It’s early on a Tuesday morning in September when Michael Whiteman enters the dining room of the Brooklyn townhouse he shares with his wife, Rozanne Gold. Gold has set the table in their high-ceilinged living room. On the mantel sits a Mexican tree of life. On the wall, a 19th-century Buddhist shrine; on the table, a still life–perfect spread. “Here’s some of Michael’s bread,” Gold says. “Some berries, a Genovese cake I kind of made up, some holey Swiss cheese, butter. And, oh, have you had my Venetian Wine Cake? This is a cake with a story.”

Formerly the chef for Mayor Ed Koch, Gold is a poet and four-time James Beard Award–winning cookbook author. Now she works as a death doula and Jungian psychoanalyst. But the story of the Venetian Wine Cake would have to wait. Gold has to run out to see a client, and I am here to speak to Whiteman, who, at 88, is the last surviving member of the original team that opened Windows on the World.

Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 107th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, opened in 1976, which would have made it 50 years old today. Founded by Joe Baum and Whiteman, the 350-seat space featured design by Milton Glaser and food by James Beard and Barbara Kafka. In 2000, a year before 9/11, it was the highest-grossing restaurant in the country; on the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attack, renewed interest in the restaurant — and all sorts of memorabilia — is high. A new documentary, from the makers of RBG, called Top of the World, premiered on CNN on September 7.

We tend to think of 9/11 either as one big tragedy or, more devastatingly, 2,977 individual tragedies that circled out in ever-widening rings of suffering. What one doesn’t often think of are the institutions, like Cantor Fitzgerald, which lost half of its employees, or Marsh & McLennan Companies (358), or the more than 20 restaurants housed in the towers, the highest and by far the most famous of which was Windows on the World. Not only did Windows lose more than 70 employees there that day, but the restaurant itself was gone. Many remember its demise. Whiteman, a trim and spry man with long white hair, is the sole witness to the history of its construction.

“There’s a whole new two generations of people in New York who were not around in 1976 and don’t remember the shit that the city was in at the time.” he tells me. “When the Towers were first being constructed, the Bronx was burning and the city was bankrupt. Graffiti had turned ugly. Nobody, especially tourists, went south of 34th Street. Wall Street was not only broke, but it was a wasteland. Tumbleweed city. The Towers were hated, loathed as they were coming up. They were called two packing cases, two file cabinets. Ada Louise Huxtable called them two tombstones. And the Port Authority, the building’s owner, was spending vast amounts of money that everybody knew was going to be reflected in their tolls sooner. So that made the city grumpy.”  He gingerly takes a slice of Genovese cake. “We knew that Windows was not going to be just a restaurant, but rather a reflection of the two towers. And I think the people in the city knew if the restaurant was a bust, it was one more heartbreak that they couldn’t take. As luck would have it, it wasn’t a bust. The city embraced it.”

At the time, Whiteman was working with restaurateur Joe Baum, who had become the president of Restaurant Associates. Baum specialized in large, theatrical “mass and class” establishments like Tavern on the Green, The Four Seasons, and La Fonda Del Sol. He was built for a project like Windows, a restaurant meant to lure, endear, and seduce a clientele. But by 1971, he had been pushed out of Restaurant Associates. “His restaurants never made any money,” explains Whiteman, “and they were frightfully expensive.” Whiteman, who had founded Nation’s Restaurant News in 1967, was also looking for a job. “I lost a boardroom battle because I was running it as a renegade editor,” he explains of his departure from the still-extant publication. “I was writing about industry problems, and it was just alien to them that a newspaper for the industry would also say bad things about the industry.”

The two formed Baum + Whiteman and soon thereafter got the contract with the New York Port Authority — “the largest consulting job in the restaurant world,” says Whiteman — to build Windows. The original team included Baum, Dennis Sweeney, Kafka, Glaser, and architect Warren Platner. “Much later, Jacques Pépin was brought on to help develop the commissary because he had done that for Howard Johnson,” Whiteman says. “So he made soups and sauces.”

