Hello! Mia here, filling in for Melissa Clark, who’s on vacation. I’ll start with a confession: For most of my life, I was a potato-salad hater. Too much mayonnaise, too many lackluster celery chunks, too much meh. Why smush potatoes into mayo when you could shingle them with cheese or roast them until crispy? What…
For me, the only Icee is the one that Kon Ping Young — Mr. Young to me — used to make at the Crack Seed Store in Honolulu, where I grew up, in what people in Hawaii call small-kid time. The base was always strawberry, the rosy slush whorling down into the cup. Halfway through,…
It may have been no pepperoni with extra cheese, but it still caught the eye of archaeologists working on the ruins of Pompeii, and not because they were hungry. The researchers were excavating the site earlier this year when they ran across a fresco depicting a silver platter laden with wine, fruit — and a…
There are a few summer inevitabilities: A heat wave that will test the limits of your window air-conditioner. Sweating on a subway platform. One of your favorite bands or musicians playing a show at Forest Hills Stadium. Concerts are a boon for restaurants in that tree-lined section of Queens, and, if you’re not a local,…
The new Superiority Burger on Avenue A is about 10 times larger than the original, a 240-square-foot below-grade box on East Ninth Street that was outgrown “on the first day,” according to Brooks Headley, the chef and an owner. The second location finally has room for tables, chairs and other stuff like that. It has…
SoFun Kitchen Chao Wang, whose sleek East Village restaurant, Hunan Slurp, was awarded two stars nearly five years ago by Pete Wells in The New York Times, has opened a noodle-centric sibling in Queens. The name is derived from “suo fen,” meaning slurp noodles, so slurping is the sport on display with mifen rice noodles…
Traditional American barbecue sauces have always had an air of mystery. The lengthy ingredient lists. The complex flavors. The secrecy surrounding the recipe. The mythical pit masters who vow to take their formulas to the grave. So the notion of a barbecue sauce that contains only three ingredients smacks of heresy — even more so…
The way the food writer Anya von Bremzen sees it, many cuisines can be defined by iconic dishes. In her latest book, “National Dish,” she examines six of them through a personal lens while consulting a gaggle of experts, from academics to local butchers. Beginning with French pot-au-feu in a country of richly globalized cooking,…
One of the unsung heroes of my prodigious pantry is the pesto in the freezer (I consider my freezer to be part of the pantry). It might not be as chic as chili crisp or as multitask-y as mayo, yet it adds an herby, garlicky brightness to all kinds of meals and requires no extra…
The buffet got creamed during the pandemic. Even when diners crept back into restaurants covered in hand sanitizer, a model of eating based on shared serving spoons and food seasoned with the breath of strangers seemed like a goner. But the all-you-can-eat buffet, that symbol of America’s love of choice and penchant for excess, will…