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! 

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. 

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: 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.  

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. 

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.  

Tables for Two Tango: Helen Rosner's "Foul Witch"

Photo by Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet, from Helen Rosner's "Tables for Two: Foul Witch"

This is the second 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 Rosnor’s deeply sensual “Tables for Two: Foul Witch” (December 18, 2023).

This piece does not start promisingly. Rosner describes Foul Witch’s neighborhood: “feels neither hip nor interesting.” She says, 

The restaurant, too, is oddly short on ambience: the long, narrow, high-ceilinged dining room is like a hallway to nowhere; the rough brick walls and exposed ductwork make the space feel unfinished, rather than artfully gritty; the open kitchen, built into the back of the space, has a startup-garage haphazardness, eschewing any aesthetic grace.

So far, so meh. But the next lines surprise and delight:

Thank goodness, then, for early winter sunsets, and low interior lighting, and food so fascinatingly delicious that you don’t care where you’re sitting to eat it. Every meal at Foul Witch begins with a complimentary portion of bread and butter: a wedge of crisp, oil-slick focaccia; a length of sour baguette, bien cuit; an enormous dollop of yolk-yellow butter, soft as cake frosting, salted like the sea. It’s a struggle not to finish every bite, which would be strategically unwise, given what’s to come. 

Wow! Food so fascinatingly delicious that you don’t care where you’re sitting to eat it – can restaurant praise get any more effusive than that? As a matter of fact, yes. Rosner is just getting warmed up. Here’s her next passage:

Foul Witch is ostensibly an Italian restaurant, though it is seemingly unconstrained by any known definition of that cuisine. The wines are global, and err on the side of bizarre. I was enraptured, one evening, by a Slovenian pinot grigio that my server described (accurately) as “entirely un-green.” On another visit, I fell hard for a gravelly Ryšák, an uncommon Czech blend of red and white grapes. The food, meanwhile, is luscious, almost libidinous; Mirarchi’s motivating principle seems to be the pursuit of suppleness and surrender. For an appetizer, pale rounds of pawpaw, the custard-like North American fruit that tastes like the tropics (and which ought to be a star on far more menus), are served at the bottom of a small, deep bowl, bathed in cream, beneath an obscene, slumping scoop of Golden Kaluga caviar. Tortellini, soft and curvaceous, have a velvet filling of veal sweetbreads; they swim in a golden broth made strange and beautiful by a butterscotch splash of Amaretto. A tender filet of wagyu, grilled over charcoal, comes with an earthy, almost animal, sunchoke béarnaise.

That “The food, meanwhile, is luscious, almost libidinous” makes me smile. Rosner is a voluptuary. Her review of Foul Witch is one of her most voluptuous pieces. Dig her conclusion:

What unites the menu is a concentrated sensuality. Even the kitchen’s more pointed preparations, with piercing flavors that break up the menu’s otherwise relentless rolling softness, are almost unnervingly alive: a needle-sharp salsa verde dressing a plate of yielding Sorana beans; an anchovy-drenched celery salad, the vegetable sliced lengthwise into curling tentacles. 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.

That last line is one of my favorites in all of “Tables for Two.” Rosner is a brilliant carnal writer.

Tables for Two Tango: Hannah Goldfield's "Eyval"

Photo by Cole Wilson, from Hannah Goldfield's "Tables for Two: Eyval"

This is the first 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 ravishing “Tables for Two: Eyval” (March 13, 2023).

I love the beginning of this piece – no throat-clearing, just jump right in:

I’ll start with the cocktails at Eyval, a Persian restaurant that opened last year—and so should you. Gin tends not to agree with me, and yet I couldn’t help but steal sips of a friend’s orange-blossom Negroni, a cold and viscous concoction that lingered on my tongue and in my memory (I can taste it now!), the intoxicating, floral perfume of the orange-blossom water achieving thrilling alchemy with the herbal gin, bitter Aperol, and sweet vermouth.

That sensuous passage sets the tone for the rest of the piece. Taste, scent, texture, color, pleasure – all are covered in this first delectable paragraph. The second paragraph continues the theme:

For myself, I ordered a Conference of the Birds—a sour-candy-like mix made with more orange-blossom water and Aperol, plus vodka, lemon, and honey—and the tart, smoky Limoo Margarita, featuring mezcal infused with limoo amani (dried lime), an ingredient used in Iran in soups and stews, the rim of the glass coated in coarse salt and flakes of mild, fruity Aleppo pepper.

