July 20, 2026 Issue

The pieces in this week’s issue I enjoyed most are:

1. Taran Dugal’s “Bar Tab: Folk.” Here’s a sample: 

The guests ordered the Mangalorean, named after the chef Jay Kumar’s birthplace, an Indian city on the Arabian Sea: a sublime, sweet, velvety mix of rum, pineapple, lime, and coconut cream infused with amchur, a tangy spice made from unripe mangoes. 

2. Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: Fro-Yo Fever.” Here’s a taste:

You’ll do far better if you walk to Eighty-eighth and Madison and dip into the small, cool Madison Fare, a specialty-foods-and-candy storefront opened, in 2022, by the chef Amin Kinana, whose frozen-yogurt creations are, by my estimation, unreserved works of art. The yogurt itself is dense and almost puckeringly sour, and oh, my God, the toppings. They’re some of the most spectacular toppings I’ve ever encountered, an array of ritzy, globe-spanning garnishes that evoke the posh worldliness of peak-era Dean & DeLuca: snowy cubes of Turkish delight, cinnamon-dusted pecans, bitter cocoa nibs, pistachio knafeh, vibrant edible flowers, honey on the comb, actual honest-to-goodness raspberry coulis.

Photo by Lanna Apisukh, from Helen Rosner's "Fro-Yo Fever"

3. Dan Chiasson’s “One Last Thing,” a review of Franz Wright’s posthumous Axe in Blossom: Last Poems & Fragments. Chiasson writes,

Celan’s shattered “neversongs” taught Wright important elements of his own style: the lines narrowing as they approach silence, like water disappearing down a drain; the clauses and multisyllabic words split like cordwood by line breaks; the pressurized neologisms picking up where available vocabulary runs out of road; the rich, sometimes asphyxiating details that make a beeline into the senses.

4. Zachary Fine’s “Go East,” a review of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition “Orientalism: Between Fact and Fantasy.” Fine’s commentary on the paintings of Jean-Léon Gérôme is excellent. Here’s a sample:

Gérôme is the rare artist who’s easy to like and to hate. Every painting is a model of academic crispness and polish, filled with visual cues and prearranged emotional payoffs. “The Snake Charmer,” on loan from the Clark, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, shows a naked boy wrapped in an enormous snake while an old man plays a flute. We’re brought into the scene via the boy’s illuminated buttocks, and conducted to the background, where a crew of ten soldiers gawk at the spectacle. To the right, there’s a guy with a beatific smile who seems to be enjoying more than the snake, an enormous gun propped vertically between his legs. Tabulate the number of stiff objects in the painting (gun, stick, flute, sabre, etc.) and you’ll see that the whole thing is a festival of phallic abundance. Just in case you forget to feel aroused, Gérôme reminds you to.

And another:

How do we account for the beauty of “Bashi-Bazouk” (1868-69)? The subject is just a man with a colorful headdress. Bashi-bazouks were a feared paramilitary outfit in the Ottoman Army, known for cracking skulls, and yet the sitter is a paragon of calm, not violence. He’s almost certainly a civilian whom Gérôme put in a costume. There’s a rifle on his shoulder, but it’s not shooting anytime soon; if anything, the mouth of the gun feels like a chimney inside the painting, letting out invisible puffs of psychological smoke. All the exquisite details—the man’s glowing salmon-pink tunic, the cherrylike tip of his headdress, the fluffy tassels—are an excuse for pure visual stimulation. 

Jean-Léon Gérôme, Bashi-Bazouk (1868-69)

Tables for Two Tango: BOOM!

Photo by David Williams, from Hannah Goldfield's "Tables for Two: Zauo"

Hannah Goldfield and Helen Rosner are essentially positive critics. They love writing about great restaurants. They rarely write about bad ones. But when they do, look out! They pull no punches. It’s fun to see them in vinegary mode. How do they express distaste? We shall see. Today, I’ll consider two of their most acid reviews – Goldfield’s “Zauo” (November 26, 2018) and Rosner’s “La Boca” (November 9, 2025). 

What do I mean by “acid”? Try this zinger: “Muddy-tasting flounder sashimi had a texture that might be best described as ‘rigor mortis.’ ” That’s from Goldfield’s review of Zauo, a Japanese restaurant in Manhattan, where diners catch their own fish from indoor tanks before having a chef prepare it on the spot. She writes, 

No matter how you feel about eating fish, eating at Zauo is a disaster. Where to begin? The endearing Japanese ritual of restaurant staff emphatically greeting all customers feels perverted here: every time someone catches a fish, employees are required to cheer, chant, and strike a taiko drum, resulting in an endless dystopian cacophony.

She catches a rainbow trout (“I grimaced as it flopped around, taking its last breaths, in the net used to scoop it out of the water”). The kitchen prepares it. Here’s her description of the result:

Did it have “a simple flavor with a touch of sweetness”? It was hard to say after half of it had been simmered in soy sauce to a bony mush, the other half grilled in salt until chewy and served with its head still on, propped up with a wooden stake like a Big Mouth Billy Bass about to sing. 

Goldfield’s concluding paragraph makes me smile:

Not even the supplementary appetizers and sides offered solace: edamame was slimy and saltless; a pile of seaweed salad arrived, for some reason, atop a bed of droopy green lettuce. If Zauo has one redeeming quality, besides a cheerful and accommodating staff, it’s the bathrooms. There are water tanks here, too—atop beautiful Toto toilets, with blissfully heated seats.

The staff and the toilet seats – these are Zauo’s only redeeming features. 

The tagline of Helen Rosner’s “La Boca” review is “The Argentinean chef Francis Mallmann is notorious for his love of cooking over open flames. With his New York début, he fizzles out.” How does he fizzle out? Rosner tells us:

Maybe it’s the lack of heat: La Boca is beautiful, and expensive, and charismatic, but it is also very bad. I ate there on three occasions, marvelling each time at the gulf between the appealing scene in the dining room, which offers live music at dinnertime and floods of sunlight during lunch, and the astonishing insipidity of what was on my plate. Virtually every dish was a disappointment, sometimes disconcertingly so. Empanadas, an essential avatar of Argentinean cuisine, arrive filled either with bland, greasy ground beef studded with slippery hunks of hard-boiled eggs, or with an oregano-infused Vermont cheddar that congeals almost immediately into a waxy blob. Their appeal is marginally lifted by an accompanying llajua sauce, which I know as a fiery, chile-based Bolivian salsa fresca, but which here seems to consist of grated tomatoes—just grated tomatoes, with hardly any salt.

