My New York in 25 Restaurants

A personal and cultural history told through dining out

Returning to New York has been an emotional whirlwind, and the time I’ve taken off from The Angel has been immensely clarifying. A few weeks ago on Substack, I asked: if I were to publish one letter from New York before year’s end—leading into a proper relaunch in early 2026—what should it be? Matt Rodbard, editor of TASTE and an early champion of my food writing career, replied with this:

I liked the idea, so I took on the assignment, refining it a bit along the way. I was born at Beth Israel Hospital and raised in the Village. I’m 32, and I’ve spent 20 of those years living full-time in Manhattan or Brooklyn. These are the restaurants that define each year of my life, starting at the millennium, when I was seven—about as far back as I can remember clearly.

Some years the choice was obvious; others were harder to pin down (the college years, spent mainly in Connecticut, are blurrier). I’ve also included a chronological list of honorable mentions, many of which feel just as essential as the restaurants I’ve expanded upon. I should note, because this is New York, 11 out of 25 of these spots are gone, and 4 have been uprooted from the originals I knew and loved.

Here goes.

Me, center, with a spoon on my nose. Blue Water Grill, 1999.

2000, age 7/ The Mercer Kitchen
When I was born, in 1993, my family lived in Brooklyn Heights. Then we moved to Westchester for a few years. My mom and dad hated it there, so when I was five years old, we came back to the city and landed at André Balazs’ The Mercer Hotel, where we stayed until we could move into our rental in Chelsea. I grew fond of the hotel’s industrial, subterranean restaurant, especially the roasted chicken, and the way the light drifted into the bathroom through the vaulted SoHo sidewalks above. At one point during our time there, the city shut down due to a near-hurricane, but luckily, The Mercer Kitchen stayed open. As my mom remembers it: “You [and your siblings] were walking around the restaurant and in the kitchen. Fred and I got hammered. It was an epic evening.”

2001, age 8/ Union Square Cafe
My earliest specific transformative restaurant memory—besides getting my thumb stuck in a slatted chair at a Southern restaurant in Savannah, GA and having to have it greased out with kitchen oil—took place at Union Square Cafe when I was eight. My mom took me for the lunchtime-only burger, which subsequently blew my mind. I remember stopping mid-bite, wide-eyed, to profess my ecstasy.

2002, age 9/ John’s of Bleecker Street
I went to K-8 on 6th Avenue and Bleecker Street. On half days leading into our winter and spring breaks, my group of friends, chaperoned by our parents, would go to John’s Pizza to eat tangy, coal-fired pies and etch our names into the excessively engraved wooden walls. The 96-year-old pizzeria was quiet during the day back then.

2003, age 10/ Joe Jr.’s
For kid-me, the griddled cheeseburgers at Joe Jr.’s in Greenwich Village—not the unassociated diner in Gramercy—were the everyday counterpoint to Union Square Cafe’s extraordinary burger. The patties were seared crisp, draped in melted cheese, tucked into squishy buns, and served with classic from-frozen fries. The greasy spoon was our neighborhood spot, perched on the corner of 12th and 6th, two blocks from our house on 10th Street. It was the first place I ever ate without adults, and the first place I went on a date, with my eighth-grade boyfriend. For a while, I went once a weekend, after Friday night basketball practice at nearby P.S. 41 or post-game on Saturday morning. Joe Jr.’s closed in 2009, and I mourn it to this day (as does Adam Platt).

2004, age 11/ Otto Enoteca Pizzeria
Mario Batali was a kingpin of the city’s restaurant scene when I was growing up. His kids went to our school, and we regularly ate at many of his very good restaurants. Esca for crudo and salt-baked whole fish before catching Wicked on Broadway, Babbo and once even Del Posto for special occasions, but most often, Otto Enoteca Pizzeria, which felt like a family restaurant. The thin-crust pizzas were superb, the caramelly eggplant caponata a must-order, Meredith Kurtzman’s olive oil gelato a revelation. Unfortunately, to put it lightly, Batali really didn’t age well.

2005, age 12/ Blue Water Grill
I think about the room first when I think about Blue Water Grill. Set in a former bank on Union Square West, the high-end seafood restaurant sprawled across a soaring, two-tiered space, its ceilings carved with elegant molding. From the terrace section, you could see the whole production. Then I think about the raw bar, where pristine seafood rested on ice before being arranged onto towering platters and whisked to tables. My parents loved Blue Water Grill, and my brother, sister, and I got to tag along fairly often. It’s probably where I ate my first oyster, and they served molten chocolate cake for dessert.

