After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It's nice to be able to convey your feelings to your audience through writing, but great writers go further.
The world needs great writers, because they are travel guides. They guide us to visit places we couldn't reach alone. Worthwhile places that would go unvisited and unknown without our guides.
That's why "Kitchen Confidential" is such an amazing book. It's a travelogue.
When Gay Talese wrote "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold", he didn't write a profile of Frank. He was inviting us to go see Frank with him, to sign up to the great adventure of finding out who Frank really was.
If you would like to be one of our guides, I thank you.
Study the book "On Writing", by Stephen King, and begin inviting us to your travels!
Any favorite restaurants in NYC which folks on HN may not have heard of?
Ugly Baby (Carrol Gardens) is my favorite Thai restaurant outside of Thailand. The Chef/Owner also has a restaurant in Sylva, NC for those in WNC.
Popina (Columbia Street Waterfront) is a cozy Italian spot, with a stellar wine list.
Claud (EV) is casual fine dining that serves all the good stuff. They're two old Momofuku vets that serve a lot of the stuff chefs like to eat.
Lilia and Misi (Williamsburg) are always excellent for pasta.
Lucali (Carrol Gardens) is the best pizza in the city. Razza (Jersey City) is the best pizza outside of a borough. Frank Pepe (New Haven) is the best outside the city.
Rossi Rosticceria Deli (Poughkeepsie) is an amazing deli, up by the CIA.
Glacken's Bar and Grill (Bronx) is absolutely the best bar to stop in before a Yankee game.
Minca (EV) for Tsukemen Ramen
Paisanos (Carrol Gardens) is my favorite Italian Butcher.
My favorite restaurant in NYC at the moment is Frenchette (Tribeca).
Bars in no particular order Dante (everything campari, get a Garibaldi), Attaboy (anything is great), Dead Rabbit(Irish Coffee is spectacular), Four Horsemen (natural wine).
I was glued to the series as it plodded on week by week and it still sticks in my mind today as simultaneously the best and worst job in the world I could imagine. Part of what made it so enthralling to read was this grand act of human perversity that a single woman would endure such a gruelling quest for such a trivial question and she made you feel that perversity along every step of the journey.
[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americas-best-burrito/
This is part of why I enjoy watching a couple of RuneScape YouTubers. The sheer time commitments they put in for seemingly minor gains is like gore but for amputating off their own time effort & energy and throwing it into a bottomless maw.
Very entertaining to watch and explains things so even non players can understand the sheer absurdity of some of the attempts.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWiMc19-qaA3u1ZawZQIKAh0B...
The other good one from the same channel is Tileman, where he is limited to only using tiles that have been "unlocked"
His current feature is Lowlife, where if he takes a single point of damage his account gets deleted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hRJ-CcwvrI&list=PLtyo3aqsNv...
Verf - https://www.youtube.com/@VerfRS
Limpwurt - https://www.youtube.com/@Limpwurt
The grind sure is relentless!
Very few things in life are as important as burritos in my view.
You know, running a business kind of like that guy who writes about inside Apple news very rarely but effectively (what’s his name, Gruber? Daring Fireball?)
The business doesn’t actually have to make money in the first few years, as long as you are making bona-fide attempts to grow it. No one requires you to watch every movie or eat every burrito. But who is the government to say you’re not trying to run a business as a food or movie critic?
Much of your personal lifestyle could then be deducted as a business expense on your schedule C, being “necessary and ordinary” for your various LLCs. Perhaps even your travel expenses if you are a travel blogger staying at hotels etc.
But maybe it’s not a joke. Any lawyers or accountants on HN see any problems with this? Again, I’m talking about doing the minimum to make this an actual business — it may become profitable through the monetization but even if it isn’t, that’s 30% additional you’re saving on what would otherwise be your personal entertainment expenses!
The main issue I see is that if your LLC has debts that it defaults on, a court might see you as “commingling” personal funds with the business, even if you keep the accounts separate, and pierce the corporate veil. But, this is a separate issue of limiting liability for debts, which your LLC doesn’t have to even take on. Even if that were the case, from a tax point of view the question is only whether the expenses are necessary for the business, and ordinary, both of which they are.
Maybe one day, long term capital gains tax will be on the same level as income tax, and then people will stop trying to use things like 83b elections.
But regardless of that, if you invest into your own startup by buying equity or lending it money, that is NOT currently a taxable event. And then that LLC’s losses are passed through to your Schedule C.
