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FROM OUR CHIEF CRITICS Why do the top sushi restaurants leave us so bored, and so broke?
Hiss, hiss, hiss. Up and down the marble counter, the sushi chefs are brandishing their weapons. The first time it’s a thrill, the blue gush of the hand torch, the whoosh like an F-16 fighter jet taking flight. The fifth time it’s a tic. Piece after piece of fish goes under the flame, until the flavor is more smoke than sea, until everything tastes the same. In a 1963 column about new Japanese restaurants in Manhattan, the New York Times food editor Craig Claiborne wrote that sushi “may seem a trifle too ‘far out’ for many American palates.” Then came the California roll, popularized by Ichiro Mashita in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles, and the flocking of Hollywood stars and studio heads to sushi bars like Osho, conveniently located next to the 20th Century Fox lot. By 1987, Charlie Sheen, playing a whippersnapper stockbroker in the movie “Wall Street,” was churning out rice balls eight at a time from a home nigiri-making machine in his penthouse. That nigiri-maker might have been an omen for what was to come: the co-opting of sushi by finance bros, favoring optimization and spectacle over craft, in an eerie Benihana-fication of the American sushi-ya. Read the story →
THE BRIEF REVIEW Barker★ | Critic’s Pick Restaurants aren’t always our first destination for nourishment these days. They’re occasional spaces, built for pleasure. Or utility. But at Barker, a new daytime cafe in Bed-Stuy, the chefs Henry Wright and Gracie Gardner make a compelling case for the restorative potential of the dining room. Mr. Wright and Ms. Gardner, who are married, met while working at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, but almost everything about Barker — the cafeteria seating, the counter service — feels light years away from the strict precision of fine dining. Until it’s time to eat. The chalkboard menu of sandwiches, soups and salads is a modest advertisement for the couple’s careful, from-scratch cooking, which lifts up these quotidian staples. I’m sure there are people who would argue that there’s nothing better than a cheap and unpretentious Boar’s Head bodega sandwich. And to those people I’m saying, no offense, but this is actually better. For crunch, Mr. Wright adds fried matchstick potatoes. The sweet potato sandwich is equally satisfying with velvety cumin-crusted rounds between sturdy slices of pizza bianca. Add a cup of herby chicken soup for one of the best soup-and-sandwich combos in the city. Ms. Gardener’s pastries are an excellent excuse to eat dessert with lunch, starting with the nanaimo bar, which layers coconut, vanilla frosting and slick chocolate ganache. The “hippie cookie” crusted with seeds is more like an urban energy bar: rough yet endearing. Barker’s lofty space outfitted in cool white and wood tones caters to a changing neighborhood, where young creatives might hash out their latest project over jammy eggs. Nevertheless, what Mr. Wright and Ms. Gardener have going here is a reminder that simple cooking is, at its best, far from basic. Address: 395 Nostrand Avenue (Putnam Avenue); Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn; instagram.com/barker.newyork. Recommended Dishes: All the sandwiches, including cold roast beef, spiced sweet potato, smoked turkey, ham and cheese; chicken noodle soup; curried chicken spoon salad; pastries such as the nanaimo bar, apple fritter and “hippie cookie” as well as the weekend-only Turkish eggs, yogurt and Lamb shoulder plate. Price: Sandwiches, $14 to $15; soups, $7 to $15; salads, $13 to $16; pastries, $5; weekend specials like yogurt with granola, Turkish eggs or lamb shoulder roast, $7 to $24. Wheelchair Access: There is accessible seating available in the dining room, but bathrooms can only be reached by stairs. NOTICING Is Goop Kitchen the new Maple?If you were wondering how Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop Kitchen plans to open seven locations by the end of the year, the answer is venture capital: In 2024, the company raised $15 million in an investment round led by Travis Kalanick, the co-founder and former chief executive of Uber. Goop Kitchen doesn’t do dining in — only pickup or delivery — which is vaguely reminiscent of Maple, another delivery-only company that attempted the direct-to-consumer lunch and dinner model. As a then-25-year-old editorial assistant working near a still-under-construction One World Trade Center, I vividly remember its baby-chick yellow bags, its Thanksgiving dinner offering, and the cellophane-wrapped sugar cookies. The thing that ended Maple after just two short years was that it wasn’t able to scale with such low prices (lunch for $12, dinner for $15, tip and delivery included) and lost money on every meal served in 2015, its first year in business. The Goop Kitchen menu is far more expansive and expensive, with menu items priced from $4.95 for a chocolate chip cookie to $30 for a whole rotisserie chicken, with many $13 to $19 salads in between. The company will target neighborhoods like the Upper East Side and Williamsburg and not just business districts like Midtown or the Financial District. Maple also didn’t have the godmother of the clean-girl aesthetic at its helm, which might help Goop Kitchen last longer in the famously rough waters of New York City lunch culture.
RESTAURANT AT HOME California rolls from Yanagi SushiBecause most of us can’t afford to dine out at the nation’s most exclusive sushi restaurants on a regular basis, there’s always the option to make your own at home. (It might not be as pretty, but it sure will taste good, especially if you use high quality ingredients.) Last year, Eric Kim got the recipe for the California roll from Yanagi Sushi in Honolulu, open since 1978. As a bonus, here’s a five-star recipe for making sushi rice at home. See the recipe → 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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