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).

Scroll down for a review of Stars, a great new wine bar in Manhattan’s East Village.

But first…

I’ll be honest: It’s been difficult to think about anything other than the ICE surge in Minnesota and the killing of Alex Pretti on Saturday.

The 37-year-old Pretti, who had a permit to carry, was an intensive care unit nurse for the VA in Minneapolis. He was coming to the aid of a fellow demonstrator being pepper sprayed when masked agents took him to the ground, struck him repeatedly, and shot him at close range.

They fired 10 times in under five seconds, ABC News reported.

The shooting took place outside Glam Doll Donuts on Nicolett Avenue in Minneapolis.

Talya Minsberg of the New York Times reported on the aftermath from the doughnut shop. She wrote that protestors gathered at the bakery, which provided free hot chocolate, coffee, pastries, and a warm space to gather.

One of the images I can’t shake from my head is how a local at Glam Doll “looked over the scene and, like others, wore face coverings to protect himself from tear gas coming from canisters launched into the streets by federal agents,” Minsberg wrote.

That was the scene from a doughnut shop in the United States of America.

Nicolett Avenue, also known as Eat Street, is a mostly-immigrant owned restaurant corridor in Minneapolis, as Kirstie Kimball reminds us in her Beyond Buerre Blanc newsletter.

Kimball, a restaurant critic, has assembled a list of Eat Street restaurants that are accepting online orders for gift cards. Among those venues are Quang, a Vietnamese spot, Pimento Jamaican Kitchen, and Glam Doll. Kimball suggests purchasing those cards as a form of support, as she believes some of those institutions will be “forced to close due to the volume of people coming to protest and observe.”

She goes on: “Our restaurants need us badly as ICE has targeted restaurants and restaurant workers in their operations…”

The owners of Glam Doll Donuts posted about Saturday’s killing on Instagram today.

“The experience we had yesterday will haunt us all for life. Alex Pretti will live with us forever,” the two proprietors wrote. They added: “Things are going to be tough here for a while. Making donuts is hard work that takes people and time and everyone is traumatized right now. Please give us a little time to recuperate but please also support us.”

Glam Doll wrote that the shop will be closed on Monday and Tuesday and then “we will return because WE LOVE YOU MINNEAPOLIS. The tragedies we continue to experience together are horrifying but our people are beyond beautiful and we don’t take your shit.” Click through for the full caption.

All about Stars, a wine bar that’s actually a wine bar!

Including…

• An epic (and tiny) shrimp sandwich

• The case for “blini service” at Stars

• Notes on the “effervescent” apple slices and the fancy potato frico

• Some thoughts on the affordable beverage list at Stars

Read more

I haven’t yet visited Ha’s Snack Bar on the Lower East Side — the acclaimed spot where there’s always a proper line outside — but I rolled the dice and dropped by the larger and newer Bistrot Ha on Friday. I got quoted a half hour wait (not bad) and shortly thereafter I was enjoying French Vietnamese fare in a snugly corralled room where chic patrons were squeezing past waiters carrying basil seed margaritas. So yes, this is definitely a bistro — and one where you’ll inhale the intoxicating aroma of fish sauce at some point. My type of place.

Mike Chau, a local influencer who co-runs the Food Baby account, posted photos of a chile-laced steak frites last month. Alas, that beefy dish wasn’t on offer during my visit (hard to tell with no online menu). Instead, I ordered a blood sausage tart topped with plump kumquats; it was so good I regretted not ordering a second one while Citibiking back to Midtown afterward.

Bistrot Ha — by Sadie Mae Burns and Anthony Ha — is still too young for a review, which is why I’m not really commenting on food! But I’m sure I’ll have more to say in the coming months. 137 Eldridge Street, Lower East Side

I should be back over the weekend with a (paywalled) column; there will be some fun review-y stuff in there! But today…

How Minnesota Restaurants Are Coping With ICE Enforcment

We’ve all seen sobering videos from the ICE surge in Minneapolis.

We’ve watched an agent aggressively arresting a Target employee who was filming him and shouting expletives at him. We’ve seen an undocumented person go unconscious as agents dragged him out of a car at a gas station, before carrying his limp body into a van.

And so many of us have watched the Renee Good clips over and over again.

“This is a military occupation,” Elliott Payne, president of the Minneapolis City Council, told the New York Times last week. He described how armed agents screamed obscenities at residents and patrolled the streets in convoys, shining lights from their vehicles onto pedestrians at night.

And over at NPR, a reporter witnessed agents questioning people in parking lots about their immigration status, while asking for documentation. Those officers exclusively approached people of color, the reporter wrote.

The U.S. has sent roughly 3,000 federal agents to Minnesota.

I pass along these anecdotes because the martial environment — which the Trump administration defends as necessary to fight illegal immigration — is having a measurable impact on restaurants in the Twin Cities.

Here’s a key graph from Sharyn Jackson’s Minnesota Star Tribune column, published on Sunday:

“As immigration enforcement activity increases across the Twin Cities and the suburbs, food businesses are adjusting, making visible changes such as locking doors to screen customers before entry, cutting hours, switching to takeout-only service, temporarily closing and consolidating space. Many restaurants are operating short-staffed with owners taking on multiple roles…”

Restaurant owners told the Tribune that the conditions recall the “early days of the pandemic,” while noting that this time they’re expecting “longer term disruption.”