It may be strange to have you buying shares in your company if you already have 100% of shares. But if you do a Limited Partnership with a few people, then all of you could be competing to buy shares in it and dilute the others. Those are non-taxable events. And the members of the LLC are also its staff, who go watch movies and review them. Then the tax deductions are claimed on Schedule K instead, by each partner.
I am only talking about a bona fide business. You don’t have to go all-out for each business you start, working 40 hours a week for each one. You could even go to the movies and restaurants once a week and save 30% by turning it into an actual business. Can’t you?
Do travel bloggers deduct their travel expenses as necessary and ordinary?
That's not how it works. You can maybe deduct the price of your movie ticket and mileage to drive to the theater. Anything beyond that and the IRS will be up your ass in an instant.
Or if you’re a travel blogger, the plane rides and hotel stays become a business expense if you’re doing it for profit as part of an LLC. You have to have an actual business plan with memberships, advertisements, etc.
You could be making money with it. But even if you aren’t yet, as long as you’re trying, the business expenses made by an LLC that you are investing into, are deductible on your personal Schedule C! Are they not?
“The limit on not-for-profit losses… does not apply to corporations except S Corporations”.
It doesn’t seem to mention LLCs. These are “disregarded entities” at the IRS level, so what does that mean? For tax purposes they are treated as sole proprietorships?
It seems to me there is some “minimum” level of bona-fide for-profit business that might be helpful to reach if you are a prolific traveler or movie goer or eat out in restaurants a lot. That’s my main point. A little bit of effort and you can write off thousands of dollars a year in business expenses while you also stand a chance of making money on top of it.
Doesn't work for a lot of things (including reputable restaurant reviews) but bloggers also have the opportunity to get free stuff if they get noteworthy enough. Yes, it's a source of bias but so long as everything isn't how this thing they were given for free is fantastic, I don't have a problem with it. I've reviewed books (and a few other things) sent to me and I've given some pretty negative reviews as well as positive ones.
Entertainment expenses are no longer deductible with recent tax law changes with few exceptions. It would be difficult today to get a CPA to sign-off off on a lot of what may have passed previously. A decent write-up can be found here - https://www.thetaxadviser.com/issues/2023/nov/navigating-aro...
This seems to support what I’m suggesting
The only case that I am aware of where you can take business losses / write offs and apply them to other income sources is in real estate, and only under very specific circumstances. This is one reason why high income individuals love things like short term rentals which is one circumstance in which this is possible.
How does this even work?
If a local or federal government attempted to do this type of survey, they would end up having to pay McKinsey seven figures just to plan the whole operation..
I felt the same way about Eddy Burback's "I ate at every Rainforest Cafe in the Country" [and Canada]
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4NL9i-Fu15jdlr2KQf_lyhXl...
The following year The New Yorker wrote a profile of him which features some of the backstory. "Is it possible to say with a straight face that Señor Frog’s is a better restaurant than Per Se? Can you get those words out without collapsing under your own idiocy?"
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/12/pete-wells-the...
If you ask a real chef, "What do home chefs do wrong the most?"
They will often say, "Not enough butter, not enough salt."
i think you are right.
i have always seen big portion sizes in restaurants when i have gone to the US.
also, very recently, i saw a youtube video in which a french person says the same thing. they said that even though the French eat a lot of fat, their overall portion sizes are smaller than those of the US. so overall, they end up eating less calories than US people.
also the French tend to walk a lot, while the US people tend to drive a lot.
it's a generalization, i know.
The weight-loss drugs like Ozempic, supposedly make you feel like that. I haven't taken them myself. It's like you don't really want any more.
Americans seem to feel entitled to two meals for the price of one, and they may or may not eat them both in the restaurant. (If they don't finish, they take the rest home with them)
yes, when my parents used to go to the US, a few decades ago, they told us kids about this practice called using doggie bags. apparently people used to ask for the uneaten part of their restaurant orders to be packed in what was called a doggy bag, under the euphemism that they were taking the extra food home for their dog.
I don't know whether the practice is still followed.
I do know a few places that are sort of known for having portion sizes that are oriented towards people taking leftovers home.
The French Paradox: How rich food and wine could help you stay healthy | 60 Minutes Australia
I submitted it as an HN post here, in case anyone would like to discuss it:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40980964
See:
I guess it varies between restaurants, and everyone is talking based on their own experience.
apps?
I think some of it is that many restaurants have a lot of fairly inexpensive filler (potatoes, rice, etc.) with entrees that I probably sort of tune out and don't really try to finish a lot of the time. This is probably less true of some countries/cuisines than others.
