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.  

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. 

Helen Rosner's "Tables for Two: Cove"

Photo by Yael Malka, from Helen Rosner's "Tables for Two: Cove"

A special shout-out to Helen Rosner for her delectable “Tables for Two: Cove,” in the January 26, 2026, issue. Her descriptions of Cove’s food are ravishing! This, for example:

The dishes are simply beautiful. I nearly didn’t order a salad of golden beets with smoked yogurt, struggling to muster enthusiasm for yet another beet-and-dairy salad, but my dining companion insisted. It turned out to be amazing, a parade of roots in every shade of yellow, with bursts of brightness from what seemed like a whole bouquet of nasturtiums, orange and vermillion and gloaming purple.

And this:

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.

The photos that illustrate Rosner’s piece are by Yael Malka. They’re as sensuous as Rosner’s prose. Someday I’ll compile a “Top Ten ‘Tables for Two’ Photos” list. At least one of Malka’s “Cove” pictures will likely be on it. 

Tables for Two Tango: Hannah Goldfield's "HK Food Court"

Photo by David Williams, from Hannah Goldfield's "Tables for Two: HK Food Court"

This is the third 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 delectable “Tables for Two: HK Food Court” (February 3, 2020).

I chose this piece because it shows Goldfield’s democratic taste. She’s as much at home in a humble food court as she is in a Michelin-starred restaurant. For her, it’s all about the food. I also chose it because it contains an intensely vivid food description – one I’ve never forgotten.

HK Food Court is located in the Elmhurst neighborhood of Queens, in New York City. It consists of a couple of dozen stalls—serving regional Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Filipino cuisine. 

Goldfield visits more than once and orders from various stalls. She loves Lao Ma Spicy’s hot-and-sour soup:

But the soup is what haunts my daydreams: a large disposable plastic bowl priced irresistibly, at $4.99, and packed precariously full of glass noodles in an intensely flavorful broth—indeed hot, both in temperature and flavor, scarlet with chili oil, and vinegar-sour. For a few dollars extra, you can add a protein: beef, shrimp balls, Spam. Either way, the final and most crucial ingredients are dry-roasted peanuts with their papery brown skins intact, sweet leaves of steamed bok choy, and an intoxicating spoonful of ground pork, sautéed with tender curls of wood-ear mushroom and pickled radish.

Mm, I can almost taste it. How does Goldfield do it? Intensity, vividness, sensuousness – a combination of all three. I love that “packed precariously full of glass noodles,” and that “dry-roasted peanuts with their papery brown skins intact,” and that “tender curls of wood-ear mushroom.” It might be the most exquisite soup description I’ve ever read.

And Goldfield is not done. She’s just warming up. She visits other stalls:

One evening, at Lan Zhou Ramen, I ordered fat coins of Japanese eggplant—so shellacked in oil that they looked like porcelain yet melted forgivingly in the mouth—and bunches of chives as pliant as seagrass. From Mr. Liu Henan Wide Ramen, one stall over: cubes of fried wheat-bran dough dusted in cumin and a spiral-cut potato.

And now the climax:

I knew what to get at a seafood stall called Chili Boiled Fish, where live ones flopped around in a tank. A friendly cashier with a tattoo on her neck of a lipstick kiss carefully sealed a patterned bowl (for which I paid a five-dollar deposit) with plastic wrap to insure that it stayed hot. That proved unnecessary; it was many minutes before the dish cooled to less than scalding—which didn’t stop me from immediately plunging my flimsy spoon into the oily depths to find silky fillets of fish, tender cabbage, and chunks of cucumber, Sichuan peppercorns clinging to all, staining my rice with neon drips.

And there it is – “staining my rice with neon drips” – an inspired detail! The whole piece is inspired! One of “Tables for Two” ’s all-time best.  

