy prices and tariffs on aluminum. Indeed, consumer prices for canned fruits are up 7.7 over the past year (CNBC).

So, let’s keep an eye on slice prices, shall we?

NYT’s 100 Best Restos, Food Price Inflation, And More Reviews!

It’s Monday, 11 May 2026, and the U.S. will release one of its most widely-watched inflation indicators tomorrow: The Consumer Price Index. Some economists expect the April data to show higher energy prices spilling over into food prices, putting a further strain on consumers smarting from $4.52 gas.

On a much lighter note: Ligaya Mishan will release her top ten New York City restaurants tomorrow in the NYT. The chief critic dropped her longer list of the city’s top 100 places to eat earlier today. Mishan — whom I’m lucky to count as a colleague — has been working super hard on this guide for the past 11 months, and I think you’ll enjoy spending some time with it! She also published this nice piece about five great restaurant neighborhoods, including my beloved South Brooklyn.

Related: I was happy to see some of my own favorites on the longer list, including Eyval, Txikito, Taco Mix, Corima, and Kono.

Finally: The NYT published a set of restaurant reviews by Mahira Rivers and me just the other week! Among the latest batch: Corner Slice (Jersey pizza!), Lucky Charlie (coal-fired pizza in Bushwick), Golden Steer (steak!), and Pangat (Western Indian).

Behind the paywall: Delicious, affordable eats!!!

• The hot dog bun at Dominique Ansel’s Papa d’Amour!

• The new pancita negra tacos from Frijoleros

• The epic flank steak “Manolo” tacos from Dolores

• The mochi toasties, also from Papa d’Amour!

• One of New York’s priciest prime ribs is now….pricier!

Read more

This afternoon’s column concludes our unofficial “Steak April” coverage!

If you’re new to the dance floor — and indeed a few of you are — here’s what you might’ve missed these past few weeks:

• All the steak price hikes around town

• A review of Gui’s lunch and thoughts on El Gauchito!

• The Budget Steak Guide, with lots of new reviews!

And today, I write about an early visit to Bar Chimera, the posh new restaurant by Simon Kim’s Gracious Hospitality — better known as the team behind Cote.

You know what there’s a lot of at Bar Chimera? Martinis.

Really. I’ve never seen so many bartenders pouring so many martinis into so many chilled stems. It’s like being at some sort of futuristic cocktail factory where all the patrons have livers made out of titanium.

Anyway! I left Chimera feeling energized about the steak frites, one of the best I’ve tried recently.

So enjoy today’s read, and remember to support independent food media! Our friends at Ravenous — an ambitious startup run by five ex-Eater folks — are continuing their pre-launch campaign. Check out these interviews with co-founders Jaya Saxena, Ashok Selvam, Frances Dumlao, Amy McCarthy and Courtney E. Smith.

Do we need another Cote? Maybe we do!

We don’t usually need fine dining sequels, at least not in the same town.

Like, must there be four Avras in Manhattan?

But things are a little different with fancy steak clubstaurants. Given how hard it is to snag a table at Cote before, like, 11:45 p.m. on a Thursday, one could make a good case that we actually could actually use a second location of the Korean American hotspot.

Well, now we have one!

The new Cote is at 550 Madison, that famed postmodern Philip Johnson building with an ACME-style cannonball hole running through the length of the roof. Gracious Hospitality now occupies 15,000 square feet of space at the storied address.

For reference: The stadium-sized Buddakan has 16,000 square feet.

Just the other week, Resy and American Express threw a splashy grand opening fête, the type of event that could’ve doubled as an Oscars after-party. There were, according to Instagram, giant tins of caviar, DJs, a brass band, cello players, Eric Ripert, Daniel Boulud, and Nas. (remember that Busta Rhymes and Mayor Eric Adams showed up to the Coqodaq opening).

Behind the paywall: An early visit to Bar Chimera

• What you’ll pay for a meal at the new Cote (and how to get in)

• Why the $55 steak frites at Bar Chimera is so darn good

• Another steak tasting menu goes up in price…

• Thoughts on wagyu and the closure of Donohue’s

Read more

Pumping gas will set you back over $4 a gallon in New York.

Riding a Citibike to FiDi will cost more than two good slices.

And renting in Manhattan runs upwards of $4,700 a month.

Inflation is eating away at our paychecks. We’re acutely aware of this. And so it’s no wonder that a Greenpoint wine bar charging $40 for half a chicken is irritating more than a few folks. Or put differently: That pricey bird is serving as a flashpoint for the city’s overlapping affordability crises, including the cost of dining out, as my colleague Luke Fortney reported this week for the NYT.

Fortney also reminded us that it’s not hard to find lower priced rotisserie birds.

Of course, chicken isn’t the only dish commanding a few extra bucks these days. Over at The Lo Times, we’ve been tracking rising tasting menu prices, sushi prices, lobster roll prices, power lunch prices, and most of all, fancy steak prices.

But we also keep our eye out for deals. And so I’m happy to report that it’s not hard to find an affordable-ish steak frites or carne asada these days. You just have to know where to look. So welcome to our third annual Budget Steak Guide!!!

Here are some of my favorite steaks under $50.

That price tag is still a lot of money to a lot of people, but it’s not bad by New York’s ridiculous standards. And yes, that’s $5 higher than my limit for last year’s guide.

Inflation even affects listicles :)

Keep in mind that this isn’t just a guide to affordable steak frites. This is the place to learn about creative red meat options at Estela and Confidant, as well as where to get great Argentine parrilladas, Japanese beef tastings, Persian skewers, and Mexican carne asada.

You’ll also find quite a few interesting cuts of meat, the kind that don’t typically find their way into classic steakhouses. I’m thinking of chuck flaps, bavettes, short ribs, rib fingers, Denver cuts, chopped steaks, teres major, and tri-trips. And as a bonus, I’ve added a few upgrade options that go above our stated price limit.

Let’s get to it!!!

Behind the Paywall: New Steak Reviews, Including:

• The flatiron steak frites from Café Chelsea

• The creative steaks at Estela and Confidant

• The tongue tasting at Chubby Tan’s

• Lori Jayne’s $25 chuck flap au poivre!

• The wagyu kabob from Eyval, and more!!!

New York’s Top Steaks Under $50, Reviewed!

Read more

Let me recount one of my favorite New York evenings.

Two summers ago, my artist friends and I strolled up and down the Brooklyn waterfront — with a very good dog — before ending up at Colonie for an impromptu bite. We soaked up the waning sunlight, shared a little halibut and duck breast (the server even brought a water dish for Mister Woof), and then we picked up a fizzy pet’nat to keep hydrated during a screening of “Challengers.”

It was a glorious night. But the actual dinner — the part I usually focus on as a critic — was just a single event in our longer evening. I appreciated that. And that’s exactly why I enjoyed my recent meal at Confidant in the old Colonie space. The brand new American spot by two Roberta’s alums had the easygoing energy of a neighborhood staple.

We snagged two bar seats after a few minutes. And then, we ate.

There was no waitsplaining, like at a recent tasting menu where each course required 60 seconds of contextual monologuing. There was no upselling. There were no folks constantly changing silverware or saying “sorry to interrupt.” And the cocktails all cost less than twenty bucks each.

We ordered some bread with boquerones, a plate of mushroom pasta, and a big steak with potato foam (as one does). And for dessert, we walked over to Henry Public for cold gin martinis. It was another glorious night.

But here’s the thing: we didn’t spend too much time dwelling upon what we ate.

It was just dinner.

