The Cheapest Steak on the Menu!!!
The Dynamo Room's $43 steak & mashed is serious business! Plus: Notes on Olmsted's closure, lobster rolls, and roasted oysters at Dynamo
Three Meals at The Greenpoint Film Festival
If you’re looking for something cinematic this weekend, might I suggest swinging by the Greenpoint Film Festival? Those who attend the shorts screening on Friday are in for a treat: a showing of “Three Meals” by Pelin Keskin Liu. The British and Kurdish filmmaker — we worked together at Eater — packs a lifetime of emotion into 15 minutes.
“Three Meals,” which I saw last year at Cinema Village, centers on a mother and her daughter as they struggle through conversations about an ill family member. The film takes place over three meals: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. As Keskin Liu writes, the food allows her to showcase a version of the “first tangible power dynamic we learn as humans; relying on your mother to feed you.”
The three meals in the film are shakshuka, ekşili köfte çorbası (sour meatball soup), and sarma (stuffed vine leaves). They’re shot beautifully, but a more touching and bittersweet current underpins the fare. “Food serves as a third character in the film,” Keskin Liu told Something Curated’s Adam Coghlan last December, adding that the dishes symbolize “care and love but also avoidance — an act of giving that sometimes replaces the emotional vulnerability needed for honest communication.”
You can purchase tickets right here and you can watch the trailer for a quick taste.
This Stupid Week | Shellfish prices, home cooking, Tesla Diner
It’s Tuesday, 5 August 2025, and I’m happy to report that the lobster rolls at Red Hook are still obscenely delicious, even if they’re still $40.50. My artist friend and I indulged in a little post-Rockaways snack the other week, and while I’m usually agnostic between the cold mayo and hot butter versions, I’d argue that the Connecticut roll — with big, tender chunks of warm claw and knuckle meat — holds up better over delivery than the mayo roll.
Yet somehow, my opinion was precisely the opposite last year!
But here’s what I do know: I don’t care for mild, steakhouse-style lobster. I like lobster that tastes deeply of the ocean, and Red Hook continues to deliver on that front.
On a semi-related note, I’m in Denver right now, which means I’ll be paying $5 each for oysters on the half shell. “Guess there ain’t no ocean in The Rockies,” I quipped to a waiter a few years back after she told me of the steep price.
The waiter was not as amused as I was.
In other news, Charlotte Druckman suggested that there should be a food column about “what you SHOULDN’T cook at home.” Or as she puts it: “This would be the ultimate no-recipe recipe column. LOL.” As usual, Druckman is correct. Also: You should read her newsletter about vegan chocolate-adjacent bars.
And…if you’re thinking about trying Elon Musk’s new “retro-futuristic” Tesla diner in Los Angeles, maybe don’t? “Tesla, which still promises a vision of the future to its devoted fans, fails to deliver on one that isn’t bland and familiar,” Tejal Rao writes in her tough “critic’s notebook” NYT missive.
Olmsted is closing…
The groundbreaking Olmsted in Prospect Heights will shutter later this month, chef Greg Baxtrom announced on Instagram.
In my review for Eater in 2016, I called the venue a “destination local restaurant.” Or as I wrote:
It’s a venue that fills a need in the immediate community — Prospect Heights has plenty of casual weeknight spots, but no real history of haute cuisine — and yet it also ends up attracting a city-wide crowd
Nearly a decade later, I wish I hadn’t used “haute cuisine,” “community,” and “need” in the same sentence.
But it was nice to see a chef trying to do something fancy in King’s County that wasn’t as expensive as Brooklyn Fare or Blanca. Indeed, dishes like carrot crepes with clams or watermelon sushi reflected the type of whimsy one might’ve encountered at a more expensive tasting menu haunt — in any borough. Except here, the dishes generally hovered below $20 in the early days. I still can’t stop thinking about the frozen yogurt with whipped cream, where it was tough to tell the two monochromatic ingredients apart until you shoved a big spoonful into your smiling face.
Do read the full Insta caption, where Baxtrom, an Alinea alum, talks about mental health and sobriety, and where he hints at a funding plan that didn’t come through. Or head over to Eater NY where Melissa McCart has a more in-depth report, with comments about the difficulties of the Vanderbilt dining scene.
But here’s one last thing that has always struck me as a critic: While certain types of smartly creative dining rooms are doing well right now at Foul Witch, Superiority Burger, and elsewhere in New York, restaurants with a more resolutely modernist bent — along the lines of an Alinea or Disfrutar — have had a harder time enjoying the type of success that they’ve had in Chicago or Barcelona.
And that’s too bad.
Steak and mashed in Midtown….an old school treat for $43
Scroll past the paywall for a 1,000 word review of The Dynamo Room in Midtown, which serves one of the city’s best new “budget steaks,” a generous cut that sits atop mashed potatoes and garlic beef jus. Asparagus comes with, too!