For this year's project, I visited 23 cities and ate at 93 restaurants. Perhaps those simple facts provoke a twinge—the way that seeing people shake hands in movies or on TV shows so quickly started causing an involuntary recoil. They do in me. Throughout my time on the road, the coming crisis thrummed like a distant bass line. By the last leg—Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia—it was becoming more common to see airplane seatmates wipe down their area before sitting. My companion for one of my last meals got up nervously from the table more times than anyone would need to pee; each time he returned, my next few bites would be perfumed with a trace of hand sanitizer. I got back to New Orleans in early March, relieved to be home, and composed my list and essay soon after.
This is all to say, I write you now from the Distant Past. It's a time when five hours ago, every five hours ago, feels like a distant past. As I type, every one of those 93 restaurants I visited is either closed, limited to takeout and delivery, or, it seems clear, will soon be one or the other. Nobody knows how long that will last or what lies on the other side. At this moment, America effectively has no restaurants—an incredible and heartbreaking fact.
Why, then, press on with this list? Because the art, not only of cooking, but of restauranting, which is the creation of social spaces, is worthy of celebration, even, or perhaps especially, at this moment. Because I hope doing so can, like writing about dance, or theater, or live music, bring joy to those who can't experience it firsthand. Because the American Food Revolution in its full flower—for all its silliness and pretension, all its obnoxious trends, its opportunistic hawkers, its stubborn inequities, its unresolved prejudices, its disappointments and inanities—has been an extraordinary moment in which to live and eat and drink. And because the women and men who fed and challenged and soothed us throughout it—the bartenders and servers and designers and line cooks and barbacks and architects and dishwashers and floor managers and, yes, also the chefs—deserve to be recognized for their herculean efforts and kaleidoscopic creativity, even if their work is on hiatus, or fundamentally altered, or gone forever.
My God, just look at what didn't make my final list of 16 restaurants.
I wish you could try the weird and wonderful endive salad at Paju, in Seattle, each leaf cradling walnuts, burrata, and an emulsified, jelly-like smoked vinaigrette, like a delirious '70s canapé. I want you to tuck into classic Texas brisket alongside loamy green-curry boudin at Houston's Blood Bros. BBQ, started by Chinese American brothers and the city's first Vietnamese pitmaster. I wish for you the marrow bones at Comedor, in Austin, stacked like campfire wood. And the tempeh sandwich at Fermenter in Portland, Oregon. And bubbling-hot cheese and spicy sausage provola at Gianna, a celebration of Creole Italian, in New Orleans. And maafe, a West African stew, at YumVillage, in Detroit, and nearby, the duck doner kebab at Magnet, where the dudes with their beards and their open kitchen of wood fires and gears and wheels arrange themselves in a tableau that looks like the Diego Rivera murals of automotive production a couple of miles away. I wish you could brave, as I did, New York City's Hudson Yards, that oceanic dead zone of a neighborhood grafted onto the belly of Manhattan, for white-pepper wings and restorative tilefish soup at Momof*cku Kāwi. Or sit doing the crossword puzzle while eating sardines, butter, and honey spread on warm sourdough in a sunlit perch at Bungalow by Middle Brow, in Chicago, or while sipping natural wine at Verjus, with the Transamerica Pyramid looming outside like a giant sitcom set to show you're in San Francisco. I would insist that you visit Thalia, in New Orleans's Lower Garden District, because many people talk about opening an affordable, accessible “neighborhood restaurant,” but chefs Kristen Essig and Michael Stoltzfus actually did the thing; that you line up at Balkan Treat Box, in St. Louis, for Bosnian ćevapi on steaming pita-like somun bread; that you settle in for lunch at Scratch Farm Kitchen, in Lafayette, Louisiana, a small-town diner for the third decade of the 21st century.
In a way, the long ubiquitous small-plates-for-sharing genre has had a similar effect, making of us all nervous assistant inventory managers, in charge of calculating budget, stomach, and table space. The recent national penchant for skewers of various origins—Middle Eastern, Thai, Japanese—presents this administrative work at its most granular. Among the more delightful manifestations of the trend can be found at Brooklyn's Maison Yaki, the second restaurant from Greg Baxtrom, who also owns Olmsted, across the street. As suggested by the name, Maison Yaki marries Japanese charcoal-skewer grilling with classic French flavors. So you get a kind of lobster meatball, suggestive of both a French quenelle and Japanese tsukune, served with sauce américaine. Duck meatballs are served with a dip of tare sauce and spherified orange purée: Voilà! Duck à l'orange! It's a gimmick, yes, but a good one, clearheaded and focused. What I really fell for at Maison Yaki is that it's sneakily a sauce restaurant, a one-kitchen devotional to the great classical French “mothers”—velouté, hollandaise, béchamel, et al.—and their offspring. It's an underground Brooklyn cell of French classicists.
