Grub Street

This week, we’re excited about Filipino bar snacks, lots of pies, zhuzh-y hash browns, a new pastry line (really), and some fall-friendly pizza. Get the full rundown: grubstreet.visitlink.me/pMmE…

Kay Chun, a recipe developer for New York Times Cooking and author of the new cookbook ‘Gather Around My Table,’ says she always eats salty snacks after dinner: ‘I didn’t know it was an odd thing until my husband pointed it out to me.” grubstreet.com/article/cookb…

Every Thursday, Grub Street starts to think about the weekend — specifically what we’ll be eating. We sift through the week’s openings, pop-ups, and more to help game-plan with five very promising picks. grubstreet.com/2026/10/5-new…

New York restaurateurs are increasingly drawn to the idea of remaking old spaces into the best version of their former selves. grubstreet.com/article/old-r…

‘New York’ Magazine’s restaurant critic Matthew Schneier reviews Good Time Country Buffet. It is quite simply the city’s hottest hot bar, translating a $26.99 all-you-can-eat format into a buzzy downtown cafeteria. grubstreet.com/article/good-…

Here’s your first look at Altbau, the new Williamsburg bakery from Tartine co-founder Chad Robertson. The project opens to the public this Thursday, October 29. grubstreet.com/article/chad-…

Esther Choi’s debut cookbook, ‘Hand Taste: Cook Like a Korean Grandmother,’ out next week, celebrates the power of sohn-mat, the idea that experienced cooks season their food with their hands. “Each family has their own sohn-mat, so when you taste kimchi from different families, it tastes different,” she says. “It’s your palate, but it’s also something that you can learn to hone over time.” Choi has become something of a celebrity in the Korean food world since opening Mokbar in 2014; the restaurant remains a stalwart among the carousel of rotating Chelsea Market vendors. She now lives in Flatiron with her husband and their 2-year-old son. Motherhood has deepened her love for home cooking, she says, but she isn’t ashamed to call in the obligatory Chinese food delivery order when a nasty hangover demands it: “I’ve ordered Chinese takeout everywhere else, and it never tastes the same as New York’s.” Read Choi’s full Grub Street Diet: grubstreet.visitlink.me/q2gw…

If you’re like us, you’re currently thinking about what you want to do this weekend. To help, we’ve debuted our newest guide. Every Thursday, we offer you exactly what this column’s name promises: five things to eat this weekend. We’ve sifted through the newest restaurant openings, events, and limited-run menu items so you don’t have to. This week, there are a lot of new, excellent sandwiches, so we’re dedicating the column to things served between slices of bread. Get the full rundown from Oset Babür-Winter: grubstreet.visitlink.me/1GSS…

Chef Esther Choi knows there’s nothing better for a hangover cure than Chinese delivery — especially in the city. “I’ve ordered Chinese takeout everywhere else,” she writes in this week’s Grub Diet, “and it never tastes the same as New York’s.” grubstreet.com/article/chef-…

Every Thursday, Grub Street starts to think about the weekend — specifically what we’ll be eating. We sift through the week’s openings, pop-ups, and more to help game-plan with five very promising picks. grubstreet.com/2026/10/5-new…

Crescent Duck Farm — the only duck farm left on Long Island — is open again after avian flu threatened to close it, and Long Island’s once-thriving duck industry, for good. grubstreet.com/article/cresc…

Alice Feiring has known Pascaline Lepeltier “for almost 20 years (when she was 27, she was opening the now-defunct Rouge Tomate and crashing on my sofa; together, she wrote the introduction to my book, the ‘Dirty Guide to Wine’), so I was hardly an impartial audience member.” But she was not alone in her shock last week when Lepeltier, who is also the wine director at the Tribeca restaurant Chambers, came in second place at this year’s World’s Best Sommelier event. It was not Lepeltier’s first attempt — or her first disappointment. Sommelier competitions are solidly in the realm of the arcane, and they are as much about wine knowledge as they are wine service. In one early attempt to secure the title of top sommelier of France, Lepeltier was the only woman. One task at a 2010 contest was to serve a magnum of Champagne, a big-boy bottle that Lepeltier poured perfectly nestled into her elbow, while the male competitors used two hands. While she passed that test but did not win the top award, she did collect irksome feedback from one of the judges: “She was too enthusiastic,” he told her. “Perhaps, being a sommelier wasn’t her thing,” the suggestions continued. “If she were to insist on pursuing this career, she should wear ‘un petit talon’ (a little heel) and some makeup.” “I asked her a while ago why she’d keep subjecting herself to a formal competition that has little to do with the pleasure of wine and — with its emphasis on three-star dining and blind tasting — reinforces the belief that wine is for the elite and not something to be enjoyed by everyone,” writes Feiring. “I want to do it for women,” Lepeltier said. Read more about Lepeltier’s fight to rewrite the rules of the wine world: grubstreet.visitlink.me/A25k…

