How to read a restaurant menu's hidden language: codes, abbreviations, and what chefs really mean
From 'market price' to 'entrée,' the words on a Manhattan menu carry more history and more math than most diners realize.
Culture: Arts, Media and Society
Food as city life: immigrant kitchens and what the second generation changes, greenmarkets and suppliers, delivery platforms and their effect on menus, dining rooms that outlive the neighborhoods around them, and the rituals New Yorkers build around a regular table. Reported with attention to the people cooking.
How the city eats: immigrant kitchens and second generations, greenmarkets, delivery apps, and dining rooms that outlast the blocks around them.
East Harlem’s chopped cheese, and the two men who say they invented it
At Blue Sky Deli on First Avenue, the counter’s own staff can’t agree on the sandwich’s origin — which is part of why the story keeps traveling.
The unwritten rules of eating out in Manhattan: reservations, the bar seat and the check ballet
New York dining has its own etiquette — set by real estate, clocks and crowds — and knowing it makes every table better.
Boiled, baked, union-made: the New York bagel's century from Yiddish delis to every corner in town
A Polish-Jewish bread arrived with the immigrants, got unionized on the Lower East Side, and then mechanized its way to becoming the city's default breakfast.
Lunch at the Algonquin, dinner at the River Café of the mind: New York restaurants in film and literature
From Dorothy Parker's round table to the dining car of every Woody Allen fantasy, Manhattan's restaurants have starred in the city's stories as long as it has had them.
One neighborhood, many kitchens: how Manhattan's Chinatown ate its way through five waves of immigration
Cantonese beginnings, Taishanese cookery, Fujianese arrivals and East Broadway's ivory trade of flavor — Chinatown's menus are a map of migration.
The slice is the system: a short history of New York pizza by the piece
Baked for the whole pie, sold by the single piece, eaten folded on the street — the New York slice is an invention of the city's economics as much as its ovens.
Le Pavillon's long shadow: how French fine dining taught Manhattan what a restaurant could be
The French houses that ruled mid-century New York set the service, the pacing and the ambition that American fine dining still runs on.
How New York invented restaurant criticism: from anonymous dinners to the star system
The city's dining journalism began as society gossip, became a serious literary form mid-century, and turned into the data business we read today.
The Harlem Renaissance was also a dining scene: chicken and waffles, speakeasies and the tables that fed a movement
Between roughly 1918 and the mid-1930s, Harlem's dining rooms and supper clubs turned Southern cooking into uptown high culture.