October 27, 2025 Issue

Helen Rosner, in her delectable "Tables for Two: Chateau Royale,” in this week’s issue, describes a wonderful variation on my favorite cocktail – the Kir Royale. She writes,

I recommend ending your meal with a splash of Champagne poured from a silver ewer over a garnet-hued sphere of cassis sorbet – a thrilling riff on a Kir Royale, providing a bit of fizz and lightness at last.

I had my first Kir Royale at the Canadian Grill in the Chateau Laurier, Ottawa, on the evening of March 16, 1981. I remember the date because the next day I made my first appearance in the Supreme Court of Canada. I was there with my law partner, David MacLeod, and our bookkeeper, Marion MacCallum. It was Marion who ordered the Kir Royale. She didn’t call it that. She asked the waiter to bring us three glasses of Champagne with cassis. I’d never heard of cassis. The drink was elegant and delicious, a fitting way to celebrate our arrival in the nation’s capital. Here’s to you, Mare! 

November 4, 2024 Issue

I’m embarrassed to say that of all the worthwhile subjects in this week’s issue – aid workers in Gaza, the remaking of J. D. Vance, Joe Biden’s economic policies – the one that caught and held me is Cocina Consuelo’s grilled cheese sandwich. Helen Rosner knows how to pleasure me. She writes,

A dish understatedly called “grilled cheese” has undeniable star power: made on, of all things, a croissant, it features tangy orange cheddar and is squashed on a griddle until the cheese and pastry are crisp. It’s liberally spread with a similarly sharp-textured salsa macha, a Veracruzan condiment akin to chile crunch, made with toasted hot peppers, garlic, and toasted pepitas and sesame seeds.

Yes, yes, yes! I’ll have one of those, please.

Photo by Evan Angelastro, from Helen Rosner's "Tables for Two: Cocina Consuelo"

September 30, 2024 Issue

My fascination with the two versions of Helen Rosner’s "Tables for Two" column continues. This week, she reviews the Taiwanese restaurant chain Din Tai Fung’s first New York location. The print version of her piece contains this wonderful description:

Runners zip and zag among the tables, bearing teetering stacks of bamboo steamer trays, including dessert dumplings filled, not unappealingly, with chocolate ganache, or smooth, warm, sweet black sesame paste. The grid of tables and their identical accent lamps recede into the distance with mathematical regularity, the lighting somehow both overdim and overbright. Din Tai Fung is a machine, but a notably delicious one.

I love the imagery – “Runners zip and zag among the tables, bearing teetering stacks of bamboo steamer trays”; “The grid of tables and their identical accent lamps recede into the distance with mathematical regularity, the lighting somehow both overdim and overbright.” I can’t imagine how it could be improved. Then I read the digital version on newyorker.com, and voilà! It’s even more vivid:

Runners zip and zag among the tables, bearing teetering stacks of bamboo steamer trays, shedding the vertical layers table by table. Servers swing by to ask if you’re interested in some boba tea (they make it in-house), or a cocktail (see that enormous U-shaped bar all the way over there?), or another round of cucumbers, or maybe some dessert—dumplings, naturally, filled not unappealingly with chocolate ganache, or smooth, warm, sweet black-sesame paste. Time flows quickly, and also slowly; the walls are black, and far away; there are no windows. The transparent walls of the kitchen echo the uncanny fishbowl effect of the street-level entrance far above. The grid of tables and their identical accent lamps recede into the distance with mathematical regularity, the lighting somehow both overdim and overbright. More than once, I was struck with the disorienting feeling that I was hovering at the edge of the void. You could be deep below the streets of midtown Manhattan, or you could be on the ninth floor of a casino in Vegas, or you could be on a space station, or in Taipei, or in a shockingly real-feeling, slightly uncanny, notably delicious dream.

So many additional delectable details! Rosner’s enhancement of the first sentence with “shedding the vertical layers table by table” is inspired. To fully appreciate the beauty of her writing, I recommend reading (and comparing) both versions. 