And James Beard, I point out.

“I’m sorry, I forgot Jim,” Whiteman says, chuckling. “He was an interesting fellow. He could be pissy and he could be withholding. Joe used to say, ‘You have to press the right button. You have to ask the right question. You can ask 12 questions and not get an answer until you ask the right one.’ But if you pressed the right button, then he was a fountain.” Beard, like Kafka, was one of the many voices chiming in on the menu while the chef was an Austrian named Hermann Reiner. “I remember Beard came into one of the meetings and said, ‘Hot food on cold food.’ And I said, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ And he said, ‘I’ve just come back from San Francisco and that’s what they’re doing. They’re putting a salad on the plate and they’re putting a protein on it, fabulous vinaigrette and baby herbs and all kinds of things.’ Basically what Beard was describing was a chicken Caesar, if you want to reduce it to that.”

The then-new restaurant was featured on New York’s cover in May 1976.

Though Baum and Whiteman were responsible for the design and the concept of Windows, the restaurant was owned by Hilton International. “They were a hotel company; they had no idea how to run a restaurant,” Whiteman says. What Hilton could do was help bring to life the vision of a restaurant that truly reflected the world’s cooking. “For instance, the yakitori chef was Japanese and wearing a traditional outfit,” Whiteman tells me. “That was one benefit of Hilton — they could fly anyone in.” The restaurant itself was divided into different areas. One was Cellar in the Sky: “It was, as far as I know, the first restaurant to introduce not a tasting dinner, but a real dinner with the wines accompanying the dinner.” That was run by chef Eberhard Müller (he later founded Satur Farms).

The first attack on the World Trade Center, on February 26, 1993, killed six people, including Wilfredo Mercado, a Windows employee, and marked the end of Windows’ first era. “The bombing destroyed our loading dock and all the infrastructure we needed to get our product up to the 106th floor,” Whiteman explains. The restaurant closed, which, incidentally, gave the Port Authority a chance to finally remove all the asbestos — which it had done to the rest of the building already — and renovate. When the Port Authority put out an RFP for a new operator, Whiteman wanted to apply to get the place back but says Baum wasn’t interested: “He had a deep-seated fear of failure.” Eventually, the company applied anyway. “Rozanne designed the menus,” Whiteman says. “Eventually, it was between us, Michael Stillman, and Warner LeRoy. We got the job.”

Though the new restaurant was a success — “The last year it was operational, it did $37 million in sales,” Whiteman points out — it was a far cry from the original iteration. “When it first opened, we were innovative,” says Whiteman. “But the second time around, Windows wasn’t particularly important. A whole world of gastronomy had developed in the 1970s, and the excitement of food was at a much higher level than it was in ’76.”

In 2001, Whiteman, like so many others, watched the attacks unfold on TV. “Rozanne got a call that said, ‘Turn on the television,’” recalls Whiteman. “We did and watched the disaster. Then the city got very quiet.” Seeing the towers come down, Whiteman didn’t yet realize that nobody had survived from the restaurant or, indeed, from above the 99th floor. “Later that day, we were sitting in the backyard and I went, ‘Why the hell is anybody barbecuing?’ And then I realized that nobody was barbecuing. It was the breeze carrying the odor from the Trade Center across Brooklyn.”

All these years later, the memory of the restaurant has stayed with Whiteman. “I’d been working on the Trade Center since 1971, and so a large hunk of my life was entangled with it,” he says, “and so a lot of loss, not just the restaurant and not, I’m speaking personally now, and not just the people who were lost in it, but the restaurant was part of our identity. That left a permanent pit.” Nearby in another Brooklyn garden, the wind carried documents fluttering from Ground Zero. One was a letter to Joe Baum, written years before to praise Windows’ reopening: “I felt as though I died and went to heaven,” it read, ”which I imagine is not too far from the 107th floor!”

