Best Dishes New York Editors Ate This Week: August 4
Ajo blanco at Bartolo
I admit the description on the menu of the ajo blanco ($25) didn't originally catch me — a bowl of crema didn't seem fitting for an early dinner on a sunny Summer Friday. But our server insisted it was the hit of the menu at the new Spanish restaurant, Bartolo, and boy, he wasn't wrong. The almond crema, almost like Spanish tahini, was served with a scoop of honeydew sorbet topped with ice-cold green grapes. It was a stunning bite, rich and fresh at the same time, something I wanted to put in a to-go cup and sip as I strolled along the river. 310 West Fourth Street, near West 12th Street, West Village — Jaya Saxena, correspondent at Eater
A seasonal gratin at Lex Yard. Paul Quitoriano/Lex Yard
Tomato and zucchini gratin at Lex Yard
You can't get more seasonal than a tomato and zucchini gratin ($20), a side with main-dish aspirations at the new Lex Yard at the Waldorf Astoria from Gramercy Tavern chef Michael Anthony. The homey dish wears some cheffy details, like the perfectly mandolined coins, the artful layers, and the even-handed dusting of Parmesan. For an after-work light bite, get it with the citrus-cured sea trout ($28) and a summery white wine at the bar. Read more about the scene at the restaurant over on Eater New York's new Substack. 550 Lexington Avenue, between East 49th and 50th streets, Midtown — Melissa McCart, lead editor, Eater Northeast
The pickled okra at Bar Kabawa. Missy Frederick/Eater
Pickled okra at Bar Kabawa
I was dazzled by Bar Kabawa last week: the smart but subtle jerk daiquiri, the fiery red shrimp, the hearty and zingy pepperpot patty. But the dish that resonated the most for me involved two words I don't normally gravitate towards on a menu: salt cod and okra. Chef Paul Carmichael brings them both together with his pickled okra in salt cod XO sauce ($14). The okra achieves just the right texture — firm, with bite, and gets blanketed with a sauce offering mild heat and assertive umami. I couldn't stop eating it, and it's officially inspired an okra kick for me — I just picked up a batch of green and purple pods over the weekend at the farmers market for further experimentation. 8 Extra Place, at East First Street, East Village — Missy Frederick, cities director
The Yaddo at Saratoga Bread Basket Bakery. Nadia Chaudhury/Eater NY
The Yaddo at Saratoga Bread Basket Bakery
We trekked to upstate New York for the day to attend the Outlaw Music Festival to see Wilco and Bob Dylan. We got there early for lunch, so we hit up this bakery from my husband's youth. He recounted how he used to walk over to pick up bread for his dad and stepmother when he was a teen. We shared the Yaddo sandwich ($14.99) and the Chicken Lisa salad ($14.99). The former is a beautiful sandwich of turkey-bacon-cheddar cheese-spinach-chipotle ranch, which is built with shaved turkey packed together, sticking together with ooey-gooey cheese, and the zingy sauce, in between slices of sourdough bread. The salad came with a big plop of chunky chicken salad atop greens, walnuts, and dried cranberries, for a nice hearty side to our lunch. 65 Spring Street, Saratoga Springs — Nadia Chaudhury, editor, Northeast
Garlic knots from Madonia Bakery. Ashok Selvam/Eater Midwest
Garlic knots at Madonia Bakery
While visiting the Bronx and my new baby niece, I had to stop at Arthur Avenue and help stock my younger sister's kitchen as they experienced all the bliss and sleepless nights that come with tending to a newborn. There's a lot of love at Madonia Bakery, from cannolis filled in front of you to delightful Italian cookies. But the garlic knots stood out. On the surface, they're not the sexiest item, nothing that could compete with a shower of rainbow sprinkles on social media. But just one whiff of the buttery-garlic goodness hooked me. These simple knots were complex, more satisfying than most pizzas. You could taste a tradition of 106 years of baking with each bite. I thought about breaking out some marinara, but it truly didn't need it. I didn't expect garlic knots to be the best thing I ate on a visit that included high-end sushi, premium Korean barbecue, upscale Indian food, and more. This was an upset and a wonderful surprise. 2348 Arthur Avenue, between Crescent Avenue and East 186th Street, Belmont — Ashok Selvam, lead editor, Eater Midwest
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Eater
2 hours ago
- Eater
Here's What Bobby Hill and Pamela Adlon Have in Common
is a reporter at Eater, focusing on pop culture, policy and labor, and only the weirdest online trends. King of the Hill, Mike Judge's seminal animated series about the best darn suburban Texas family who ever lived, is back on the air, and nobody's more excited about it than Pamela Adlon. The Emmy-winning voice actor who brought Bobby Hill, the quirky son of Hank (Judge) and Peggy (Kathy Najimy) Hill to life, was more than thrilled to resurrect one of television's most unique characters, especially when she found out that everyone's favorite cartoon gourmand grew up to be a chef. On the heels of the release of King of the Hill's 14th season on Hulu, Eater caught up with Adlon about returning to the role, why chef was the perfect career choice for a guy like Bobby, and which of the Japanese-German fusion dishes on his menu she's looking forward to trying out. What was it like to inhabit the character of Bobby Hill again after 15 years away from the show? Easy as pie. He just lives inside me, and he's been dormant. It really didn't hit me until later, though, that I do a lot of cooking in real life. I'm an amateur chef, and I did a lot of cooking in my own show, Better