Happy Tuesday: Have you voted yet, New Yorkers? Early voting ends on Sunday, Nov. 2 and Election Day is Nov. 4. (Find your polling site here.) Sunday is also New York City Marathon day, so if you have a car, leave it parked. Instead, consider finding your nearest viewing area along the marathon route and take in a little triumph of the human spirit. Here’s what we’ve got for today:
The city’s most Off Broadway play is at a Brooklyn dinerWhen my friend Kasia sent me a TikTok about the second run of the play “Oh, Honey,” I knew I had to go. Not because I’m necessarily a stage play head — though I have seen “Oh, Mary!” three times this year, brag — but because this site-specific play takes place in the restaurant Little Egg in Prospect Heights, albeit only in a literal sense. (We never find out where it takes place figuratively.) The setting is both out of convenience and by design: Jeana Scotti, the playwright and educator behind “Oh, Honey,” also works at Little Egg. The play follows a group of four women who meet at a diner every month to discuss the sexual assault cases against their college-age sons, among other things, a plot “loosely inspired” by a 2017 New York Times article. After catching the play on Saturday night — the 27-seat show is sold out, but joining the wait list is a great bet — I got on the phone with Scotti to talk about what it’s like to stage a play in a restaurant. This interview has been edited and condensed. How did you get permission to stage the play at Little Egg?Evan Hanczor, the owner, and Nora Kaye, the amazing manager, were like, two years ago, we want it to be a community space, if anyone wants to rent out the space for anything, we can offer reduced rates. And I was like, Well, can I do a production? And he said yes. I had been working there for about a year at that time and just observing from afar. I was like, I know where the perfect focal point would be to stage a play. What about the play being in an actual restaurant do you feel adds to the show that a theater might take away from it?I think in restaurants there’s a certain level of everyone being in their own world. Everyone is having their own conversations around you, too. And as servers, we don’t hear everything and we’re not intentionally trying to listen, but you do get bits and pieces of conversations. And I think the inherent theatrical nature of a restaurant space, and being able to observe a conversation that maybe you’re not supposed to as another diner, felt very particular to this piece — of listening in on this conversation where they think they’re not being listened to. One of the most impactful scenes in the play features a monologue from Mari, the women’s regular server. How much of her role did you pull from your own experience?The server character was my way into the play, because I’m not one of these mothers. I think as playwrights when we have truths in the play about ourselves, we tend to want to hide that. But I think it’s kind of apparent that a lot of that is my experience. I think I’ve had to, throughout my time, reckon a lot with choosing an artistic lifestyle that isn’t always financially stable, and the guilt of that and having obligations. Part of the show is that the actors come through Little Egg’s front door multiple times. Where do they stand? I kept on stressing out that a random person would walk into the restaurant in the middle of the play!Yeah, shout out to our lighting designer, Attilio Rigotti. He has a cue light set up there. And so our wonderful stage manager, Sarah Jones, communicates with our assistant stage manager, Tea Rigor. Tea will then tell the actors to go in when the light goes off. We have a heated back patio at Little Egg. It’s obviously not the most comfortable scenario, so shout out to all of the actors and our stage managers, too, to just be willing to jump into a nontraditional experience.
THE RESTAURANT REVIEW Korai KitchenHop on a PATH train and in 45ish minutes you could be dining at this Bangladeshi restaurant in Jersey City, opened by a mother and daughter in 2018 as a buffet. The restaurant now serves a $95 tasting menu, but this is no tweezered small-plates spot — expect a sumptuous feast of home-style cooking with “rice pairings.” Read the review → OPENING OF THE WEEK Metro CinemaA hot new birthday party option just dropped: Metro Cinema in Chelsea promises “an elegant dinner in your own private screening room.” For $50 per person, groups of four to 20 people get to select a family-style menu and then watch a movie of their choosing — and there are many to choose from — including new releases like Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” and “One Battle After Another.” Personally, I’d go with the 1995 masterpiece “Babe” and call it a day. More restaurant openings →
NOTICING Is it cake? Or is it sandwich?I’ve been thinking a lot about MeMe’s Diner lately, which walked so many a zany, modern diner could run. (It also happened to occupy the space on Washington Avenue that’s now home to Little Egg.) If you don’t follow Libby Willis of MeMe’s on Instagram, I highly recommend doing so: Recently, she’s been posting these sandwich cakes she makes. They look like sheet cakes on the outside but feature ingredients like white bread, egg salad, shaved beets, cured meats and pickles on the inside. The piped “frosting” is cream cheese. Embrace the sandwich cake → Have New York City restaurant questions? Send us a note here. Follow NYT Food on TikTok and NYT Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Pinterest.
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