Just like my last meal at Colonie, my first meal at Confidant didn’t dominate our evening. It simply fit in like the penultimate piece of a jigsaw puzzle. I realize that’s the type of normal societal function that thousands of restaurants fulfill every day without folks like me writing about it, but it’s nice to experience this type of ease and unobtrusiveness at a venue that folks might otherwise call a hotspot.

You feel me?

It’s Sunday, 5 April 2026. Ashley Padilla continues to kill it on SNL. Amazon continues to charge me obscene sums for my NA negroni habit (let’s try to keep Lapo’s in stock!!!). And gasoline prices have hit $4.11/gallon nationwide, putting a strain on consumers everywhere.

Would you like to read a restaurant review? My fellow contributing critic at the NYT Mahira Rivers has a two-star take on Pangat, a Western Indian spot in Park Slope. And my good colleague Luke Fortney, who writes the excellent “Where to Eat” column, somehow ended up at Henry Public a few days before me; apparently I should’ve ordered a few beignets to soak up the booze!

The martinis there are strong, lol.

In case you’re in the mood for something clubby on the South Asian front, Matthew Schneier has an early take on Ambassador’s Clubhouse in New York, while chief NYT critic Tejal Rao filed on Gymkhana in Las Vegas a few weeks back!

And finally, be sure to follow Ravenous on Instagram. Some good journalists that I know quite well are launching something cool on Monday!

Beef prices predicted to rise 10 percent or more in 2026

The USDA forecasts that prices could jump as high as 18 percent

About a month ago, I swung by a popular Mexican spot to meet up with another food writer. And to grab a few tacos.

The tacos were good.

So the story goes that the owner recognized me and we ended up chatting for a few minutes. I asked him whether he’d have to raise carne asada prices — this is what happens when you strike up a convo with me, lol — and he replied that he probably wouldn’t have to. At least not anytime soon.

He said he’d heard that beef prices might ease up this year.

This conversation, I should note, took place before the war in Iran. And it appeared for a while that things wouldn’t be terrible on the steak front in 2026.

Consumer beef and veal prices actually fell in December, and the USDA initially predicted that things would only hike up by 5.5 percent this year. A five or six percent increase isn’t too shabby compared with last year’s absolutely massive beef price inflation, fueled by tight cattle supplies and strong consumer demand. And earlier this year, Carnibro RFK Jr. rejiggered our nation’s dietary guidelines to highlight saturated fats like red meat and tallow.

But really. There’s no way that things could be that bad in 2026 at the checkout counter, right? Well, I have some tough news on that front.

The USDA raised its price forecast at the end of March. The agency now expects beef and veal prices to rise by 10.1 percent this year; that number could be much lower — or much higher, as steep as 18.3 percent.

Yep.

It’s unclear if the war in Iran factored into that forecast, but here’s what we do know: Diesel prices have risen by $1.97 since this time last year. And higher fuel prices put cost pressures on just about every aspect of the cattle industry. Or as AGDAILY explained earlier last month: “When diesel prices rise sharply, the cost of hauling cattle to feedlots or packing plants increases almost immediately.”

Translation: Higher fuel costs could eventually translate to higher beef costs at the grocery store and at restaurants.

Ground beef is already 20 percent higher than at this point last year.

The Mexican operator I was chatting with earlier still hasn’t tweaked his steak prices. A recent Axios report suggested that restaurants are hiking their prices more slowly than grocery stores, “making steakhouse meals look like a better value than they used to.” Perhaps that’s true nationwide, at chain spots; Axios was speaking to Darden’s chief executive, who runs the LongHorn brand (which I’ve never visited).

But things look tougher in New York City, as they always do.

As I’ve reported before: A good steak and a side can easily surpass $100 in Manhattan. One of my favorite strip loins at the moment — from Kiko in West Soho — will run $125 after a side of rice, tax, and tip.

Indeed, scores of New York restaurateurs have been pushing up the cost of steak dinners recently. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen so many beef price hikes all at once! Would you like to take a look?

Steak Price Hikes: Almost Literally Everywhere!

Cote

As Simon Kim prepares to open his second New York Cote at the old Sony Building on Madison Avenue, he’s raising the set-menu price at his Flatiron flagship by four bucks to $82. That’s still a fair deal; you get four cuts of Korean beef with banchan, egg soufflé, spicy kimchi stew, savory doenjang, lettuce wraps, and soft serve. But it’s breathtaking to see the restaurant nearly double in price since the early days back in 2017. That’s inflation for you.

If anything, the real challenge is getting a reservation; if you care to swing by next Friday your party of three won’t do better than midnight, lol. And let the record state: The $225 beef omakase, whose price hasn’t changed for a while, remains the best menu offering at Cote. 16 West 22nd Street, Flatiron

The Eighty-Six

The uber-exclusive West Village restaurant ranked as the county’s top steakhouse on a recent listicle, which is impressive for a brand new venue that most civilians will never get into. But if you do score a booking, dinner will be just a little bit pricier than before. The dry-aged rib cap (I’ve not encountered a dry-aged calotte elsewhere) is up by nine bucks to $78, while the porterhouse is up $10 to $160. Other prices have ticked up as well. 86 Bedford Street, West Village

Wild Cherry

My favorite thing about the latest hotspot by Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson (Frenchette) is the steak dinner for two. It’s a hefty Denver cut with a small salad, a baked potato, and a soft serve dessert. When I reviewed it in December, the prix-fixe ran $120. Now, it’s $140. Zoinks! Still a deal, though. 38 Commerce Street, West Village

Skirt Steak

Laurent Tourondel’s bare-bones prix-fixe spot reopened this year with the same menu: A field green salad, a prime skirt steak, and endless fries. It’s more or less the same deal as Le Relais de Venise (not my cup of tea, $38), or Medium Rare (which I still need to try, $35). Skirt Steak is the most expensive of the bunch, especially at the new price of $48, a three dollar hike. That’s literally twenty bucks more than the opening menu from 2022. 835 Sixth Avenue, Midtown

Atla

Enrique Olvera used to serve one of the city’s top budget steaks. His chile-rubbed ribeye with herbed potatoes ran $42 when I wrote it up around this time last year. Now, it comes with refried beans and guacamole. Cost: $65. That’s a heck of a hike — the extra $22 you’re now spending would otherwise pay for an entire plate of suadero tacos (and then some) on Atla’s current menu. 372 Lafayette, Noho

Carne Mare

One of my favorite steaks in the city has hopped up in price yet again. The 12-ounce gorgonzola-cured wagyu striploin, packed with all sorts of heady blue cheese aromas, was $72 at the time of my 2021 review. It steadily climbed in price over the years, and not too long ago it jumped by five bucks to $155. It’s well over double the original price. Carne Mare is part of Andrew Carmellini’s NoHo hospitality group. 89 South Street, Seaport

The Dynamo Room

Steak frites is a New York standard for an affordable-ish dinner. But at The Dynamo Room in the Penn District, the chief deal is an old-school steak & mashed. It’s easily one of the city’s top budget steaks, but now it’s just a little bit spendier, at $44.95, up a buck from the opening price last year. The Dynamo Room comes courtesy of the team behind Rule of Thirds and Cafe Chelsea. 2 Pennsylvania Plaza at 33rd Street and Seventh Avenue, Midtown West

Cuerno

Prices are up across the board at the Northern Mexican steakhouse, the first U.S. outpost of the Grupo Costeño empire. The skirt steak tacos with bone marrow have risen by four bucks to $42. And the arrachera norteña, the cheapest cut on the menu, is now seven dollars pricier at $52. 1271 Avenue of the Americas, Midtown

The Grill

I can’t pin down when it happened — likely sometime between last June and now — but The Grill’s excellent prime rib with a deviled bone has risen by seven bucks to $105. And the New York strip steak has risen by thirteen dollars to $115. The Midcentury Modern space by Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe remains one of the city’s most beautiful dining rooms. 99 East 52nd Street, Midtown East

Esse Taco

The ribeye steak taco at Enrique Olvera’s massively improved taqeuria is up by 30 cents to $7.25, while the American wagyu — one of the city’s priciest tacos — is up by 50 cents to $13.45. 219 Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg

Hamburger America

George Motz’s celebrated Soho spot upped the price of the classic smashburger and fried onion burgers by a quarter to $7.75 in the new year. The burgers were $7.25 when the space opened in 2023. 155 West Houston Street, Soho

Many thanks to Kirstie Kimball for including me in this long reported piece about critics who are doing their things on Substack. Publishing reviews and columns like these without editors is….often quite scary lol!