I have stopped eating out completely as I always feel gross and tired after a restaurant meal vs energized after home-cooked food. I think it's mostly due to cheap oils in quantities you would never dream of using at home.
I suspect portion size and number of dishes with homecooked food.
In a restaurant, adding appetizers, side dishes and desserts can be done with a nod. At home, it will take a lot of work to add each dish.
But yeah, if you do apples:apples I think restaurants are paid to make things tasty - with salt, cheese, cream, butter, oil. And then with more of those.
(also, I wonder how restaurant review eating compares to supersize me)
there is a famous cooking book with a name close to that. ;)
it's called something like fat, acid, salt and heat. you can Google it.
you know, like here:
https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(18)...
Because I could see a lot of variability amongst those. And without controls, the study will default strongly toward fast-food, doughnut shops, pizza, burger / franks stands, and the like. Several of which have pronounced associated negatives (see, e.g., Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me (2004).
I find some restaurant meals strike me as far better than others. Taquerias, Thai and Vietnamese food, better vegetarian restaurants (say, Greens in SF), for example. Specific choices such as sides, beverages, alcohol, and whether or not the restaurant permits smoking (some parts of the US still allow this barbaric practice) would likely be huge confounding factors.
I'm not discounting home-cooked meals, and generally far prefer them myself. But overly-broad, undifferentiated analysis is ... not especially illuminating.
There may be associated negatives, but Super Size Me is a terrible piece of evidence of it. Spurlock not only intentionally ate far more than any normal person would, but also declined to mention in the movie his copious alcohol consumption. (Not that I expect someone to admit to their alcoholism in a movie, but when you're making a polemic about how what you consume is bad for you, not mentioning that you're drinking a lot of alcohol during the same period isn't great!)
If you've any links or references to share I'd be interested.
On business travellers vs. truckers, I'm finding ~ 3.5 million truckers in the US, who all but certainly eat on the road at least one meal per day (local) and more likely 3+ (long-haul). <https://schneiderjobs.com/blog/truck-drivers-in-usa>.
For corporate travel: there are ~400 million long-distance business trips annually <https://www.trondent.com/business-travel-statistics/>. Trips-per-person is harder to find, though one source gives 6.8 trips/year, which gives 60 million travellers/year. So that's more than truckers ... but it's a lot fewer trips (and meals). I'd put money on there being more trucker meals-out than business travelers'.
Fleshing out further: we really want trips per year, for each classification. I'm going to assume truckers are on the road 250 days/year (roughly 5 days/week) ... we'll do variance after in case I'm wrong. That gives 3.5 million * 250 or 875 million trucker trips/year, more than double the business air travel number. We could cut trucker travel in half and still be somewhat above the business air travel trips figure.
The truckers vs. business travellers comparison was mostly me just trying to suss out what the relative magnitudes of those were. Information's sketchy, but inferences can be drawn. That was independent of your points, which are valid and insightful.
And yeah, the idea that 1) most "restaurant" meals are fast-food franchises and 2) that's not especially healthy on a consistent basis, as well as that 3) specific choices about menu items can have a major impact are ... fairly self-evident. Pity the study doesn't seem to address those, at least based on the unembargoed bits at the shared link above.
You won't achieve wok hei on your stove, your oven will not be ablr to achieve the high temperatures required for the best versions of certain foods, restaurants in your area will get priority from suppliers over what you find in the grocery store and even most farmers markets, and that's just talking about average restaurants. You start getting into fine dining or a Michelin experience with teams of people preparing the food and it's an entirely different level of impossibility to make at home.
Sure eating a fast food burger and fries everyday will be heavy, but even something that simple can be difficult to match compared to the restaurant. Grinding your own meat, double frying the fries, finding/making decent buns, etc.
Food is one of the few activities that can be very enjoyable daily. It's usually cost saving to cook yourself and there's a lot of good stuff you can make at home. But you're missing out on some enjoyable experiences by completely avoiding professionals using professional equipment with access to better ingredients.
Not true. Pull out that blowtorch.
> your oven will not be ablr to achieve the high temperatures required for the best versions of certain foods
Get a steel or aluminum plate for your oven. The conductivity can make up for a lot of the heat differential. Yeah, a true Neapolitan at 900F is out of reach, but almost everything else is just fine.
> restaurants in your area will get priority from suppliers over what you find in the grocery store
This might be true, but from what I have seen most of the restaurants are barely even reaching SysCo/USFoods level of quality ingredients. Your local grocery store is probably just fine until you are a very good cook. At that point, you might have to start looking at more niche grocery stores.
