The Effect of Dining Out Too Much

Kernels, March 1 - 20, 2024.

Howdy folks,

Most of my March so far has been spent obsessing over the various parties I hosted — two Oscars dinners, an Oscars viewing party, and a Spanish-Italian feast. I have nothing to contribute to the post-Oscars discourse except to point out that this year, five foreign-language films won an award outside of the International Feature Film category, the most there have ever been. Very cool!

Kernels is a somewhat weekly column of what I’ve been up to lately. This edition touches on theater and dining!

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🚨 Dave Arnold is Back 🚨

Hash brown croquettes and a cerulean blue cocktail, from happier times (December 2019)

Until 2020, my favorite cocktail bar was Existing Conditions, which sadly did not survive the COVID pandemic. One of the owners of that bar was Dave Arnold, a legendary drink maker who helmed Booker & Dax and literally wrote the book on molecular mixology. A recent announcement that he was heading up the drinks program at the forthcoming Bar Contra was, for me, a drop everything and text your friends moment. The team promises a bar that is “à la carte and affordable, with the potential for shock and delight.” We’ll see how that goes, given its Lower East Side location. No word yet on an opening date, but if you have any connections in the beverage space and can get any more info… please tell me.

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Love & Other Drugs

Walking into The Shed’s Griffin Theater, I could have been fooled into thinking I was about to see a fashion show, not a play. The stage was a narrow, flat strip, and underlit by white LEDs, which gave the impression of a futuristic catwalk. Electronic music pulsated as attendees took their seats. The Shed, that glossy, aseptic theater located in that black hole of consumerism known as Hudson Yards, was a fitting venue to see The Effect, a drama by Lucy Prebble. First performed in 2012, it was recently revived on the West End and has landed stateside for a limited run that ends on March 31. The cold, clinical staging of director Jamie Lloyd’s production aligns well with the setting: a cold, clinical observation facility, where an experimental antidepressant is being tested on young volunteers. Secluded and monitored over the course of several days, two of the volunteers, Tristan (Paapa Essiedu) and Chloe (Taylor Russell), soon fall in love, intensely. But reasonable doubt lingers in Chloe’s mind: do you love me because I’m me, or do you love me because this experimental drug is flooding your brain with dopamine? And if one of them is on a placebo, is that better or worse? While the two try to figure out whether or not they have a future together, two of the doctors overseeing the trial grapple with their shared past.

It’s a gripping premise, and The Effect probes uncomfortable questions about our agency over our emotions, particularly love, and ponders the need to medicate away the natural, negative aspects of the human condition. (And in times like ours, with climate crises and sectarian conflicts, perhaps it’s abnormal to not be depressed.) There’s some strong bones in this play, which Prebble has slightly revised. Cultural references have been adjusted to account for American audiences, and the fact that all four actors in this cast are Black provides depth to their characters, but doesn’t define them. But I found this production of this play to be overstimulating, even though the monochromatic athleisure costumes and mimed props gesture at minimalism¹. The electronic music that plays before the show continues throughout a good chunk of the play’s duration as an underscore, and occasionally becomes deafeningly loud in between scenes. It’s a choice I found distracting, and the overall sci-fi thriller vibe seems designed to appeal to those who don’t usually attend plays.

Catwalk or stage? We report, you decide.

Three of the four actors in the cast are British vets of the West End, while Taylor Russell hails from Canada and made her stage debut last year, when this play opened in London. While I fervently believe that Russell is an emerging screen talent — she’s formidable in Waves and Bones and All — her inexperience on the stage is quite clear. The rest of the cast bring a studied presence and provide their characters with layers outside of the page, but Russell plays Chloe with a flat self-seriousness. Paapa Essiedu, best known for the television series I May Destroy You, is very good as Russell’s love interest and foil. But the more compelling duo to watch are Michele Austin and Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, who play the doctors conducting the clinical trial. Witty and wizened, their character’s histories with each other imbues each of their interactions with tension, even when it seems strictly professional.

(Funny enough, the previous time I saw something at The Shed, it was for Stephen Sondheim’s posthumus musical, Here We Are. It lampoons the ultra-wealthy, making the show just as apt a fit for its venue as The Effect, although for different reasons. At least the artistic programmers of Hudson Yards are self-aware.) 

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Hav It Your Way

Before the play, I had dinner at Hav & Mar. I had walked by this restaurant quite a few times, whenever I had the misfortune of being in the farthest reaches of Chelsea, and had assumed it to be a beautifully designed restaurant with unremarkable Italian-ish cuisine. But just as one should not always judge a book by its cover, one should not always judge an eatery by its address. It’s owned by Marcus Samuelsson, of the famed Red Rooster, and chef Fariyal Abdullahi brings a distinctly Ethiopian spin to the upscale seafood format. 

Branzino, Addis York, bread basket, Caesar salad, scallops and sunchokes, havatini.

The whole branzino was perfectly cooked and presented, buttery and butterflied. You could get that at many restaurants, but it wouldn’t also come with berbere-infused crema, pickled onions, and injera to form quasi-tacos with the fish. Another playful combination of Ethiopian and American cuisines came in the form of the Addis York, which remixes the traditional doro wot (chicken stew) into a fried chicken dish where the stew is wrapped in injera and then fried to a crisp, and placed next to a crispy drumstick. It would have been nice if there was more than one piece of chicken, if only to make it easier to share. The banana leaf snapper brought Southeast Asian flavors to mind, probably because it was served with sticky coconut rice. Somewhat confoundingly, it also came with blackened brussels sprouts, a side that also accompanied the lamb meatballs. I did have one Italian-ish dish, but it was definitely remarkable. The havatini, a bucatini bathed in butter and uni with shrimp and crab, was very fulfilling.