Crasqui, a Venezuelan restaurant in Saint Paul, is selling frozen meals and has stopped taking walk-ins after an ICE agent dined at the restaurant, per that same story. And Fardowsa Abdul Ali of Albi Kitchen, which sells Somali sambusas and sweets, saw a drop in business after a viral daycare video happened to show images of her establishment. She also told the paper she has received harassing phone calls in the aftermath.

Earlier last week over at MinnPost, reporter Shadi Bushra also wrote about restaurant staffing shortages, noting that both both documented and undocumented workers are “afraid of being swept up in ICE raids, which have sometimes targeted entire establishments’ staff.”

Latin American employees at Homi, a Mexican spot in Saint Paul, have started wearing immigration paperwork around their necks on lanyards; the owner said they’re worried that agents won’t give them enough time to reach for their wallets, Bushra reported.

Or here’s what Savio Nguyen, co-owner of Càphin Minneapolis, a Vietnamese cafe, told MinnPost: “My siblings, even though they’re citizens, are afraid to leave their homes because they don’t want to be harassed.” Do read the whole column for additional notes on how patrons and at least one bar owner are patrolling neighborhoods with whistles and car horns to alert folks about potential immigration enforcement.

On a more heartwarming note: the Twin Cities hospitality industry appears to be doing what most restaurants do during tough times. They’re banding together. Joy Summers, a former Eater staffer who’s now a reporter for the Star Tribune, reported last week about restaurant-led food drives and fundraisers.

One of those efforts involved Wrecktangle, a pizzeria that, in the aftermath of the killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent, gave away a frozen pie for each one purchased. That pizzeria ended up partnering with Smitten Kitchen and collected $83,000 in donations, which it’s now working to distribute. And at Bar of Their Own, the owners hosted coloring and movie days after local schools cancelled classes for safety, Summers reported.

Minnesota restaurant workers detained by ICE agents who visited taqueria for lunch

This story has attracted national attention, but it’s worth recounting: In Willmar — a small community about 100 miles outside of Minneapolis — agents visited El Tapatio Mexican Restaurant for lunch, then returned to detain its owners and a dishwasher, after the restaurant had already closed early due to the presence of law enforcement, CBS News reported (click through to the story for a response from the Department of Homeland Security).

The 20-year-old son of the owners has since stepped in to run the restaurant.

For great context on Willmar, a city of about 21,000 with sizable Latin American and Somali populations, check out this MinnPost profile from earlier in January. The story of Willmar, journalist Forrest Peterson reported, is a “story of resilience that is nonetheless being tested in the wake of demeaning rhetoric about immigrants in the aftermath of fraud scandals involving Somalis, the never-ending political battles over immigration and ramped up immigration enforcement in the Twin Cities”

How to support restaurants and residents…

Justine Jones, food and dining editor at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, is maintaining an updated list of food drives, fundraisers, temporary closures (to protect employees amid ongoing ICE sweeps), restaurants to support, and grocery stores offering free delivery.

Why are grocery stores offering free delivery? Because “many of their immigrant customers — including those who are citizens or are documented — are afraid to venture out in public due to ICE’s presence throughout the Cities,” Jones writes.

For local updates on support and mutual aid, you can also follow independent food critic Kirstie Kimball here on Substack!

Vox Media Fires Three More Journalists at Eater

If you asked me what Eater does right now, I’d say the site continues to produce great reporting about our food and restaurant world, and the team does precisely that with some of the best reporters, videographers, designers, and editors that I know. Here’s a Nadia Chaudhury report on where our new Mayor Zohran Mamdani has been eating. Here’s Mona Holmes on how “Kavanaugh stops” are making Los Angeles restaurant workers more vulnerable. Here’s Melissa McCart on the Eater NY Substack, writing about how DoorDash is entering the reservations space.

But if you asked me what I thought Vox Media’s long-term strategy is for the food publication, I’d say I have no idea, because upper management just keeps firing great journalists at Eater.

Jim Bankoff’s company laid off three more in-unit employees late last week, including Kayla Stewart, the James Beard Award-winning writer and co-author of the New York Times best selling cookbook “Gullah Geechee Home Cooking.” The senior editor joined Eater full-time in September of 2024 and recently spearheaded the publication’s Best New Restaurants package.

Vox Media also parted ways with Harry Cheadle, editor for the Pacific Northwest and Northern California, and Erin Perkins, former editor of Eater South.

Perkins, whom I met over a decade ago, had been with the company for nearly 13 years.

I’m told an out-of-unit employee on parental leave also saw her position eliminated.

“There is almost no further room to be shocked at these developments,” Vox Media Union wrote in a statement, adding that the company has laid off workers at an average of once per quarter in the last year.”

I’ve written about previous rounds of layoffs, including the loss of longtime critic Robert Sietsema, correspondent Jaya Saxena, reporter Amy McCarthy, Midwest editor Ashok Selvam, reporter Emma Orlow, Northeast editor Erika Adams, home editor Rebecca Flint Marx, editor Jesse Sparks, and others.

Heck, I actually thought about pinging a friend at Eater last week to see how they were coping; I’m glad I didn’t because I’d momentarily forgotten that they too had been laid off earlier last year.

It’s honestly hard to keep track.

Any large company will undergo competitive pivots and reductions in force over its lifespan. That’s just how things work. But the defining aspect of Vox Media’s stewardship of Eater over the past three years has been the firing of some of the smartest journalists working there. The people who keep Eater running every day — both in labor and in management — deserve better.