March 18, 2024 Issue

My fascination with the two versions of Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two” continues. This week she reviews Misipasta, a Williamsburg market that sells fresh pastas and sauces, and is also a restaurant. In the print version, she writes, “There are about twenty counter stools, and the air smells like Parmigiano and butter.” In the extended newyorker.com version, she says,

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. 

What fascinates me is (1) the artful economy of the magazine column, and (2) the ravishing extra details of the web version. Here’s another example: in the magazine, she writes, 

Have a slice of crispy farinata, a lacy-edged chickpea-flour pancake aromatic with rosemary. Have an artichoke sandwich, one of the city’s great secret sandwiches – an enormous mess of grilled artichoke hearts and hot chili peppers, barely held together by oozing provolone cheese. Bring home a pound of pasta – frilly lumache, or long, flat tubes of paccheri – and a jar of thirty-clove sauce. You won’t make pasta nearly as good as Robbins’s – even with the same ingredients, some things just have to get all the way into your bones—but it doesn’t hurt to try. 

Here's the web version:

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.

Who would not want such delectable writing to go on forever? The print version is wonderful. But the expanded newyorker.com version is divine. To have them both is double bliss! 

March 4, 2024 Issue

I love these sentences:

1. Nearly every dish incorporates luxury ingredients, though they generally show up as supporting players: foie-gras drippings in a creamy onion dip, or an earthy whiff of white truffle in a garlic-cream soup. At times, this can feel a bit like opulence theatre, rather than actual opulence—a black-truffle-flecked gelée, draped over a devilled egg en chemise, tasted like nothing much at all, least of all truffles—but when it works, my God, it works. [Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: Le B.”]

2. In 2005, Goswick sliced his suit going through the windshield of a car that went off the old Tappan Zee Bridge. [Ben McGrath, “Where’s My Car?”]

3. Once the performance started, the cloud, which you soon forgot about, and others like it (all products, probably, of an offstage cloud-making machine), vividly captured beams of light from above the stage that came down in vertical shafts, suggesting interrogation lamps, the columns of a courthouse, or the bars of a prison cell. [Ian Frazier, “Uncaged Birds”]

All three are from this week’s New Yorker. Which one’s my favorite? Well, all three are great. And I don’t actually have to choose. But if I did, I’d pick Frazier’s surreal “cloud” description – such a surprising, delightful combination of words: “performance,” “cloud,” “off-stage,” “cloud-making machine,” “beams of light,” “vertical shafts,” “interrogation lamps,” “columns of a courthouse,” “bars of a prison cell.” You’d wonder how their combination makes sense. But it does, in the context of Frazier’s excellent Talk story about an opera for the wrongfully convicted. Bravo, Ian Frazier!

Postscript: I see the magazine has a new film critic – Justin Chang. Is this just for this issue, or is it permanent? Chang’s review of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “About Dry Grasses” intrigues me, particularly its exotic setting (eastern Anatolia). If I get a chance, I’ll check it out.

January 15, 2024 Issue

I’m fascinated by the differences between the two versions of Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two” – one in the magazine, the other on newyorker.com. I know I’ve written about this before. I’ll probably write about it again. The situation is similar to the days when Pauline Kael provided two different versions of her movie reviews – one a long-form essay, the other a capsule review for the “In Brief” section of the magazine. It was interesting to see how she performed the reduction - what she cut, what she kept. It’s the same with Rosner. I take it she writes the long piece first. That’s the one that appears on newyorker.com. Then, for the print version of the magazine, she trims it down to fit the smaller space.

For example, the newyorker.com version of her “Tables for Two: Old John’s Diner,” in this week’s issue, begins,

I always read the whole menu at a diner, but I don’t really need to. My order is both predictable and unremarkable: a cup of soup, a cheeseburger with fries. Sometimes I’ll switch things up and have a Greek salad, with extra feta cheese, or corned-beef hash and scrambled eggs, though the side of fries always remains. A cup of coffee—lots of milk—and a slice of pie. If I were to scroll back through my life, tallying every diner meal, every fat ceramic mug of watery coffee, I think they might number in the thousands. 

