Happy Festivus! Be careful in airing your grievances and performing your feats of strength. Here’s what we have for you today:
GUEST ESSAYS How we adapt our favorite restaurant recipes
I recently spent the better part of a day slowly simmering stock to make ramen at home, a soft burble calibrated to hover around 200 degrees for eight hours. The results? Way pricier and way less delicious than my local ramen spot, where the chefs are equipped to cook massive vats of stock and use each ingredient, nose-to-tail style. Adding insult to injury, the pork-sauna scent lingered in my home for a week. Not all restaurant recipes make sense for home cooks, so when we consider publishing a dish on New York Times Cooking, we essentially weigh its wonder versus its effort. First, our reporters and editors reach out directly to chefs to share their recipes. Once we take a look at the process — or step into their kitchens — we ask questions about streamlining a dish, whittling down an ingredient list (Will one fresh herb garnish suffice in place of three?), offering substitutions (Is halibut mandatory, or will another whitefish do?) or simplifying steps (Can we add the aromatics at the same time as we sauté the onions?), while ensuring none of the magic gets lost along the way. The best recipes capture the essence of a dish, and the brilliance of its chef, in a way that is actually doable for home cooks. Like Golden Diner’s tuna melt, from Sam Yoo, who fashioned his tuna salad with Big Mac flavors in mind. He squishes salt-and-vinegar chips into the sandwich, an idea that can be applied to a grilled cheese or any warm pressed sandwich cooked at home. Or they capture the expertise of their chefs with perfected recipes for bo ssam, cioppino, banana pudding and Swedish cardamom buns. Some introduce us to unexpected ingredients and ideas, like this pickle brine margarita, these olive-oil mashed potatoes perfumed with bay leaves, or the Chez Ma Tante pancakes, which turn crackly and delicious in a pool of ghee. Other recipes provide us with new formulas that can be adapted to our own palates, like the crunchy queso wrap, which readers have mixed and matched every which way. (Kudos to those who have swapped in Doritos for plain tostadas; yo quiero your version.) For more inspiration, take a peek at our staff’s favorite restaurant recipes. We guarantee they work, but there’s one drawback: You’re in charge of doing dishes.
THE BRIEF REVIEW Zimmi’s★★ | Critic’s Pick
Vanilla has a reputation for blandness in certain circles. The slender bean carries such deep connotations of mediocrity that a new Google ad mocks iPhone users by depicting their devices as blobs of pale soft serve. Enter Zimmi’s. The West Village restaurant is here to remind us of vanilla’s inherent distinctiveness. Clodagh Manning, who runs the pastry program, makes her ice cream with so many Tahitian pods that the scoop appears ashen. It tastes densely of cream and flaunts a perfume that recalls fancy marshmallows. “I don’t recognize it as vanilla,” a companion said. This dessert isn’t afraid to alienate. In a city rife with mega-brasseries, Zimmi’s, from the chef Maxime Pradié and the restaurateur Jenni Guizio, is an uncompromising bistro, that doesn’t lean on steak frites or shellfish towers. In this small room, curtained off from Bedford Street, folks who look like they raided the alpaca department at Nordstrom eat vol-au-vents filled with airy pike quenelles. Pradié, formerly of Lodi, showcases dishes that pay homage to the regional countryside cooking of France. Crisp socca comes topped with sliced bottarga, faintly orange and deeply briny. The chef whips up a bracing artichoke soup, cutting the mild astringency with a slab of foie. He sends out tender saupiquet stews, letting the black Beldi olives speak louder than the grassy lamb. And he drenches chicken in a tangy sauce moutarde, spiked with heavy cream and teeming with Vegemite levels of savoriness. For dessert, the Proustian madeleines are an option, but I like the quince tart. It comes with a scoop of something you might have feelings about. Address: 72 Bedford Street (Commerce Street), West Village; 646-770-9038; zimmisnyc.com Recommended Dishes: Legumes frits, soupe aux artichauts, Snowdance chicken with sauce moutarde, agneau en saupiquet, vanilla ice cream. Price: $$$$ Wheelchair Access: The entrance to Zimmi’s is at ground level and the restaurant is wheelchair accessible; one restroom accommodates a wheelchair. OPENING(S) OF THE WEEK Lalyn and KelangBetween Bong, Hōp, the newly opened Bistro Ha and one million new Thai restaurants, this has been a banner year for Southeast Asian food in New York City, in case you haven’t noticed. And it’s not over yet: Lalyn, a new Thai restaurant with “urban sophistication” from the restaurateur Olie Sangpetpairot is now open near Penn Station. Andeveryone I know is buzzing about Kelang over in Greenpoint, where Malaysian food and Italian food come together on your plate in the form of stracciatella and sambal oil and other fusion-leaning offerings. More restaurant news →
ON THE JOB At the Plaza HotelThe final “On the Job” of the year takes us inside the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan (made famous by Eloise), where Priya Krishna shadowed Syed Rahmani, a Bangladeshi immigrant and longtime in-room dining server at the hotel. When a one-night stay can cost five figures, no room service detail is too small. Watch the video → Have New York City restaurant questions? Send us a note here. Follow NYT Food on TikTok and NYT Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Pinterest.
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