Vox Media Union also reported that the company will no longer have a centralized diversity, equity and inclusion team; that work will be redistributed.

In 2022, Adam Platt stepped down from his role as restaurant critic at New York Magazine. He remained as a part time staffer, but last week Platt wrote on Instagram that he was departing the Vox Media-owned publication after a quarter century.

Gourmet lives on!!!

It’s highly amusing that the Condé folks let the Gourmet trademark lapse, but it’s awesome to learn that some good journalists are rebooting the brand as a worker-owned newsletter publication on Ghost. Here’s Jessica Testa of the New York Times with the story.

Among the co-founders are: Nozlee Samadzadeh, of the NYT, Sam Dean, formerly of the Los Angeles Times, Cale Weissman (The Real Deal), Amiel Stanek, and Alex Tatusian. Here’s one of Gourmet’s first columns: A story about what might be the only Kyrgyz restaurant in Southern California.

How about a burger?

“What a time for my first restaurant review,” Raphael Brion, formerly of Food & Wine, The Infatuation, and Eater, wrote on Instagram a few days ago. In case you missed the news: Brion is the new critic at the Star Tribune!

Brion added the following in his social post: “But maybe what we all need right now is community. A gathering spot. Perhaps a dive bar that’s at the center of a neighborhood. A place that gives good vibes, where the food is significantly better than it needs to be.”

Check out Brion’s column on Bull’s Horn Food and Drink from chef Doug Flicker. “Sure he grinds his own beef blend, but then he does stuff like make his own American cheese using rendered beef fat from the burger griddle’s drip tray,” Brion wrote in his Insta caption. He awarded three stars!

Alright. That’s it for today. More soon.

Ryan Sutton is editor of The Lo Times and a contributing restaurant critic for The New York Times. Previously, he was a longtime restaurant critic and reporter at Eater; his position there was eliminated as part of companywide layoffs that hit three years ago this week.

Previously:

But first…

On not keeping quiet…

Last January, I wrote about M.F.K Fisher’s Consider the Oyster.

It didn’t make my “most read” list, but it’s the one column I wrote in 2025 that speaks most directly to what I want for this tiny newsletter.

What impressed me about Fisher— nearly two decades after I first encountered her writings — is how fluently she shifted between the delights of food and the horrors of war.

She let readers indulge in epicurean pleasures, in the joy of slurping down bivalves, while also slipping in references to bombs and the people they maimed.

She did this nearly a century ago.

When I read Fisher, I was reminded of the importance of not shying away from the realities our era — the student deportations, the family separations, the president’s “xenophobic tirade” against Somalis, the fear coursing though immigrant communities, the armed raids by masked agents in military fatigues, the Supreme Court-sanctioned racial profiling, the detention of U.S. citizens by La Migra — even as we food writers try to provide a modicum of respite and diversion from these very issues.

Even as we write listicle after listicle.

It’s a tough balance to strike, but it’s an ethos that I’ll work hard to remember throughout 2026. And it’s an ethos that so many folks throughout the food writing community really nailed in an amazing way this past year.

Food journalism is journalism.

Shout out to Jaya Saxena for having published this incredible piece of explainer journalism last year: “What Should You Do if ICE Comes to Your Restaurant?” That column went live less than two months before the heartbreaking layoffs at Eater that ended up costing many of my former colleagues, including Ashok Selvam, Amy McCarthy, and Saxena, their jobs.

The Most Read American Food Stories

This was yet another year when long restaurant guides dominated a handful “most read” lists from around food media. It reflects how more publications are trying to make a dent in the competitive market for service-y content and recommendations.

I also thought it was interesting how protein, steak, or hot dog-related stories appeared on multiple most-read lists. It’s a reflection of the very weird RFK red meat MAHA saturated fat inverted food pyramid carnibro era in which we’re living. A world in which you can get your Starbucks coffee topped off with a little banana protein. A country where beef tallow, “a fat that both cardiologists and the federal government told Americans to avoid for nearly half a century, has become an unexpected breakout star in the new federal dietary guidelines,” as Kim Severson writes for the NYT.

So…let’s get to it!

Saveur’s Top Food and Travel Stories

Saveur is run by Kate Craddock. The editor-in-chief first joined the brand in 2015, but she took over the esteemed publication in 2023 and re-launched it. What follows are Saveur’s most-read food and travel stories. Among the top twelve are:

• That Chewy, Bouncy Texture You Love Has a Name. This is Cathy Erway’s wonderful essay on Q, the bouncy texture in gummy bears and rice cakes that’s particularly prized in Taiwan.

• Meet the Vendors Keeping New York City’s Hot Dog Carts Alive

• The Quiet Joy of Doing the Dishes. Dwight Garner of the NYT takes a look at how literary figures — including George Orwell, Henry Miller, and A.E. Stallings — wrote about doing the dishes and keeping a clean kitchen.

• Where Did All the Banana Ketchup Go?

• The most read story was…“Why Are the Hot Dogs in Maine Neon Red?”

Grub Street’s 20 Most Read Stories

Here are some of the top food and restaurant stories by New York Magazine, a Vox Media publication.

• No. 12: Le Creuset Is Cheugy. Tammie Teclemariam writes about why a collection of $400 pots suddenly looks so cheap.

