Surf & Turf: What to Order at Zoli in Brooklyn!
Plus: Notes on the LIRR transit strike, our James Beard Award finalist nod (!!!), Eater's future, and a really good bison strip steak
I don’t usually write up restaurants in their first month, but I made an exception for Bar Chimera — one of the year’s biggest openings — to talk about the unique steak frites!
And I’m making another exception for Zoli, an artsy new seafood spot on a warehouse-y block in East Williamsburg. Ned Baldwin, the chef, is doing some tasty and creative stuff with shellfish, and his anchovy-topped bison steak is most definitely worthy of attention.
“We don’t have rules at Zoli, but we also don’t serve beef,” Baldwin wrote on Instagram. I respect that sentiment, and I talked with the chef — via email — about that ethos. Scroll past the paywall for that one.
But first…
On Unions, Alamo Drafthouse, and French Textbooks
Well, the Long Island Rail Road strike is over!
If you’re not from around here, let me fill you in: The country’s busiest commuter rail network shut down for three days while the MTA and rail workers struggled to come to an agreement over annual raises.
This was a big deal.
The LIRR is Long Island’s cardiovascular system, shuttling nearly 300,000 folks into the city on any given weekday. Without the LIRR, getting to that Broadway show or Knicks game gets very, very inconvenient.
Here’s how my own Monday morning commute went:
Step 1: Car ride from Oyster Bay to Great Neck
Step 2: N20G bus from Peter Luger in Great Neck, toward Queens.
Step 3: Take local 7 train from Flushing to Court Square
Step 4: Long transfer to the G in Long Island City
Step 5: Impromptu transfer to Citibike in Greenpoint because I got tired of being inside a metal tube.
Step 6: I arrive in downtown Brooklyn nearly three hours after I left home. I generally prefer NA drinks these days, but when I got to Alamo Drafthouse to meet my artist friend, I had a beer. And then, I had another.
Then again, being inconvenienced — which a lot of us certainly were — is a very small matter considering what’s at stake.
No one likes transit strikes. Not politicians, who try to be good stewards of our taxpayer dollars. Not restaurant workers, whose livelihoods depend on folks grabbing oysters and beers before hopping on the train to Port Washington. Certainly not commuters, who end up spending hundreds on Ubers to get to jobs they can’t do from home (I’ve heard about remote surgeries, but you can’t cook a steak via Slack).
Even the transit professionals would’ve preferred taking us all to Montauk on diesel trains instead of picketing in front of Penn Station. They would’ve preferred working, instead of watching their rent money disappear during an unpaid work stoppage.
Ideally, at least.
But here’s the thing: Forgoing a few bucks today to earn a few more dollars tomorrow is a sacrifice that unionized folks are willing to make. It’s a sacrifice that sets the bar higher for other industries when it comes time for them to bargain. It’s a sacrifice that gives non-union workers in other industries a little inspiration to organize themselves. Maybe.
I don’t have much insight into the right balance between fair pay for LIRR workers, fair taxes for New Yorkers, or fair ticket prices for those who ride.
But regardless of where you stand on those issues, the sheer breadth of the LIRR strike — impacting hundreds of thousands of commuters — is testament to the power of unions to get our collective attention, and to effect change in a very real way. This is why New York housekeepers will see their average pay rise to over six-figures. This is why Starbucks baristas keep fighting for recognition. This is why investment banking associates, AI workers, Atoboy’s bartenders, and others have sought to unionize as well.
Normalizing union activities — including strikes — is one of those lessons that never gets old.
I started studying French in the ninth grade. We learned basic verbs of motion and other fundamentals, like how to order a medium-rare steak frites in Paris. The kind of stuff I expected to learn.
But in the tenth grade or thereabouts, our public school teacher tested us on the modern vernacular of going on strike (“se mettre en grève,” or something like that, was a key phrase in our textbooks). Our teacher regaled us with stories of Gallic truckers blockading highways and farm workers dumping tomatoes. Not the kind of stuff I expected to learn.
I never encountered those tomatoes in France. But during a trip to Spain in 2018, I watched thousands of Barcelona taxi drivers protest ride share services by parking their vehicles along the city’s grand boulevards. Not even municipal buses could make their way through!
Sure, it was aggravating; I almost missed my flight back to JFK. But the drivers were doing what they were doing because this was their time. This was their leverage.
I had a reason to be sympathetic. We were in the early stages of bargaining our first contract at Vox Media that summer, and we ended up organizing our own one-day walkout — a mini-strike of sorts — when negotiations got tough.
But looking back further: It was a Long Island French teacher who planted that seed in me — as a fifteen-year-old — that unionizing was part of life. That striking, while never the first option in collective bargaining, was a normal reaction to rectifying the imbalance of economic power. And perhaps more than anything: That Europeans absolutely, positively do not mess around when it comes to this sort of thing.
Our teacher wasn’t trying to be political. She was just using French to teach us the language of resistance, an inconvenient but vital lynchpin of any democratic society.
You know what they say; start teaching kids languages early :)
Remember that Alamo Drafthouse theater I mentioned earlier?
I was there to see Curry Barker’s “Obsession,” a cautionary courtship horror tale that, for reasons I’m not entirely sure of, sneaks in a few lines about being a food critic.
But I should also point out that Alamo — which serves very good Buffalo wings — is a unionized workplace. Last year, staffers at the Manhattan and Brooklyn locations went on strike for nearly two months to secure the reinstatement of roughly 70 workers who had been laid off.
They all got their jobs back.
And since there’s often a bit of (understandable) talk about what unionizing does to restaurant prices, let me state that my beers cost just $9 and $10 apiece at Alamo. Not a bad deal in our exorbitant city.
But allow me to suggest skipping the truffled popcorn. Not everything needs to be gourmet!
Folks covered by union contracts generally earn 12.8 percent more in wages than staffers in non-union workplaces, according to The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning, non-partisan think tank.
Restaurant workers have one of the lowest rates of union membership of any industry, at just 1.8 percent, according to BLS data. Folks who work in construction, by contrast, enjoy a higher rate of union membership, at over 16 percent.
Kindly spend some time with Mahira Rivers’s Sweet City Roundtable with Jaya Saxena, co-founder of the worker-owned food media site, Ravenous! My beloved rice roll spot, Yi Ji Shi Mo, makes an appearance, as does a bakery I’m curious to get to: Elbow Bread by Zoë Kanan!
Saxena also talks about blondies, which I think I might need to eat more of in 2026.
The Lo Times is a James Beard Finalist!!!
I can’t tell you how grateful I am to the James Beard Foundation for recognizing The Lo Times with a finalist nod in the newsletter & columns category!
This was for a trio of stories on the SNAP food aid crisis, on fasting during Ramadan, and on the vulnerabilities of restaurant workers amid the immigration crackdown.
I’m so honored to be named alongside respected journalists from Saveur and Civil Eats in this category. And I’m so thankful to all of you, my good readers, for sticking with me during the opening years of The Lo Times — as I switch between topics as diverse as restaurant criticism, food prices, the ICE surge in Minneapolis, and the ongoing relevance of M.F.K. Fisher’s “Consider the Oyster.”
As I always told my CUNY students: Food journalism is journalism.
Three Dishes to try at Zoli in East Williamsburg
Notes on the surf clam, the stuffed chicken wing, and the very good anchovy-topped strip steak!!! Also, a few thoughts about the art…
