Photo: Dick Landry/© 2024 Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York For New York’s anniversary, we are celebrating the history of the city’s restaurants with a series of posts throughout the month. Read all of our “Who Ate Where” stories here. In 1971, Carol Goodden, age 31, was living in a loft on East 4th Street with her artist boyfriend, Gordon Matta-Clark. His work was never restricted to something you could hang on a wall: slice holes in old buildings, or, in partnership with the curator and MoMA PS1 founder Alanna Heiss, a pig roast under the Brookly ..read more

Photo: Mark Peterson/Corbis via Getty Image For New York’s anniversary, we are celebrating the history of the city’s restaurants with a series of posts throughout the month. Read all of our “Who Ate Where” stories here. Few lunch more decadently than law students with summer internships at white-shoe firms in Manhattan. No one knows exactly how the tradition began, but for interns of Davis Polk, Cravath (where I “summered” in 2005), Cleary Gottlieb, Fried Frank, and dozens of others, the summer lunch is often a multicourse, multi-hour affair at one of the city’s swankiest spots. Neve ..read more

Photo: Hugo Yu In name, Sammy’s Roumanian was a steakhouse, but in practice, the subterranean dining room always felt more like a midnight bar mitzvah, or an episode of Twin Peaks if David Lynch had been born Dovid Lipsky, where every customer eventually had to dance the hora. Because of its many fans, as well as all the caddies of schmaltz that dripped onto the floor during its 46 years in business, it seemed as though the restaurant would be stuck in its Chrystie Street basement space forever. When it closed in 2021, it was as shocking for the dining public as it was for owner David Zimmerma ..read more

New York Magazine For New York’s anniversary, we are celebrating the history of the city’s restaurants with a series of posts throughout the month. Read all of our “Who Ate Where” stories here. Has any reasonably affluent New Yorker ever not imagined life as the silent partner in a good restaurant? You can always get a table, maybe you make some money (maybe), you don’t have to deal with the day-to-day or the long-term labor issues, and you can entertain friends by saying “Let’s meet at my place.” In real life, of course, it’s probably a money loser and definitely a headache. Yet th ..read more

Illustration: Maanvi Kapur For more than 30 years, Kathleen Hanna has performed as the front woman of Bikini Kill, Le Tigre, and the Julie Ruin, a career she documents in her upcoming memoir, Rebel Girl: My Life As a Feminist Punk, which comes out May 14. Before going on a national book tour — which kicks off with an event at Kings Theater in Brooklyn — she caught up on a little R&R at a vacation house with her family, contemplated the essence of root beer, tried a chain restaurant she’d always avoided, and made it home in time to catch the NCAA women’s basketball finals. Friday, April 5 I ..read more

Photo: Courtesy Flamingo East For New York’s anniversary, we are celebrating the history of the city’s restaurants with a series of posts throughout the month. Read all of our “Who Ate Where” stories here. In January 1999, I was 23 and living in a sixth-floor walk-up on Pitt Street (then the most aptly named street in lower Manhattan). To pay the rent, I waited tables four nights a week at Flamingo East on Second Avenue and East 13th Street. The restaurant had made a splash when it opened a decade earlier (and even was name-dropped in American Psycho). Much of the hype was thanks to ..read more

Photo: Hugo Yu The region we now call the Levant — from the French for “rising,” like the sun, a nod to its placement on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean — stretches across Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon, through Syria and Jordan. It is a place of civilization’s beginning, part of the so-called Fertile Crescent, home to some of mankind’s earliest agricultural experiments and of current and intractable conflict. It’s heartening, at a disheartening moment, to visit Huda, a “new Levantine bistro” in Williamsburg. Its owner, Gehad Hadidi — who in 2019 bought midtown’s La Bonne Soupe, a more t ..read more

Photo: Mo Gaffney For New York’s anniversary, we are celebrating the history of the city’s restaurants with a series of posts throughout the month. Read all of our “Who Ate Where” stories here. In the extremely niche hothouse atmosphere of my late 20s in Manhattan, the nostalgic abstraction commonly known as “The Nineties” actually began on February 3 when the Roxy, a cavernous nightclub on West 18th Street (see also roller disco; hip-hop venue), opened its doors to the gays for the first of many Saturday-night parties known as Locomotion, an extravagant, two-year phenomenon that som ..read more

Photo: Rahim Hashim In 2017, Rahim Hashim was living in San Francisco, dismayed to discover that city’s near-total lack of the New York halal carts he loved. Feeling he had no other choice, he returned east, partly to pursue a Ph.D. in neuroscience at Columbia University but also, and more crucially, to get a decent platter of chicken and rice again. It was at a favorite cart near Columbia’s campus that he had an idea. “I remember giving the guy a $5 tip and he was almost crying,” Hashim says. It was 2020, during the pandemic, and “he’d been working his ass off trying to just stay in business ..read more

Photo: Hugo Yu Any restaurant can make an order of $12 fries, but the move from “good” fried potato to “excellent” requires intention, and, sometimes, days of prep work. I’m thinking, in part, of Golden Diner’s home fries, where the potatoes are shredded, rinsed, brined, steamed, pressed, chilled, fried, and chopped before being served next to an egg sandwich stuffed with a hash-brown patty inside as well. You can see why people wait hours for its brunch. The twice-fried Belgian batons at Pommes Frites are among the oldest entries in the NYC Potato Hall of Fame, while the “proper English chips ..read more