• No. 7: The Cool Restaurants Are on OpenTable Now

• No. 5: Big Food Gets Jacked: How protein mania took over the grocery store.

• No. 3: Drinking Was the Job: On Mario Batali. Excerpted from Laurie Woolever’s “Care and Feeding.”

• No. 2. The Tin Building Is a $200 Million Flop: On the Seaport’s epic food hall by Jean-Georges Vongerichten

• No. 1: Critic Matthew Schneier’s best restaurants list.

This year marks the first time that Schneier has put together an extended restaurant guide, the type of product we’re increasingly seeing around food media, at the Los Angeles Times, The Lo Times, the New York Times, and now, at New York Magazine.

Shout out to New York Magazine’s Chris Crowley, who’s leaving the publication for the soon-to-launch Caper Media. Crowley was the author of numerous seminal columns, including “The Nightmare Inside Mission Chinese Food,” and “He’s Taking Advantage of Your Dream,” a vital story about an entrepreneur who preyed upon street vendors seeking out permits.

Eater NY: DoorDash’s $1 Million Donation to Cuomo PAC

The Vox Media-owned site, where I worked for nearly a decade, and which continues to do great work, published a list of its most read news stories of 2025.

Among the top 10: The opening of Tashkent Supermarket’s West Village location, the debut of Bradley Cooper’s cheesesteak restaurant (I still haven’t been), the launch of members-only club San Vicente (where I enjoyed some tasty fried vegetables during a summer meeting), and the arrival of Juici Patties.

Juici Patties nabbed the top spot — not something I’d have predicted, especially as the patties are just a little better than average — but it shows how folks are eager to consume more stories about the city’s Caribbean scene.

Two of the stories in the top five were particularly meaningful news items: In the No. 4 slot was Emma Orlow’s story on DoorDash’s $1 million donation to a pro-Cuomo Super PAC (imagine what else that cool million could’ve went to….). And the No. 2 spot went to Melissa McCart’s NYC Department of Education Spends $745,000 at a Single Restaurant. Rock on.

Emma Orlow, one of my many brilliant former colleagues at Eater, is also joining Caper Media. You’ve surely seen her coverage about so many different aspects of the restaurant industry, including regulation of the reservations black market.

L.A. Taco: Richard Hart, GMO Corn, Best Tacos!

In the larger food writing world, publishing “service-y” pieces typically means putting out “best lists” or proffering advice on what to order at a restaurant.

L.A. Taco performs a very different type of service journalism.

Javier Cabral and others published regular dispatches on ICE and border patrol raids. A recent snippet: “…agents chased a man to the front of a donut shop, where they were seen handcuffing him and taking him away.”

The independent publication’s most-read list is a cool mix of cultural and policy-minded columns, alongside the type of lists you might expect from an outlet called L.A. Taco :)

• No. 10: British Baker Richard Hart Insults a Nation—And Shows What He Doesn’t Get About Mexican Bread. “Fallen baking hero Richard Hart painted a big target on his back for talking smack about Mexico's working-class bread culture.”

• No. 8: Little Tokyo’s New ‘Punk Izakaya’ Is Also a Temple of L.A. Punk History

• No. 4: The 43 Best Mexican Restaurants in Los Angeles, Ranked

• No. 3: The 69 Best Tacos in Los Angeles, Ranked

• No. 2: What to Know About Mexico’s Bold Move to Ban Growing GMO Corn. “The move to at least ban Mexico’s planting of GMO corn is President Claudia Sheinbaum’s way of fighting back against Mexico losing its war against the import of American-grown GMO corn in Mexico.”

Here’s a separate list of L.A. Taco’s most-read reports and investigations, which includes stories about so-called “Kavanaugh stops” and the detentions of taqueros and customers during a food truck raid.

NYT Food: The Two Big Guides, Protein Breakfasts, Salad Dressing

A combination of recipes and long, labor-intensive guides dominated the NYT most-read list. Here are some of the selections from the top 12, including one of two stories about Anne Burrell:

• No. 12: Inside Meghan’s Real Kitchen, Away From the Cameras (Julia Moskin)

• No. 10: 4 Rules for Better Burgers (J. Kenji López-Alt)

• No. 8: 18 High-Protein, Make-Ahead Breakfasts… (Emily Johnson)

• No. 5: The World’s 50 Best Restaurants Announces Its 2025 List (Moskin)

• No. 4: 3 Salad Dressings You Should Memorize (Samin Nosrat)

• No. 3: Anne Burrell, Chef and Food Network Star, Dies at 55 (Priya Krishna)

• No. 2: The 100 Best Restaurants in New York City in 2025 (Krishna, Melissa Clark, Brian Gallagher)

• No. 1: The National Restaurant List 2025

Click through for the full list!

This was the year that Ligaya Mishan and Tejal Rao assumed the roles of chief restaurants critics, while Luke Fortney started writing the “Where to Eat” column alongside Becky Hughes. Mahira Rivers and Ryan Sutton (that’s me) joined the section as freelance contributing critics, as Meghan McCarron filed vital dispatches about SNAP, food prices, and the Los Angeles Fires. I’m still so unbelievably grateful and excited to share a little space at the NYT with all the amazing journalists there.

The Lo Times in 2025 | What you loved

If you’re a regular reader of The Lo Times, you can probably guess which post did the best of all: The Steak Guide. That long list — a series of mini-essays and short reviews about where to eat red meat — performed quite well in an age when more and more diners are expressing an interest in steak, no matter how expensive it might be.