2006, age 13/ Baby Buddha
Any kid raised in New York City before the boom in excellent regionally diverse Chinese food grew up on classic New York-style Cantonese takeout. Steamed pork dumplings, cold sesame noodles, and crunchy-gooey sesame chicken were my comfort foods, and Baby Buddha on Washington and Bethune was the best delivery in the neighborhood. After the rabbi dropped the Torah at my bat mitzvah and the entire congregation was asked to fast for a day (instead of the traditional 40), I broke mine by ordering in from Baby Buddha. Mama Buddha, on Hudson and West 11th, was another standby—better for dining in, and unrelated despite the name. As was Sammy’s Noodles, for their quart containers stuffed with peanut buttery noodles, cut thick like udon.

2007, age 14/ Florent
In the spring of 2007, my family relocated from Greenwich Village to the part of the West Village that’s just south of the Meatpacking District. During the transition, we stayed at the Gansevoort Hotel for three nights and ate dinner at a neighborhood restaurant each evening. Night one was Florent, a French-American bistro-cum-diner, hyped up by my mom as iconic—and it really, really delivered. The mac and cheese was stupid good, and it was open 24 hours, though at 14, that detail was irrelevant. For the next year, I went as often as I could, usually with my more serious high school boyfriend. Then it closed. I was too late to the party. Here’s Frank Bruni with an oral history. (P.S. On the other nights, we went to Pastis and Five Ninth.)

2008, age 15/ The Tea Box at Takashimaya
Eating lunch or having tea inside the Japanese department store Takashimaya felt like being in on a secret. It was my mom’s favorite place to shop, particularly for jewelry, and she’d routinely take my sister and me with her. We’d always stop for a bite on the basement level of the serene, immaculate store, where they served bento boxes, tea sandwiches on pressed rice, and not-too-sweet sweets, alongside up to 40 varieties of tea steeped in gorgeous cast-iron pots. It was all incredibly chic, and the perfect light lunch to pair with a day of shopping. Takashimaya closed in 2010, shifting its focus to East and Southeast Asian markets, ending a 52-year run in New York, 17 of them in a beautifully architected postmodern building on Fifth Avenue.

2009, age 16/ Blue Ribbon Sushi
Somehow, I still haven’t eaten at Blue Ribbon Brasserie, but I’ve had countless lunches and dinners at Blue Ribbon Sushi on Sullivan Street, mostly with family, sometimes with friends. I love the descent down the stairs and the way the sushi arrives on wooden planks. It’s where I first had omakase, and even though I haven’t been back in years, I can still taste the shrimp shumai. I’d be remiss not to mention Blue Ribbon Bakery Market, too—a go-to on Downing Street during high school lunch breaks for open-faced sandwiches and cinnamon sugar-coated miniature donut muffins.

2010, age 17/ Pastis
Shrimp cocktail ranks among my favorite foods, and I have Pastis to thank for sparking the obsession. It’s the Keith McNally restaurant I feel most connected to, where my requisite order of cold, snappy shrimp with aioli and cocktail sauce was always followed by chicken paillard and a side of frites. The original corner space on Ninth Avenue and Little West 12th was a showstopper—an anchor of the neighborhood and a glamorous stomping ground for my friends and me. I’ve been to the new location a few times, and it’s still good, just not the same.

2011, age 18/ Barbuto
The private dining room at the original Barbuto on Washington Street remains the most special PDR in my mind. It sat right beside the open kitchen and wasn’t even truly private, just sectioned off from the rest of the warehouse-style interior, where, on summer nights, light would pour through the glass garage doors. If you booked it, you and a dozen or so friends were served a family-style spread of Jonathan Waxman classics: kale laced with pecorino and breadcrumbs, gnocchi with seasonal veg, roast chicken and salsa verde, crispy rosemary potatoes. That’s exactly what I did for my 18th birthday, and it was perfect. (According to my fact checker, Barbuto had another, actual private dining room—I still believe this one was better.)

2012, age 19/ The Spotted Pig
I don’t need to tell anyone reading this how spectacularly The Spotted Pig fell from grace. Repulsive, repugnant behavior took place within the walls of this infamous gastropub, especially on the third floor. But before we knew all of that, I loved the restaurant madly: first for April Bloomfield’s food—her Roquefort burger and her way with vegetables—and second for the atmosphere, cozy and quirky and convivial, with figurine pigs tucked into every crevice. By 2012, The Spotted Pig had been open for eight years, and I’d often walk the few blocks from our apartment to put my name down for dinner when I was home from college.

