September 29, 2025, Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Another sensational “Tables for Two” by Helen Rosner in this week’s issue. It’s a review of Bong, a new Cambodian restaurant in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights. Rosner calls it “absolutely electrifying.” She says,

For the three evenings a week that it’s open, the whole operation, in a modest storefront on a residential corner, is shimmeringly alive. The cooks are half dancing in the open kitchen as they slice and stir-fry. The customers all seem wildly in love with one another. Inside, the light bouncing off the acid-green walls makes everyone’s faces appear traced with neon. The thumping bass of the hip-hop playlist reverberates through the dining room and rolls out through the open door to reach the diners seated at bistro tables out front. Even a half block away, the air smells sweet and bright, like seared shellfish, sharp vinegar, and the blistery green of sizzling herbs.

That “blistery green of sizzling herbs” is inspired! Rosner is a brilliant describer. Dig her description of Bong’s lobster dish:

Mama Kim’s namesake lobster (listed with the minimal description “IYKYK”) is a magnificent mountain of crustacean legs and claws, the pieces stir-fried with oodles of slivered ginger and a sweet-spicy herbaceous paste, made by Mama Kim, that clings, slurpably, to the meat and drips juicily onto a pile of rice below. (Lanna Apisukh’s photo of this dish is equally succulent.)

Photo by Lanna Apisukh, from Helen Rosner's "Tables for Two: Bong"

Here's another succulent sample:

Almost everything on the menu is thrilling. Even what fails to be thrilling, such as a fairly floppy green salad that I tried on one visit, manages to be at least interesting. (The dressing on that salad was afire with Kampot peppercorns, a hard-to-find Cambodian variety that has a tealike flowery astringence.) Another salad of chewy-crisp pork jowl and sliced melon is zingy with garlic and pickle-tart. The round sweetness of squid, fried in a light-as-air batter, is magnified by intensely floral curry leaves and a salty snowfall of shaved cured egg yolk. A bone-in pork chop, thick as a dictionary, tender as can be, and drowning in a luscious mess of charred tomatoes marinated in a sugar-lime-fish-sauce concoction, features every shade of sour and sweet.

Wow! What a feast! I devour it. 

2. Zadie Smith, in her “On the Impersonal Essay,” describes the tone of her essays as “impersonal” (“But my tone? Controlled. Impersonal”). Is she right? I don’t think so. I haven’t read all her essays, but I’ve read quite a few. “Dead Man Laughing,” “Generation Why?,” “Northwest London Blues,” “Man vs. Corpse,” “Love in the Gardens,” “Find Your Beach,” “Through the Portal” – I love them. What I love about them is their personal nature. They’re subjective to the bone. Later, in her “On the Impersonal Essay,” she says, “Aside from the fact that I never meant to be an essayist in the first place, one detail that has surprised me most during the past twenty years is that I have, in fact, written more personally in the essay form than I ever expected or intended.” That seems to contradict her earlier statement. To me, Smith is a personal essayist par excellence. Her pieces brim with the ardent energy of her own exquisite sensibility.

3. Dana Goodyear’s “Fire Season” is a vivid account of the loss of her home in the devastating Palisades Fire that killed twelve people and burned down six thousand eight hundred and thirty-one structures, including schools, churches, grocery stores, shops, banks, restaurants, and more than fifty-five hundred homes. She writes, 

Every house on my block burned to the ground. It got so hot that the water boiled in our small swimming pool, turning the concrete pink. The birds-eye view, captured by news helicopters, looked like the aftermath of an aerial bombardment, all gray.

In the course of the piece, Goodyear draws a parallel between Los Angeles and Pompeii. At one point she asks “Were we witnessing the beginning of an irreversible decline?” To me, the answer seems obvious: Yes. Just ask Elizabeth Kolbert (Field Notes from a Catastrophe) and Bill McKibben (The End of Nature).

4. Anthony Lane triumphs again. This time with his wonderful “Cinema Paradiso.” It’s an account of Lane’s recent attendance at a film festival in Bologna called Il Cinema Ritrovato. This is no ordinary film festival. As Lane explains, “it specializes in the shock of the old: films that have been forgotten, overlooked, undervalued, truncated by studios, or damaged by time, and that are asking to be brought back into the light.” For example, one of the festival’s films that Lane views is a recently restored version of Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925). Lane writes, “Such was the lustre of the results, at the evening showing, that there was no sense of our being in the presence of the antique; for all practical purposes, we were watching a new release.” This piece is pure pleasure – the pleasure of old movies, the pleasure of watching them at night in the warm open air of the Piazza Maggiore, the main square of Bologna’s historic center. Lane describes the scene:

There, beside the shiplike hulk of the Basilica of San Petronio—which is a work in progress, the foundation stone having been laid in 1390, and which somebody really should get around to finishing one of these days—was a vast white screen. Rows of ticketed seating were ranged before it, like pews in a nave. Alternatively, you could lounge, for free, on the marble steps of the basilica, or grab a table outside at one of the restaurants on the opposite side of the piazza. The best ice-cream parlor, around the corner, stayed open till midnight, allowing you to cool your throat with an almond-milk granita. (It comes with a spoon and a straw, so that you can slurp it up as it softens. Pleasure, in these parts, is a serious business.) In short, here was a halcyon arena for a thoroughly normal experience: going out to the movies.

Perfetto. I wish I was there. 

Photo by Matteo de Mayda, from Anthony Lane's "Cinema Paradiso"