With that in mind, my reporting on prices at restaurants — a staple area of coverage for me since the early 2010s — resonated well with readers. The Power Lunch Price Index, and my column on price increases at Per Se came in at No. 2 and No. 3, respectively.

Rounding out the top five was our comprehensive guide to America’s best edibles, and a review of Ceres, an expensive slice joint that no longer serves slices. I’m also quite proud that four other reviews (Limusina, Sip & Guzzle, Monkey Bar, and Red Lobster) cracked my top 12.

I don’t release too many metrics, but: The Lo Times received ~700,000 views this past year, with search impressions clocking in at a little under 12 million in twelve months. Not bad for a small, independent newsletter that publishes once a week* and that doesn’t advertise. A sizable portion our traffic comes from Google search, which helps drive free and paid subscriptions. I put a lot of thought and effort into SEO!

*Sometimes we publish twice a week during busy seasons

Our Most-Read Stories of 2025

12. You Will Love or Hate This $35 Burger

I swung by Sip & Guzzle, an experimental West Village bar and restaurant, after Mike Bagale’s burger started picking up attention on listicle sites and elsewhere.

11. Who’s Thankful for Clubstaurant Nachos?

A review of Limusina by the Quality Branded crew.

10. Amazing Tasting Menus for $125 or Less

I reviewed some pricey spots in 2024, including the exorbitant (and incredible) Sushi Sho. But for whatever reason, I found myself drawn towards more affordable spots in 2025.

9. These Steaks Are Not for Beginners

A long review of Monkey Bar, now under the auspices of the Hogsalt group, with a focus on the city’s growing class of cheese-aged steaks.

8. Red Lobster’s $50 Lobster Roll Is Bad

Red Lobster is a Times Square institution with a lively crowd. But the lobster roll I tried was not good. It’s no longer offered.

7. Dining Out in 2025: What I Loved (And Hated)

This is what I published instead of my typical “best restaurants” list (though you can find a best dishes list right here). Maybe I’ll keep it this way going forward?

6. New York’s Best Tacos: The Full Guide

Rest assured, this won’t be the only taco list we publish! I’ll have some more cool stuff coming your way on this front throughout the year.

5. Behold, the $9 Slice. Yeah, It’s Good!

A review of Ceres. It’s a slice spot by two former Eleven Madison Park vets that transitioned to a pie-only joint after a YouTube clip helped the venue go viral.

4. America’s Best Edibles: Your Definitive Guide

I can’t even begin to tell you how nervous I was when I first launched The Lo Hi, our vertical about edibles and consumables. Fingers crossed, I’ll do my best to update this guide on a regular basis.

3. Per Se’s Long Tasting is Now $1K. Is it Worth the Mortage? (20.6k)

I’ve been covering price increases at Thomas Keller’s flagship New York restaurant for nearly twenty years!

2. The Power Lunch Price Index (22.4k views)

Looks like I’ll be doing this one every year! A column that looks into the current boom in posh midday dining in Manhattan and what those meals now cost.

1. New York’s Best Steaks and Chops, Reviewed! (64,300 views)

This is last year’s steak guide! I publish this long column every December or thereabouts.

You can read the 2026 version of the steak guide right here!!!

On Art…

Museums are a huge part of my life, and so you’ll continue to see occasional notes about the art world in this space, especially when it pertains to food and restaurants. This past year, I’m proud to have written about José Clemente Orozco and the immigrant experience, Diego Rivera and Mexican Modernism, Amy Sherald and strawberry ice cream, and Francis Bacon’s thoughts on butchery.

Ryan Sutton is editor of The Lo Times and a contributing restaurant critic for The New York Times. This week, he returns to CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism to teach a short food writing seminar. Hopefully more of that, fingers crossed!

Previously…

Today, I’m sharing some more personal takes and anecdotes from the year in food.

Please enjoy, and scroll down for my full list of the year’s best dishes.

A few brief notes from my year in eating out!

1. For the first time in my life, I ate more roasted oysters than raw ones. Strange Delight is partially responsible for this! But so is M.F.K Fisher…

2. Please put your menus online. Please put your dessert menus online. Please list your pastry chefs on your website. Really.

3. Eddie Murphy’s “four cheese lasagna” impression of Tracy Morgan was the funniest thing on Saturday Night Live this year. But SNL’s smartest food take, by far, was “Big Dumb Line.”

4. I now watch movies at Alamo Drafthouse. And honestly, that’s the experience I want more of in 2026: Good bar food, hazy IPAs, La-Z-Boy seating, and a dark room where an attendant is going to kick me out if I keep texting or scrolling.

5. Red Hook Lobster Pound was still my favorite splurge delivery this year. But I can’t believe we’re living in an era of $50 lobster rolls!

6. I stopped drinking martinis. I don’t really enjoy them anymore. They’re too boozy for me and they cost too much.

7. I cooked a lot. A few dinners a week, at least. And almost always for other people. My favorite dish at the moment is vegetarian chile Colorado, amped up with ham hocks and bone broth. I used Melissa Clark’s giant bean guide to steer my recipe, alongside this Max Falkowitz column on dried chiles.

8. Cookbooks and good online recipes made me happy this year. ChatGPT’s television ads for sh!tty AI recipes made me sad. It drives me nuts that big tech is using its bully pulpit and advertising dollars to promote plagiarized knowledge instead of highlighting individual authors.