Baum is gone, Kafka is gone, Sweeney and Glaser are gone. “Hugh Hardy’s gone. Warren Platner’s gone,” says Whiteman, continuing the Kaddish. And neither Windows nor the World onto which it looked exists. “Whether the second time around it was a grand innovation, which it wasn’t, it certainly still remained a big symbol in New York. And its existence was an act of redemption for those two ugly packing crates. It wasn’t the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building, but it was right up there as a symbol. And symbols,” he says, “are important.”

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The artist Lucien Smith has died at 37, according to ARTnews. His death was confirmed by his longtime friend and gallerist Bill Powers, who told the publication, “Lucien lives in a wordless place inside us now.” No cause of death was given.

Smith was a fine artist, primarily working in painting and sculpture, and a restless creative spirit who dabbled in everything from NFTs to film and restaurants. He was an inescapable presence on the downtown social scene of the past 15 years. He stayed out late, possessed an impish sense of humor, and seemed to know everybody. He was also deeply thoughtful, a perceptive analyst of his own successes and failures, and, in recent years, devoted to finding new ways to support younger artists.

Smith’s career took off at a young age. While still an undergrad at Cooper Union, he found a patron: Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, the curator and collector who runs the blue-chip gallery Salon 94. She bought a painting from his senior-thesis show in 2011 and became a supporter. “I didn’t really come from money,” Smith told the New York Times a few years later. “So I wanted my thesis show to grab as much attention as possible. Jeanne, she bought one of the first paintings I showed.” Smith grew up in Southern California, the child of a Filipino mother and Black father who bounced around a lot. “I’ve had to move to so many different schools because of my parents’ situation that I was thrown into so many different identities,” he told Office Magazine. “Going from public school to private school, playing sports, and being more art-oriented. I’ve always been a chameleon.”

In 2012, Powers hosted Smith’s first solo gallery show, “Good Vibrations,” at his space Half Gallery. “It was all appropriated guitar bodies which Lucien had then turned into wall sculpture by either painting or adorning them with bottle caps, glitter, tin foil, etc.,” Powers told Office in 2018. “Think John Armleder meets junkyard Duchamp.” Soon, Smith had the support of megawatt art dealers like David Zwirner and Alberto Mugrabi. Asked in 2013 whom he had his eye on, Mugrabi told Artsy, “I will be watching Lucien Smith because he brings me sunshine in the rain.”

Early in his career, Smith produced a series of works called the “Rain Paintings,” in which he used a fire extinguisher to create abstract fields of paint on large canvases. Many of these pieces, which initially sold in the low five figures, quickly ended up on the secondary auction market, where their prices climbed as high as $389,000. He became a poster boy for a new wave of speculative money washing into the art world. He benefited from and wrestled with his position as a “wunderkind,” as the New York Times dubbed him in 2013. In 2014, he bought a house in Montauk and started spending most of his time there. He studied storm patterns for inspiration. He played in bands and DJ’d. “I really want to stay out of the art world right now,” he told the Observer at the time. In 2015, he returned with another show at Half Gallery. “This is the time in my life when I’m maturing,” he told T Magazine. “Most of your favorite artists, if you ask them to show you work they made when they were 21, they would blush. The work I was making when I was 21 was selling for half a million.” He continued, “Work that I was making when I was 21 was on the cover of Sotheby’s catalogues. That pissed a lot of people off, but that’s an accomplishment.” He sometimes ruffled feathers. In 2015, Greenberg Rohatyn and the real-estate developer Keith Rubenstein threw a party in a South Bronx warehouse building that Smith decorated with sculptures he’d made of bullet-riddled cars and burning trash cans, sparking criticism from then–City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito.

Smith’s creative ambitions often outstripped the traditions of the art world. In 2017, he launched Serving the People, a multidisciplinary platform that sought to branch out beyond the gallery system. He wanted to “nourish emerging talent in art, music, and film,” he said in an interview the following year. “Our goal is to provide an alternative platform for creative inquiry and experimentation. We want to help bring awareness to the unrefined, uncommercial, and create a market for it as well.” Serving the People hosted regular workshops and discussion groups for young creatives. Smith’s network of friends and collaborators extended beyond the world of blue-chip galleries to include fashion designers like Tremaine Emory, Heron Preston, and Virgil Abloh, who in 2018 hosted an exhibition of Smith’s paintings at his Soho flagship Off-White store.