“Virtually every dish was a disappointment, sometimes disconcertingly so.” That’s an abnormally negative comment for Rosner to make. She usually finds something to praise. But not at La Boca. Here’s her next paragraph:

If you’d like a steak—this is an Argentinean restaurant, after all—the options reflect Mallmann’s characteristic preoccupation with scale. There is, for instance, a thirty-two-ounce rib eye for two hundred and thirty-five dollars, and something called the Tower, which a server hyped up as a dramatic vertical assembly of beef-tenderloin slices interleaved with crispy smashed potatoes. Upon arrival, it was the anticlimax of the year, the meat mushy and flavorless, the potatoes so thin as to be nearly translucent, with the chewy toughness of a dehydrated banana peel. And what a tower—three inches high, more broad than tall, slumping glumly in a puddle of oddly oily jus. The menu’s centerpiece is the parrillada, a traditional Argentinean mixed-grill platter, here featuring a carnivorous quartet of lamb chops, branzino fillets, giant prawns, and a plump New York strip served on the grates of a grand, urn-shaped tabletop grill (unlit, purely for the vibes). It’s a nice steak—a solidly nice one. I was so surprised, and relieved, to at last find something at La Boca that was straightforwardly unobjectionable, that I started to laugh, and then nearly aspirated my bite of meat and choked to death, though I can’t fault the restaurant for that. What I can fault it for is the fact that I had requested the meat medium rare—I’d had a pleasant little exchange about it with our server, who shared happily that that’s how the chef prefers it as well—but it arrived medium well. The rest of the parrillada was fine: the lamb chops tender, the branzino crisp-skinned, the prawns gigantic. Despite their technically precise preparation, everything in the array is grossly underseasoned, though the dish does come with a tiny cup of chimichurri, peculiarly un-garlicky and unsalty, and two tiled lines of Mallmann’s famous “domino potatoes.”

Rosner knows something about Mallmann’s domino potatoes. “I’ve cooked these potatoes before,” she says. “The potatoes’ unique shape is achieved by hacking the sides off each one to make a tight-cornered rectangular brick, then slicing it thinly and pressing down to fan the pieces out like Ricky Jay spreading a deck of cards. The potatoes are baked in oodles of clarified butter, until the outsides are golden, the corners of each thin slice crisping and curling, the interiors silken.” But that’s not what she’s served at La Boca. She writes, 

The version served at La Boca—which is available as a stand-alone side dish, as well, with a pouf of arugula—was barely recognizable as the same dish. The slices of potato were thick and pallid; instead of crisp they were sticky with their own starch. Another side dish that Mallmann is famous for—humitas, an Andean preparation of fresh sweet corn slow-cooked with milk—is served in a metal ramekin, which might be why it had the tinny undertones of creamed corn straight from the can. Does the great chef know what’s going on here? Does he like it?

“Mushy and flavorless,” “chewy toughness,” “grossly underseasoned,” “thick and pallid” – these are annihilating descriptions. And that last bit about the corn dish tasting like it came “straight from the can” is the coup de grâce. Rosner obliterates La Boca. And she’s not done:

Every single dish I tried was under-salted—a common complaint, it seems, as I noticed, on my final visit, that saltshakers had been set out on every table. Squat little silver sentries that clashed with the room’s motif of gold, they seemed like quiet admissions of defeat.

Bottom line: “I don’t want to go back to La Boca, and I can’t in good conscience recommend that anyone else eat there.” 

Goldfield and Rosner aren’t by nature harsh critics. They seek pleasure and love describing it. They prefer tossing bouquets to lobbing grenades. But on the rare occasion when they do the latter – BOOM! 

Mid-Year Top Ten 2026

Time for my annual “Mid-Year Top Ten,” a list of my favorite New Yorker pieces of the year so far (with a choice quotation from each in brackets):

Best Reporting and Essays

1. Ed Caesar, “The Stunt Pilot,” June 1, 2026 ("Once the plane passed the highway, Slipkan gave Gusak the order to shoot. The plane was slightly less than nine hundred feet away from the drone. Gusak squeezed the trigger, and the cabin of the Antonov filled with the drilling sound of automatic-weapon fire and the smoky-sweet smell of spent rounds").

2. John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa, Volume Six,” April 27, 2026 ("You want Aisle 7, north side, top shelf, Pennington Quality Market, or wherever you get your I.G.A. cherries. The larger the jar, the larger the cherry, in generally discernible fractions, so you want the sixteen-ouncer. I.G.A., of course, is the Independent Grocers Alliance, and this is your vox-pop cherry, your socialist cherry, but politics is not why you drown it in bourbon").

3. Michael Schulman, “Deepfaking Orson Welles,” February 9, 2026 ("Then, there was what Saatchi called the 'happiness' problem: left to its own guided intuition, the A.I. technology often makes characters look cheerier, especially women. Saatchi played an A.I. clip of sullen Aunt Fanny, in the grim final scene, inappropriately smirking in her rocking chair. 'In terms of subtle despair, it has absolutely no idea what to do,' he said. 'That’s part of why having the actor is really important' ”).

4. Lauren Collins, “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” May 4, 2026 ("Finally, he drove to the spot where we’d looked on the first day. 'It was the very last place I could go,' he said. He walked until he saw our footprints and then pushed a little farther. About half a mile on, he spotted a champagne bottle, green and clear, with a perfect little cigarette of a scroll inside—the real thing, at last").

5. Rebecca Mead, “The Landscape Artist,” February 16 & 23, 2026 ("The environment was Goldsworthy’s true studio. He makes art using natural materials—stacked stones, interlaced leaves, threaded wool—that might take hours to create and then only moments to evanesce").

6. Nicola Twilley, “Pour One Out,” January 12, 2026 ("We established that I am prone to overthinking, that I’m not a huge fan of the earthy and acidic notes that are considered the hallmark of the region’s flagship varietal, and that the only sample I’d willingly purchase was a blend of one-quarter smoke-tainted wine and three-quarters not. According to my checklist, it tasted like tobacco, black pepper, and dark fruit, with a slight herbaceous note and a bitter finish").

7. Ian Frazier, “The Ice Curtain,” January 26, 2026 ("While walking around Nome, I came upon and tried to make sense of the city’s former hospital building, which sprawls in an indeterminate shape and contains the offices of the Department of Motor Vehicles, a car-repair garage, a pawnshop, the Nome courthouse, and the labyrinthine workshops of Rolland Trowbridge, an enterprising man who bought the building and damaged his knee crawling around in its crannies as he rehabbed it for its present uses").

8. Paige Williams, “Call of the Wild,” January 19, 2026 ("He ate daylilies, violet greens, chickweed, shepherd’s purse, greenbrier tips, sheep sorrel, thistle stalks. He learned how to make bamboo-pokeweed spring rolls, persimmon ice cream, spicebush muffins, dandelion jelly, pan-fried groundnuts, watercress soup, acorn cookies, roast squirrel glazed with honey and balsamic vinegar. If a wild hog came onto his property, he killed, butchered, and ate it, then freeze-dried the leftovers. He dried stalks of goldenrod and mint on racks").

9. Julian Lucas, “Urban Legend,” June 29, 2026 ("What’s a novel but a big score of details burgled from the world? And what’s a novelist but a fence, furnishing imaginary scenes with choice pieces of reality while obscuring their provenance?").

10. Jon Lee Anderson, “Is Cuba Next?,” March 30, 2026 ("A military band played a patriotic tune, and the marchers began to make their way through the city, bearing torches and chanting old revolutionary slogans: 'Socialism or Death,' 'I Am Fidel.' As they sang and shouted about honor, sacrifice, and the fatherland, they seemed like adherents of a religion in which the rewards are realized only in the hereafter").