And, if you get better than that, well, you're likely sufficiently obsessive that you will find a way.
> You start getting into fine dining or a Michelin experience with teams of people preparing the food and it's an entirely different level of impossibility to make at home.
It's more sheer technique and attention to fussy detail than teams of people. A patissier is simply WAY better than you are at making desserts, for example. They know all the tricks; they will also have all the necessary equipment.
However, yeah, Michelin restaurants are definitely next level.
Go look for the folks that hack off the safety latch on their self-cleaning ovens. It's kind of nuts.
I have a steel plate. An hour at 500F only gets it to around 400F.
Which is fine for pizza, actually, so you're right about that.
If you ask big US pizzerias (I don't know about the famous Naples ones) what temp they use, it's usually 650-750. At 900F you have zero margin for error.
It was just too much trouble. A pizza steel in a kitchen oven, preheated, works very well; maybe not as good as a 700F oven but WAY easier. And 5 minutes instead of 1 minute is not a big sacrifice.
Can you share: Do you think normie home cooks can taste the difference between a 5min and 1min pizza? I am unsure. For example, is the 5min pizza much drier? (I assume no.)
My decision to sell my Ooni, after about 6 tries, was because my actual results were nowhere close to a pizzeria's, and way more trouble than my kitchen oven's.
Since you can't just open the door as you can with the kitchen oven, you have much less tolerance for error. In the kitchen, you just open after 5 minutes and decide, "OK, it's done" or "One more minute."
I guess I decided the brick oven pizzeria results are just not attainable at home. The kitchen results are damn good; way better than a frozen pizza.
Have you tried Adam Ragusea's NYC pizza recipe? He gives a lot of sensible advice about how to get a great pie from a shitty kitchen oven!
It was a PITA. I don't miss it at all.
My setup at home is a 20kg pizza steel and pre-heat it in the oven at max temp for at least 1 hour. Even with all that thermal mass I find the later pizzas take longer to cook due to the steel cooling off. You just cant put enough energy into a home oven to match the energy it looses during cooking.
Another tip is when the steel is maximally heated I find the rate of cooking on the bottom of the pizza is faster than on the top so I also turn the broiler onto max after I put in the pizza so the toppings get cooked at the same rate as the bottom of the crust. A delicate balance which requires continuous feedback.
> My setup at home is a 20kg pizza steel and pre-heat it in the oven at max temp for at least 1 hour.
At some level baking becomes an art form — a way to channel your efforts into a form of mastery. Does the leoparding make a difference? Probably not. It is the aesthetic and demonstration of mastery which makes leoparding desirable, much like how people desire perfectly manicured lawns and gardens.
> because you need a fryer
Are they as good as deep-fat fried? No, but they're crisp on the outside and tender on the inside.
OK, you all want to hear this, you know you do:
===============
Start preheating the air fryer to 400F.
Slice the potatoes. Drop them in a bowl of water, swish them around and drain off the water, and fill the bowl again. By now, the water should be clear. If not, do it again.
Take the fries out and dry on paper towels, as dry as you can get them.
*These steps are important; you need to wash off the surface starch, and get them dry so you're not steaming them*
Put the fries back in the bowl and get them all oily. Put them in the fryer. The basket should be hot enough that they make a sizzling sound.
Every 5 minutes, toss the fries. You can either get compulsive and turn each one individually, or just pour them in a bowl and shake it, or shake the fryer basket (if that doesn't cause it to separate, as it does mine). Put them back in the fryer.
Check periodically that they're as brown as you want them.
==============
Good variations? I want to hear them
But longer might indeed be better. I can tell you they come out crispy and not soggy my way.
> You won't achieve wok hei on your stove
For any readers unfamiliar with the stir frying technique called wok hei, read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wok#Cooking
If my memory/understanding is not wrong, then that adds to the idea that people won't achieve wok hei on their stove even if the reason is not wanting its side effects rather than being technically impossible.
> wok hei produces enough smoke to be extremely unpleasant to have inside a residential building
Does anybody else remember this? Or am I crazy?
I ate home cooked meals while WFH. They weren’t even made to be specifically healthy or with the objective of losing weight.
Then I jumped ship for a company that was 100% in office. I started eating the supposedly healthy meals catered by the company for lunch. Dinner also came later because commute time.
I gained back all the weight I lost WFH and then some. The significant amount of walking and/or biking from the commute did nothing to help.