Things. So to be able to do that with Bobby, I love that. I love that they're showing grown-up Bobby with his friends who are all off at university, and he's working in a restaurant. He's taken on some of these attributes of his dad — being a blue-collar working man, being responsible — but he's still an outside-the-box thinker who comes up with an idea like serving German-Japanese cuisine in Dallas. What was your reaction when you found out that Bobby grew up to be a chef? I freaked out. I thought it was the greatest thing ever. It just feels right. The only other option was for him to self-actualize and become a prop comic. I love that it has artistry, and also what I call 'blacksmith skills,' the stuff that all human beings need to stay alive. It just feels so natural to see Bobby inside a restaurant. Like, of course he's a chef. It really is a beautiful transition for him, and that's a testament to the writers and the creators of the show, both the OG writers and the new writers. The new writers we got are real fans who grew up with the show, and it's really sweet. They're working so hard to honor the old-school, vintage King of the Hill stuff, but infuse it with new juice. And I think they did an awesome job. Did you bring any of your own restaurant experience to the role? I never worked in a restaurant. I always wanted to have a restaurant, but I'm just an amateur cook. My experience is years of cooking for my kids and their friends. I also did a lot of cooking on Better Things, and I loved incorporating food into those scenes. Food is a big part of my life and what I do, but [the writers] didn't need me to give them any of my ideas. They already came up with all the good stuff. Bobby's German-Japanese fusion definitely sounds interesting, but I'm not so sure about eating herring tempura. Are you looking forward to recreating any of his recipes at home? Absolutely. I think if I had to pick just one, it would be the miso-wurst. Sign up for Eater's newsletter The freshest news from the food world every day Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Axios
5 hours ago
- Axios
San Antonio JINYA locations serving Italian ramen
San Antonio's two JINYA Ramen Bar locations are dishing up a new Italian-Japanese fusion creation from social media sensation Gianluca Conte — better known as QCP or the "Pasta King." The latest: The limited-time dish, called "Ciao Ramen," debuted Monday at JINYA locations nationwide. Dig in: The ramen has a tomato purée broth blended with garlic, olive oil and herbs, then folded into creamy chicken stock. It's topped with sous-vide chicken, spinach, cherry tomatoes, a drizzle of chili and basil oils, and a heap of fresh Parmesan.
Vox
5 hours ago
- Vox
Meet the Substackers who want to save the American novel
is a senior correspondent on the Culture team for Vox, where since 2016 she has covered books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater. In book world, the summer of 2025 is officially the summer of Substack. Over the past few years, Substack has been slowly building a literary scene, one in which amateurs, relative unknowns, and Pulitzer Prize-winning writers rub shoulders with one another. This spring, a series of writers — perhaps best known for their Substacks — released new fiction, leading to a burst of publicity that the critic, novelist, and Substacker Naomi Kanakia has declared 'Substack summer.' Vox Culture Culture reflects society. Get our best explainers on everything from money to entertainment to what everyone is talking about online. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. 'Is the Next Great American Novel Being Published on Substack?' asked the New Yorker in May. Substack 'has become the premier destination for literary types' unpublished musings,' announced Vulture. Can Substack move sales like BookTok can? No. But it's doing something that, for a certain set, is almost more valuable. It's giving a shot of vitality to a faltering book media ecosystem. It's building a world where everyone reads the London Review of Books, and they all have blogs. 'I myself think of BookTok as an engine for discovery, and I think Substack is an engine for discourse,' said the journalist Adrienne Westenfeld. 'BookTok is a listicle in a way. It's people recommending books that you might not have heard of. It's not as much a place for substantive dialogue about books, which is simply a limitation of short form video.' Related How BookTokers make money Three years ago, Westenfeld wrote about Substack's rising literary scene for Esquire. Now, Esquire has slashed its book coverage, and Westenfeld is writing the Substack companion to a traditionally published nonfiction book: Adam Cohen's The Captain's Dinner. That progression is, in a way, par for the course for the current moment. All the sad young literary men that are said to have disappeared are there on Substack, thriving. With both social media and Google diverting potential readers away from publications, many outlets are no longer investing in arts coverage. The literary crowd who used to hang out on what was known as 'Book Twitter' no longer gathers on what is now X. All the same, there are still people who like reading, and writing, and thinking about books. Right now, a lot of them seem to be on Substack. What strikes me most about the Substack literary scene is just how much it looks like the literary scene of 20 years ago, the one the millennials who populate Substack just missed. The novels these writers put out tend to be sprawling social fiction about the generational foibles of American families à la Jonathan Franzen. They post essays to their Substacks like they're putting blog posts on WordPress, only this time, you can add a paywall. All the sad young literary men that are said to have disappeared are there on Substack, thriving. On Substack, it's 2005 again. Substack is a lifeboat in publishing… or maybe an oar Writers can offer Substack literary credibility, while Substack can offer writers a direct and monetizable connection to their readers. In a literary landscape that feels perennially on the edge, that's a valuable attribute. 