Best Cover

Barry Blitt, Split Screen (February 16 & 23, 2026)

Best of “The Critics”

1. James Wood, “Visiting Hours,” May 11 & 18, 2026 ("Sylvie systematically deconstructs Suzanna’s world. You don’t have to visit your mother, she says. But I do have to, Suzanna replies. 'According to who?' Sylvie asks. 'You don’t even have to go to school.' Fed on moral scraps, the child must find her own meaning on which to subsist").

2. Alex Ross, “Crisis Mode,” May 25, 2026 ("Instruments and voices accumulate into immense, sustained, saturating dissonances, with a snare drum cutting through the tear-gas haze. Characteristically, Czernowin’s control of timbre, texture, and structure yields a kind of cataclysmic grandeur. Then, at the very end, she kicks away the frame of art and makes things blunt. Singer and her doppelgänger plead together: 'Don’t take my child away / Don’t take my child / Don’t / No.' The final syllables accelerate into a blur, whereupon a ritual of wailing erupts. A composer writes to the limits of her art, and steps into the real").

3. Zachary Fine, “Let It Bleed,” January 12, 2026 ("From one perspective, the shape is an island seen from above. From others, it’s a half-finished paint job, a blast hole, or an ocular stain. The choice is yours: you can survey it cartographically, insist on its flatness or depth, or be reduced to your own eyeball").

4. Hannah Goldfield, “Daily Bread,” February 16 & 23, 2026 ("We spend our lives in a cycle of having eaten and then needing to do it again; how we feed ourselves reflects our relationship to money, time, pleasure, place. If the food diary pushes its practitioners toward solipsism, or toward showing off, its popularity also evinces something encouraging: a curiosity about how other people live, the texture of their days").

5. Hilton Als, “The Seer,” March 9, 2026 ("When I was younger and didn’t “get” Atget, I thought of his images as silent, with no action, no story. But now I can see that they are full of story—the story of time and its passage. My visits to the I.C.P. convinced me that Atget knew exactly what he was doing when he chose to make an epic record of time and place").

6. Zachary Fine, “The Doctor Is In,” March 23, 2026 (Schiele could have placed Graff next to an operating table, like Rembrandt’s Dr. Nicolaes Tulp or Eakins’s Dr. Samuel Gross. He could have given him the dignity of Goya’s Dr. Arrieta, or made him look dashing, like Sargent’s Dr. Pozzi, with his crimson robe and Turkish slippers. Instead, Schiele strips Graff of a stethoscope and examination room, and reduces the background to platelets of white. Who would know that Graff was a talented doctor, or a hearty and athletic man who liked the outdoors and played the cello, or that he had two divorces on the horizon? His body, with its mottled face and hands, is the only wisp of narrative.)

7. Zachary Fine, “Back to the Future,” April 13, 2026 (The centerpiece of the expansion, which was led by the architects Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas, in collaboration with the firm Cooper Robertson, is an atrium that snaps right onto the side of the flagship building. I can’t say it was worth the renovation’s eighty-two-million-dollar price tag, but the space is brilliantly subtle. It works like a snorkel for the museum, giving it a new column of air for the vertical flow of traffic to the galleries, which have basically doubled in size.

8. Anthony Lane, “Seeing and Believing,” April 20, 2026 (My favorite sentence in Graham-Dixon’s book has him probing the nitty-gritty of Vermeer’s roofs: “It is possible that he ground actual red terracotta tiles in with his pigments and oil to get the required result.”)

 9. Justin Chang, “Art of the Steal,” April 13, 2026 (Once Lori enters Julian’s home, the film springs to life. So does Soderbergh’s camera, which begins sniffing and roving about the space like a dog unleashed.)

10. Zachary Fine, “Monster Mash,” February 16 & 23, 2026 (But the film persuades with its frightening beauty: the shimmering flesh-colored rocks, the throbbing soundtrack, the smoothness of the creature’s skin. It’s all too human, but not.)

Best Illustration

Bill Rebholz's illustration for Rachel Symes' "On and Off the Avenue: A Total Flop"

Best of “Goings On”

1. Taran Dugal, “Bar Tab: Ornithology,” January 12, 2026 ("Sometime during the coda, the guests’ cocktails arrived. The Autumn in New York, a tangy, gin-heavy blend of lemon and crème de violette, was just fine, and not quite worth its sixteen-dollar price tag").

2. Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: Cove,” January 26, 2026 ("An oyster is poached in chamomile oil and served with wisps of creamy chestnut. A carrot is roasted to marshmallow sweetness, tempura-fried, and wrapped in charred sweet leaves of caraflex cabbage, then draped in uni and drizzled with spiced quince syrup. Like much of what’s on McGarry’s menu, it has a lot going on, but it doesn’t feel busy or chaotic; McGarry layers ingredients and flavors like washes of watercolor").

3. Jillian Steinhauer, “Art: Louise Bourgeois’s ‘Art Can Still Enthrall,’ ” February 2, 2026 ("The display, although understated, highlights the rhythms of Bourgeois’s obsessive repetitions, and pleasure comes in the form of details, such as in an untitled piece in which a pair of marble eggs hides in a stack of weathered crates").

4. Dan Stahl, “Bar Tab: Haswell Green’s,” February 9, 2026 ("Several pages of beverage options include ninety varieties of whiskey, plus wine, beer, cider, and custom cocktails like the mezcal-forward P.Y.T., which, well—imagine a drinkable cigarette").

5. Hilton Als, “Photo Booth: William Eggleston’s Lonely South,” February 9, 2026 ("The real stunner when it comes to showing us community is Eggleston’s 1972 image of a young Black woman, sitting in a church pew with other women of color, turning to look over her shoulder at the camera. The woman’s hair is straightened—“correct”—and she is thin; she wears a sleeveless, wine-colored dress, and the long fingers of her left hand rest on her left shoulder, partly hiding her mouth. It’s a powerful evocation of the psychology of beauty in the American South. Is she covering her mouth because she’s been made to see her lips as too big? Does she straighten her hair because the “natural” look has caught on only in big cities, where women have more freedom to express themselves, or is she simply trying to align herself with the older women she is sitting with, to be one with them? By looking at the white man behind the camera, is she doing something forbidden? We’ll never know. And it’s those many mysteries, rooted in the real and the possible, that continue to make photography in general, and Eggleston’s in particular, so fascinating").

6. Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: The Eighty-Six,” February 16 & 23, 2026 ("I was, for my sins, dining with a vegetarian, and twenty ounces felt too ambitious to tackle alone, so I went instead for the New York strip, served bone-in. The exterior, salted and peppered, crackled from a hard sear; the inside was tender pink from edge to edge. The sauces I’d ordered alongside were hardly necessary: an eggy, vinegar-tart béarnaise, and a wiggly, wobbly gelée-adjacent steak sauce made with veal demi-glace. I dipped my fries into them, at least, and enjoyed a whole phalanx of steak-house sides: garlicky spinach; butter-laden mashed potatoes; a strikingly photogenic creamed-corn potpie with a swirly croissant top; snappy green and yellow long beans, dressed in a sharp lemon vinaigrette that sliced through the density of the rest of the food").