2013, age 20/ Perla
My first and (embarrassingly) only restaurant job—unless you count working behind the counter at Momofuku Milk Bar’s Upper West Side location—was as an assistant hostess at Perla, Gabe Stulman’s seductive, sensational Italian restaurant that slinked effortlessly into Minetta Lane. I worked there the summer after my sophomore year at Wesleyan, when the place was at the height of its popularity and Michael Toscano’s rock shrimp pasta, coated in a buttery, lemony tomato sauce, was on the menu. It was my favorite restaurant then, and it felt both intimidating and exhilarating to eat family meal with the staff at 4 p.m. and then man the host stand until after 11, greeting customers like Anderson Cooper and Kelly Ripa (she ate only steamed vegetables).

2014, age 21/ Momofuku Noodle Bar
Like The Spotted Pig, Momofuku Noodle Bar opened in 2004. David Chang and April Bloomfield were part of the same cohort, arguably the last cohort, of celebrity chefs. Ten years in, the place was still rocking, having sparked a decade-plus ramen fervor in New York and, more broadly, a revolution in casual, cheffy dining. This was long before reservations ruled the city; if you were strategic and willing to wait, you could eat at Noodle Bar, and it was a very cool thing to do with your college friends. I always ordered the dry spicy sausage noodles—which, apparently, are no longer on the menu?—and they were incredibly delicious, but also ferociously spicy. Being able to handle them felt like a flex.

2015, age 22/ Mission Chinese Food
I visited the original, ultimately mice-infested Mission Chinese Food, down a flight of stairs on Orchard Street, in either 2012 or 2013. I was with my friend Liam, maybe someone else too, but I only remember Liam, the red-hued, clubby room, Laura Palmer in the bathroom, and the phenomenally psychedelic food. The restaurant’s reopening at the end of 2014 on East Broadway timed perfectly with my graduation and move back to the city the following spring. That summer and fall, it became a weekend ritual: meet friends in Chinatown, put our name on the list, warm up at Mr. Fong’s or 169 Bar, then settle in for a round of Tom Khallins (still one of the greatest drinks ever invented), Chongqing chicken wings, thrice-cooked bacon with rice cakes, and salt cod fried rice.

2016, age 23/ Hart’s
Hart’s was my first true adult neighborhood restaurant. The pocket-sized dining room with an even more pocket-sized open kitchen sat awkwardly on Franklin Avenue, facing the covered stairs that ferried people across the C train station. It felt like a miracle that the space worked at all, but it did, beautifully. And because the menu changed almost daily, it never got old. I loved the punchy, salty flavors expressed through pickled veg, swipes of yogurt, and shavings of bottarga. I loved the intimate room and the kind servers. But most of all, I loved that Hart’s was only five blocks from my apartment. At one point, I remember seeing through Resy (where I was working at the time) that I’d eaten there more than 40 times.

2017, age 24/ Chez Ma Tante
This was the era in which I learned the joys of being a regular. In the spring of 2017, Chez Ma Tante opened in Greenpoint with a bare, St. Johnian room of wood tables and white walls, serving classic cocktails, natural wine, and rustic French-Canadian-tinged cooking. One dish lodged itself firmly among my cravings: a maple-kissed slab of grilled pork shoulder with silky lentils and a piquant salsa verde. The desserts were incredible too, including one of the city’s best chocolate cakes, surely a riff on The River Cafe’s chocolate nemesis. I’d gone to college with one of the chef-owners, Jake Leiber, which made me feel like an insider. Going back again and again made me feel like even more of one. That it remains great brings me its own kind of joy.

2018, age 25/ I Sodi
I don’t feel as strongly about I Sodi 2.0 as I did about the OG on Christopher Street, a sliver of a restaurant with eight tables and 14 bar seats. Its tinyness, paired with a straightforward Tuscan elegance, was transportive. Throughout my twenties, I always wanted pasta on my birthday, and there was usually nowhere I’d rather have it than I Sodi, preceded by the raw artichoke salad and followed by panna cotta. So I developed a ritual: go online at midnight one month out, book a two-top, and await my ideal self-celebratory dinner.

2019, age 26/ Hug Esan
The culinary perks of having a car in New York City outweigh the weekly hell of alternate-side parking. I firmly believe this. Being within 30 minutes of most of Queens makes for glorious weekends. Bangladeshi in Astoria, KBBQ in Flushing, Jamaican in Jamaica, and Bukharan Jewish in Rego Park were all in my rotation, but of all the borough’s wonders, I most often sought out nam khao tod, gai yang, and mango sticky rice in Elmhurst and Woodside. The sisters-owned Hug Esan was my go-to for Isan-style cooking served atop colorful oilcloths.