For the print version, she cuts the first four sentences. The piece begins, “If I were to scroll back through my life, tallying every diner meal, every fat ceramic mug of watery coffee, I think they might number in the thousands.”

Another example: when she describes Old John’s lemon pie in the website version, she says, “The lemon-meringue pie is unimpeachable, with a buttery crumb crust and pucker-tart yellow curd under a snowcap of floaty, marshmallow-like meringue.” In the print version, this is changed to “the lemon-meringue pie was impeccable, a buttery crumb crust and pucker-tart yellow curd under a snowcap of floaty meringue.” I devour both versions, but the web version’s “snowcap of floaty, marshmallow-like meringue” is slightly more delectable.

The piece has a great theme: the diner as time machine. The web version says, “Diners, as a rule, are time machines; whether through the formica sheen of the nineteen-forties, the chromium optimism of the fifties, or the pastel geometries of the eighties, a diner traffics in nostalgia for past decades and past selves.” In the print version, this is reduced to “diners, as a category, are time machines, fuelled by memory of past decades and past selves.” Again, both versions are excellent, but the web version is more detailed. Comparing the two affords a peek at Rosner’s compositional process, or at least her editorial process, which is a form of composition. Also, if you read only the print version, you’re missing out on many wonderful, delicious details. 

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!

December 4, 2023 Issue

Funny, I was thinking of April Bloomfield earlier this week as I considered launching a new series on my blog called “Top Ten New Yorker Food Pieces.” One of the pieces I was thinking of including is Lauren Collins’ brilliant “Burger Queen” (November 22, 2010). It’s a profile of Bloomfield when she was chef at the Michelin-starred New York restaurant Spotted Pig. And now this week’s New Yorker arrives, containing Helen Rosner’s delectable “Tables for Two” review of Sailor, a new Fort Greene restaurant. Who is Sailor’s chef? None other than the great April Bloomfield. It appears she hasn’t lost her touch. Rosner describes Bloomfield’s stuffed radicchio:

Slicing into the sphere of wrapped radicchio leaves, I discovered an interior of fragrant rice studded with firm, creamy borlotti beans. Taking a bite of this mixture, bathed in a wine sauce—which was rich and emulsified and, I learned later, vegan—was like sinking into a quicksand of warmth and flavor. The leaves of the radicchio imparted a lingering hint of bitterness, a scalpel through the savory roundness of everything else. This is the dish, I thought to myself—the dish of the restaurant, perhaps the dish of the year.

That’s from the newyorker.com version of Rosner’s review. If radicchio isn’t your thing, try Bloomfield’s roasted chicken:

The roasted chicken for two is excellent, with burnished skin and tender, herb-infused flesh. It is served directly on top of a pile of Parmesan-roasted potatoes and garlicky braised chard, which absorb all the golden drippings and nearly eclipse the pleasures of the bird itself. 

Mm, I’ll have that, please. 

November 13, 2023 Issue

Helen Rosner, in her superb “Tables for Two: Bronx Sidewalk Clam Heaven,” in this week’s issue, writes, “There’s something unavoidably primal about prying open an oyster or clam and sucking it from its shell—there’s no way to aesthetically refine the act’s essential ferality. It’s fun as hell, a disposal of ritual, a moment of pure sensation.” I agree. And the way she puts it is pure pleasure. The passage in the newyorker.com version is even more delicious:

There’s something unavoidably primal about prying open an oyster or clam and sucking it from its shell—there’s no way to aesthetically refine the act’s essential ferality. All the usual intermediations of human carnivorousness are absent: no slaughter, no butchering, no cooking. It’s fun as hell, a disposal of ritual, a moment of pure sensation. A white-haired gent in a topcoat and fedora throws down a dozen clams shoulder to shoulder with a twentysomething fashion girly in platform sneakers, an eleven-year-old boy in a camo jacket, and a middle-aged food writer: We are animals eating animals, in the middle of the street, in the Bronx.