7. Rachel Syme, “On and Off the Avenue: Spring in the Trenches,” April 13, 2026 ("We aren’t watching chicks hatch or witnessing the miracle of foaling or plucking clumps of wild ramps from the earth. Instead, we continue traipsing through concrete, burdened with utter confusion about what, exactly, to wear: spring is a time of meteorological fakeouts; one day it will be balmy, the next frigid. Or, mornings are crisp and call for bundling up, but dress in too many layers and you’ll overheat by noon. Rain, April’s rude house guest, visits erratically and unannounced").

8. Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: Dean’s,” June 8, 2026 ("The restaurant rewards the diner who understands that, at this kind of proudly jolie-laide establishment, there’s a secret code: the more vividly horrid-sounding a dish, the more glorious it will be. 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"). 

Best Poem

Rosanna Warren, “Coots,” March 30, 2026 (It would snow soon, / we walked fast, night was spreading its cloak, / the western skyline sparkled its broken glass, / and the birds in their tuxedos tightened their rings / so the water rippled glossily / out around them, catching glints).

Best “Talk of the Town”

1. Julian Lucas, “A Real Gas,” January 26, 2026 ("She was sanding down an L-shaped knob for a client in the Hamptons, who’d hired her to modernize his nineteen-thirties Magic Chef. Behind her was an Aladdin’s cave of more than a hundred and fifty venerable gas ranges, some with polished chrome fixtures and others nearly rusted through. There were Chambers, Garlands, Crowns, and a hulking, buttercup-yellow Roper that resembled a muscle car. In a world going electric, the Stove Lady keeps their flames alive: 'Nobody—not nobody, anywhere—does what I do' ").

2. Ben McGrath, “Ice Capades,” March 2, 2026 ("The fourth running of the Van Nostrand, when it finally transpired, after two days of postponement, featured three boats from the Shrewsbury club and three from New York. All, per the rules, were so-called 'A' boats: restored antiques, wooden, with gaffed rigs. From a squinting distance, they resembled Hudson River sloops. Up close, they were more like giant crosses atop machetes. The wind was a fluky northwesterly, gusty at the starting gun, such that a couple of blades levitated briefly, as if launching into flight. Then came the lulls, and a reminder that sailing, even on sherbert, can be a “hurry up and wait” kind of sport. Dan Lawrence’s son, Luke, piloting Ariel, which once belonged to the Roosevelts’ neighbor Archie Rogers, took the first heat, and then the second, obviating the need for a third. No team scores needed this time. The New Yorkers had won, and the cup was going home to Newburgh after a hundred and thirty-five years").

3. Sarah Larson, “Big Time,” March 16, 2026 ("At a Gagosian gallery in Chelsea the other day, the master rigger Joe Vilardi, a gray-haired Long Islander in a hoodie that said 'Budco Enterprises,' surveyed the final steps of the installation of Michael Heizer’s new exhibition, 'Negative Sculpture.' The show features 'Convoluted Line A' and 'Convoluted Line B' (2024), two eighty-seven-and-a-half-foot curved steel troughs that wend through the gallery’s floor like a figure skater’s tracks on ice").

4. Henry Alford, “Special Deliveries,” April 6, 2026 ("At 10:44 a.m., after docking near West Thirty-ninth Street, a thousand and fifty-six feet above trucks stuck in traffic in the Lincoln Tunnel, the package was assigned to a Dutch X biker named C Jay Jaime, a Brooklyn-born, thirty-four-year-old father of three, who would be riding around town on a special pedal-assist e-bike that came equipped with a windshield, a roof, and an attached trailer. Jaime, who had on a yellow reflective vest and a helmet, held up his phone near his supervisor’s and, courtesy of the FarEye app, instantly received the coördinates for the packages—a total of forty-five—he’d be delivering. “This should take about six hours,” he said. The Sephora box would be his nineteenth of the day. He removed the parcel from its Kevlar tote and placed it on a shelf in the trailer. The D.O.T. estimates that two cargo bikes can do the work of a van or a box truck. Moreover, the trim little contraption cut a wholesome figure reminiscent of a Richard Scarry book—as if a courtesy tram birthed a tiny Zamboni").

5. Nick Paumgarten, “Fanboy,” June 15, 2026 ["He was sitting in a corner of Old Rabbit Club, a bar on MacDougal Street, drinking a non-alcoholic beer. He had on a Waylon Jennings T-shirt under a red plaid shirt, and an MF Doom baseball cap that contained a cascade of curly hair that Vile has a tendency to hide behind. A beer-menu lamplight suggested that the color of his Chuck Taylors was lavender. He was hanging out late (a) to make the trip down the turnpike at midnight (“Musicians know, it’s an easy shot late at night—it’s like teleportation”) and (b) to catch another band’s gig at Le Poisson Rouge"].

6. Ian Frazier, “ICE Prison Watch,” June 22, 2026 (Doremus Avenue and the warehouses and tank farms and truck lots and junk yards along it are not far from the Passaic River. This is swampy Jersey, as opposed to hilly Jersey. Next to the prison visitors’ parking lot, a small catchment pond holds runoff. The lawn around the pond had been mowed without anybody picking up the trash beforehand. Two Canada geese and six gangly brown-suède goslings walked among the refuse, while in the near distance the truck horns and the protesters’ chants rose up. The geese had been there off and on for days.)

Best Photo

Ian Loring Shiver's photo for Helen Rosner's "New York's Finest Sandwich"

Best of newyorker.com

1. Helen Rosner, “New York’s Finest Sandwich,” March 22, 2026 ("What I find most wondrous about the Vegitalian is that it’s not a vegetarian sandwich that happens to be good. It’s not a concession to dietary preference, or a consolation prize. It is, in every sense, a more considered sandwich than the typical monument to meat; every ingredient is load-bearing, each element thought through and assigned a job. The result is a sandwich that illuminates, a sandwich that delights, a sandwich that redefines the Italian combo as a structure, a set of relationships, a formula that admits many solutions. The meat never figures, and you never miss it; all you miss, when the sandwich is gone, is the sandwich itself").

2. Samanth Subramanian, “Sohrab Hura’s Frozen Vision of Kashmir,” May 2, 2026 ("What does “Snow” testify to? Possibly to a way of life that not only survives many kinds of precarity—cruel weather, scanty income, a despotic army—but that even molds itself to them. I kept returning to an image of the side of a house with unfinished red brick walls and a corrugated metal roof. Quilts and blankets burst out of its upper windows, perhaps to be aired or perhaps as plugs to keep out the winter wind. It’s a sight so unexpected that it feels faintly comic, until you clock just how many blankets there are—and how bitterly cold it must be in that house at night. The day is bright, and the distant peaks are carpeted in green, but there’s still a berm of snow on the road by the house, as if to warn that the winter will never entirely leave this land").