Overall, it was a very solid dinner, and while I wouldn’t go out of my way to eat here again, mostly because of its location, I’d come back if it were convenient. The prices are reasonable, with entrees ranging from $28-54, and the net total for food was a bit over $60 after tip and tax. (Cocktails have the standard Manhattan menu price of $18-20.)

The Dining Slump

An overly chewy pig ear at Foxface Natural.

I hadn’t realized, until sitting down at Hav & Mar, that it had been five weeks since I’d had a sit-down meal at a restaurant. That’s extremely out of character for me; usually it’s odd if I went five days without dining out. Part of that was spending all of my recent weekends hosting parties (of the dinner or housewarming kind). But another part of that was coming to a realization that I had burnt out on New York dining.

I’m sure many food-interested people have gone through this at some point in the recent past… becoming disillusioned with the PR-driven food media/social network hype machine. Prices keep rising yet reservations have gotten harder to come by. (Though it seems like menu prices have plateaued into a new normal.) It’s not that I went to a bunch of restaurants and hated them. At this point, I like to think I have a pretty good sense for what will be worth my time. But I stopped getting truly excited by New York’s hottest restaurants. 

Kangaroo tartare and dry goat.

What started this dining malaise was a disappointing meal last fall at Foxface Natural. “The city’s most original new restaurant,” declared Grub Street. “Something unusual is happening,” blared The New Yorker. The menu promised adventures on the frontiers of eating. Kangaroo tartare! Berkshire pork ear! Turns out, kangaroo doesn’t taste very different from game meat, and the pig’s ear can be very good if prepared properly, as in a Filipino sisig, but it was far too chewy here. The Boer goat, according to the menu, was “smoked low and slow,” but in reality it was dry and tough, and served atop a mushy eggplant. One of the owners served us, and when we asked questions like “what went into the stock,” she’d just say something like “oh you know, stock.” This defensive posture extended to the professional eaters. It was probably the wrong choice to send Robert Sietsema to cover Foxface Natural, it’s clearly not his vibe. When the expected pan was published, the restaurant fired back with an Instagram post even more petty than Sietsema’s preordained takedown. In that post they claim they don’t “pay a PR agency to feed garbage publications [their] content,” but given the well-timed press in every other publication… I call bullshit. While I’d like to give the restaurant another shot — perhaps it was an off day, it happens — I’m not getting paid to eat out. I have to choose my dollars and my evenings wisely.

An edit: one of the owners of Foxface Natural left a comment on this post, strongly refuting my conjecture about the nature of his restaurant’s press coverage. You can read the comment at the bottom of this page, and I’ve written a response to his response which has been published in the following newsletter.

(It was after this somewhat poor experience that I started thinking about launching this newsletter because I needed a better venue for writing about things as opposed to just posting about it on Instagram. This was also the night that my trivia team was born. So a lot of good came out of this!)

But I’m ready to get back out there into the restaurant scene… with more intention, certainly. My bimonthly visit to Rosella earlier this week reminded me that it’s nice to eat a great meal that you didn’t have to cook yourself. (After spending the past several weeks obsessing over my elaborate dinner parties, I swapped out one burnout for another.) It’s not like I haven’t forsworn fine dining altogether. Last October I traveled to Copenhagen solely to eat at Noma. The Michelin Guide defines their three-starred restaurants as “worth a special journey,” and it truly was. I can’t be contrarian about Noma: it was one of the most complete dining experiences I’ve had in my life. That doesn’t come cheap at all: dinner set me back about $600 USD, and I spent an additional $130 on wine and cocktails. But absolutely worth saving for. I’ll be back in May for Ocean Season 👀 

Game & Forest season at Noma.

As most of us know, the Noma as we know it is closing at the end of this year, when the beautiful Copenhagen barn will shutter its doors to the public. It’s unknown exactly in what form the Noma brand will take shape a year from now, but my guess is an increased focused in consumer packaged goods (see: Momofuku closing all their non-chain restaurants to sell instant noodles) and the occasional, extremely expensive pop-up (see: their ten-week Kyoto residency, where the beverage pairing is mandatory. It costs 840€, which is currently $913 USD… certainly, it’s not cheap to house dozens of staff members for three months.)

But hey… Maybe all this crankiness is just me approaching thirty.

Correction: After publishing this column, a friend informed me that my Noma news was out of date… at the start of March, they announced that instead of ending things with the Game & Forest Season at the end of this year, they’ll have one more Ocean Season in early 2025… thus postponing their closure to likely be at the end of next May. We love an eternal “going out of business” sale.

Best New to Me Restaurants of 2023

You can consider this section to be my year in review for dining, a thing that I was totally going to write more fully at one point but dropped it. But this is my list of the best restaurants that were new to me in 2023.

• Aldama

• Defonte’s Sandwich Shop

• Yubutart/Ddobar

• Clown Bar (Paris)

• Meia-Nau (Porto)

• every pintxo bar in San Sebastián

• Ursula’s breakfast burrito

• Claro

• Achilles Heel

• Nr 30 (Copenhagen)

• DD Soup Dumpling near Times Square

• Shalom Japan

And favorite bars new to me:

• Liquor tastings at Duke’s Liquor Box

• Subject

• The Wandering Barman

• Cafe La Trova (Miami)

• The Sylvester (Miami)

• Ra Ra Rhino

1. Not like I have anything to compare it to, as I’ve never seen this play before.