In recent years, Smith continued exhibiting a steady stream of work. In 2024, I attended an opening of his work at Kapp Kapp gallery called “A Day Above Ground Is a Good One,” featuring a number of small sculptures and paintings; during the opening, Smith sat inside a small dog crate in the middle of the gallery floor, chatting with bemused visitors. In 2025, with nearly no restaurant experience, he opened FOOD, an homage to a restaurant of the same name founded in the 1970s by the legendary Soho artist Gordon Matta-Clark with the dancer and photographer Carol Goodden as a canteen for the neighborhood’s art scene. Smith wanted to offer something similar to the creatives working in and around Dimes Square. “This is my Soho,” Smith told this magazine, “and I’m very into it.” He was a ubiquitous presence at the restaurant, often working behind the counter or chatting with an endless parade of passing friends all evening on the street outside. The tiny restaurant’s line of stools was often occupied by Smith’s friends and peers from the art, fashion, and music scenes. Last week, FOOD updated its Instagram bio: “closed until further notice.”

In late August, Smith created a new round of Rain Paintings on a baseball field in Montauk. “Life has taken me full circle,” Smith told Artnet. “I think it is time to return to the process I was given.” The paintings were created for an upcoming exhibition titled “Delay of Game” at Tripoli Gallery, set to open on September 12.

Smith was excited about revisiting the practice that had put him on the map more than a decade earlier. “I’m doing something. Staging a comeback,” he texted me recently. “Art world is zzzzz. I think it’s time to make a move.”

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Everyone needs a neighborhood joint, that back-pocket place where it’s easy to stop by without making a reservation a month in advance, order dinner without looking at the menu, and return again and again whenever the mood strikes. (Ideally, that happens quite often.) The city’s restaurateurs know this as well as anyone, and many are, right now, busy building the reinvigorated pizzerias, high-energy brasseries, overachieving cafés, and down-home country kitchens that — if all goes according to plan — will feel lived in from the moment they open their doors. Each of the 23 spots on this list is a wholly original creation — a nouveau cha chaan teng, a Turkish hot spot, a Mexican cocktail bar — that, taken together, speak to the power of familiarity: Who doesn’t want to drop in to a dining room and feel at home from the first visit?

While Keith McNally’s son George opens his first restaurant (Faux in Tribeca), Dad’s former Soho canteen will become Straker’s, British chef Thomas Straker’s American arrival. His style, as at the London original, is English food with an Italian influence: Expect potato galettes with crab, tuna-belly carpaccio, and various flatbreads from the open kitchen’s wood-burning oven. 59 Grand St.

Mid-September is the target debut date for Bar à Part, the long-in-the-works offshoot of Jenni Guizio and chef Maxime Pradié’s Zimmi’s. The plan is for an all-day wine bar and café with baked goods from executive pastry chef Clodagh Manning and an emphasis on homemade charcuterie from Pradié. 72 Bedford St.

This city’s most restless French chef has combined his Upper West Side properties into a single entity: Brasserie Boulud. The burgundy leather banquettes and all-day hours will no doubt draw tourists and theatergoers plus any neighborhood parents looking to placate their toddlers with ultraflaky croissants. 1900 Broadway

Austin Johnson, last seen at One White Street and Rigor Hill Market in Tribeca, is striking out on his own at H. Valley, a market featuring the expected array of pastries, breakfast sandwiches, and rotisserie chicken to go, plus unique additions like a weekends-only omelet station and housemade dog food. 569 Hudson St.