I know I’ve mentioned it before, but I’m fascinated by the newyorker.com variation of “Tables For Two.” Here’s another example from the same piece: Rosner writes, “There’s an array of dressings and hot sauces, including a mouth-puckering homemade mignonette, and the oysters are glorious, a symphony of brine and richness.” Yum! That sentence is double bliss; both form and substance are delectable. The newyorker.com version contains a delightful extra clause:  

There’s an array of dressings and hot sauces, including a mouth-puckering homemade mignonette, and the oysters are glorious, a symphony of brine and richness, especially the Blue Points, mild and rich as salted butter, and the peachy sweetness of the Kumamotos.

Rosner is rapidly becoming one of my favorite New Yorker writers. 

October 30, 2023 Issue

It’s interesting to compare Helen Rosner’s “Tables For Two: The Bazaar by José Andrés,” in this week’s issue, with the version that appears on newyorker.com. The electronic version is richer, more detailed. For example, in the magazine, Rosner writes, 

The theme is unsubtle (a towering portrait of a geisha wearing a comb and a mantilla looms over the bar), and it’s all a little ridiculous in a way that could be fun – if the restaurant didn’t seem to be working so hard to deflate any shred of amusement. This is unfortunate, because playfulness is the most generous lens through which to consider the experience. Take the 0-toro tuna wrapped in poufs of cotton candy (total nonsense, with flavors that fight one another), or the dramatically vertical Japanese coffee siphon employed tableside to infuse a mushroom broth for a bowl of ramen – dishes that foreground spectacle over satiety, presented with monklike sombreness by stone-faced servers.

Here's the newyorker.com version:

Playfulness is the most generous lens through which to consider many of the dishes on the menu, which are intricate, kooky, and not always successful. Cotton Candy O-toro is a small pouf of spun sugar on a stick, in the center of which is a morsel of soy-marinated raw tuna and a confetti of crispy rice. The creation is a riff on Andrés’s famous cotton-candy-wrapped foie gras—a brilliant twist on the traditional pairing of the sweet and the fatty. Andrés débuted the dish in the early two-thousands, at his now-closed D.C. restaurant Café Atlántico. Here, run through a Nipponifying algorithm, it becomes total nonsense, with the one-note sugar of cotton candy fighting against the delicate salinity of the fish rather than balancing it. For a bowl of mushroom ramen, the broth is heated tableside in a Japanese coffee siphon, a complexly vertical contraption that looks like lab equipment and is thrillingly, pointlessly dramatic as a vehicle for soup. It’s impossible to take seriously, but if you engaged with it on the level of silly spectacle it could be a delight—if only any of the nervous-seeming servers, lighting the flame and gazing into the roiling liquid with the sombreness of holy monks, looked as if they were allowed to have fun. 

To me, the newyorker.com version, with all those marvellous extra details, is far superior to the print version. 

Here’s another example. In the print version, Rosner writes,

I was grateful for the relief of the cocktail menu. The drinks are unreservedly exquisite – tight, focussed, and beautifully balanced. Though, like the food, which seems priced for people who never look at prices, they are soberingly expensive, twenty to thirty dollars apiece; a few, made with a jamón iberico-infused mezcal, climb to fifty dollars. For the cost of one ham-kissed glass, you can get a lordly portion of actual meat, sliced tableside, precisely arranged in a vermillion nautilus, streaked with snowy fat. It’s funky and ferocious, the righteous king of aged hams. Such severe simplicity is, itself, a type of spectacle. Not another thing on the menu is its equal.

Here's the newyorker.com version:

I’ve eaten at many José Andrés joints over the years, including the original Bazaar, in Los Angeles, an excellent restaurant that knew how to wield its gimmickry. (Sadly, it closed permanently during the pandemic.) My favorite thing, across the whole Andrésverse, is a cocktail: the Salt Air Margarita, a satiny blend of tequila, orange liqueur, and lime juice, under a dollop of salty foam, like the fading head on a beer. I first encountered the drink a decade ago at China Poblano, Andrés’s dumpling-and-taco parlor in Las Vegas (another, more successful exercise in audacious culinary exchange), and was overjoyed to see it pop up here at home, albeit with a pomegranate twist. Andrés and his team have an uncanny knack for drinks; their love of unexpected infusions and trompe-l’oeil textures are more reliably successful behind the bar than in the kitchen. At the Bazaar, a nonalcoholic concoction called the Firefly was one of the most pleasing zero-proof drinks I’ve had in ages.