My next column is a bit more labor intensive than usual, so you’ll likely see me back in your inbox the following Mon or Tuez!

Happy Easter and Happy Passover!

Cheers,

Ryan!

Ryan Sutton is a contributing restaurant critic for The New York Times and editor of The Lo Times. You can read starred NYT reviews by Mahira Rivers and Ryan Sutton right here.

p.s. Shout out to Brooklyn-based artist Marcela Avelar for the Confidant photo up top!

p.p.s. I’m still mulling over my meal at Confidant! I didn’t get a chance to visit the original Industry City location, which I understand didn’t really click (check out the smart Helen Rosner review in The New Yorker). But I did enjoy the steak. Maybe I’ll write about it soon? Briefly: It’s dry-aged. It comes with potato espuma. It’s not served “a la carte” (a.k.a. a hunk of meat on a plate). Instead, it’s presented as a composed main, which is why it looks like this:

Right on.

What a great time to be alive in New York. It’s finally getting warmer. The Whitney Biennial is in full swing. The Knicks are heading to the playoffs. And it’s Steak Season again here at The Lo Times!!!

So today, we’ll talk about my NYT review of El Gauchito, a rollicking Argentinian grill that’s more interesting than, like, 93 percent of the city’s steakhouses. I’ll also have some quick reviews of Gui, Fish Cheeks, and Soothr.

I’ll try to be back later this week or over the weekend with some price hikes.

No single item is more expensive than $35 in today’s column!

Let’s get to it.

The case for El Gauchito

Delmonico’s opened in 1837. Keens launched in 1885. Peter Luger debuted in 1887. And Gallagher’s first set up shop in the late 1920s as a speakeasy.

Some of the city’s most prominent steakhouses have been around for a century or longer. And perhaps a new collection of high profile meateries like La Tete d’Or, Cuerno, and Cote will have a good long lifespan ahead of them too.

But let’s not forget about another class of beefy restaurants.

Let’s talk about a group of South American hangouts that sometimes go overlooked, longtime venues that Matt Rodbard and New York Mag’s Matthew Schneier would fairly call middle-aged (check out their Food Time/Taste discussion).

I’ve long believed that Argentine grill spots — restaurants that showcase morcilla, short rib, and offal — deserve more attention in our Red Meat Metropolis. And that’s why I was so excited, and a little nervous, when I got the thumbs up to review El Gauchito for the NYT.

Mario José Civelli opened El Gauchito in 1978 as a butcher shop, and then as a restaurant the following year.

Nearly half a century later, it’s still a community staple.

On a Saturday night in March, folks were nearly spilling out the door while queuing up for tables. Quoted wait time: 45 minutes. A couple behind us wondered whether they should’ve swung by the Rockville Center outpost instead…until they guessed that the Long Island location would’ve been even more crowded.

I hope you spend a few minutes with my full review, but let me tease you with a few quick observations:

• Like other Argentine steakhouses (and Korean BBQ joints), you’ll find that grilled (not braised) short ribs figure prominently on the menu. Be sure to appreciate their chewy, springy texture.

• The parrillada is the highlight of any proper Argentine steakhouse, and El Gauchito is no exception. Steaks and organ meats arrive in disheveled heaps on a hot steel platter. I like letting the mollejas (sweetbreads), chinchulines (stomach), and other cuts sizzle up a little longer so they develop a deeper, saltier char.

• El Gauchito is one of the few restaurants I know of to offer a veal skirt steak on the regular menu. It was unavailable on my last visit!

Let me know how you like El Gauchito if you go! The other year I tried out Baires Grill, a fancier and more expensive Argentine steakhouse in Hell’s Kitchen. I didn’t like it.

By the way…

Since we’re talking about middle-aged spots: El Gauchito is the only restaurant I know of that still hands out floppy magnet calendars with every guest check. It’s a nice homage to a pre-iPhone era when folks looked at their refrigerators to admire photos of their spouses and children…and to find out what day of the month it was lol.

Every check also comes with a branded packet of toothpicks! It’s another throwback touch for a restaurant that’s nearly 50 years old…and a restaurant where every menu is somehow on an iPad. I can’t explain everything!!!

94-60 Corona Avenue, Elmhurst

For further reading on El Gauchito, check out this fine Caroline Shin column over at Gothamist.

The article dives into the owner’s immigration to the U.S., his dreams of becoming a world class boxer in New York, the early days at the Elmhurst location, and the expansion to Long Island and Flushing (Published: 2025).

Let’s try a $40 steak lunch at Gui in the Theater District!!!

Plus, notes on the dry-aged krapow at Fish Cheeks, the braised beef at Soothr, and more

Read more

Last week, I wrote about how prices are creeping up at some of the city’s top tasting menu spots. But today, we’ll talk about the cost of dinner at an even tonier class of restaurants: New York’s rarefied sushi counters.

Things are getting more expensive, yet again.

Sometimes, like with Sushi Sho, the newly higher prices come via menu surcharges.

Sometimes, like with Noz, the cost of dinner has gone up following the elimination of a service-included policy (a development from late 2024).

And in the case of Masa, the country’s most expensive restaurant, there’s a brand new menu that caters to the wealthiest of wealthy patrons.

Whatever the scenario, these are all signs that upscale restaurateurs aren’t afraid to exercise a little pricing power — even as everyday operators face steep challenges in passing along cost increases.

Some of us might not swing by these exorbitant institutions every second Sunday of the month. Or ever. But I still like to think these stories are relevant. One of the things I’ve learned from 15 years of covering restaurant pricing is that when one or two high profile venues push up the cost of dinner, others inevitably follow.

Also: Price watching is a favorite spectator sport among New Yorkers! We love to complain about things becoming more unaffordable even when we couldn’t afford those same things in the first place. It’s a little like screaming about baseball player salaries or scrolling through Zillow for that regal townhouse in Carroll Gardens.

Prices are what we talk about. Even if we don’t have the means — or the desire — to sample the product or service they’re attached to. It’s part of our collective, “the rent is too damn high” narrative as New Yorkers.

So let’s get to it.

Masa’s new $1,200 omakase

Masa is already country’s most expensive restaurant.

Lunch is $495, service-included, while dinner at the hinoki bar runs $950.

At these stratospheric levels — well above what you’ll pay at any of the city’s celebrated omakase spots — Masa feels more like a semi-private club for plutocrats rather than a vital sushi destination. That’s all the more true in the aftermath of Michelin downgrading the decades-old institution to two stars last December.

In any case, Masa now offers a new seasonal omakase. It costs $1,200 per person.

The booking site calls the offering an “extended expression of Chef Masayoshi Takayama’s philosophy, rooted in the pursuit of purity.”

Masa goes on:

“The menu highlights rare ingredients at their most fleeting moment, featuring produce harvested at the turn of the season and delicacies chosen for their singular character.

Each evening unfolds differently, guided by what nature offers, with additional courses exploring nuance, depth, and quiet innovation.”

