WHO ATE WHERE

119 YEARS of PUNK BREAKFASTS, UPTOWN LUNCHES, DRUNKEN DEALMAKING, and IMPOSSIBLE RESERVATIONS

- MATTHEW SCHNEIER, LANE BROWN, CHRISTOPHER BONANOS, JONATHAN LETHEM, ADAM PLATT, ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ

THIS CITY Has ALWAYS LIVED in its RESTAURANTS

STORK CLUB
IN 1961 

GO TO ANY CITY in America and you can likely find a good Italian place, the hot Korean spot, and a semi-secret sushi counter. It’s only in New York that we have the rapmogul restaurant, the supermodel café, the indie-director diner, and the club kids’ breakfast nook. We go to restaurants for oxtail or cocktails, but we also go to find our people. The great New York critic Vivian Gornick recently told my colleague Hilary Reid about the first time she was taken to Café Loup on West 13th Street by an editor: “He told me it was a ‘writer restaurant.’ I was thrilled. I thought, Oh boy, I’m being initiated.”

It was not always this way. As William Grimes writes in his 2009 book, Appetite City, the word restaurant entered popular usage only about 200 years ago. Paris was the western world’s culinary capital. New York subsisted on tavern grub: beef, bread, beer, oysters. Then the Delmonico brothers gussied up their downtown café with European-style glamour and a new era was born. Henri Soulé unveiled his Pavillon, Edna Lewis put she-crab soup on the menu at Gage & Tollner, and Masa Takayama turned a Columbus Circle mall into a sushi-baller landmark. Tastes change, styles evolve; the essential fact that our restaurants are our hubs and our hideouts does not.