'As long as I've wanted to be a writer, as long as I've taken it seriously, it's been mostly bad news,' said the novelist and prolific Substacker Lincoln Michel. 'It's been mostly advances getting lower, articles about people reading less, book review sections closing up, less and less book coverage. Substack feels like a bit of a lifeboat, or maybe an oar tossed to you in your canoe as you're being pushed down to the waterfall. You can build up a following of people who are really interested in books and literature or whatever it is you might be writing about.' Substack summer, however, is not about the established big-name novelists. Substack summer is about writers who are not particularly famous, who found themselves amassing some tens of thousands of followers on Substack and who have recently released longform fiction. They are the ones whose works are getting discussed as central to a new literary scene. In her original 'Substack summer' post, Kanakia identified three novels of the moment as Ross Barkan's Glass Century, John Pistelli's Major Arcana, and Matthew Gasda's The Sleepers. To that list, Kanakia could easily add her own novella, Money Matters, which she published in full on Substack last November. 'No other piece of new fiction I read last year gave me a bigger jolt of readerly delight,' the New Yorker said in May of Money Matters. It wasn't quite Oprah putting Franzen's Corrections in her book club, but it was still more attention than you would reasonably expect. When Barkan and Pistelli's novels came out in April and May, they garnered a surprising amount of attention, Kanakia said. The books were both ambitious enough to be of potential interest to critics — Glass Century follows an adulterous couple from the 1970s into the present, and Major Arcana deals with a death by suicide at a university. Still, both books were from relatively small presses: Belt Publishing for Major Arcana and Tough Poets Press for Glass Century. That kind of book traditionally has a limited publicity budget, which makes it hard to get reviewed in major outlets. (Not that coverage is all that easy for anyone to get, as Michel noted.) Nonetheless, both Major Arcana and Glass Century got reviewed in the Wall Street Journal. A few weeks later, Kanakia's Money Matters, which she published directly to Substack, was written up in the New Yorker. It wasn't quite Oprah putting Franzen's Corrections in her book club, but it was still more attention than you would reasonably expect. 'I was like, 'Something's happening,'' Kanakia says. ''This is going to be big. This is going to be a moment.'' 'Had this novel been released two or three years ago, it would have been completely ignored,' says Barkan of Glass Century. 'Now it's been widely reviewed, and I credit Substack with that fully.' Pistelli's Major Arcana is even more a product of Substack than the others. Pistelli originally serialized it on Substack, and then self-published before Belt Publishing picked it up. The book didn't garner all that much attention when he was serializing it — Pistelli's feeling is that people don't go to Substack to read fiction — but after it came out in print, Substack became the peg for coverage of the book. 'A lot of the reviews, both positive and negative, treated my novel as kind of a test of whether Substack can produce a serious novel, a novel of interest,' said Pistelli. 'The verdict was mixed.' The theory that Substackers have about Substack is this: As social media and search traffic have both collapsed, the kinds of publications that usually give people their book news — newspapers, literary magazines, book specific websites — have struggled and become harder to find. Substack, which delivers directly to readers' inboxes, has emerged to fill the gap in the ecosystem. 'It's very easy to talk to people and it's very easy to get your writing out there,' said Henry Begler, who writes literary criticism on Substack. 'It feels like a real literary scene, which is something I have never been part of.' While there are lots of newsletter social platforms out there, Substack is fairly unique in that it's both a place for newsletters, which tend towards the essayistic, and, with its Twitter clone Notes app, a place for hot takes and conversations. The two formats can feed off each other. 'It creates an ongoing discussion in a longer and more considered form than it would be on Twitter, where you're just trying to get your zingers out,' says Begler. The buzzy authors of the Substack scene are also all associated with the Substack-based literary magazine The Metropolitan Review. Barkan is co-founder and editor-in-chief, and Kanakia, Pistelli, and Gasda have all written for it, as has Begler. 