Hi friends, I hope you all made it through this weekend’s heat wave in good shape. (I ran straight to the beach.) I’m back with another edition of reader questions and, boy, do we have an interesting mix this month. There’s a visitor from the South searching for “decent Thai” — and we can do…
A melody drifted across the dining room like a smoke ring: “Tall and tan and young and lovely. …” The singer, sitting at the end of the bar, had Astrud Gilberto’s sultry contralto and calm, unrushed phrasing. There was a guitarist, too, tracing bossa nova rhythms that the bartenders fell into each time they raised…
On a recent Friday morning, the cookbook author Molly Baz put the finishing touch on a new recipe for shingled tomato toast with sesame mayo. Reaching into a wooden salt cellar, she grabbed a three-finger pinch of salt and showered her dish. Not just any salt — Diamond Crystal kosher salt. “It’s just the only…
Headliner Yemen Café What does owning restaurants have in common with flying? Both are risky endeavors, and both are Akram Nassir’s careers. He’s a captain for Delta Air Lines and has just opened another Yemen Café. While achieving his dream of becoming a pilot, he went into the restaurant business with his father and uncle.…
This August menu is essentially designed for beating the heat on seriously sweltering summer days, when ice-cold everything seems appropriate. We’re on the right track, I think, with a chilled soup, followed by a room-temperature vegetable salad and a dessert straight from the refrigerator. The avocado soup — a cool, savory smoothie of avocado, lime…
It’s cruel that the best time of year to bake is also when you’re least likely to want to turn on the oven, and yet every summer I heat up the kitchen baking cherry pie and blueberry crisp. Desserts made with peak fruit are irresistible, and I mean that literally: I can’t resist them. I…
Taste56, a new wine shop in Dumbo, Brooklyn, takes an uncommon approach. Though you can count on finding white, red, rosé and sparkling wines, they are presented according to what the store calls “palate character,” instead of by geography or varietal. There is a limited inventory of about 300 labels. Consider whites that are bright…
When David Yun commissioned a custom sign to hang on the wall of his Korean-Southern tapas restaurant, C as in Charlie, he chose LED lighting over neon so that he could change the sign’s color on a whim. Soon, though, the hazy red glow spilling out onto the street became a calling card for the…
August starts tomorrow, which means summer is at least halfway over and it’s high time to ask yourself: Have I eaten enough tomatoes? The correct answer, of course, is “most certainly not.” Ham El-Waylly is here to remedy this with his new recipe for grated tomato pasta (above). This is exactly the sort of thing…
Good morning. There’s some very nice writing about recipes in The New York Times Magazine this week, not surprisingly under the byline of Ligaya Mishan. Her subject is a hummus recipe (above), dating back to 13th century Syria, that Lucien Zayan of the Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn served at a dinner series he…