Chez Fifi partner Justin Wands is readying Cafe Wands, where pastry chef Camari Mick’s high-end PB&Js and breakfast sandwiches vie for attention with superpremium coffee offerings, including $40 pours and reservation-only cupping experiences. 215 Union St., Carroll Gardens

Fish and chips from Chippy’s. Photo: Courtesy of Chippy’s

Patricia Howard and Ed Szymanski are taking their famously airy, lace-edged fish and classic chips from Dame and making the dish the star at Chippy’s, a counter-service joint slated to open in October. They’re also adding an 18-seat wine bar, Friars, which will have its own entrance at the same address. 21 E. 7th St.

After nearly a decadelong hiatus, Carnegie Deli’s glowing signage will light up Seventh Avenue in late September. The pastrami and cheesecake haven’t changed; the décor has, courtesy of a face-lift from the firm that designed Hamburger America. (The Wall of Fame remains intact.) 834 Seventh Ave.

Chef Albin Vincent turned the Upper East Side into a destination for standout Sri Lankan and Southern Indian cooking at Lungi. Now, he’s expanding to Queens with Ghungroo, an Indian gastropub with a full tandoor menu, Indian beers, biryani, and more. 31-19 Newtown Ave., Astoria

After serving banana-leaf-wrapped branzino, rum cocktails, and grilled skewers at pop-ups all over Brooklyn, Red Hook Tavern’s executive chef Bun Cheam is aiming to open a much-anticipated permanent location of his Cambodian restaurant and cocktail bar, Hōp, in November. 358 Van Brunt St., Red Hook

Photo: Scott Semler

Over the years, the near-century-old Sam’s was always closed in August. Louis Migliaccio, the owner, decamped to Italy for the month, depriving his regulars of pizza and parms until he returned and reopened well after Labor Day. The restaurant’s new owner, Georgia Fulton, inadvertently honored that tradition this year when she pushed a planned midsummer reopening to September 10. Fulton wasn’t vacationing, however; a film crew took up residence in the space for two weeks this summer. Continue reading …

Jon Neidich’s Golden Age Hospitality — responsible for spots like the Nines and Le Dive — has moved into the corner space that was previously home to the Silver Spurs diner and the Morgenstern’s Finest Ice Cream flagship. Now, it will be Saint Denis, a French bistro with a Parisian sidewalk setup; food including escargot, salmon rillettes, and moules marinières from chef Marjorie Meek-Bradley (last seen at the View); and a cocktail list from Sarah Morrissey (last seen at Le Veau d’Or). 490 La Guardia Pl.

Pimento cheese and biscuits have a long history in this part of town, as anyone who remembers the Commodore’s early days and the original Egg can attest. Ferguson’s Country, from the team behind the wine bars Baba and Baba Cool, keeps that tradition alive. The new spot has a functioning jukebox, pitchers of beer, shrimp and grits, moonshine liquor, and a catchy nickname: Ferg’s. 732 Lorimer St., Williamsburg

Ferg’s. Photo: Dave Fitz

Next door to their hit bakery, Hani’s, Miro and Shilpa Uskokovic are turning their attention to hardpack ice cream, sundaes, and slushies at Neighbors Famous Ice Cream. Miro is dusting off his recipes from his time as Gramercy Tavern’s pastry chef for a rotating selection of scoops that will change with the season. 69 Cooper Sq.

Hommali’s tom yum seafood cocktail. Photo: Courtesy of Hommali

Three Bangkok transplants are serving curries and beef tartare with larb spice at Hommali. Chef Chattchakorn “Benz” Khajornchaisan and general manager Kritayanee “Air” Promsarin met working at Eleven Madison Park; along with operations lead Pichalak “Picha” Srigungvarl, they’ll welcome guests to dine at their large communal table as well as a cozy eight-seat bar. 28 Seventh Ave. S.

Harrison Ginsberg helped make Fidi’s Overstory one of the world’s buzziest bars. Now, he’s returning to street level (and repartnering with former Overstory co-owner Jeff Katz) on Bar CC, a velvet-lined nook next door to Crane Club that goes all in on opulence. Chef Melissa Rodriguez will handle snacks, including caviar with potato chips and chicken skin that nods to poutine. 85 Tenth Ave.

