June 8, 2026 Issue

Stargazy pie. Ever heard of it? I hadn’t until I read Helen Rosner’s delightful “Tables for Two: Dean’s,” in this week’s issue. The pie has a gross-looking fish head sticking out of it. A photo of it, by Clark Hodgin, illustrates Rosner’s piece. Stargazy pie is a specialty of Dean’s, a new British pub on the edge of SoHo in Lower Manhattan. Rosner loves the place. She says, “I was shocked by how much I adored the food at Dean’s, how walloped I felt by it.” You can tell how much she enjoys it from the lavishness of her food descriptions. Here’s Dean’s stargazy pie:

The stargazy pie at Dean’s—a new British-ish, pub-ish restaurant on the edge of SoHo—is, in a word, freaky. The head of a fish, cooked and glossy gray, emerges from a latticed crust, regarding the ceiling with an unnerving, dull-eyed serenity. A tail protrudes, too, at an opposite angle, giving the impression of a flexed body hidden beneath the surface of the pastry sea. (In fact, the head and tail are unconnected, and mostly decorative, intended to be removed before eating.) This wondrously bizarre dish originates in Cornwall, where the story goes that a fisherman named Tom Bawcock once braved a winter storm to bring in a catch so vast that it saved his whole village from starvation. His neighbors baked the entire haul into an enormous pie, and left the heads of the fishes poking through as a celebration of abundance, or maybe an announcement of survival. The version served at Dean’s is more modestly sized than the pie of legend, serving one or two, but under its crust, which is almost obscenely rich with butter, is a classic stargazy filling, a creamy, chowder-adjacent stew of assorted fishes and soft hunks of potato—hot and heartening, and not freaky at all.

Mm, I’ll have a plate of that, please. I love that “almost obscenely rich with butter.” That’s from the newyorker.com version. When reading “Tables for Two,” always check out the newyorker.com version. It contains numerous extra felicities. For example, here’s Rosner’s description of Dean’s boiled ham:

The boiled ham, for instance, is heaven: two thin slices of meat, pink as tongues, with a parsley bechamel dotted with tiny, tender favas, and a mass of rough-mashed potatoes that seemed to be nearly half butter, salted just to the ecstatic edge of overmuch.

That “salted just to the ecstatic edge of overmuch” is inspired. Only the newyorker.com version has it. 

Photo by Clark Hodgin, from Helen Rosner's "Tables for Two: Dean's"