3. Max Norman, “August Sander’s Enormous Attempt to Capture a Lost World,” May 21, 2026 (Despite his claims to universality, Sander thought with his eye, which was attracted to abnormal bodies, unforgettable faces, unkempt free thinkers, and all sorts of people the Nazis would soon label “unerwünscht,” or undesirable.)

4. Taran Dugal, “How Raghu Rai Captured an India in Transition,” May 23, 2026 ("My favorite shot from the book is “Monsoon Downpour in Delhi,” from 1984, which shows a bull pulling a load in the heavy rain, its driver balancing barefoot atop a wooden cart. To his left is a black car with a bulky, rounded frame, glimmering in the deluge. One look at the image and I remembered the Delhi monsoons from my childhood summers—the intolerable humidity, the legions of darkened clouds gathering on the horizon, followed by stentorian thunder and relentless, life-affirming rain. The photo functioned as a window into the past, but it reminded me, too, of the future").

5. Hilton Als, “The Expansive Joy of Mao Ishikawa,” May 30, 2026 ("The photographs in 'A Port Town Elegy' are strong images about being trapped and exercising masculinity. But who takes the poor’s power or demand for power seriously? Ishikawa doesn’t sentimentalize these guys; she lets them get in her face (and, by extension, her frame), she pays attention to them, and imagine how rare that is in their world!").

6. Naaman Zhou, “How City Kids Used to Play on the Streets of New York,” June 6, 2026 ("Earlier, I’d asked Cooper what her favorite picture was in the series. It was one she’d taken of a go-kart race down an abandoned stretch of the West Side Elevated Highway. Two groups of kids are screeching down the road. Other boys are sitting on the guardrail, or strolling and watching from a distance. It’s otherwise empty—just the kids and the road. Like almost all of Cooper’s photos, the scene is fleeting, a remnant of a New York that no longer exists. That highway was demolished, and, though Cooper saved one of the go-karts, and exhibited it at the Museum of the City of New York, she wasn’t able to keep it. In the seventies, when Cooper took these photos, she already knew that what she was seeing was temporary. 'I would drive around Alphabet City, and I would see these things,' she said. 'But they might last for a couple of hours. If I saw it one day, generally, it wouldn’t be there the next' ").

7. Naomi Fry, “The Delicious Anticipation – and, Yes, Release – of ‘Heated Rivalry,’ ” January 10, 2026 ("To try to tell if someone likes you—if someone might even want to have sex with you and, if so, when, and what that encounter might be like, and, once it’s over, when and how it might be repeated—can be one of life’s greatest pleasures").

8. Alex Ross, “What Went Wrong When Susan Sontag Met Thomas Mann,” March 14, 2026 ("What, exactly, was the root of Sontag’s 'shame' over the encounter with Mann, if her semi-fictional story reflected her real-life attitude?").

9. Rebecca Mead, “David Hockney’s Hidden Depths,” June 16, 2026 ("His 'pool paintings,' including 'A Bigger Splash,' remain his most iconic works, despite the fact that he made only a dozen or so of them. They capture a kind of carefree milieu that manages to be suggestively hedonistic while being almost Edenic in the loving treatment of male nudity").

10. Zach Helfand, “How to Canoe to the World Cup in New Jersey,” June 16, 2026 (“The Hackensack appeared behind the parking lot, surprisingly broad and sparkly. Phragmites reeds lined the water, and the American Dream mall loomed over the far bank. It didn’t smell too bad. Except for the cars roaring overhead on a nearby bridge, a continuation of Route 3, it was pretty peaceful”).

Best Sentence

Over and over, I ran those films on our family projector, watching Pepper Constable (6'1", 191) go off-tackle, shucking Yalies, Harvards, on his way to the end zone. - John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa, Volume Six” (April 27, 2026) 

Best Paragraph

Once the plane passed the highway, Slipkan gave Gusak the order to shoot. The plane was slightly less than nine hundred feet away from the drone. Gusak squeezed the trigger, and the cabin of the Antonov filled with the drilling sound of automatic-weapon fire and the smoky-sweet smell of spent rounds. A stream of orange tracers rained from the minigun. After a few bursts of gunfire, a small plume of black smoke tailed out behind the Shahed, and it began losing altitude. The crew expected it to explode, but it glided into a field beneath the Antonov without detonating—a surprise for a farmer the next morning. Inside the plane, there was no jubilation. After the successful kill, Gusak spent a few minutes tidying up his work station, collecting round casings into a burlap bag. - Ed Caesar, “The Stunt Pilot” (June 1, 2026) 

Best Detail

Two Canada geese and six gangly brown-suède goslings walked among the refuse, while in the near distance the truck horns and the protesters’ chants rose up. - Ian Frazier, "ICE Prison Watch" (June 22, 2026)

Best Description

Every other detail of the Vegitalian likewise replaces an element that the meats provided in the original. Arugula, in lieu of more traditional iceberg lettuce, adds peppery bite. Pecorino, rather than Parmigiano, provides funk. In addition to mozzarella (salty, springy) there is a very nontraditional layer of Swiss cheese, lending a gently savory note. Rather than a conventional splash of red-wine vinegar, the Vegitalian gets a hefty smear of Court Street Grocers’ signature “hoagie spread,” a piquant relish of kalamata and green olives plus a briny, giardiniera-style mix of cauliflower, carrots, peppers, and other pickly things. There’s also a smear of mayo—Italian-combo sacrilege, in some sandwich circles, though I’ve always felt that it boosts the lusciousness of this sort of sandwich. The bread is a soft-crumbed, crackly-crusted seeded roll, with faintly salty pockets of air. - Helen Rosner, "New York’s Finest Sandwich" (March 22, 2026)

Best Drink

The Calcutta Cutie – “a pear-and-chai-infused vodka—sweet, refreshing, and just bitter enough” (Taran Dugal, “Bar Tab: Ornithology,” January 12, 2026).

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"

Tables for Two Tango #8: Hannah Goldfield's "Fan-Fan Doughnuts" and Helen Rosner's "I'm Donut ?"

Photo by Shawn Michael Jones, from Hannah Goldfield's "Fan-Fan Doughnuts"

Descriptions of doughnuts: three by Hannah Goldfield from her “Fan-Fan Doughnuts” (March 15, 2021) and three by Helen Rosner from her “I’m Donut ?” (December 1, 2025). The challenge: pick the best one. Okay, here goes. First up – Goldfield:

1. I was especially delighted by La Donna, featuring an irresistibly fuchsia-hued, refreshingly tart, juicy black-currant-and-raspberry glaze, crowned with crisp shards of meringue and dried rose and cornflower buds.

2. An oblong, éclair-inspired number wore a long squiggle of torched meringue and oozed with yuzu curd; another paired guava and a sweet, salty cream cheese.

3. But it’s the basics I crave: Gerson’s yeasted, brioche-style dough, which contains flour, butter, and eggs and is fried to the color of honey, is a marvel in itself, not much heavier than cotton candy, and is perhaps best coated in an inky slick of Valrhona chocolate or braided and lightly lacquered with the simplest white icing. 