Like the food, which seems to be priced for people who have no need to look at prices, the drinks are soberingly expensive, at twenty-five to thirty dollars apiece. A few, made with a pricey mezcal that’s been infused with precious jamón ibérico de bellota, have price tags that can climb to fifty. It seems like a pointless flourish—the star ingredient, to my palate, was undetectable in the Andrés y Cooper, though the drink itself, something like a smoky Negroni, was otherwise excellent. Still, for the price of that one ham-kissed glass, you could get a lordly portion of the actual meat: a leg of jamón ibérico crisscrosses the dining room on a wheeled mahogany cart; flag it down to have a serving sliced tableside, each piece carefully arranged in a spiralling vermillion nautilus, streaked with snowy fat. It’s funky and ferocious, the righteous king of aged hams. Such severe simplicity is, itself, a type of spectacle. Not another thing on the menu is its equal. 

Note how “precisely arranged in a vermillion nautilus, streaked with snowy fat,” in the magazine version, becomes, in the newyorker.com version, “carefully arranged in a spiralling vermillion nautilus, streaked with snowy fat.” Both versions are excellent. But, to me, the addition of “spiralling” in the newyorker.com rendering makes it a shade more vivid.

What's the lesson to be learned from this comparison? Simply this: if you enjoy “Tables For Two,” as I do, it pays to check out the newyorker.com version. It provides a much richer reading experience. 

September 25, 2023 Issue

Couture shows are describers’ dreams – so many gorgeous shapes, colors, and textures for the eye to devour. There’s an excellent description of one in Rachel Syme’s “The Suitor,” in this week’s issue. Syme profiles American fashion designer Thom Browne. She visits Browne’s French headquarters in Paris. She visits his Georgian-style mansion in New York. And, most arrestingly, she attends his couture show at the Palais Garnier, Paris’s grand nineteenth-century opera house. She writes,

During the next thirty minutes, more than fifty looks paraded down the runway. Alek Wek emerged first, wearing a plain Thom Browne suit and a head scarf. She sat onstage, on a piece of luggage, and remained there for the rest of the presentation, making eye contact with each model passing by. The collection was a kind of self-retrospective, but with Browne’s usual motifs carried to elaborate extremes. A series of coats had a plaid pattern—a Browne staple—that was made not with preprinted fabric but by crisscrossing colored threads through tiny glass beads. His typically kitschy nautical themes were pushed into riskier, more grotesque territory. One striped blazer featured a puffy golden lobster whose embroidered claws came up over the shoulders, as if it were trying to drag the model underwater. Browne had strayed from his monochrome palette in previous collections—his 2022 styles included sumptuous evening jackets in mustard, lavender, emerald, and cantaloupe—but his couture looks were nearly all in shades of gray. The effect was to attune the eye to subtle contrasts—the way a gown juxtaposed shiny pewter satin with matte taffeta in a similar hue, or a pair of sequinned ombré trousers changed from charcoal at the hip to faintly ashen at the hem.

That “One striped blazer featured a puffy golden lobster whose embroidered claws came up over the shoulders, as if it were trying to drag the model underwater” made me smile. 

My favorite passage in “The Suitor” is Syme’s description of a Browne-designed wedding gown: 

She glided down the center aisle, wearing a beaded, sheer white garment that looked like a tuxedo jacket whose hem was melting to the floor. Two men in swim caps carried the train of the dress. From far away, the piece shimmered as if made of shaved ice.

