Hello! Apologies for the brief pause in stream-of-consciousness programming. I promise I’ll be back to you with more restaurant reviews before too long. In the meantime: a gift guide!
The Venn diagram overlap of restaurants I am interested in writing about and restaurants that have well-organized merch operations is not large, I will say. But it’s hard to make money from a restaurant, and I always appreciate when they think outside the box with fun retail extensions or limited-addition project launches or even just normal shirts and hats and stuff that are actually good. I’ve rounded up some products from, about, or related to New York City restaurants I enjoy.
I am aware this short list is heavily biased toward Brooklyn and Manhattan—that’s just where my scheduled flight paths typically take me :) If you want to buy me something from this list, make it the chore jacket or the napkin rings :)
Sushi Noz • Manhattan
Sushi Noz was the first very good sushi restaurant I ever went to. It was for a press dinner that involved pairing the restaurant’s distinctive aged-fish sushi with tequila. I certainly don’t remember which tequila brand was hosting, but I still compare all omakase experiences to Sushi Noz. Six years later, the restaurant now has two Michelin stars and its own little online store, Noz Honten, which, if I’m not mistaken (very possible), translates to something like “Noz Head Office,” a perfect name. There’s a lot to love (the $2,250 set of two hinoki chairs is, sadly, sold out) but my favorite thing is this smart chore jacket, which the website says is meant to work equally well “in the kitchen of a sushi-ya, shopping at the fish market, or briskly walking through the streets of New York,” aka the three things I am usually doing.
$165, link here.
Grand Army Bar • Brooklyn
For those of you who have not been to Grand Army Bar, one of the things to know is that the menu theme rotates and it’s always fun. The current theme is astrology (the drink for my sign, Aries, is a shot of “fancy fireball,” which, lol), but over the summer it was “Grand Ole Army,” because everyone’s having a country moment these days I guess. And the merch was excellent! I like the design of this (showgirl in an oyster? yes!) plus “Grand Ole Army” is just impeccable wordplay and I want that to be rewarded.
$45, link here.
Gene’s Restaurant • Manhattan
Real ones will recall that Stream-of-consciousness Restaurant Reviews was born from a series of chaotic slides on Instagram Stories. My first subject was Gene’s Restaurant, a red sauce place in the Village founded in 1919. Here is a selection from my original review:
celery and radishes on ice when you sit down. styrofoam ceiling, bad old oil paintings everywhere, mirrors on every surface not covered by oil paintings, the other diners look like they would sue your pants off or key your car and none of them are younger than fifty and half of them are actively talking on the phone. martinis mediocre, icy, better than if they were good.
I still think of Gene’s when I try to describe what type of restaurants I want to write about in this newsletter. The exterior was captured by the late regional artist Armondo Dellasanta, whose paintings and prints are now sold by LKBurke Fine Art in Binghamton.
inquire for pricing, link here.
Vanessa’s Dumpling House • Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens
The perfect hat doesn’t exi— just kidding, it is sold by Vanessa’s Dumpling House.
$16, link here.
JG Melon • Manhattan
I normally grumble when I have to go anywhere near the Upper East Side—for many reasons, the main one being that it means my trip home is going to take an hour, minimum. But then I remember JG Melon, which helps take some of the edge off. Is it the best burger I’ve ever had? No. The best martini? No. Fries? Service? Ease of getting a table? Not those either. But something about all of those things together (plus the green checkered tablecloths) makes it just so much fun. Plus, at 50-ish years old, it’s become the kind of place (cash only, obviously) that people describe as an “institution,” which adds a certain gravitas. Inside, the decor is delightfully melon-forward. You can buy a print of the canteloupe-bearing matchbook from Charles Ryan Clarke, who photographed it for his Matchbook Diaries series.
$175, link here.
Buvette • Manhattan
Like many I have some thoughts about the Via Carota industrial complex, but it’s undeniable that any Williams and/or Sodi restaurant is going to be so so good. My go-to is Buvette, which is just one of those picture-perfect West Village cafe-bistro-bars where everything is simple but excellent and you feel like Emily in Paris when you swirl your white wine and gaze wistfully out the window. (This can be done even if you are dining with others.) My perfect dinner order would be: gougères, every vegetable dish on the menu, escargots, lots of bread, and maybe steak tartare depending on hunger levels. Buvette’s French tea towels would go well in a French country home (I want to say it’s located in one of the cold, buttery parts, like Normandy) or a tiny-but-well-appointed kitchen in a tiny-but-well-appointed West Village apartment.