Masa did not respond to an inquiry about the new menu, but a receptionist at the restaurant said the offering has a “few extra dishes with seasonal ingredients.” She added that those additional appetizer dishes can change on a daily basis.

For something more affordable: Masa’s $950 menu kicks off with six to seven dishes, which might include Takayama’s toro tartare with caviar and toast, or his Ohmi beef with shaved truffles. That’s followed by 15 to 17 pieces of sushi. The lunch menu is a more abbreviated affair, as one might expect for a paltry $495 (lol). 10 Columbus Circle, Midtown West

Behind the Paywall: The New York Omakase Index!

Plus….

• Sushi Sho’s new 10 percent admin fee

• Noz is no longer service-included. What will it cost now?

• Three big-deal sushi openings for this spring

• How to book a well-regarded sushi pop-up in Union Square

• Bonus! The steep price of Champagne and sake at Masa

Read more

Alright.

Last Saturday, Julia Moskin of the New York Times published a detailed story on past abuses by one of the world’s most famous chefs: Noma’s René Redzepi. The investigation was based on interviews with 35 former employees. A key graph:

“Between 2009 and 2017, they said, he punched employees in the face, jabbed them with kitchen implements and slammed them against walls. They described lasting trauma from layers of psychological abuse, including intimidation, body shaming and public ridicule. Mr. Redzepi, they said, threatened to use his influence to get them blacklisted from restaurants around the world, to have their families deported, or to get their wives fired from their jobs at other businesses.”

Moskin’s reporting came as Noma prepared to open its 16-week Los Angeles pop-up, priced at $1,500 per person.

American Express and Blackbird pulled out as sponsors in the aftermath, as Kristen Hawley reported for Expedite. Jenn Harris, a food critic at the Los Angeles Times, wrote about why she wouldn’t be dining at the Noma pop-up.

One Fair Wage and Jason Ignacio White, former head of Noma’s fermentation lab, organized protests outside the Silverlake estate where the pop-up is being held, as Meghan McCarron of the NYT reported.

And Caper’s Chris Crowley wrote about how the Danish media were responding, passing along the following machine-translated quote from Weekendavisen’s Christian Bennike: “It is the biggest cultural scandal in Denmark in decades, because Redzepi is the biggest Danish cultural personality in the last 20 years.”

Last night, four days after the original Moskin report, Redzepi announced in an Instagram post and in a video that he was stepping away from Noma.

The video clip “included no talk of divestment, amends, or the slightest hint at who’s really in charge now,” Hugh Merwin wrote for Grub Street.

It’s Thursday, 12 March 2026. Like so many other folks, I’m finding it a little tough to spend too much time thinking about where to get a good bite to eat right now. So let me go on for a little bit longer. Then we’ll talk about the cost of dinner.

Shortly after Moskin’s initial Noma report went out, a hospitality professional DM-ed me about their tough experiences working with another acclaimed fine-dining chef. I her message sink in. And I spent some time thinking about Jenn Agg’s Instagram post about fellow chefs posting supportive notes below Redzepi’s social media apology.

Tejal Rao, chief restaurant critic at the NYT, dedicated a full column to Noma today. She suggested that the institution, which had a broad influence on how food looked and tasted throughout restaurants, failed to apply “some of its creative juice to reimagining and reshaping the toxic kitchen culture familiar to so many cooks…”

Here are two key sentences from that Rao column, which I hope you read in full:

“Mr. Redzepi says he has changed in recent years, but from the comments posted under a recent apology, it seems that plenty of food professionals shrug off bullying in the kitchen or agree that it can be motivating, even necessary — the only way to get the best out of the people who work for you, the only way to get to the top.

That simply isn’t true, and one of Noma’s greatest flaws is its passing down that idea to the thousands of cooks, many of them unpaid, who made pilgrimages there to learn from the best.”

Let’s Talk About the Cost of Dinner Out, Again

The Iran War has translated to higher costs at the pump for Americans. Gas prices are currently averaging nearly $3.60 per gallon across the U.S., a 20 percent increase in just 11 days, Reuters reports. That means a lot of folks are getting squeezed.

So I reckon it’s a good time to talk about restaurant price hikes.

Let’s get to it.

Eleven Madison Park’s $1,000 dinner for two!

You’ve heard this story before, but it’s one worth repeating. Some of New York’s most expensive fine-dining spots have become even more expensive, yet again.

Eleven Madison Park, a restaurant with a remarkable track record of overhauling itself every few years (pour one out for the old three-card monte homage), hasn’t raised prices in roughly four years.

In 2022, during the early days of the plant-based menu, Eleven Madison bumped up the tasting menu to $365 as part of an effort to raise wages — amid reports of low staff pay.

Well, prices are going up again, less than a year after Humm announced that he’d be ending the restaurant’s vegan-ish phase by reintroducing select animal proteins.

More specifically: Eleven Madison has hiked the tasting menu by twenty bucks to $385. That new price will go into effect starting in April. That means dinner for two will run $992 after tax and tip. A thousand bucks, before wine.

Yep.

Add on optional pairings for two and you’ll be at $1,495. The restaurant did not respond to a request for comment.

Eleven Madison no longer offers its shorter six-course tasting menu, but a bar menu is still available for $225. Reservations are prepaid and non-refundable. 11 Madison Avenue, Flatiron

I don’t write about fine dining tasting menus too often these days.

Don’t get me wrong; the length of a good menu doesn’t bother me too much, just as I don’t mind the three-hour run time of “One Battle After Another.”

But when I have a few extra bucks, I generally prefer to work my way through one of the city’s myriad small plates places, venues where I can exert control over my culinary and financial experience during the meal itself. By ordering more.

Or by ordering less.

That’s entirely more preferable to dropping $400 on a pre-paid reservation 13 days out, which is the precise opposite of having control over what I choose to put into my stomach.

But that’s just my off-the-cuff take. For longer inquiries into the State of the Tasting Menu, spend a few minutes with Matthew Schneier of New York Magazine, or with Jaya Saxena, writing for Slate (“Who Is the Tasting Menu Even For Anymore”).

Aska is nearly $1,000 for two these days

I gave a proper rave to the Nordic spot in Williamsburg spot during my Eater days, due in no small part to the type of funky flavors that don’t typically find their way into polite fine-dining palaces. I haven’t been back in quite some time, but I’ve heard good things and I’m curious to see how the restaurant has evolved!

That return visit will be more expensive now.

Aska in recent months bumped up its menu price by $50 to $375. The Swedish-born chef, Fredrik Berselius, told me via text that costs are “rising in basically all areas of the business. Every line item going up to some degree,” he said.

That means dinner for two will now run $967 after tax and tip, but before wine. Add on optional pairings at $250 and you’ll be at $1,611 for two.

Reservations are prepaid and non-refundable, though transfers are permitted with a fee. 47 South Fifth Street, Williamsburg. NA pairings are $150.

Some of New York’s priciest tasting menus….

An $850+ dinner for two without drinks — which often translates to $1,000 after a few glasses of wine per person — is a heck of a thing.

But it’s far from unusual in New York.

Here’s what you’ll spend on some of the city’s priciest tasting menus. I’m excluding sushi and kaiseki spots to keep this list shorter and because I might have a few words to say about pricing at those spots soon enough.

The prices below are reflective of tax and tip for two, unless service is already included. The prices in parentheses are the “published” menu prices for one.

