Three Potpies That Go Beyond Chicken

New York Times

13-02-2025

Ever since I was a little girl, I knew I wanted to eat potpie. Like its dessert counterpart, the potpie is everything I want in a dish: a rich amalgam of textures, always filling and eternally comforting. I grew up eating Marie Callender's mini potpies from the frozen food aisle (Marie, you'll always be famous, girl) and post-Thanksgiving potpies made with all that leftover turkey and store-bought pie crust.
It was only in adulthood (and in New York) that I realized the incredible heights a potpie could reach — I'm talking veritable clouds of puff pastry over piping hot stewed chicken and vegetables like the kind you'll find at the Waverly Inn or Kellogg's Diner — as well as the magic New York City restaurants could work with potpies of the non-chicken variety. Here are three options that have recently melted my cold, wintry heart.
We need to talk about Greenpoint. More specifically, we need to talk about that strip of Greenpoint Avenue between West Street and Transmitter Park that is teeming with restaurants: Taku Sando, El Pingüino, Radio Star, Panzón and, of course, Lingo, which opened almost two years ago. So often I'm meeting restaurants early in their lifetime, so it was nice to walk into a restaurant — this one from the chef Emily Yuen, an alum of the Japanese restaurant Bessou — that knows exactly what it's about.
Personally, I was about the beef pie, a stunning potpie served in an oval-shaped dish with a hunk of bone as a vent. 'Beef pie' as a description really undersells what makes this menu item so special because underneath that thin but crispy sheet of crust is a tantalizing beef curry with root vegetables in the style of Hokkaido, Japan, where it's prepared more like a thin stew and enriched with a buttery roux. When we dropped by for dinner on a snowy Sunday night, my friend Joey and I chipped every piece of crust off the edge of the platter long after the curry had disappeared.
27 Greenpoint Avenue (West Street)
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