9. My artist friend and I did our annual Caviar Night in August. I picked up some kaluga and blini from Pearl Street. She picked up the Diplomatico rum. I truly believe everyone would be happier if they ate more fish roe at home, where it’s more of an affordable-ish indulgence, rather than a prohibitively expensive one. But I realize that “prohibitively expensive” is the whole point for members of the aristocracy.

10. This was the year I learned that e-bike fees are capped when you cross a bridge! One of the cheapest and easiest ways to make me happy is by Citibiking over the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset.

11. One of my favorite moments this summer came when an impromptu thunderstorm hit the Rockaways; my friend and I sought cover under an awning and ordered an arepa pabellón and a cold beer from Caracas.

12. I won’t comment on Andy Cohen’s drunken New Year’s Eve rant about former mayor Eric Adams, but watching B.J. Novak chime in with “See you at Zero Bond” was an absolute delight and a perfectly New York-y way to end the year.

13. It was nice to hear Zohran Mamdani pay tribute to our city’s diverse foodways in his his inaugural address: “Where else can you hear the sound of the steelpan, savor the smell of sancocho, and pay $9 for coffee on the same block? Where else could a Muslim kid like me grow up eating bagels and lox every Sunday?”

14. It’s too cold right now, but the second the weather gets warm, I’m going to spend a little more time with The Piragua Guy. Until then, keep scraping by :)

New York’s 25 Best Dishes of 2025

Plus: My favorite affordable tasting menu.

The night after Christmas, I ended up chatting with a young cook sitting next to me at a downtown wine bar. She was telling me about how tough it is to make a living in the industry….and how New York feels so saturated with good restaurants right now.

I couldn’t agree more. On both counts.

Read more

And Happy New Year, my friends!

But first…

Our Decade of a Year

I’ve dined well these past twelve months.

For all the meals in New York, and a few in Denver, I’m so grateful.

But what I’ll remember the most isn’t a particularly delicious steak or taco. What I’ll remember the most is…literally everything else?

This was the year that restaurants in New Orleans, Southern California, and elsewhere decided to temporarily shutter as ICE carried out raids. This was the year that a Supreme Court shadow docket ruling allowed ICE to stop and detain people based on their job, ethnicity, or language.

This was the year that both diners and staffers stayed at home as La Migra conducted sweeps. Indeed, a national ThinkNow survey showed that 44 percent of Hispanic households avoided restaurants, stores, and other public spaces because of concerns over immigration enforcement. Citizens were occasionally caught up in those raids. “Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents,” ProPublica reported, documenting 170 cases of citizens having been detained.

I’m still in awe of L.A. Taco’s regular ICE activity reports. And I can’t stop thinking about these lines from Tejal Rao’s NYT review of Taquería Frontera:

Agents and officers have targeted carwashes, store parking lots, parks and other public spaces where food vendors, in particular, are vulnerable. Images of abandoned ice cream stands and grills are chilling because of what you don’t see — the people missing from the scene.

I’ll also remember the cruel food aid crisis, when a government shutdown halted SNAP — the country’s largest anti-hunger program — to tens of millions of Americans for weeks. The suspension of funds surely hit the hospitality industry hard; food service is the single largest industry employing SNAP users, making up 10 percent of all beneficiaries.

I’ll remember how restaurant workers and others faced the prospect of skyrocketing health care premiums as ACA subsidies were set to expire. Many of those folks — the people who feed us every day — will likely have to drop their coverage in 2026. And by doing so they’ll potentially forego life-saving care.

And I’ll remember how the year began, with the devastating Los Angeles wildfires.

Restaurant workers, some of whom lost their homes, as Meghan McCarron reported, were among the first to step up as part of the relief efforts. That shouldn’t be a surprise. We saw their sacrifices during the pandemic. And quite frankly we see their sacrifices every single day. Restaurant workers — no matter where they come from, no matter their immigration status — are our heroes.

And the independent restaurants they run are the lynchpins of so many communities across the country. On that note, let me give the final word to Khushbu Shah, who had this to say in a widely read column about the fires in her newsletter, Tap Is Fine:

“Many restaurants are simply one bad week away from shutting down. Somehow still, independent restaurants are the first to step up and support the most, even though they are the businesses with the least to give.”

The trends that defined dining out in 2025

It was a good year for eating out in New York and beyond. Except when it wasn’t. So what follows are my favorite dining trends of 2025, alongside a few that I wasn’t too big on.

Tacos in the city

New York’s once derided taco scene has been simmering for a while now — with the arrival of more good tortillerias, molinos, and, of course, the Ramirez crew.

But 2025 was a watershed year. Fancy folks queued up down the block for the superb sirloin trompo at Santo. The El Chato guys expanded. Mexico City-import Cariñito started slinging Issan-style laab tacos with rice powder. Seasoned operators like Julian Medina and the Casa Carmen crew open some of the city’s top new taquerias — in a very under-the-radar fashion. And since steakhouses are now everywhere, so are a new class of steak tacos; don’t sleep on the (extremely expensive) wagyu variety at Esse by Enrique Olvera. Read our coverage of the city’s best tacos!