• Per Se Evolution: $2,014 ($925 for one)

• Jean-Georges ten-course menu: $1,026 ($398 for one)

• Eleven Madison Park: $992 ($385 for one)

• Brooklyn Fare: $992 ($385 for one)

• Aska: $967 ($375 for one)

• César: $949 ($368 for one)

• Per Se regular menu: $925 ($425 for one)

• Atomix: $922 ($385 for one)

• Le Bernardin: $902 ($350 for one)

• Jungsik: $863 ($335 for one)

A few of these spots offer shorter and cheaper bar menus. Le Bernardin serves a four-course menu for $218. Jean-Georges also offers a six-course menu for $238.

Regular price hikes are common at any given restaurant, as venues cope with rising costs related to real estate, food, utilities, retaining talent, and minimum wages that (justifiably) keep going up.

Yesterday’s U.S. Consumer Price Index showed that food prices — at home and at the grocery store — were a top driver of inflationary pressures across the country.

The Iran War could push up food prices even further as tight oil supplies impact shipping costs.

But price hikes at ultra-fancy spots are in a class of their own. When you’re pushing up the cost of a dinner by $100 or more for a two-top, you need a particularly willing and well-heeled consumer. That’s all the more true when a meal already runs $850.

That is to say: These steep increases suggest that fancy spots are confident enough in their ability to keep attracting enough wealthy residents and destination diners. A $50 per person price hike at a posh tasting menu joint won’t even put a dent in the bank account of someone earning over $450,000 a year, someone who doesn’t have to worry about when their own rent goes up by a few hundred bucks every year.

Meanwhile, a $2 increase in the price of an egg sandwich at a diner can be a more complicated thing to pull off.

It’s all part of the K-shaped economy, where the rich get richer and keep spending accordingly, while lower-income Americans and small business owners keep getting pinched.

Two budget tasting menu price hikes: Corima and 63 Clinton

More affordable-ish splurge restaurants — the kind that cash-strapped gourmands might save up for — are hiking up their prices too….

Corima by Fidel Caballero and Sofia Ostos serves one of the city’s few (or only?) Modern Mexican tasting menus. The bread course — a stretchy flour tortilla — tips its hat to Sonora and Chihuahua.

When I first wrote up Corima two years ago, the tasting ran just $98. It was one of New York’s best set-menu deals. That offering eventually hopped up to $125 last year.

And as of this February, it jumped to $140.

Ostos told me via email that the new price was driven by continually rising food costs, but she also added the following:

Although raising the price is never something we want to do, it reached a point where it became necessary in order to continue operating in a way that aligns with our values. It was especially important for us to ensure we can maintain fair wages for our team, who are a huge part of what Corima is and the experience we strive to provide to our guests every night. Maintaining that balance between supporting our team while continuing to source and cook at the level we believe in, was the primary reason behind the adjustment.

Is Corima it still worth it? Yes.

But if I can be more specific: My good colleague Ligaya Mishan, chief restaurant critic at the New York Times, found more excitement outside of the formal tasting menu in her two-star review. Caballero’s “à la carte dishes are just as smart and intricate but more expansive, at times madcap and, frankly, fun,” Mishan wrote.

I agree with that take! Three Allen Street, Lower East Side

I finally got around to trying 63 Clinton by Samuel Clonts last year, a tasting menu spot that nods to the American Southwest. The best course was the first, a breakfast taco for the ages. Trout roe sat next to a hash brown on a plush flour tortilla. The price of dinner was $112, before supplements.

Earlier this year, that tasting jumped up to $130. The current menu still highlights the breakfast taco, but I’m very curious about the newest dessert: a Choco Taco with key lime and brown butter! 63 Clinton Street, Lower East Side

I thought today would be a good day to do a newsier post.

If you’d like to read a restaurant review, check out my two-star take on Rice Thief in Long Island City. I’ll likely have more to say about that review and about raw crabs throughout the city in the coming weeks.

More soon,

Ryan!!!

Ryan Sutton is a contributing restaurant critic for The New York Times and editor of The Lo Times. You can read starred NYT reviews by Mahira Rivers and Ryan Sutton right here.

This post has been updated to include the $398 menu at Jean-Georges. I’ll continue to update The Tasting Menu Index as new prices and offerings come in! (17 March 2026).

For some previous thoughts on the cost of dining out:

My fellow contributing critic Mahira Rivers and I just published our latest set of starred reviews for the New York Times! This week, we wrote about Le Chêne (fancy French), Santi (fancy Italian), Chalong (Southern Thai), and Kiko (an expensive tavern near the big Google campus). These were fun to write!

You can easily drop quite a few bucks at 75 percent of these spots (lol), so I thought it would be fun to keep things a little less pricey over at The Lo Times today.

Let’s get to it.

The (Affordable) State of Chicken Sandwiches!!!

One of the practical laws of menu pricing is that burgers are almost always cheaper than steaks. That’s a welcome reality given what type of advanced degree you’ll need to afford a dry-aged strip these days.

Just the same, your favorite chicken sandwich will usually cost less than an actual chicken, which is no small matter in an era when poultry can be, as Frank Bruni reported, the most expensive thing on any given menu.

Indeed, the affordability — and accessibility — of a chicken sandwich feels particularly refreshing right now. Especially as burgers themselves can command serious prices.

You’re not going to stroll into a West Village restaurant and ask the bartender if they have a limited count McChicken, the way you know there are only a few wagyu trim burgers every night at your favorite cocktail bar. And no one is really uspcaling chicken sandwiches with truffles or caviar or whatever other obvious luxuries the chef is somehow really excited about.

A burger can easily hit $30 or more.

A chicken sandwich rarely costs too much more than $20.

Peak chicken sandwich arrived in the mid-2010s, when folks started queuing up for Chik-fil-A in Manhattan. Those aggressively saline sandwiches with pickles on the bottom (and a controversial corporate ethos) were still pretty new to the Big Apple lunchtime crowd back then.

And for a while, it seemed as if David Chang was going to start an entirely new empire with Fuku, a place to get shockingly delicious sandwiches that were spicy, fatty, and even a little gelatinous. Alas, breast meat has replaced the original dark-meat recipe, and that once promising chain is now confined to stadium concessions and sporting arenas in the Northeast (this press release states that the thigh meat sandwiches will still be available in New York).

But perhaps chicken sandwiches are starting to boom again in a big way?

Last summer, folks were waiting up to an hour for green chile-topped chicken sandwiches at Mommy Pai’s in Nolita. It was one of the year’s hottest openings!

This spring, the Ample Hills co-founders will try to strike out with smashburger-style chicken patties when they open Ramblin’ Chick in Gowanus, as the Strong Buzz reported. And just last week, I queued up in the cold at 4:45 p.m. for the chance to order a fried chicken mochi doughnut sandwich at DCP. I ate it next to some nice folks visiting from Ohio.

Further fueling the chicken boom, for sure, is the fact that poultry price inflation remains under control. Consumer chicken prices, while far from cheap, are up just 1.1 percent over the last year, compared with over 17 percent for ground beef.

This is when I tell you that most of the fried chicken sandwiches at DCP are actually cheaper than the cocktails there.

I suppose cocktail price inflation is a different story.

Seven Amazing Chicken Sandwiches!

Reviews of the chicken sandwiches at Double Chicken Please, Mommy Pai’s, Pecking House, Three Roosters, Bolivian Llama Party, and others. Plus, notes on tonight’s hot chicken specials at The Fly!

Read more

Today’s column is mostly free, but subscribers can scroll past the paywall for a review of the $73 Barnsley chop at Hawksmoor! Let’s get to it.

A fancy new chile crisp shrimp cocktail at…Hawksmoor!

I generally avoid discussing my own preferences when writing about food. Criticism isn’t about what a particular reviewer or patron enjoys; it’s about….a heck of a lot more.

