Pop-ups, grilled oysters, garlicky toum, and…more pop-ups

I was halfway through eating the best skewer of my life—caramelized shrimp coated in its own innards—when the sky erupted into rain. It was the kind of humid summer afternoon in Brooklyn when standing on the street feels like being inside of a mouth, and I had been lured away from the valiant efforts of my window AC to the Bótani café block party in Bed-Stuy with the promise of food from chef Phoebe Tran of the Vietnamese pop-up Bé Bếp. We crouched on the curb and slurped summer melon slushies from Mina Park of cake pop-up 99 to the soundtrack of heated mahjong games. When the sky turned black, friends crammed together under awnings or surrendered to the rain. Finally, the heat broke.

New York has always been a restaurant city—the restaurant city. Our streets are studded with taquerías and brasseries, omakase spots and 24-hour diners. Despite the wave of closures prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, whose ripple effects are still being felt nearly half a decade later, there are more than 21,000 restaurants operating in New York City today, a number that has nearly doubled since the year 2000, according to data from the New York State Department of Labor. It feels like a fool’s errand to even attempt categorizing a city’s restaurant industry of this scale, but it is now the time of year to reflect on this unique period of dining out.

This year, restaurateurs bet big on shellfish, and we were all better for it. I found myself literally moved to tears over aguachile negro and piles of peel-and-eat shrimp in the bustling backyard of Mariscos El Submarino’s new Greenpoint location this summer. Amy Hernandez and her husband, Alonso Guzman, opened their first location in 2021 in Jackson Heights, specializing in the kind of fiery seafood from Mexico’s west coast that is hard to come by here in New York. Each bite is an explosion of acidity and brine.

Seafood also doubles as dinner theater in Penny’s perfect dining room, where one can perch at the marble-topped raw bar to snack on gambas al ajillo while watching the staff shuck all manner of seafood. At the New Orleans–style oyster bar Strange Delight, I found bivalves piled on the table, from chargrilled barbecued oysters to raw ones on the half shell, alongside poached shrimp and fried saltines atop a sleek roulade tower. Paired with a wobbly gin fizz, it feels like a celebration. I’m not the only one who feels this way—check the “Do the Right Thing Way” street sign over the kitchen pass autographed by neighbor turned regular Spike Lee.

“He gave it to us after his third visit,” chef and co-owner Ham El-Waylly told me, adding that the lauded Brooklyn director went to his nearby studio to retrieve the sign and drop it off after the meal was over. I guess he wanted one more meal to ensure the magic was consistent before bestowing a literal sign of approval.

This year, restaurateurs bet big on shellfish.

Much has been written this year about the rise of the grown-up kids’ menu in New York City, a craving for “haute nostalgia” resulting in some strange permutations of comfort food, like $20 pizza rolls at the Corner Store, the new favorite of Taylor Swift and seemingly every other celebrity in Manhattan. Caviar abounds, topping cheffy chicken nuggets dusted with 24 karat gold at Coqodaq or a giant eight-inch Goldfish cracker at the newly opened Time and Tide on Park Avenue South (where else?). My first instinct is to steer clear from splashy takes on the hits. But I must confess that 2024 was the year I unexpectedly attended two birthday dinners for folks who work in the food industry at Benihana in Midtown. Why? Perhaps because the hibachi chain is the opposite of trendy, a place where there are no acquaintances to bump into in the dining room or Resy alerts required. There is no natural wine on the menu, only an abundance of lychee martinis and a giant heart-shaped pile of shrimp that thumps in time to the chef’s spatula. 

Yes, we all put on the silly paper hats, and yes, I felt nauseous afterward. The last time I had crowded around a hibachi table to observe an onion volcano was in middle school, but at least nobody was pretending the meal was “nouveau” anything. It was nostalgia, straight up, and all the better (and greasier) for it.

Some of the best meals I had all year were ephemeral, impossible to reproduce because they were made not at conventional restaurants but at pop-ups by chefs with varying degrees of interest in permanence. There was magic found in fighting over the last slices of JJ Johnson’s jerk-spiced duck on the dais in the former Great Hall at St. Bartholomew’s Church in Midtown Manhattan. The bishop was dining just a few tables away, or so we heard whispered as the in-house DJ turned up the bass on the ’90s R&B. One day, I hope the duck will appear on the menu at The Glory, Johnson’s upcoming Afro-Latino take on the American steakhouse, and I will be delighted to eat it again, but will it have the same scent of divinity?

The sidewalks have become contested territory for restaurants in New York again, as the city moved to severely restrict outdoor dining sheds from December to April after years of COVID-inspired leniency. Car owners rejoiced, but when I walk past a once-bustling corner and see a parked Subaru (or worse, a Cybertruck), my heart hurts a little. The sidewalk held a sense of holiness in October outside Huda New Levantine Bistro, where several generations of Dubbanehs were shaping, baking, and topping perfectly puffy manoushe with labneh and za’atar.

Normally based out of their Washington, DC-area bakery Z&Z, the Palestinian American family had driven up to New York to join a pop-up hosted by my friends cook Noreen Wasti and designer Arsh Raziuddin, benefiting Healing Our Homeland’s Gaza Relief Fund and the Beirut-based NGO Nation Station. I smelled the garlicky toum before I saw it, joining the back of the line that snaked around the corner on the Williamsburg street. We moved fast as hundreds of dough rounds were flipped on and off the saj, a dome-shaped metal griddle, and devoured the still-warm manoushe just as quickly.

The list of restaurants I visited is anything but extensive. These days, obtaining access to a certain echelon of New York City restaurants requires resources. One day I will finally secure a reservation at Tatiana by Kwame Onwuachi at Lincoln Center to devour short rib pastrami suya and honeynut piri piri salad alongside the glitteriest of New York. Or I’ll duck under the branches of fake jasmine and into the tamarind-scented dining room at Bungalow to gnaw on mango powder–dusted lamb chops and more regional Indian delights from the celebrity chef Vikas Khanna. (One can dream.)

In a city where hype is its own currency, an inordinate amount of attention is focused on newness and clout. But when I look back on a year of eating, very little joy came from the nights out that required reservations. Instead I found my own version of comfort at restaurants that played the hits without delusions of grandeur: dozens of savory-sweet char siu bolo bao from Mei Lai Wah in Chinatown; almost biweekly takeout orders of tender oxtail and golden lentil patties from my neighborhood favorite Kingston Bakery; every permutation of seasonal cruller fresh from the frier at Little Egg, whether drizzled with plum compote in the summer or apple cider syrup as fall unfolded. There were my few sacred spots for tuna melts with the right ratio of fish to bread: the ever-unchanged B&H Dairy, the lovingly revamped S&P Lunch, and the new-school staple Agi’s Counter, where the tuna is confited and the bread is a Pullman loaf but there’s little fanfare about it.

The truth is that I lack the stamina to set alarms months in advance as well as the deep pockets required to wade into the world of reservation reselling. And while every so often there is a special occasion worth commemorating by going to great lengths, most days, I am just a New Yorker who wants to eat well without cooking or doing the dishes. I crave a booth to duck into with friends, or a nook at the bar that’s a perfect fit for two. I’m forever seeking the exquisite sensation of letting the world collapse into the confines of our table and the food placed upon it.