December 18, 2023 issue

I applaud the creation of the new Hannah Goldfield column “On and Off the Menu,” in the “Critics” section of the magazine. Goldfield is one of my favorite writers. Her “Tokyo Story,” in this week’s issue, is excellent. It’s a review of several Japanese restaurants in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood. One of them is Uzuki. Goldfield writes,

If there is one Japanese restaurant in Greenpoint that best embodies understated luxury, it’s Uzuki, a recently opened temple to soba, also known as buckwheat, that humblest of crops. The chef, Shuichi Kotani, is a master of noodles, which he makes daily from one-hundred-per-cent-buckwheat flour. (Packaged versions are usually cut with wheat.) Firm, slippery, and ever so slightly grainy, they’re served warm—in a glistening hot dashi made with duck bones and topped with medallions of roast duck—or cold, in chilled dashi, layered with thin sheets of raw salmon, pearls of salmon roe, shiso leaves, and daikon radish. Every bowl is finished with a sprinkling of pale buckwheat kernels, simmered until glossy and chewy.

Ravishing!

Postscript: There seems to be a rivalry shaping up between Goldfield and Helen Rosner as to who can write most carnally about food. Rosner takes the contest to a new level this week in her delectable “Tables For Two: Foul Witch.” She writes,

Often, when restaurants are called “sexy,” that means sleek-lined and hard-edged; the food at Foul Witch is sexy, not in the way of a fast car or a low-slung couch but like actual sex: a physical indulgence, a sinking in, an embodied experience of pleasure.

Top that, Goldfield!