Another happy return: In mid-September, John Fraser will open Ondîne in what was once Snack Taverna (where he held his first head-chef position). The menu leans into French stalwarts like steak haché au poivre and swordfish à la moutarde. 63 Bedford St.

Photo: Scott Semler

After growing up in Hong Kong, the chef Lucas Sin appeared on this city’s culinary scene in 2017 with Junzi Kitchen, a fast-casual Chinese chain with homestyle noodles he started developing during his senior year at Yale. He has hosted several popular web series (including Street Eats on YouTube) and spent time abroad researching his first cookbook, Cha Chaan Teng: Comfort Food From Hong Kong’s Iconic Diners, which will be published this fall. Coinciding with the book, he began hosting his own pop-up dinners in the city, serving dishes such as dual-sauced yin-yang fried rice, tofu-skin shrimp rolls, black-pepper brisket with potatoes in a clay pot, and mochi French toast that’s battered, deep-fried, and draped in a thick layer of condensed milk. Continue reading …

Mark Chou has cooked at Frenchette, Le Bernardin, and Blue Hill, among others. Now, he’s the face of his own spot, Dragonne, in the landmarked room that was once Anita Lo’s gone-but-never-forgotten Annisa. Chou’s high-technique experience shines through on his debut menu, which includes a 14-day dry-aged duck with boudin noir and plum as well as seared foie gras with Sorana beans. 13 Barrow St.

Enrique Olvera has turned his all-day café Atla into Bar Cosme, which he says will channel the “evening energy” of his highly regarded Flatiron restaurant. Tequila drinks by Sebastian Tollius are the main draw, and there’s a menu of raw and “slightly cooked” seafood plus homemade tortillas. 372 Lafayette St.

Do cockles and sujuk belong in a dish together? Cavalier is a Turkish-inspired spot (with an ’80s-swank dining room) that, care of chef Mason Lindahl and co-owner Yasmin Kaytmaz, will answer this question once and for all. Get a bottle of natural wine to go with your plate of goat cheese, cabbage, and stewed apricots. 1 E. Broadway

After antagonizing both meat lovers and vegans at Eleven Madison Park by removing animal products from the menu, then adding them back, Daniel Humm will be in crowd-pleaser mode at Humm. He’s using produce from Magic Farms, his exclusive upstate supplier, and has even teased the return of his once-famous foie-stuffed roast chicken from the NoMad. 435 Hudson St.

A salad from Humm. Photo: Jovani Demetrie

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The author and playwright Jordan Tannahill — his 2025 production, Prince Faggot, posited “what would happen if, just a few steps down the line of inheritance, there were a guy who loved being a little bitch in bed?” — has spent the past four years working on his new novel, The Living Realm, even though it runs just 160 pages. “It took me a long time to write very few words,” he says, but that pace was deliberate. “I ended up with exactly the book I intended to write.” Part of the process was the last year spent editing. “Even though the bulk of the writing happened a year ago,” Tannahill says, “you’re deep in the world of the novel, and I realize I haven’t left it since I started.” This being summer, though, he did leave it and leave New York (where he lives in the East Village), which is where we start this edition of the “Grub Street Diet.” 

Monday, August 17
I’d woken up in my tent the day before with a very sharp, shooting pain every time I inhaled. I was at Honcho Campout, a queer four-day techno festival in the Pennsylvania woods, which I’d gone to the previous year and had such a wonderful time that I’d gone back. The pain didn’t go away as I went about my morning. In fact, it got worse. I had breakfast, and after breakfast it continued to intensify, so I packed up my things. My friend helped me walk to the top of the road. I found the nearest emergency room, packed my rental car, and drove off for Harrisburg. They ran a few tests and said, “You don’t have COVID, you don’t have the flu; it’s actually a bacterial pneumonia.” I think it came on quite suddenly. I don’t actually think I contracted pneumonia there; my immune system probably just got worn out while I was there. So Monday morning I wake up in UPMC Harrisburg hospital. It’s my first time overnight in a hospital, ever, and my first time in an American hospital. The very first thing I’m ingesting is a steady supply of an IV saline drip and an antibiotic IV. I’m also served breakfast, which is apparently French toast, and I just want something softer and simpler. So I have a yogurt and some fresh fruit and a little bit of coffee.

