New York City is one of the great food cities, has been for decades, centuries, even as a rising tide of interest in the delicious has made it possible to eat brilliantly in places around the world.
The five boroughs are home to gilded dining rooms and steamy, slightly sticky ones, to restaurants serving amazing duck or vegetables or broth or noodles, often all four — and to every sort of restaurant in between.
The city plays host to a huge variety of food fairs, to a pageant of food trucks and carts arrayed across its immigrant byways, its Midtown avenues and the canyons of Wall Street. It is where pizza rose to its highest incarnations, where you can eat a tasting menu of 15 courses and stop off for a griddled hot dog on the way home, before arising in the morning to fetch smoked fish, breakfast congee, Trinidadian doubles.
The diversity and quality of our restaurants’ offerings are staggering. If you want to eat well in New York City, just walk down the block, ask questions, walk a little farther, eat and then eat again.
That’s what we do, anyway, here at the Food section of The New York Times. We travel the city in search of the delicious and unknown, and sometimes — often! — we succeed. We taste new flavors, or old ones reimagined, and we interview the kitchen geniuses who make them happen as if by magic trick, by alchemy.
We find deliciousness in small, cramped kitchens and giant, gleaming ones, in homes and commissaries, in food stalls and on side streets and political offices and next to ball fields, in parking lots and office buildings, private homes and public schools.
Our journalism is the who and the what, the where and the why and the when of excellent eating, drinking, shopping, cooking, farming, winemaking, fishmongering and more.
We talk politics with line cooks, culture with sommeliers, history with restaurateurs, science with cheesemakers. We examine the art of hospitality, the architecture of dining rooms and kitchens, the love and craft that goes into the creation of a perfect home-cooked meal.
We cook a lot of recipes and experience the joy of passing them along to readers as if to friends, as if to family. We revel in the delight of discovery — the new and the forgotten, the dark news along with the light — and we take great pleasure in reporting on what we have found.
It is a marvelous way to make a living. And we put together The New York Times Food Festival to celebrate that world, to introduce our readers to what we cover as we cover it, to offer the chance to experience New York City as we ourselves experience it, at its best.
So we have asked the chefs and owners of more than two dozen of the city’s best restaurants to join us in Bryant Park on Saturday and Sunday to serve their interpretations of the food you might generally find at a street fair, along with the best of the Brooklyn-based, open-air food market Smorgasburg.
We put together a marketplace there, selling our favorite ingredients, and we invited some of the city’s best chefs to demonstrate their singular cooking techniques, on a stage, in conversation with our reporters. At the same time, in TheTimesCenter, nearby, we will gather some of the most influential and interesting voices in food, restaurants, policy and design to talk onstage with our reporters and critics about the subjects that fill our pages and motivate our reporting.
Finally, we’ll dive deep into the world of our restaurant critic Pete Wells, at a series of dinners at restaurants that are among his favorites in the city, dining rooms in which he’d spend his own money on his own time, for pure pleasure.
These restaurants — among them one of the city’s most exclusive sushi emporiums and what amounts to a neighborhood pizza shop — have created menus for the event that celebrate the virtues Mr. Wells highlighted in his reviews of their work. They offer a view into his sensibility: catholic in taste and technique; unstinting in excellence; and they celebrate some of what makes New York City’s restaurants great, right now, in the fall of 2019.
So far as we know, this is the first food festival The Times has presented in its 168 years in print. We very much hope that you will join us for it in New York during the first weekend in October and that it will become a regular event for us and you for years to come.