Our white hot Mexican scene

As more Americans visit Mexico’s capital city, CDMX-inspired became an increasingly ubiquitous tagline for hot new restaurants. Dolores, the Bed-Stuy purveyor of comida chilanga, drew two-hour waits with $4 bar snacks like fried masa stuffed with mashed potatoes. Other spots, like Comal, kept things modern with elegant small plates like chanterelles with persimmons.

But this year wasn’t just about Mexico City. Vato, Los Burritos Juárez, and Cuerno all represented big time for Chihuahua, Sonora, and Nuevo León.

Steakhouse city

Steakhouses are one of the quintessential restaurant archetypes of New York City, and that’s one reason why we cover the red meat scene so intensively here at The Lo Times. But this was the year that steak took off in a big way, a trend that carried more than a whiff of a political current.

There were occasions when the beef boom felt just a little extra, like when José Andrés rebranded Leña to Txula Steak and then flipped The Bazaar into the extraordinarily expensive Bazaar Meat.

But there were times when restaurateurs did genuinely unexpected and creative things with meat. Gui opened as a fun Korean riff on American steakhouses with sweet-savory prime ribs. Cuerno was a gem of a Northern Mexican steakhouse, and a rare bastion of beef to keep wagyu and caviar off the menu. And Wild Cherry started serving an absolutely amazing Denver steak dinner for a very fair price. “Everything is Steakhouse Now,” as Bettina Makalintal wrote in a smart piece for Eater National. Read our longer take on the State of Steak in New York.

Alcohol-free wines

Americans are drinking less, largely over legitimate health concerns.

NA cocktails are just about everywhere these days, which is great if you like to spend $17 on a watermelon tonic, like I did at some point this summer. But a small but growing class of restaurants like Bōm, Zimmi’s, and Lei are adding excellent non-alcoholic wines to their lists; I’ve found those selections to exhibit gorgeous aromas, tartness, tannins, bubbles, and complex personalities — the same good stuff I love in great wines.

If you drop by Lei, try the Villbryg FLYT sparkling elderflower ($12).

The OLP: Obvious Luxury Proliferation

“Here, the more expensive it is, the faster it sells,” La Chêne’s Alexia Duchene told Julia Moskin of the NYT, as part of an inquiry into all the caviar, truffles, and ultra-marbled meat showing up in Manhattan and across the country. Heck, last year, a waiter in Denver tried to sell me on some A5 wagyu as an appetizer….before another steak as a main course, lol. I was a solo diner!!!.

It all represents an obvious, uniform approach to luxury that makes otherwise diverse restaurants feel like the same bland business class airline cabins. And it signifies a lowest common denominator approach to luring in wealthy diners as our K-Shaped economy soldiers on.

But shout out to Thai Diner for doing something genuinely fun and affordable-ish with caviar, pairing it with roti and coconut creme fraiche. Cost: $60!!!

Wild prices

My general belief is that restaurants charge what they have to. And, indeed, post-pandemic inflation made the cost of dining out (or in) crazy for just about everyone.

But some prices in New York these days are…intense! The excellent Comté tart appetizer at Bridges now costs $38. A great French dip with fries runs $53 at Monkey Bar. And more recently my party of three dropped, like, $400 on a very average meal in a Long Island suburb. To be clear: I’m not criticizing any particular chef or restaurant, but sometimes you look at a price and know in your gut that things are getting out of control!

The kaiseki boom

I love our city’s omakase counters, but when you start getting very similar bites of bluefin or caviar at all of them, you wonder whether these sushi spots are all pandering to the same network of wealthy tourists and bros. So it’s nice to see kaiseki chefs succeeding with hyper-seasonal and ever changing menus of tiny, intricate plates at restaurants like Yamada, Muku, and Yoshoku.

Small, intimate spots thrived

As sprawling steakhouses and crowd-pleasing mega-brasseries continued to draw in hordes, we saw something else happen: Small, uncompromising venues also appeared to thrive. I’m thinking of spots like Ha’s Snack Bar (French Vietnamese), Zimmi’s (countryside French), Lei (the Chinese American wine bar), Bub’s Bakery (allergen-free pastries), Sunn’s (banchan), and more.

Restaurant of the Year: Bánh Anh Em!

Every year I publish a list of the city’s best restaurants.

But not this year!

I’m hitting the pause button on that effort in 2025 because, well, when I started stringing it together it just felt a little too similar to the other lists I was reading! That said…

I named Cuerno my steakhouse of the year the other week.

And since I usually name a restaurant of the year, I figured I’d do that here too.

That restaurant is Bánh Anh Em.

Owners Nhu Ton and John Nguyen have given New York a gem of a Modern Vietnamese spot. I loved the dishes I couldn’t find elsewhere, like the bánh ướt chồng rice sheet towers, the chewy Bánh tiêu xôi kẹp pork floss dougnuts, and the Haiphong-style pork liver sandwiches. But I also loved the airy baguettes — their lightness reminded me of the best new-school pizzas — and the myriad coffee drinks.

Actually, maybe my favorite thing about the place was the fact that such a popular restaurant, regularly commanding two-hour waits, offered the better part of its menu for takeaway. If I lived nearby, I’d drop by Bánh Anh Em at least once a week for those amazing savory doughnuts. Or anything else!

For a proper list of the year’s best restaurants, allow me to recommend this fine New York Times column by Ligaya Mishan, Melissa Clark, and Priya Krishna. Nice to see Hellbender on there!!!