'Basically, we're just a group of friends online who read each other's newsletters and write for some of the same publications,' said Kanakia. For Barkan, the Metropolitan Review is at the center of a new literary movement, which he's dubbed New Romanticism, that is 'properly exploiting the original freedom promised by Internet 1.0 to yank the English language in daring, strange, and thrilling directions.' Barkan's idea is that the kind of publications that used to host such daring, strange, and thrilling speech no longer do, and the Metropolitan Review is stepping into the breach. He argues somewhat optimistically that the Metropolitan Review, which has around 22,000 subscribers, is 'one of the more widely read literary magazines in America.' The combined mythologies of Metropolitan Review and Substack summer have given these writers the beginnings of a cohesive self-identity. The world they've built with that identity is, interestingly, a bit of a throwback. The literary culture of 2005 is alive and well Here are some characteristics of the literary world of 2005: an enchantment with a group of talented young male writers who wrote primarily big social novels and a lot of excitement about the literary possibilities of a nascent blogosphere. Here are some characteristics of the Substack literary scene: a lot of young male writers, a lot of social novels, and a lot of excitement about the literary possibilities of newsletter essays. Glass Century and Major Arcana are both big, sprawling novels that take place over decades, and Glass Century, in particular, reads as though it was written under the influence of Jonathan Franzen. That's a departure from what's been more recently in vogue, like Karl Ove Knausgaard's titanic autofictional saga. 'I think there's a lot of nostalgia for a time when the novel was maybe a more discussed form or a more vital form or trying to capture a lot more of contemporary society.' 'The big trend in the world of literary fiction for the last decade or so was really autofiction, the idea of you would write a slice of life first person narrated often in a kind of transparent, not very adorned prose,' said Pistelli. 'I think there's been some desire to get back to that bigger canvas social novel that has been lost in the autofictional moment.' Literary Substack in general also seems to espouse a desire to return to a time when literature was more culturally ascendant. 'I think there's a lot of nostalgia for a time when the novel was maybe a more discussed form or a more vital form or trying to capture a lot more of contemporary society,' said Begler. 'It's partially just a shift from one mode of thinking to another, and it's partially a nostalgia for your Franzen and your David Foster Wallace and whatever.' This desire is, in its way, very Franzenian. Franzen famously wrote an essay for Harper's in 1996 in which he describes his 'despair about the American novel' after the jingoism of the lead up to the first Gulf War. Franzen thought that television was bad for the novel; he hadn't yet seen what TikTok could do to a person. While the Franzen mode pops up a lot with this crowd, there are outliers to this loose trend. Gasda's Sleeper is very much a product of millennial fiction (detached voice describing the foibles of Brooklyn literati), and Kanakia's work on Substack, which she calls her 'tales,' tends to be sparse, with little attention paid to description or setting. There's also the question of gender. The amount of men in this literary Substack scene is particularly notable in a moment so rich with essays about the disappearance of men who care about and write books. Some observers have drawn a lesson of sorts from this phenomenon: The mainstream literary world alienated men. They had to flee to Substack to build their own safe haven. 'The literary establishment treats male American writers with contempt,' wrote the writer Alex Perez on his Substack last August. His commenters agreed. The answer, they concluded, was building a platform and self publishing. 'I'm a middle-aged, straight, white, conservative, rich male who writes literary fiction. It's like a demographic poo Yahtzee. I don't stand a chance,' wrote one commenter. 'But I have 85K Twitter followers and an email list with thousands of people, so I can self-publish and sell 5,000 copies of anything I write.' 'These aren't manosphere men who are constantly raging against the influence of women on fiction. These are men just writing.' For the Metropolitan Review crowd, the amount of men in Substack's literary scene is mostly value-neutral. 'I do think there's something to the fact that when I got on Substack, I was like, 'These are people that are producing work that I'm actually interested in and I actually find compelling,' and that they were probably majority men,' said Begler. 'Overall, it's a rather welcoming environment for all,' Barkan adds. 'These aren't manosphere men who are constantly raging against the influence of women on fiction. These are men just writing.' Kanakia thinks the narrative about literary white men is more complicated than literary white men let on, but ultimately harmless. 'In 2025 the varieties of men advocating for themselves — most of them are very horrific. This variety is not so bad,' she says. 'If they want a book deal at Scribners, like, fine, if that'll make you happy. That'll be great. I have no problem with that.' In the meantime, literary Substack keeps expanding. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon just signed up. 'It's smart of him,' says Barkan. 'If I were Michael Chabon and was working on a novel, I would be on Substack. I think more literary writers who have platforms already should be there.' The closest antecedent to this moment did not last. The literary moment of 2005 was blown apart the way everything of that era was: under the pressure of the 2008 recession and the so-called Great Awokening, under the slow collapse of the blogosphere as social media took off — and everything that came along with them. Will the same thing happen to this crowd? It's hard to know for sure this early. At least for right now, Substack is having its summer.