Everyone is very friendly. As a gay man coming into an ER from a festival, I got a lot of questions — “When was the last time you had unprotected sex? Are you on PrEP? Are you seroconverting?” I assure them, “No, I really don’t believe I am. I think I have pneumonia,” which is what I had. It feels slightly different from what I’m used to at Callen-Lorde, but they were friendly, concerned, kept me overnight, and did everything they needed to do to get me stabilized. God, I hope I have adequate health insurance to cover this. I’m most anxious about the expense. Coming from Canada and then living in the United Kingdom, which has the NHS, those aren’t really concerns at all.

I read Faggots, by Larry Kramer, in the hospital. Grove Press asked me to write the new foreword for the upcoming anniversary edition, so I’m reacquainting myself with the novel. The last time I read it I was in my early 20s, and now, in my late 30s, it resonates differently. I hadn’t been to a lot of these locations when I first read it — Fire Island, the Ice Palace, the Meat Rack — places that are still active within the queer ecology that I’m part of now in New York. I’m also essentially the exact age of the protagonist. He’s 38 or 39.

I am getting discharged shortly, but I get lunch before I do. I order the salmon, which is something my husband claims I always do: order fish at the exact place where I shouldn’t order fish. I think this proves him right. I don’t know why I’m inclined to order salmon at a hospital, but I do. It comes out white, more like cod, I suppose. Maybe it is cod. I eat the mystery salmon and some broccoli and a juice cup. The food is not great, but the staff is lovely and that makes up for it.

I’m discharged around 3 p.m., though it takes me about an hour to get my medication from the pharmacy. I still have my rental car, so I drive myself home to New York, maybe four hours. I’m still feeling a little bit of pain when I breathe, but much less than the previous day, and a little bit feverish. I’m on lots of ibuprofen, which helps. I know my husband, Brandon, is waiting for me at home, and it’ll be lovely to see him and sleep in my own bed. In the car, I listen to a few episodes of Ezra Klein’s podcast. I get gas, return the car — things just take time — and I’m walking to my door around 9:30 or 10, after dinner hour. I don’t think I can eat much, so I have some toast and some hot water with honey and go to bed.

Tuesday, August 18
Like a lot of mornings, I have oatmeal with chia seeds, some grapefruit, and coffee. I’m a big fan of Partners Coffee. We have it delivered to our house in periodic shipments, and we grind our own every morning. I drink it black, pretty strong. This week, Brandon decided to start making his own cold brew. He bought these cold-brew glass containers — you grind a coarse grind of coffee, put it into this filter that goes down almost the entire length of the container, fill it with lukewarm water, and leave it for 48 hours. We were spending so much goddamn money on iced coffee this summer that we were like, “We should just make it ourselves.” Honestly, it’s really fantastic. I’m a total convert. I tend to lean toward hot coffee myself, but the novelty of making it ourselves really appeals to me. Brandon is definitely an iced-coffee guy.

I walk the dogs as quickly as I can. They are both rescues. One is kind of corgi-like; her name is Moses. And one is kind of terrier-like; his name is Charlie. They’re very goofy, very fun. They’re Brandon’s dogs, but I’ve come to adopt them as my own children, and because I tend to walk them and feed them, they’re particularly attached to their stepdad. Moses is very reluctant to be walked. She hates living in Manhattan. She was a COVID dog for Brandon, so she spent her first year in a quiet backyard in L.A., and it’s been a very hard adjustment ever since. Charlie absolutely loves walking through the East Village. He loves to sniff absolutely everything and mark everything. He’s a big pee-er. I try to curb him as the signs tell you to do.

