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: 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. 

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

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

This is the fourth 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 Rosner’s vibrant “Tables for Two: Bong” (September 29, 2025).

In my previous post in this series, I noted that Goldfield is as much at home in a humble food court as she is in a Michelin-starred restaurant. The same goes for Rosner. She delights in the funky vibes of buzzy neighborhood eateries, where having a meal is as much about being part of the scene as it is about savoring the food. Case in point is her wonderful review of Bong. She writes,

Bong, a new, itsy-bitsy, absolutely electrifying Cambodian restaurant in Crown Heights, has more energy even while you’re waiting on the sidewalk for your table to be ready than most spots can muster on their most lit-up nights of the year. 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.

Wow! That’s her opening paragraph. She is rolling! I love that “shimmeringly alive.” Her description of Bong’s lobster dish, named after the owner’s mother, Mama Kim, is ravishing:

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. 

Most pleasurable of all is Bong’s whole fried fish:

Along with Mama Kim’s lobster, a dish about which I have had literal dreams, my favorite thing on the menu was the whole fried fish—dorade, on one visit, the skin crackly and dusted with toasted rice powder—which eyeballs you lasciviously from an oval plate. Its flesh is scored into diamonds, the way you might slice a lattice into the fat end of a pork shoulder; it’s visually striking and functionally quite useful, creating perfect little pull-off morsels ready to be dipped in sour-tamarind sauce and wrapped up in a lettuce leaf with Vietnamese coriander and diếp cá (a punchy herb known as fish mint). Here, perhaps, the chaotic-party energy of the place could have used a little focus, or been channelled into a brief anatomy spiel: I saw way too many tables dive ecstatically into the fried fish—and then, too happily, allow their plates to be cleared away without realizing that, if you flip the creature over, there’s an entire second serving to be found on the other side.

Exhilarating food, vivacious mood – the perfect blend! Rosner captures it brilliantly. 

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"