5-10 years ago I would have agreed with your comment, but once I hit my 30s I started to feel gross if I ate a bunch of donuts, super duper greasy food, etc.
As the years progress more and more food makes me feel a little yucky afterwards, not just the blatantly obvious incredibly unhealthy ones.
I'd rather cook myself now where I can actually taste flavors and feel good, rather than just having the primal "mmm good food" button bashed in my lizard brain and feeling like garbage afterwards.
Is butter really the problem here? Because to me it sounds like the problem is habitual over-eating.
Japanese izakayas frequently sell grilled items wrapped in foil that is swimming in butter. Again, I assume you will reply: "Oh, but that's not traditional Japanese cooking -- it doesn't count." Again, most normie readers don't care about that distinction.
This is fine but really not reflective of good restaurants and the majority of the food they serve.
The Greek woman behind the counter made me (well, guilted me into) getting some vegetables with my order. They weren't too salty or fatty; they were just good for me (and tasty).
It was like being fed by one's own mom. It was awesome.
She's a very good cook, and the things she improvises or makes from memory are much lighter fare. I learned to cook from her, so my meals tend to be fairly light too.
Sure, the fat and salt (and don't forget sugar) are yummy, but they'll kill you. There needs to be a compromise.
An amusing aside, Julia Child said that it's perfectly honorable to be a home cook and not a chef. Making stuff that's good but healthy is an art unto itself, especially if you're feeding vegetarians.
There’s a good chocolate chip cookie recipe from the NYT that I’ve used several times. Not only is it heavy, I’ve had to halve the ingredients and even then it still produces enough to satiate the Cookie Monster for probably at least a month.
As a Brit, I also had to convert all of the measurements (patent absurdities like ‘cups of butter’, ‘tablespoons of chocolate’, etc.) to grams — taking account of the variation in density, of course.
"A pint's a pound the world around" is a workable rule of thumb for a lot of things, but of course you need to know when greater precision is needed. Since I don't bake sweets very often, I measure most things by eyeball. For instance my bread recipe is based on filling a glass measuring cup nearly to the top, above where the volume markings end.
Maybe it's a reaction to spending my day designing precision measuring equipment.
But yeah, it's a hodgepodge of archaic units, and quite unnerving if you hail from the metric world.
Anyway, it makes more sense hearing that sticks of butter are labelled in cups. I didn’t know that! In the UK, butter comes in 250g blocks.
I'd just let the flour mound over the top of the cup by a bit to make up for the tablespoons. ;-)
Exactly that. In a restaurant, you're really pressured to make it the same each time.
At home: Who cares? It's good that it's different every time.
As far as flour goes, it's incredibly common to have both cups and measuring spoons in a US kitchen. So if a recipe says "1 cup and 2 tablespoons" or something, it's really easy to measure that.
By contrast, I hate recipes which use weight measurements. It takes a ton of faffing about to get exactly 300g (or whatever weight) of flour weighed out. Add a bit... watch scale... add a bit more... watch scale ad nauseam. And then I often wind up overshooting anyways, so then I have to try to scoop some back out! Whereas with volume measurements I just dip a cup/spoon in, level it off, and I'm done in a couple of seconds.
A relative was a professional cook. Butter wrappers are also marked with measurements here, at 25g intervals. That would be accepted for some recipes, but the butter would be measured more carefully when making certain pastries or cakes.
> "A pint's a pound the world around"
only applies to the American meaning of "world", i.e. the USA and maybe Canada.
"A pint of water weighs a pound and a quarter," when it's an Imperial pint.
https://www.gawkerarchives.com/the-best-restaurant-in-new-yo...
Here in the Philly area we have a guy doing cheesesteaks.
Obviously people are different but that has been my experience.
As Anthony Bourdain wrote... "In a good restaurant, what this all adds up to is that you could be putting away almost a stick of butter with every meal." He's not exaggerating!
I eat out when on vacation and business trips and really don't want to cook even if the hotel has a kitchenette. I also rarely go out at home to eat unless it's to attend an event or to socialize.
When I was an analyst I definitely gained weight until I developed the discipline to not eat the three meals a day (plus also snack breaks) just because they were there and often good.
I see all the pearl clutching comments about how bad eating at restaurants is (former restaurant chef, I'm extremely biased and refused to be moved), but an over the top entree coming in at 1500 calories isn't even close to a 7 pound burrito IMO.
He could just copy this strategy. If he doesn't have the will for it, semaglutides would make it really easy. You still enjoy and taste food the same on it, you just get full quicker.
So there is an easy solution to his problem.