But allow me to kvetch for a second: Shrimp cocktail, that resurgent raw bar staple, is better when it actually tastes like shrimp.

It’s not better when it tastes like styrofoam.

Don’t get me wrong. I realize most folks are looking for easygoing deliciousness when they order this nostalgic staple; they’re not seeking out gooey crustacean brains (and that’s too bad, alas).

But I like to think it’s a fair request that the dish flaunts a little sweet shellfish flavor, and maybe some court-bouillon aroma too. There’s a lot of bland shrimp cocktail out there, which is too bad given that it can easily cost as much as a burger these days, topping out over $30 after tax and tip. And let’s remember that unlike a burger, shrimp cocktail is just a snack.

Anyway, I bring this up because Hawksmoor, a luxe British chophouse, has finally added chilled shrimp to its menu. And they’re quite good! The restaurant places five poached crustaceans over ice and pairs them with a chile crunch cocktail sauce.

Hawksmoor uses jumbo Gulf prawns. That choice makes a difference.

The shrimp pack a mildly sweet flavor and a mineral-tinged perfume. The flesh occupies a Goldilocks zone between firm and creamy. And the chile crisp adds a little bitterness and smokiness before the sugars of the sauce take over. It’s a smart riff that pushes this dish ever so slightly outside its normally staid boundaries.

Any other good shrimp cocktails out there?

Yes! Penny by Joshua Pinsky serves my favorite prawn cocktail. The kitchen gently steams Argentinian red shrimp, yielding a delicate, flan-like texture. Cost: $26.

You can read some of my thoughts on the city’s finest shrimp cocktails right here, but for something more recent, allow me to recommend this quick guide from The Angel! At the top of Emily Wilson’s list is…Union Square Cafe!

A few quick things!

It’s Monday, 23 February 2026. The Winter Olympics are over (sad face!) and New York is a snowy mess yet again (barf!). But I’m here to remind you that we’ll get an extra hour of daylight in about two weeks, and baseball begins shortly thereafter.

We’ll make it to spring. But right now, a few quick things:

Home cooking! I wrote about the devastating layoffs at The Washington Post a few weeks ago, including at the storied paper’s food section. Today, I have better news. Daniela Galarza, who wrote WaPo’s acclaimed Eat Voraciously newsletter, has joined Substack. You can and should subscribe right here! Her newsletter name: A Petite Feast!!!

Digital tradecraft! My good colleague Luke Fortney noticed that online influencers were starting to use smart glasses to record their meals, raising privacy concerns for staffers being unwittingly filmed or interviewed. Here’s his very sharp piece for the NYT.

On reviewing: I’ve had some tough and scary things happen to me as a restaurant critic; perhaps I’ll write about those experiences one day. But today, go spend a few minutes with Soleil Ho, the former San Francisco Chronicle journalist who co-founded Coyote Media. For Food & Wine, Ho writes about the darker side of being a critic and passes along the following horrifying anecdotes:

Chefs and diners accused me of ignoring “normal” restaurants in favor of immigrant-run ones. People would send cut-outs of my articles, circling all the words they didn't understand in red pen. A select few readers would regularly send me pornographic hate mail and speculate about how miserable my husband must be with such a shrew for a spouse.

In Memoriam: Robert F. Moss, on his Substack, pens a thoughtful ode to the Eater Carolinas. A key line:“Eater Charleston filled the gap between the long publication cycles of the print-centric newspapers and the constant flood of random thoughts from social media.” Indeed.

Northern steak: Minnesota critic Kirstie Kimball gets on the red meat beat and writes about some of her favorite steaks. Kimball, like this reviewer, finds that steakhouses aren’t necessarily the best places to eat red meat! Precisely.

On snow: Nikita Richardson of the NYT talks with Otway’s Samantha Safer, Golden Diner’s Sam Yoo, and others about the logistical and financial calculations that go into whether to open up on snow days like these! To that point: Safer said she would’ve lost $8K to $10K if she wasn’t able to open her bakery today.

Behind the paywall: Hawksmoor’s lamb saddle chop, reviewed!

Plus: Notes on the Keens mutton chop, and where else to find these meaty splurges!

Read more

Putting together a steak taco guide wasn’t initially on my radar. But so the story goes that that spots like Santo, Soledad, Cuerno, and others have been changing the way we eat red meat. These newer spots specialize in thinly-sliced and sometimes minimalist steak tacos meant to be inhaled in just a few bites. Mexico City’s El Califa de León will join this growing club when it debuts its first stateside location in Flatiron this spring. I can’t wait.

That said, we already have a lot of steak tacos to eat. So let’s get to it.

Steak Tacos, Your Definitive Guide

Alright, what kind of steak do ya want?

We got steak tacos sliced from the trompo. Steak tacos seared over coals and grilled over mesquite. Steak tacos griddled with cheese, cut with marrow, and paired with fries.

Shall I go on?

We got steak tacos with raw beef and steak tacos as sizzling fajitas. Steak tacos served with fancy wagyu. Steak tacos made with cecina. Tiny steak tacos meant to be scarfed down in 30 seconds and giant steak taco platters meant to shared. In fact, as I’m writing these words I’m literally eating a steak costra taco at a new seafood spot, of all places, because at this point you’re either on this beefy taco train or you’re not.

The steak taco is the defining New York taco of our current era. Let it be known. I’ll share more thoughts about why this is the case in a short essay down below, but let’s get to the fun stuff first.

New York’s 17 Best Steak Tacos

This list is in no particular order! Scroll to the very bottom for a fun little video of Empellón’s steak tartare tacos

The trompo and carne asada tacos at Santo

My favorite order at Santo remains the zucchini coins with queso Oaxaca and salsa macha; it’s easily one of the city’s top vegetarian tacos. But most folks come here, to this taqueria by Cosme co-founder Santiago Perez, for different reasons. They come for the steak.

There are two varieties.

The classic carne asada involves charcoal grilled steak on good corn tortillas; the little nuggets of meat pack a solid beefiness and a nice smokiness. But the true draw is the trompo: sirloin and strip steak seared on the spit and shaved like a gyro. The tender meat sports a gorgeous exterior, not unlike a the rough hewn texture of beef jerky. It packs a clear, roast beef-y flavor while the wobbly, silky fats yield to a soft bite. Notice how lightly-loaded the taco is; the meat never overwhelms the tortilla ($6.95). 94 University Place, Greenwich Village. Read my full review!

The cecina tacos at Frijoleros

Cecina, salted and air-dried beef, doesn’t get a lot of airtime at new school Mexican spots in New York. Perhaps that’ll change after more folks swing by Frijoleros to try cecina in taco form — a dish that’s improved since I first sampled it last summer.

The kitchen serves the tacos “like how we’d eat them in Guanajuato,” the owners write on Instagram, though they caramelize their onions here (versus plating them raw) and top off everything with fries and red jalapeno salsa. This isn’t about deep, beefy flavors. The cecina tacos are a study in contrasts. The savory, gently chewy steak acts as a foil to the sugary onions and sweet tortillas. And then the papas fritas hit you with an absolute wallop of earthiness. 131 Greenpoint Avenue, Greenpoint

The steak tartare tacos at Empellón Midtown

Alex Stupak, the longtime WD~50 pastry chef who helped usher in New York’s current era of Modern Mexican dining, is still fostering an environment of creativity at his restaurants. That’s my takeaway from a recent meal at Empellón in Midtown.

I dropped by for the steak tartare tacos ($38). And I encountered a crowd that felt about right for a restaurant on the ground floor of a building known for its hedge funds and private equity firms. A dude in a BNP Paribas vest did shots with his colleagues at the standing tables, all while Goldfrapp’s “Strict Machine” pumped through the sound system. I’ll allow it.