How Pascaline Lepeltier, a world-famous sommelier and wine director at the New York restaurant Chambers, is fighting to become the first-ever woman named the ‘World’s Best.’ grubstreet.com/article/best-…

“On a recent afternoon, somewhere near the tail end of the American empire, I went to the movies. On a whim, I bought a box of Sno-Caps; they’d been my favorite movie candy as a kid,” writes Rachel Handler. “I mindlessly ate at least 19 of the semisweet-chocolate nonpareils until I realized I could barely taste them.” Handler and everyone in her life realized that something was amiss: commercial chocolate didn’t taste the way it used to. So, in early July, Handler entered the molten belly of the chocolate beast: Hershey, Pennsylvania. Did the people in Hershey — locals, tourists, employees — notice anything themselves? “I’m gonna be honest,” said a woman named Leanne. “I don’t like Hershey’s chocolate. I used to, but they changed it. It’s like they made it waxy.” Mandy and Adam, a 30-something couple who come to the park every year for their anniversary, were huge Reese’s fans but had noticed a shift in the peanut-butter cups, including the original, over the past few years. “It used to be more milky, and the peanut butter was more prominent. It’s a little less flavor now,” said Mandy. “It’s not as smooth and velvety anymore,” said Adam. But polling the average Hersheypark consumer wasn’t enough. Handler next turned to a food expert, spent time with Brad Reese of Reese’s, and eventually even faced the Hershey Company. Read Handler’s mad descent into the crumbling world of commercial chocolate as she searched for an answer for why chocolate has become so much worse: grubstreet.visitlink.me/YGMb…

When the grandson of the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups empire came after Hershey’s for ruining his family’s classic recipe, I followed him — and entered the molten belly of our crumbling world. grubstreet.com/article/choco…

If you’re like us, you’re thinking about what you want to do this weekend. To help with that, we’re debuting our newest guide. Every week, we will offer you exactly what the column’s name promises: five things to eat this weekend. We’ve sifted through the newest restaurant openings, events, and limited-run menu items so you don’t have to. This week, we’re excited about blackberry-filled brioche, appletinis (and applecanos), Spam musubi, coconut duck curry pastels, and a congee meant for rice nerds. Get the full rundown: grubstreet.visitlink.me/Fifq…

Officially, Alex Vadukul is a features writer for the New York ‘Times’’ “Styles” section, but readers also know him as the paper’s go-to nightlife reporter and tracker of this city’s vanishing haunts. Fittingly, he says he’s “a night-owl eater” who favors the greasy spoons and dim-lit pubs befitting a properly ink-stained wretch. Vadukul has been writing for the ‘Times’ for over a decade, and in many ways he inhabits a New York that is fighting to survive, but — as you’ll see in this week’s Grub Street Diet — manages to find pockets of history hiding in unexpected places (like Union Square). “New York is always offering up its stories,” he says. “They’re like weeds sprouting out of the sidewalk. You just have to slow down to yank them out.” Read Vadukul’s #GrubStreetDiet: grubstreet.visitlink.me/Ftlu…

In his Grub Street Diet, Alex Vadukul, features writer for the New York Times’ ‘Styles’ section, eats his way through vanishing New York: a favored (and hidden) falafel stand, Old Town Bar, and lunch at ‘the morgue,’ a.k.a. the Times’ archive room. grubstreet.com/article/alex-…

Every Thursday, Grub Street starts to think about the weekend — specifically what we’ll be eating. We sift through the week’s openings, pop-ups and more to help game plan with five very promising picks. grubstreet.com/2026/10/5-new…

For months chief restaurant critic Matthew Schneier has been answering the same question: Why pick the *43* best restaurants? “I wanted a guide that included places with the best cooking, places with the best ingredients, places with the best service, and places with the best vibes. The best bang-for-your-buck spots and the best money-is-no-object destinations,” he writes. “All of these bests need to coexist on one list, and 100 would be an unwieldy many; 20 cruelly few. So how to winnow? Same way you get to Carnegie Hall: practice.” Now in its second year of service, this roster was assembled by eating as variously and voraciously as possible. Twenty-nine of last year’s entries return; 14 new establishments have been added. See the full list of 43: grubstreet.visitlink.me/Fuiy…