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

Photo: GODLIS 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. Dan Flavin was one of the great artist-talkers. He would regale us with a continuous stream of anecdotes, art-historical insights, and disparaging comments about art that was not up to his standards. Back in the mid-1970s, when I was helping Dan with his installations, artists did not have to be as careful about what they said in public. After working into the night wiring his neon-tube sculp ..read more

Photo: Jens Jurgensen/B) 1997 Jens Jurgensen/Ebet Roberts Photography 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. I probably ate at Odessa on Avenue A more than any other restaurant. The food there was good. They were open 24 hours a day, served large portions, and supplied endless baskets of free bread. I do not remember ever looking at the menu, which was very large. It had a lot of pages and may have been in more than one language. I never even though ..read more

Sarah Kilcoyne “I’m always being humbled,” jokes the comedian and actress Veronika Slowikowska. Fresh off her “Canadian star moment” back home to promote her new Hulu series, Davey & Jonesie’s Locker, she was delayed for a day trying to get back to New York. Even after she returned, an empty pantry in Brooklyn meant the only thing to put on top of some eggs were some suspiciously old Tostitos. “I think because I was a struggling artist for so long, eggs are the only source of protein I know how to cook. That’s how I saved my money,” she says. “Now, I can afford chicken, but I still don’t ..read more