Servers prepare the raw beef tableside, mixing in coulotte steak, egg yolk, capers, salt, and a proper dose of lacto-fermented fresno chiles. It would be a fine tartare by itself, but a certain whimsical element transforms the whole thing into something more quintessentially Stupakian.

The kitchen sends out a pile of hard shell taco crisps.

They’re miniature crisps. You use a tiny spoon to fill each one with cubes of crimson tartare. The shells are so small it’s as if you’re hosting a suburban taco night at your…local Barbie Dreamhouse. It’s hard not to imagine a little Ken Doll pretending to eat one at a plastic table.

Simply constructing the little hors d’oeuvres is half the fun, but the flavors are spectacular. The meat is slippery, sweet, and tangy, with the chiles adding just a whisper of heat. And the corn chips lend a salty crunch. 510 Madison Avenue, Midtown. Scroll to the bottom for a video of the dish!

If you’re not reading Alex Stupak’s excellent Substack you are missing out! Here’s his latest column, where he talks about prices for Mexican fare and using tacos as proverbial Trojan horses for….well, just read the essay!

His newsletter is called The Sweet Release.

The El Rey at Dolores

“I believe that steak tacos are the first taco to ever exist, and certainly the most popular in all of Mexico,” Emir Dupeyron tells me via email. I was asking him about his “El Rey” at Dolores; it’s not a run-of-the-mill carne asada taco.

Dolores, which specializes in comida chilanga, uses grilled short rib, a flavor-packed cut that doesn’t show up too often in the New York taco world.

Why does Dupeyron prefer short rib?

Because ribeye would’ve pushed the taco to $12, he tells me, and because skirt steak “tends to dry out and if not cooked properly can be stringy.”

Chef de cuisine Damian Escalante Petersen marinates the meat in cilantro, garlic, lime, and soy. He then grills it, chops it up, and places it on a pillowy Caramelo flour tortilla with salsa de arbol ahumada. It’s a heck of a taco: The seasoned short rib, at once tender and a little chewy, sports a gentle sweetness and a lot of savoriness. You really need the zippy orange salsa to slice through it all. Cost: $8. 397 Tompkins Avenue, Bed-Stuy. Read my NYT review of Dolores!

A new breed of steak tacos…

“A steak taco is rarely the best taco on any menu,” I wrote last April, adding that steak “doesn’t carry the depth or nuances of suadero or lengua. It doesn’t have the compelling texture of good cabeza or tripa. Yet on a summer evening, a little ribeye and salsa on a tortilla can be a wonderful, momentary pleasure. It’s something meaty to keep the tequila from hitting you too fast.”

How things have changed.

When I published that column, a newer breed of steak tacos — inspired by the success of El Califa de León and other spots in Mexico City — was only starting to take hold.

Today, the New Steak Taco seems to be showing up in more and more places.

These minimalist creations, characterized by papery slices of beef, squirts of lime, and maybe a little cilantro or cebollo, stand in contrast to the chunkier carne asada tacos you’ll find at Los Tacos. No.1.

The New Steak Taco doesn’t seek to overload or overwhelm. It showcases good tortillas as much as marbled beef, just as new school pizzerias highlight airy breadmaking over stretchy mozz and fragrant pomodori.

The New Steak Taco feels like an implicit argument against the Steakhouse Steak. It isn’t a story about overindulgence or heft. It’s about proportions and balance.

But let’s be real: The proliferation of steak tacos doesn’t just coincide with our city’s booming Mexican scene. It overlaps with the rising cultural relevance of red meat — which is flourishing for all sorts of crazy reasons, including RFK Jr.’s inverted food pyramid and the MAHA movement. So we’ll keep seeing more beef, more steak tacos, for better or for worse.

But unless the algorithms control us all, lol, I like to think and hope we’ll also encounter a greater diversity of steak tacos going forward, like the short rib variety at Dolores or the whimsical mini-tartare tacos at Empellón.

New York is a steak city. New York is a steak taco city. Even if the steak taco still isn’t the best taco on most menus :)

On that note…

Read more

Here’s a tease: The Enrique Olvera cherry cola collaboration is one of the best-tasting edibles I’ve tried…ever! I wanted to write about it last year but it sold out!

I might even pop a 5 mg gummy tonight while watching the Winter Olympics!

But first…

Five quick things!

One: My heart goes out to the 300 journalists who lost their livelihoods when Jeff Bezos and his (former) publisher cut a third of The Washington Post’s newsroom. Among the layoffs were Aaron Hutcherson, a writer and recipe developer, and Daniela Galarza, author of the acclaimed “Eat Voraciously” newsletter. Related: Galarza’s WaPo column on the word “exotic” is absolutely essential reading. You can donate to The Post layoff fund right here, and you can still donate to the Vox Media Union layoff fund here. It’s tough out there for journalists. And I can’t tell you how angry I am about these cuts….I feel this one in my bones.

Two: Go spend a few minutes with this sharp Babbo writeup by NYT chief critic Ligaya Mishan. One of the best lines: “Despite the baggage and the orange-Croc-ed albatross, this is prime intellectual property, Babbo as Barbie. Keeping the name is a promise: The song remains the same. But should it?”

Three: My fellow contributing critic at the NYT, , awards two stars to La Chêne, which I’m dying to visit. Click through for lots of fun imagery of elegant pithiviers and folks snapping iPhone pics of every oligarch’s favorite liquid gold: Chateau d’Yquem.

Four: Here’s Minnesota Star Tribune critic Raphael Brion with a look at Eat Street restaurants amid the ongoing ICE surge…and in the aftermath of the killing of Alex Pretti.

Five: It’s been fun to see more big outlets bring consumables coverage into the mainstream. I loved this Lizzie O’Leary essay in Slate about how the journalist used 1 mg Rose edibles to cope with the anxiety inherent in a cancer diagnosis. She also writes about how a little bit of THC can help “quiet the horrifying drumbeat of authoritarianism.”

Rose Los Angeles: The Definitive Re-Review

What to order and what to avoid, including:

• Enrique Olvera’s cherry cola gummies

• Virgilio Martinez’s “Magical Grapes” delights

• Higher dose 10 mg edibles from Rose

• Thoughts on the $900 Rose Club

• Bonus review: Enrique Olvera’s sincronizada sandwich at Esse!!!

Read more

I’ve been working on some fun reviews that should be out later in the week! For today, please enjoy a few thoughts on how to enter a restaurant without turning the entire dining room into a set piece for “The Day After Tomorrow.”

It’s literally Siberia in New York right now lol.

Scroll to the bottom for a few brief notes on some hot soups that I love.

Ryan!!!

New York is so bitterly cold right now.

As polar ice floes collect on the Hudson, my iPhone tells me that the temperature outside feels like -8F. Cycling along the West Side Highway last night after dinner — — even with four layers on — was not the smartest thing I’ve ever done.

The wind felt like sandpaper on my neck.

My chief recommendation is that if you’re outside these days — to commute to dinner, to earn a living, or to protest masked agents detaining and disappearing our neighbors — thermals are key. I know that’s obvious advice but so many of my friends choose to ignore that sound counsel and walk into restaurants with chilly arms and numb quadriceps.

Let your quads be warm and merry.

So please, do yourselves a favor and pick up an extra pair of thermals at Paragon Sports or Uniqlo. To be sure: There’s absolutely no need to splurge on merino wool base layers that cost $125. I’ve tried them on and they’re honestly no more comfortable or warm than a pair of regular long johns that run, like $30.