Mm, more delicious description. Note the pungent specificity of the drinks’ names and ingredients. Specificity is one of the hallmarks of Goldfield’s style. She lists ingredients; she evokes their flavors (not just “tart,” but “tart, smoky”). Every detail is charged with vividness (“the rim of the glass coated in coarse salt and flakes of mild, fruity Aleppo pepper”). 

The opening sentence of her next paragraph segues beautifully to her main subject – Eyval’s food. She writes, “I’m happy to report that the dynamite drinks portended dynamite food.” With that, she takes off on a flight of glorious food description. Here’s Eyval’s bread:

You can choose between two options for bread or, better yet, get both—an oblong barbari, with grooves like a racetrack and a speckling of nigella and sesame seeds, and a round komaj, a soft, sweet bun made from a dough enriched with milk and eggs and seasoned with turmeric, perforated into quarters, brushed with butter, and adorned with cumin seeds. Both are perfect for scooping up dips, including a sharp whipped feta with walnuts and radish and a broccoli-rabe borani: strained, salted yogurt topped with blanched florets, an herb purée, pistachio, coriander seed, and chili oil and flakes.

Here's Eyval’s salads:

The Green Tahini Salad, a mix of Little Gem, frisée, radicchio, radish, and seasonal fruit (navel and blood orange, recently), is elevated to transcendence by the inclusion of warm medjool dates, a powerful kick from grilled serrano pepper in the tahini dressing (which also contains honey and mint), and a generous sprinkle of toasted sesame seeds. “Kashke Bademjan” appears in quotes on the menu because it’s an interpretation of the traditional appetizer: an eggplant lightly fried and roasted whole, the charred, silky flesh then drizzled with kashk, made from cooked yogurt, and finished with crushed walnuts, fried garlic and onion, mint oil, and fresh mint. Fat crosshatched coins of supple trumpet-mushroom stem, skewer-grilled and served with pickled beechwood mushrooms over beluga lentils simmered in fenugreek-spiked cream, were reminiscent of scallops and even more delicious than the actual scallop kebab, though that was nice, too, four plump bronzed mollusks over a luscious emulsion of tamarind pulp and squid ink.

Who would not want such exquisite description to continue forever? And it does continue! Here’s Goldfield’s concluding paragraph – one of the great finales in all of restaurant-reviewing. Are you ready? Tuck in your bib. Here goes:

There’s also a chicken kebab, as well as a ground-beef-and-lamb iteration, both excellent. (One thing that distinguishes Eyval from Sofreh is inspired riffs on street-food staples.) But, unless you’re ordering the whole menu (a valid choice), I’d prioritize the lamb ribs, sticky-sweet with date and tamarind, scattered with walnut, barberries, and pickled chilies, and the larger dishes, including a kebab-inspired, flawlessly grilled rack of lamb, sliced into beautiful, buttery chops, served with a bowl of perfectly steamed, rose-and-saffron-scented basmati rice. Saboor’s version of ghormeh sabzi is a particular showstopper, a braised veal shank (don’t forget to check the bone for marrow) crowned with a crisp disk of herbed-rice tahdig and rising regally from a rich stew of tender kidney beans and melty greens and alliums, including parsley, spinach, and leeks, plus fenugreek and limoo amani. Plucking out a puckered leathery lime and eating it whole, sticky and sour, left me feeling as lucky as if I’d found the baby in a king cake. Speaking of cake, desserts included a squishy square of it, soaked in cardamom syrup and topped with saffron ice cream, second only to the noon e khamei, ethereal, crackly choux pastry sandwiching dreamy rosewater cream. 

Wow! I’m salivating. That “Plucking out a puckered leathery lime and eating it whole, sticky and sour, left me feeling as lucky as if I’d found the baby in a king cake” is inspired! The whole review is inspired – one of the best “Tables for Two” ever written. The question is: Can Rosner match it, perhaps even top it? We shall see in our next post in this series. 

On the Horizon: Tables for Two Tango: Goldfield and Rosner

Hannah Goldfield and Helen Rosner are two of my favorite New Yorker writers. Goldfield used to write “Tables for Two.” Rosner writes it now. I want to compare their work. Over the next twelve months, I’ll pick twelve “Tables for Two” pieces – six by Goldfield, six by Rosner – and review them. I’ll choose one per month, one by Goldfield, then one by Rosner, and so on, alternating back and forth. It’s sort of like a “greatest hits” package of the two writers’ work. A new series then – “Tables for Two Tango: Goldfield and Rosner” – starting November 25.  

Credit: The above portraits of Hannah Goldfield (left) and Helen Rosner (right) are from The New Yorker.