Now, Rosner:

4. There are chocolate and matcha variants, their subtle flavors baked into the dough, and filled doughnuts, whose puffy centers are pumped with vivid creams: custard, more matcha, fragrant sake gelée with Chantilly, an airy swirl of peanut-butter and tart Concord-grape jelly.

5. There are some New York exclusives, like a ring doughnut glazed in neon-pink strawberry icing, freckled with bits of freeze-dried berry that crackle and melt on the tongue, or a chocolate variety with a caramel-espresso cream filling that was unexpectedly, thrillingly bitter and complex. 

6. The somewhat controversial scrambled-egg doughnut features a sugary original doughnut piped full of soft curds and a squirt of a sweet-savory tomato mayonnaise—a bold and bizarre breakfast manifesto that refuses to be definitively sweet or definitively savory.

These are all delectable descriptions. But, for me, the contest comes down to #1 versus #5. I love that “irresistibly fuchsia-hued, refreshingly tart, juicy black-currant-and-raspberry glaze, crowned with crisp shards of meringue and dried rose and cornflower buds” in Goldfield’s #1. Rosner’s “like a ring doughnut glazed in neon-pink strawberry icing, freckled with bits of freeze-dried berry that crackle and melt on the tongue,” in her #5, is pretty damn good, too. 

Based on these two ravishing descriptions, which doughnut would I choose? It’s a close call, but I think I’d go with #1. I’m tantalized by that “refreshingly tart, juicy black-currant-and-raspberry glaze.” Sorry, Rosner. I’ll make it up to you in a future post. 

Helen Rosner's Review of #1 NYC Restaurant Kabawa

Photo by Yael Malka, from Helen Rosner's "The Caribbean Resturant Reinventing the Momofuku Empire"

I see that the Caribbean restaurant Kabawa tops The New York Times’ 2026 “The 100 Best Restaurants in New York City” list. New Yorker food writer Helen Rosner reviewed Kabawa last year, calling it “easygoing and joyous.” She wrote, 

Though there’s no shortage of high points at Kabawa—among them a rainbow-sprinkle-studded baton of flan so dense it verges on cheesecake—the restaurant’s success lies less in the strength of any individual dish than in the ebullient sum of its parts. 

She says, “an almost euphoric pleasure comes from simply being there, pumped full of life by the colors and the smells.” 

In a year-end piece called “The Best Things I Ate in 2025,” Rosner picked Kabawa’s curry goat as one of her favorite dishes. She says,

Tender shredded goat meat, luscious and gently gamy, is formed into a tidy rectangle, then seared to a crackly crispness. The fiery sauce Creole spooned over top is dark, thick, complex, and alive with spices and a bit of fishy funk from dried scallops. The dish is crowned with a pile of glossy fried curry leaves, whose woodsy, otherworldly aroma eddies around your face as the dish is placed before you, a promise of imminent pleasure.

I love critics who are guided by pleasure. It’s Rosner’s chief criterion. Kabawa passed the test spectacularly. 

Tables for Two Tango: Helen Rosner's "Misipasta"

Photo by Lanna Apisukh, from Helen Rosner's "Misipasta"

This is the seventh post in my series “Tables for Two Tango,” a celebration of Hannah Goldfield’s and Helen Rosner’s wonderful New Yorker restaurant reviews. Each month I select a favorite piece by one or the other of them and try to say why I like it. Today’s pick is Helen Rosner’s ambrosial “Tables for Two: Misipasta” (March 18, 2024). 

This is a review of one of Rosner’s favorite restaurants – Misipasta, in Williamsburg. Rosner doesn’t expressly say it’s one of her favorites, but I infer it when she says, 

You don’t have to be tired and hungry to eat at Misipasta, though I tend to be. It’s open late, by post-pandemic standards—diners are seated through around 10 p.m.—and I often find myself rolling in the door after giving up on a less-than-thrilling meal elsewhere, and not wanting the evening (the time, the stomach space, the babysitter, the sense of life as full of joy and promise) to be wasted. There are about twenty seats indoors, all of them counter stools, and one or two are nearly always empty. The lights are just dim enough to soothe, the tidy menu of cocktails and bitter Italian sodas ready to offer a bit of relief. The air smells like Parmigiano and butter, the sound system is playing the Pointer Sisters. There’s an enormous green salad—bitter mustard greens, frilly arugula, and hunks of sweet dates and almonds tossed in a sharp vinaigrette—served in a satisfyingly big, deep bowl. There’s mozzarella in carrozza, the Italian dish of cheese layered between two slices of bread and then deep-fried until golden—a kingly grilled cheese. You can get a plate of nutty-funky prosciutto served with enormous, fluffy gougères. I recommend eating both in the same bite, like biscuits and country ham gone zippy Italiano.

I love that “The air smells like Parmigiano and butter, the sound system is playing the Pointer Sisters.” 

The specialty at Misipasta is pasta. Rosner describes it ravishingly:

Despite the dozen or so shapes of pasta available in the to-go case, Misipasta offers only two pastas on the dine-in menu, but two is enough. The spaghetti, subtle and nourishing, is cooked just to the stern side of al dente, then tossed with garlicky butter emulsified with the starchy pasta cooking water, and sprinkled with shaved bottarga and crisp bread crumbs. Luscious cappelletti—filled, folded pasta that look sort of like overlarge tortellini—are filled with a heady mixture of parmesan, ricotta, mascarpone and prosciutto, dressed simply in butter and sage, and arranged tidily in a small, straight-sided terra-cotta bowl. It’s the sort of pasta dish you’re always craving without even realizing it, the sort of pasta you want to just shovel into your mouth—but their size and heft force you to slow down, to think not bowl by bowl but bite by bite. There’s often a third pasta available only for to-go orders, a scoop of tiny pastina (star-shaped micro-pasta) in a container of brodo, golden and intense, and so rich with collagen that it leaves your lips sticky. This is the sort of potent, soul-nourishing, complexly layered noodles-in-broth situation that Campbell’s chicken-and-stars soup always hopes to see when it looks in the mirror, before resigning itself to the disappointments of reality.

The piece concludes with five delectable suggestions:

I worry, a little bit, that the secret of Misipasta will get out, and that the friendly, neighborhoody feel of the place will tighten up like a corset, and that it’ll become yet another impossible-to-enter room behind the digital gates of the Resy app. But the shop and restaurant are open nearly all day—at 11 a.m. or 3 p.m. you can breeze through and have the place basically to yourself—and, when the weather gets just a smidge warmer, the big and beautifully appointed back yard will reopen, nearly doubling the seating capacity. Have an espresso, fruity and bitter. Have a slice of crispy farinata, a lacy-edge chickpea-flour pancake aromatic with rosemary. Have one of the city’s great secret sandwiches, an enormous mess of marinated and grilled artichoke hearts, spiked with hot chilis and barely held together by oozing provolone cheese. Buy a pint of Robbins’s satiny hazelnut gelato. Get a pound of pasta—frilly lumache, or long tubes of paccheri—and a jar of thirty-clove sauce, heady with garlic. You won’t make pasta nearly as good as Robbins’s at home—even with the same ingredients, even with the same tools, some things just have to get all the way into your bones—but it doesn’t hurt to try. 