Buy the cheaper ones!!! Then, if you can, send a few bucks to some good journalists who are hurting following the latest round of layoffs at Eater. Or donate to a good cause in Minnesota, where scores of peaceful demonstrators are out there in the cold exercising their First Amendment rights — and where restaurants are struggling as the ICE surge and immigration crackdowns continue.

Let’s talk about restaurant door policies. Literally.

The coldest I’ve ever been inside a restaurant was at a Midtown hotspot in December.

This wasn’t some cash-strapped newcomer doing its best with limited resources. It was a well-capitalized Rockefeller Center spot whose other locations are in….warmer climates. Perhaps the owners didn’t realize how cold things can get here in the Empire State.

But perhaps the patrons themselves were partly to blame.

Let me explain.

The posh restaurant in question, like so many others, requires patrons to walk through two sets of doors before reaching the dining room.

You know what I’m talking about: There’s a heavy door that swings open from the street, followed by a small ante room and another heavy door that leads to the dining room. For this rudimentary type of climate control to work, at least one of the doors needs to be closed at all times. If both doors are open on a super cold day, an arctic blast plows through the dining room. And that really sucks.

So if you’d permit me to spell it out: Here’s how to enter a restaurant when it’s mad cold outside.

Rule No. 1: Open the door to the winter vestibule or foyer. If your entire party can’t fit inside the cozy space, then kindly split into two or more groups. Be patient.

Rule No. 2: Wait inside the foyer for precisely three seconds. This brief moment of peace and meditation will give the outward door enough time to fully shut. If you like, you may push or pull the door closed in a performative fashion so the shivering hosts can see you making an effort. Again, be patient.

Rule No. 3: You may now enter the actual restaurant by opening the inner door. Or by throwing open the heavy curtain. Or whatever.

I know what you’re thinking. This is basic, Cold Cereal Cookbook advice (“first you add the corn flakes, then you add the milk”). But here’s the thing: People don’t really follow these common sense rules, which is why your friendly hosts are showing up to work wearing goose down jackets. Indeed, I’ve seen at least one restaurant spell out these policies on a little flyer in the foyer.

This is no small matter.

Remember that tony Midtown restaurant I was telling you about? When I visited on that cold evening, constant streams of people entering and exiting left both doors open at once….throughout the evening!!! For me and the thirty other folks hanging out at the bar, dining inside felt a whole lot like dining outside.

I am so completely done with the outdoor dining lol!!!!

And so that brings up one more maxim:

Rule No. 4: Watch out for heavy foot traffic! If you see other people entering the chilly foyer, do not open the outer (or inner) door. There won’t be enough room. Kindly wait for the “space lock” to clear. Just the same, wait a little longer if there’s a long line of folks trying to pass through. Be patient.

Or honestly, just pretend you’re in a science fiction movie. If both doors stay open when the giant meteor hits the Yucatan or when the Ridley Scott xenomorph gets sucked out of the airlock, everyone dies lol!!! So go be Gerard Butler or Sigourney Weaver and protect the dining room at all costs!

Winterizing a restaurant is expensive; I don’t think I’d ever criticize a spot for not having a one of those outdoor enclosures. But let me say this: Once in a blue moon, I’ll drop by a place that blasts hot, forced air into its tiny foyer on cold days, and that sort of thing is more luxurious than caviar right now.

Could the Midtown restaurant I was mentioning have afforded one of those heating systems? Sure. But that’s not the point, or at least not the main one. The point is that keeping restaurants warm is a team effort. It takes a village!!! Waiting for the outside (or inside) door to close should be as ingrained as tipping 20 percent.

Be patient. Protect the dining room.

A few good soups for y’all’s

Every season is hot soup season, but that’s all the more true right now!!!

Tantanmen ramen at Donburiya: Tan tan men is a style of Japanese ramen inspired by classic Sichuan dan dan noodles. Whenever I’m craving this incendiary soup, I swing by Donburiya, the late night Japanese pub in Midtown West. Be warned: The pork broth-based soup, laced with ground pork, comes out boiling hot. And it’s sufficiently spicy to induce involuntary coughing. Fight through the pain and let it melt your frozen core ($19.50). And if you need a little chill, allow me to recommend the absolutely massive 25-ounce pints of Asahi dry ($16.50), a serving of beer that’s as big as a small child. 253 West 55th Street, Theater District

Kharcho and borscht at Spa 88: This is the type of weather that makes me want to take up residence at this Wall Street bathhouse for a solid month. Entrance fees have more than doubled since a decade ago; you now pay $65 to get in on the weekends. But I’ll argue that it’s still a fair deal to escape our frozen wasteland of a city. My advice is to alternate between the dry-heat sauna and the cold dip pool, before seeking nourishment at the (very good) cafeteria. You don’t need much, just some salty fluids to help rehydrate. Tangy borscht, teeming with verdant dill, does that brilliantly. But kharcho, a spicy Georgian soup studded with lamb and rice, is a little more restoring, and it provides a serious dose of black pepper warmth as well. 88 Fulton Street, FiDi

Chicken paitan at Ivan Ramen: If you’ve followed my writing over the years you know how I feel about this Lower East Side spot: This is the best place in New York to sample a whole variety of Japanese noodle soups. Really, just get anything, but my happy dish here is the tori paitan, which is essentially the fatty chicken analogue to porky tonkotsu ramen. Expect a salty broth emulsified with so much darn poultry fat it’s all creamy and yellow. 25 Clinton Street, Lower East Side

Shout out to of The Angel, who wrote up one of my favorite New York bakeries: Brighton Tandir in Brighton Beach! It’s a great place for assorted Uzbek samsa and lepyoshka!!! I was worried that Tandir wouldn’t last after the sprawling Tashkent Supermarket rolled into town a while back, so I’m relieved that it’s still doing its thing and doing it well. Click through for some great pics of hot, flaky pastries filled with lamb and pumpkin.

On cycling…

It’s been a tough week for delivery workers, for commuters, or for anyone else who has to be outside for long periods of time.

One of the realities of street plowing is that bike lines become collateral damage. Those vital paths — essential for commuters and deliveristas — transform into temporary snow drift repositories. At one point on Thursday, an otherwise bike-friendly stretch of Eighth Avenue felt like an impromptu Tough Mudder course. Patches of black asphalt suddenly turned white and gray. A layer of snow thick enough for cross country skiing sat above the road. My unwieldy e-bike began to slide and slip. I tried to brake. And my back wheel fishtailed.

It’s amazing how the city rebounds hours after any historic storm (seems like we’re getting more of those all the time).

But while the LIRR and subways maintain at least a semblance of normalcy, cycling remained a greater challenge by the end of the week. Scores of Citibike stations looked like they were hit by some sort of H2O-based nuclear munition; many were unusable. Retrieving a bike from the Hudson Yards station required me to climb up a giant drift before lowering a 65-pound e-bike three or four feet to street level.

I won’t lecture anyone on the morality of ordering DoorDash, especially as those services earn people a vital income — and help folks who are mobility-impaired. But please, I’d advise tipping delivery folks (who don’t use Citibike) a little extra, especially as skidding out while doing 20 mph on an e-bike is pretty scary.

To be clear, I’m not blaming anyone. I don’t have any type of engineering-based solution to clearing out all those Citibike stations or to paving every single bike lane on every single block of our five boroughs.

More than anything, we just need for things to warm up. And in a month or so, things will. We’ll get there.

Ryan!!!

Ryan Sutton is the editor of The Lo Times and a contributing restaurant critic for The New York Times

p.s. Here’s what Super Bowl halftime performer Benito had to say in his acceptance speech at the Grammys: “Before I say thanks to God, I’m going to say ICE out…We’re not savage, we’re not animals, we’re not aliens. We are humans, and we are Americans.” (via the NYT).