And for some of the year’s best desserts, check out this excellent guide by my fellow contributing NYT critic, Mahira Rivers! I’m excited to see the Bar Contra “bar” included on that list…which I definitely need to try now!

Happy New Year everyone!

See you over the weekend with best dishes and maybe notes on a memorable meal or two.

Ryan!!

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

I had a nice meal at Lei recently, but today, please enjoy this column about a pricey Midtown steakhouse — a little follow-up to last week’s big steak guide.

Blue Ribbon Sushi & Steak | The wagyu steak frites!

I ate a lot of steak this year.

Not all of it made its way into The Steak Guide.

I’m saving some cuts for next spring’s Budget Steak List. Others simply didn’t make the grade, as is the case with a certain beefy roast from The View. I had an absolute blast at the revamped Monkey Bar; the room boasts the type of pulsing energy that recalls pre-pandemic Manhattan. Alas, the prime rib isn’t quite best-in-class. Get the French dip instead!

And then, there’s Blue Ribbon Sushi & Steak, right across from Madison Square Garden.

The kitchen cooks up some serious steaks, though it’s not alone in that regard…

The Penn District restaurant is one of three steakhouses (!!!) on a single block in Midtown. Yeah, that’s a lot of red meat, and I’m generally not in the business of reviewing every single new bastion of beef.

But Blue Ribbon — a 90s-era chef’s hangout that transformed itself into a national empire — does two things of note at this location. Namely:

1. It serves very small steaks.

2. It sears its priciest cuts on a teppan — the blazing hot steel griddle you’ve seen at stateside Japanese spots like Benihana. It’s a style of cooking that doesn’t appear in New York with as much frequency (or fanfare) as gas grills, wood fires, or binchotan coals.

Let’s take a closer look…

Blue Ribbon’s small strip steak: six bites for $56

Read more

This is the definitive guide to eating steak in New York.

This isn’t just a list (I sound like a TV salesman when I say it that way lol). This is a long guide with all sorts of fun mini-reviews. You’ll find tons of new entries, including big splurge steaks (at Wild Cherry and Comal), affordable picanha and tri-tip steaks (at Bufón and Papa San), giant new Korean prime ribs, and even vegetarian steaks.

Those who scroll down further will see a mini-review of the very expensive Denver steak at Bazaar Meat by José Andrés. I did not like it.

No need to read from top to bottom. This 5,000 word guide is designed for scrolling!

We’ll kick off the list with Cuerno, our steakhouse of the year….

But First: Holy Sh!t There’s So Much Steak!!!

If there’s any doubt that steak is trending in an asteroid-sized way right now, consider the following:

Read more

Four quick things!

One: Emily Wilson will relaunch her acclaimed newsletter, The Angel, early next year. But this week, the author responds to a prompt from Matt Rodbard and writes about 25 New York restaurants over 25 discrete years. Do read the whole thing for a lovely tour of establishments from the millennium onward — including entries on Mercer Kitchen, Bridges, and Pastis — my favorite McNally spot after the late Pravda!

Two: Something that Los Angeles Times critic Bill Addison and I have in common is that we’ve both taken pains to keep our faces off of social media for the past two decades. But so the story goes that I gave up that effort earlier this fall when I joined the NYT as a freelance contributing critic. And this past week, Addison, who’s a friend and a former Eater colleague, removed his cloak of anonymity as well.

Read the critic’s thoughtful essay, or let him explain everything on video! A key line: “But the AI era is something different. To be faceless, unconsciously or not, implies absence of humanity. When we can’t always know what’s real, or what will be real, nothing becomes more important than human connection.”

Three: I’ve always enjoyed Alex Stupak’s musings about restaurants and cooking; we all remember his essay on why he didn’t (initially) serve tacos at his seminal Empellon Cocina! And so it’s nice to see Stupak writing away again, but this time on Substack! His new newsletter is called The Sweet Release!

For his debut edition, Stupak writes about seeing something that looks like his signature salsa preparation at….someone else’s restaurant! He actually ends up chatting with a Philadelphia chef about the incident; click through for how things play out!

Four: Online grocery behemoth Instacart is getting attention for the wrong reason this week. Here’s why: People are paying different prices for the same stuff, at the same stores, at the same time, according to a study by Groundwork Collective, Consumer Reports, and More Perfect Union. One big takeaway: The dynamic pricing policies could end up translating into “a cost swing of about $1,200 per year” for a family of four. Barf!

Santo Taco 2.0: What to order at the new location!

Plus: the case for ribeye and picanha steak tacos at Soledad on the Upper East Side

Read more

Let’s get to it!

Mexican Meat Skewers on Forsyth!

I finally dined at Comal, a Modern Mexican restaurant on the Lower East Side.

The manner in which I ended up there was…somewhat unexpected.

My original plan was to hit up [redacted] for dinner; the chef at that hotspot announced a tasty new menu item on social media that afternoon. So I hopped on the train to check it out. And yet, the venue was somehow closed for a private event that evening — without any apparent public notice! This sort of thing happens to me enough that it doesn’t actually bother me that much.

Anyway! I ended up at Comal. And I ate well!

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Frita serves my favorite new burger of 2025, so far, and it’s just $15 with fries.

But first…

Four quick things!!!

First thing…

On Saturday, I was supposed to hit up [redacted] in Manhattan for a review dinner, but I had a super long week — food poisoning sidelined me on Thanksgiving — and I just wanted some grilled fish and white wine.

So we went to Theodora!

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