Syme’s piece is a fascinating tour of Browne’s surreal world of gargoyle gowns, shrunken suits, men’s skirts, and starfish codpieces. I enjoyed it immensely.

Postscript: Another highlight in this week’s issue is Helen Rosner’s “Tables For Two: Foxface Natural,” featuring superb description, e.g., “Sitting at the bar one evening, I swirled a glass of a Vermentino-Moscato blend that looked like apple juice and tasted wild and metallic, like beautiful gasoline.” The newyorker.com version of this piece is even more delectable, containing several additional passages, including this zinger: “A meal at Foxface Natural is a calm affair, even as the dining room thrums with the grimy, horny bass line of Peaches’ ‘Fuck the Pain Away.’ ”

August 7, 2023 Issue

This week’s issue launches the new “Goings On” section. The magazine calls it “evolution.” I’m not sure about that. It looks more like impoverishment. The loss is substantial. The number of pages is reduced from six to two. The lead photo is shrunk from full-page to quarter-page. “Tables For Two” is cut from three columns to two. Art writers Andrea K. Scott and Johanna Fateman have disappeared. Vince Aletti on photography is gone. So is Steve Futtterman’s weekly jazz note. I looked forward to reading these writers each week. The magazine’s pleasure quotient is considerably reduced. 

I’ve decided it’s time for me to evolve, too. Previously I tried to comment on some aspect of each weekly issue. No more. From now on I’ll blog about The New Yorker only when there’s a piece in it that really grabs me. 

July 3, 2023 Issue

The piece in this week’s issue I enjoyed most is Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: Mitica,” especially her description of dessert:

“Strawberries and cream” turns out to be a heavenly pouf of whipped sour cream, topped with strawberry granita and flaky salt and hiding slivers of macerated strawberries. An ordinary-looking chocolate mousse has the delightful texture of melting ice cream and blooms on the tongue in bursts of cinnamon and salt—sweet, bitter, and deep.

January 3 & 10, 2022 Issue

Shauna Lyon kicks off the year with a wonderful “Tables For Two.” She reviews Agi’s Counter, a Brooklyn eatery specializing in “Hungarian-inspired breakfast and lunch dishes.” I love breakfast. What’s Agi’s Counter serving? Lyon tells us:

On a recent morning, breakfast included the hearty Leberkase, in which a thick slab of spongy pork pâté is sandwiched, with fried egg and pear mostarda, between even thicker slabs of Pullman-style bread. But it was the tender herb-flecked biscuit—dill aroma meeting your nose as you lean in to bite, spread with mayo and stacked with a soft fried egg and assertive Alpine Cheddar—that made for the perfect morning snack.

Mm, that “dill aroma meeting your nose as you lean in to bite” is very good. I savor it. 

December 27, 2021 Issue

The New Yorker asked lots of great questions this year, none greater than the three contained in this passage from David Kortava’s delightful “Tables For Two: Tea and Crumpets,” in this week’s issue: 

If Lady Mendl’s takes liberties with the conventions of afternoon tea, Brooklyn High Low detonates the paradigm. Pastrami and Dijon mustard on rye? Guava and blue cheese on gluten-free bread? Twenty-nine tea varieties, including one infused with whole butterfly-pea flowers that turn the liquid a psychedelic indigo?

November 1, 2021 Issue

Shauna Lyon, in her delectable “Tables For Two: Le Pavillon,” in this week’s issue, describes the location of her table in Le Pavillon as slightly evoking “a Hilton Hotel in Toronto.” Why Toronto? Is that her idea of restaurant Siberia? Never mind. Her piece is delightful, starting with a wonderful decorative detail (“A fanciful blown-glass chandelier, by the artist Andy Paiko, drips from the room’s cathedral ceiling”), and ending with a delicious description of Le Pavillon’s Noisette Chocolat (“controlled whimsy, precise geometry, silken mousse, flawless chocolate coating, a crumbly, nutty praline croustillant, and a strong hit of salt”). Mm, I’ll have a piece of that, please.