Helen Rosner's "New York's Finest Sandwich"

Photo by Ian Loring Shiver, from Helen Rosner's "New York's Finest Sandwich"

This is just a quick note to say how much I enjoyed Helen Rosner’s recent “New York’s Finest Sandwich” (newyorker.com, March 22, 2026). I love sandwiches and I love Rosner’s writing. This piece is double bliss. Rosner tells about her favorite Italian sandwich in New York City – Court Street Grocer’s Vegitalian double combo. She says,

What makes me love it with such evangelical intensity is what it has taught me about the true meaning of its salumi-filled counterpart. Sandwich aficionados will spend happy hours yelling at one another about the proper cold cuts for an Italian combo, debating with Talmudic intensity the relative merits of soppressata versus capicola, or whether to include a layer of mortadella (nice, in my opinion) or prosciutto (never; a textural abomination). But the Vegitalian renders all of those arguments entirely moot, by evoking all the best parts of a meat-laden sandwich meatlessly. What’s important isn’t the meat itself but what it provides: heft, bite, umami, complexity, funk, fat. In the hands of a sandwich master, these things can come from elsewhere—in the Vegitalian, thin slabs of fresh mozzarella and, of all things, a thick layer of roasted sweet-potato slices.

Rosner analyzes the Vegitalian in detail. She considers its texture:

In the Vegitalian, the sweet potato, with its happy mushiness, has a surprisingly similar yielding texture to a ruffled heap of thinly sliced deli meats, and its subtle sweetness evokes that of many salumi. 

Its color:

Not immaterially, its bright-orange color looks absolutely gorgeous against the rest of the sandwich. 

Its inspired combination of ingredients:

Every other detail of the Vegitalian likewise replaces an element that the meats provided in the original. Arugula, in lieu of more traditional iceberg lettuce, adds peppery bite. Pecorino, rather than Parmigiano, provides funk. In addition to mozzarella (salty, springy) there is a very nontraditional layer of Swiss cheese, lending a gently savory note. Rather than a conventional splash of red-wine vinegar, the Vegitalian gets a hefty smear of Court Street Grocers’ signature “hoagie spread,” a piquant relish of kalamata and green olives plus a briny, giardiniera-style mix of cauliflower, carrots, peppers, and other pickly things. There’s also a smear of mayo—Italian-combo sacrilege, in some sandwich circles, though I’ve always felt that it boosts the lusciousness of this sort of sandwich. The bread is a soft-crumbed, crackly-crusted seeded roll, with faintly salty pockets of air. To be fair, all these components are present in Court Street Grocers’ standard Italian combo, too—but the result, in that case, is less adjacent to perfection, with too many strong notes competing for the same frequencies.

She concludes dazzlingly:

What I find most wondrous about the Vegitalian is that it’s not a vegetarian sandwich that happens to be good. It’s not a concession to dietary preference, or a consolation prize. It is, in every sense, a more considered sandwich than the typical monument to meat; every ingredient is load-bearing, each element thought through and assigned a job. The result is a sandwich that illuminates, a sandwich that delights, a sandwich that redefines the Italian combo as a structure, a set of relationships, a formula that admits many solutions. The meat never figures, and you never miss it; all you miss, when the sandwich is gone, is the sandwich itself.

By the time I finished reading this tour de force of sandwich description, I wanted so badly to sink my teeth into a Vegitalian that I seriously considered flying to New York to get one. 

Tables for Two Tango: Hannah Goldfield's "Lhasa Fresh Food"

Photo by Christaan Felber, from Hannah Goldfield's "Lhasa Fresh Food"

This is the sixth post in my series “Tables for Two Tango,” a celebration of Hannah Goldfield’s and Helen Rosner’s wonderful New Yorker restaurant reviews. Each month I select a favorite piece by one or the other of them and try to say why I like it. Today’s pick is Goldfield’s delightful “Tables for Two: Lhasa Fresh Food” (May 20, 2019). 

I love soup. Two of the best soup descriptions I’ve ever read are in this piece. Lhasa Fresh Food is a Tibetan restaurant in the Elmhurst neighborhood of Queens, New York City, that serves dumplings, soups, stir-fries, and noodle dishes. Goldfield likes the dumplings and the noodles. But what she really savors are two soups – thenthuk and karsod. She writes,

Better yet is a traditional Tibetan soup called thenthuk, thick with hand-torn wheat noodles—described charmingly on the menu as “not longer than a thumb”—a few strands of glass noodles, bright-green bok-choy leaves, wood-ear mushrooms, translucent triangles of radish, red onion, and your choice of browned lamb, chicken, beef, or pork. Fresh cilantro floats on the surface of the cloudy, rich beef or vegetable broth, which is redolent of ginger, celery, and garlic and carries a subtle heat; the same beautifully balanced flavor profile is at work in a brothless, stir-fried version of the dish.

Of the karsod, she says,

But my favorite dish might be the karsod, another soup. With a putty-pale sheet of lightly oiled dough stretched over the top of the bowl, it resembles an uncooked potpie, a broadcast of blandness. To pierce the surface and access the piping hot broth inside is to be reminded that mild does not necessarily equate to boring. In a version with lamb, the simple, slightly gummy pastry and the clear, fragrant liquid, dotted sparingly with scallion, cilantro, and translucent coins of potato, provide an optimal canvas for the gently gamy flavor of the simmered meat—as humble yet surprising as the restaurant itself. 

What impresses me about these descriptions is their details. These soups may appear simple, but they’re not. Goldfield notes their subtle ingredients: “hand-torn wheat noodles”; “few strands of glass noodles”; “bright-green bok-choy leaves”; “wood-ear mushrooms”; “translucent triangles of radish”; “red onion.” That “clear, fragrant liquid, dotted sparingly with scallion, cilantro, and translucent coins of potato” is pure poetry. I’ve never forgotten it. 

Tables for Two Tango: Hannah Goldfield's "Peter Luger Steak House" and Helen Rosner's "La Tête d’Or"

Photo by Gabriel Zimmer, from Hannah Goldfield's "Peter Luger Steak House")

For my fifth post in this series, I want to compare two “Tables for Two” pieces – one by Goldfield, one by Rosner – on the same subject – the steak house.

Goldfield, in her “Peter Luger Steak House” (March 29, 2021), says she heard from a friend that Brooklyn’s venerable Peter Luger Steak House was delivering takeout. She writes,

Until a few weeks ago, Peter Luger, which was founded in 1887, was just about the last New York restaurant I would have associated with takeout. I had loved it, once, but before the pandemic I hadn’t been in years. A family tradition of steak-fuelled birthday celebrations had fizzled out. On my last visit, in 2015, I’d sat in the overflow space upstairs, where wall-to-wall carpeting and generic banquet chairs were a sad substitute for the well-worn wooden floors and furniture that give the main dining areas the charming feel of a German beer hall. Luger’s atmosphere had always been at least half of the appeal; without it, the steep prices were hard to justify.

