How to Open a Restaurant Door, Explained
Plus, a few hot soups at Donburiya, Spa 88, and Ivan Ramen
Dear Friends,
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 Emily Wilson 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).
love it Ryan! I just sent you a dm here on Substack -Chef Harrison :)