2020, age 27/ Ko Bar
The bar at Momofuku Ko operated like a speakeasy-style test kitchen, pulsing within the larger fine-dining destination led by executive chef Sean Gray. It was so sleek, and so goddamn good. There was cold fried chicken and oblong burgers served in hot dog buns, each the cheffiest yet somehow most stripped-down version of the dish. The menu was affordable, but the meticulously curated wine list was not, and the pours came in Zaltos. No restaurant has ever done high-low better. Ko Bar was one of the restaurants I made a point of visiting during peak COVID, dining under heat lamps on Extra Place. Even without the dark, angular room around me, the meal made me so happy.

2021, age 28/ Porcelain
I was introduced to Kate Telfeyan’s food during the pandemic, when she was one of many laid-off chefs cooking at home and delivering directly to diners. She was making things like cumin-spiced lamb and kimchi stew, and I spoke with her for a story I wrote in Eater about these types of pop-ups. When she opened her own spot in Ridgewood the following year, it was everything I’d hoped for and more: Korean breakfast sets and savory tofu pudding in the morning; crispy lamb sandwiches and, my favorite, a cold noodle salad with charred tomato and fermented chili at lunch; and for dinner, crispy soondae wontons and steamed whole branzino seasoned with peppercorns and showered in herbs. The suggested pairing? Riesling.

2022, age 29/ S&P Lunch
After moving to Los Angeles in the summer of 2021, I wanted New York comforts on every trip home. So: crispy-crusted slices of pizza, shrimp cocktail, golden-hued fries, real bars, tavern-style establishments, anywhere with a distinctly New York vibe. That’s where S&P comes in, even though L.A. has plenty of great matzoh ball soups and tuna melts (see: Langer’s, The Apple Pan). I’ve loved everything Court Street Grocers has ever done, including their partnership with Zoë Kanan on Elbow Bread, so it was no surprise that S&P—a remake of Eisenberg’s, where I first learned to love tuna melts—was an instant success. My order: matzoh ball soup (theirs is actually the best), a Fifty/50, and rugelach.

2023, age 30/ The Long Island Bar
To me, The Long Island Bar is the epitome of what Los Angeles markedly lacks: a place you can get an easy, excellent drink made by veteran bartenders who master the classics, and pair it with straightforward bar food like cheeseburgers and deviled eggs. That, combined with its retro, unpretentious vibe, is why I knew David would love it here as much as I did. I took him the first time we were in New York together. Somewhere between the martinis, the shared plate of fries, and the muted calm of a booth on Tuesday at 5 p.m., I realized I loved him.

2024, age 31/ Bridges
Toro, buttery and heavy with umami; the toffee-like sweetness of dates; earthy trumpet mushrooms—each note hit one after the other, then all at once. A shock of pleasure ran through me. Eating Sam Lawrence’s cured tuna with dates dish was the high point of our first meal at Bridges, where everything landed quite stunningly. Charming service with just the right amount of chattiness. Strong, slightly playful drinks. Inventive food backed by real chef chops. A sexily austere room. We left a little buzzed, but mostly intoxicated by the whole experience, and already thinking about when we could return.

2025, age 32/ Le Veau d’Or
Le Veau d’Or is my favorite restaurant in New York right now, and maybe the best restaurant I’ve ever been to. Walking to the bathroom midway through my first meal here, I had a sudden burst of clarity: This is what restaurants should feel like. Then: This is why I do what I do. And finally: This is why New York is the greatest restaurant city in the world. Within minutes of stepping into LVD, you understand that the place is run by absolute pros in each position. Every detail is dialed. The concept is fully realized. It’s historical but alive, reverent but fresh. Dinner here is deeply indulgent in all the right ways. It’s a place I’ll return to for decades, for small celebrations and big milestones, and when I need to remember why restaurants matter.

Honorable mentions (in chronological order): Cafeteria, Le Zie Trattoria, Joe’s Pizza, 2nd Avenue Deli, Japonica, Ess-a-Bagel, Cafe Loup, Sammy’s Noodles, SriPraPhai, City Bakery, Pylos, Babbo, Fred’s at Barney’s, Sushi Yasuda, Burger Joint at Le Parker Meridien, The Grey Dog, Westville, Once Upon a Tart, Bubby’s, Fanelli Cafe, Cafe Gitane at The Jane Hotel, Souen, Northern Spy Food Co., Mile End, Kiki’s, Little Pepper, Lilia, Pok Pok, Diner, Fort Defiance, Gloria’s, Tom’s Restaurant, Ops, Atla, Frenchette, Wu’s Wonton King, Anton’s, Taste of Persia, Ha’s Dac Biet, F&F Pizzeria at Franks Wine Bar, Barney Greengrass, Stissing House, The Commerce Inn, Penny, Lei.

More soon :)