$20 each, link here.
Dr. Clark • Manhattan
Once, I ate dinner at a kotatsu on the sidewalk outside Dr. Clark on the most freezing night you can imagine, so cold everyone who walked past our table literally laughed. At some point a server told us an indoor table had opened up and we actually stayed outside. It felt appropriate to act a little ridiculous, I guess, because Dr. Clark is a very ridiculous restaurant—most of the indoor tables are iconically way too small for how much food you get, and at least at the time it always seemed to be full of lithe male models and Dimes Square hangers-on, and someone was always doing karaoke—that also serves ridiculously rib-sticking food from Hokkaido. You kind of want to eat it in the cold. The star dish is jingisukan (Japanese for “Genghis Khan”) which is marinated, spiced, thinly sliced grilled lamb. Anyway, you can buy a kit to make it yourself!
$45 and up, link here.
Camillo • Brooklyn
I love how this looks like a sweatshirt from the campus store of a middle-to-large second-tier research university in the Northeast. It’s actually from Camillo, a Roman restaurant with great vibes and even better paccheri all’amatriciana. If you’re out and about in Flatbush and want a reliably delicious dinner with literally 13 different Negroni options, this is the spot. There’s one waiter there who, without exaggeration, is my favorite waiter in New York City. The text under the Janus head on the sweatshirt spells out Camillo’s specialty: pinsa, a Roman pizza-flatbread-type-thing that you can get topped with things like wild mushrooms, fior di latte, or salami from Arthur Ave.
$40, link here.
Kopitiam • Manhattan
I tend to like teeny-tiny restaurants where you order from a counter and restaurants that serve breakfast all day. Kopitiam is both. It’s where I first had nasi lemok, which is the exact kind of nibbly this-and-that plate I desire most of my waking hours: coconut-pandan rice, a halved soft boiled egg, tiny fried anchovies and peanuts, cucumber, and sambal. A simple, perfect thing. There’s lots of styles of Malaysian coffee—Kopitiam means “coffee shop”—plus amazing sweets, like pounded rice filled with palm sugar or toast with lots of kaya jam. They also sell beans and condiments and an all-time-great tote bag, which is back in limited stock at the moment after selling out. Yes, I know, I know, we all have enough tote bags, we don’t need any more tote bags. But I say this is a worthwhile tote bag.
$38, link here.
Cafe Rue Dix • Brooklyn
Cafe Rue Dix was one of the first places I went out to eat after arriving in New York, and it basically made me go damn, I’m about to be eating so well in this town, huh. In my head, I still associate this Senegalese-French spot in Crown Heights with that realization of just how many cuisines, executed at such a high quality, are present basically everywhere you look. Rue Dix is much more than just a restaurant: There’s a salon/nail studio as well as a boutique with products from both Senegal (and elsewhere in West Africa) and Brooklyn. It’s where I first learned about the traditional Senegalese incense called thiouraye, which they stock in many blends.
$48, link here.
Oti • Manhattan
I first went to Oti, a tiny self-described “Romanian(ish)” restaurant on the Lower East Side, because the chef is a friend of a friend. It was some of the most interesting food I’ve had this year! Lots of briny cheeses and smoky vegetables and paprika-y things, as you might expect, but all of it with some little extra thing that made me go Huh? (in a good way). The pickled grapes were particularly memorable. So was the tableware! A lot of it is from Dear Gloria, the ceramics studio that recently opened up in the restaurant’s basement. (Diners can go downstairs and tour it when it’s open, Thursday–Saturday.) I don’t think these napkin rings are in the rotation in the dining room, but I just love the smudge effect.
$24 for a set of 4, link here.
Greenpoint Fish & Lobster Co. • Brooklyn
The best seafood restaurants are also seafood markets, in my opinion, and Greenpoint Fish & Lobster Co is one of the greats. In this house, we believe in sustainable, local, traceable fish! You kind of can’t go wrong there, honestly, but the smoked fish paté is god tier. Anywayyyyyy this year the staff (aka the “fish buoys”) posed for a calendar. You can get a sneak peak on Instagram or just order it and be surprised.
$30, link here.