Goldfield decides to try it. She says, “My expectations for delivery were measured. Then they were exceeded.” She describes her experience:

Opening a plastic-and-aluminum deli container to find the iconic wedge salad was like seeing an old friend: the refreshing crunch of tightly coiled ruffles of iceberg, the surprisingly juicy chopped tomato, the chunky blue-cheese dressing, the unmistakable, thick-cut, heart-clogging bacon. I was similarly exhilarated by the creamed spinach, the fried potatoes, and the chocolate mousse, with its enormous dollop of schlag (suspiciously if delightfully reminiscent of Cool Whip).

It wasn’t so much that any of the dishes stood out on their own—although I did note, as ever, how easily a knife slid through rosy slices of the dry-aged porterhouse—as it was that they shouted “steak house” loud and clear, making for a combination that I would never replicate on my own and that brings me the coziest pleasure. One of my favorite parts of my earliest Peter Luger visits was when an inevitably brusque yet joke-cracking veteran waiter would toss a handful of gold chocolate coins on the table with the check. In a paper bag of condiments, I found my beloved foil-wrapped disks.

That detail about the gold chocolate coins is marvelous. I’ve never forgotten it.

The takeout meal inspires Goldfield to go to Peter Luger and have a meal there. She writes,

The other day, I ventured back to headquarters. To mark the return to limited-capacity dining, Peter Luger announced a corny gimmick: celebrity wax figures, on loan from Madame Tussauds, would be seated between tables of warm-blooded customers. My lunch reservation was for a booth outside, but, freshly vaccinated and double masked, I could steal a peek at Audrey Hepburn.

At my table, in the shadow of the historic Williamsburgh Savings Bank building, I ordered another wedge salad (rapture, again) and a burger, a beautiful mass of luscious ground beef whose iodine tang played perfectly off a sweet, salty slice of American cheese, a fat cross-section of raw white onion, and a big, domed sesame bun. Inside the restaurant, there were no wax figures to be found; they’d gone back to Times Square after just five days. The dining room looked the same as ever, if subdued.

That “beautiful mass of luscious ground beef whose iodine tang played perfectly off a sweet, salty slice of American cheese, a fat cross-section of raw white onion, and a big, domed sesame bun” is ravishing! 

The piece ends charmingly with a Holy Cow sundae and some savvy advice from a waiter:

Before dessert—a Holy Cow sundae, with vanilla ice cream, hot fudge, and walnuts, plus schlag and a cherry on top—I asked for a burger to go, a spirit lifter for my husband, hard at work at his desk. “How do you want it cooked?” my slightly surly server asked. I hesitated. Medium? Medium rare? No, medium. “Get it medium rare and it will be medium by the time you get it home,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye.

Now turn to Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two” review of La Tête d’Or (March 31, 2025), a Manhattan steak house owned and operated by the famed French chef Daniel Boulud.

Photo by Amy Lombard, from Helen Rosner's "Tables for Two: La Tête d'Or") 

Rosner begins by describing the restaurant itself:

Housed on the lobby level of a Flatiron office tower, La Tête is Boulud’s farthest-downtown restaurant, though there’s little downtown about the restaurant itself: it is vast, formal, and luxurious, très Boulud, from the plush, hotel-like reception area to the plush, burgundy-swathed lounge to the plush, sweeping dining room decorated in brown marble and blue velvet. The ceilings soar, the art is large and muted and gently abstract, the white linens on the tables glow like cream in the halo of Art Deco sconces and dramatically tubular chandeliers.

She likens the dining room to a stage:

A proscenium-size cutout in one wall reveals a dreamy tableau of a steak-house kitchen: butcher block and white tile, countertops artfully arranged with carnelian hunks of meat. It’s mostly for show: the real action of the real kitchen is hidden behind the rear wall of the diorama, though movement is visible, occasionally, around the edges of the backdrop, and white-jacketed cooks occasionally step into the show kitchen, plating and finishing this or that with the stoic composure of actors playing out a silent scene. A horizontal line of mirrors mounted periscopically across the top of the aperture allows diners to gaze at the workstations without any need to leave their very comfortable seats. Besides, much of the action comes to you: several of the restaurant’s dishes are prepared or plated tableside, on wheeled carts that servers glide showily around the dining room, dispensing Caesar salad and Dover sole in intimate command performances.

Rosner refers to the restaurant’s starter dishes as “foreplay.” “The meat is the thrust of the thing,” she says. The star of the menu is the prime rib. Rosner writes,

As the various table-service trolleys zigzag through the dining room, few diners look up from their conversations (or their phones). Not so when the wagon carting the “primal” of beef, from which each slab is sliced, comes around. Boulud takes his prime rib extremely seriously: only one primal is cooked at a time, a long, slow process that demands exacting attention; on one of my visits, a server sorrowfully conveyed the news that the most recent cut hadn’t been up to chef’s standards, and so none would be available for at least two more hours. Once carved and plated, each slice is draped on one end in a yellow veil of béarnaise from a copper pot, and on the other end in wine-dark bordelaise. The flesh of the meat shades from a carnation-pink medium-rare center to a deep, herb-scented outer crust. The near-melting fat cap shines like polished quartz. Bite for bite, it is truly one of the most beautiful steaks I’ve had the pleasure to consume, and it nearly earns every silly, self-serious flourish. Ignore the climate-ravaging effects of cattle ranching; ignore the plaque building up in your arteries; ignore the hundred-and-thirty-dollar price tag (which gets you sauces, two sides, and a black-pepper-inflected popover—something of a deal, compared with the nickel-and-dime exorbitance of a meat-and-sides meal à la carte). A well-prepared steak is goddam delicious.

That last line makes me smile every time I read it. 

Like Goldfield, in her Peter Luger review, Rosner ends her meal with an ice-cream sundae:

It is a strict rule of the steak house that dessert should be both childlike and wondrous, a reprieve after all the posturing and peacocking that came before. A menu might offer chocolate cake, apple strudel, a slice of cheesecake, a sticky slab of bread pudding, or, as at La Tête d’Or, a selection of oven-warm cookies. But just as essential to the steak house experience as the steak itself is the sundae—complex, frilly, multicolored, slightly absurd, an indulgence earned through innocence rather than through brute force. La Tête d’Or’s features soft-serve, your choice of swirled-together chocolate and coffee or swirled-together vanilla and a seasonal fruit flavor, their alternating stripes spiralling upward like a circus tent. It’s served in a metal coupe surrounded by a roulette of toppings in little bowls: tiny marshmallows, dehydrated berries, little bits of brownie, house-made rainbow sprinkles. The ice cream is, of course, magnificent, the chocolate sauce luscious, the bits of brownie divine. But something about this version was off, unsteady, a little wrong. There was no whipped cream—is it still a sundae without it? And there was no cherry on top.

Such a simple thing, the sundae, yet so crucial to the steak house experience. Peter Luger gets it right. La Tête d’Or doesn’t.