My breathing is better, but I still feel lots of sensation. I’m coughing very frequently, coughing up bloody mucus, and feeling pain. I run a nice hot bath and sit reading Faggots in the bath. That helps. For lunch, I start eating lots of white-bean-and-spinach soup — Tuscan white-bean soup from Westside Market. I’m drinking lots of Lifeway blueberry kefir to counteract the strong antibiotics I’m on.

I’m really bad at just lying in bed doing nothing. I go a bit stir crazy. So I’m taking pleasure in having an excuse not to do all the admin that consumes a day and just writing for pleasure — playing around with a new idea for a play, which may become something or may not. It’s almost like playing in the lab, R&D, exploring certain images, certain ideas, certain characters, and seeing if something catches fire and begins to smolder. I do my best writing when I’m not also trying to multitask, when I don’t have a lot of social commitments. I have some honey-roasted pistachios and trail mix as a snack while I try to work.

Brandon is a wonderful cook. He makes this chickpea-apricot tagine with minced lamb meatballs. He’s in tech rehearsals at night for Marina, this play at Little Island by Julio Torres and Martine Gutierrez, yet still managing to cook during the day and have this lovely food for me.

I go to bed quite early, around 11,  which is early for me, and take a melatonin gummy. I know I will be on a steady diet of those all week to really knock me out and give me a deep sleep. Very much appreciated.

Wednesday, August 19
I have a cup of coffee, but I need some more protein, so I boil some eggs — two boiled eggs for breakfast with sourdough toast and some kimchee, again for the gut biome, the gut flora, which is being a bit ravaged.

At the same time as Faggots I’ve been rereading my friend Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Exit Party, which comes out in a couple of weeks. She’s an incredible author — she writes literary speculative fiction, and Exit Party is very much that: a near-future America that has eroded and devolved into civil war. I’d read early drafts, so I wanted to know what she did with it ultimately, what final form the book took.

I take the dogs for a walk around the block. We live in the East Village. We moved in two summers ago, and I love it so much. I feel like there are these frequent glimpses of an older New York, a New York of the ’70s and ’80s. When we moved in, Gary Indiana, a really meaningful writer in our lives, lived a block away on 11th, one of the last survivors of that generation that included Kathy Acker and the original Village Voice. A block away from us on 12th and Second, above the Village East theater, is where David Wojnarowicz and Peter Hujar had their apartment. I walk by that every day and think about that lineage, that foundational queer culture of the ’70s and ’80s. We’re a block away from St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, where Patti Smith played her very first punk poems and Allen Ginsberg read and the Black Panthers operated out of in the ’70s. Brandon and I got married there a couple of years ago. Even though we’ve only been here a couple of years, I feel increasingly part of this neighborhood, even of the particular apartment building we live in — knowing our neighbors, having a community here in a way that I really value.

For lunch, Brandon very kindly makes a tuna salad, which is really nice — albacore tuna, green onion, dill, lemon, salt and pepper, mayonnaise, of course — also with sourdough toast. Brandon is doing double duty: husband and actor. He plays three different characters in Marina, all three of whom are Marina’s suitors. Marina is this mermaid-esque sea creature played by Martine. It’s this beautiful, very funny, also quite moving trans allegory around love and dating and community. I keep joking that it’s like The Little Mermaid meets Under the Skin.

I am supposed to go to a screening of a friend’s film. I am really gearing up for it, and then I have to message them: “I’m too sick. I don’t think it’s contagious; I’m on antibiotics, I don’t have a fever, but I’ve got to stay home.” So once again, stay home and read. For dinner, I have leftovers of the tagine.

Thursday, August 20
Breakfast is peanut butter and cut-up banana on toast with black coffee.

I do an interview with Adam Eli for Cultured about the book. He’s wonderful, really thoughtful. It’s my first one for the book, and Adam is very patient with me as I figure out how to talk about it. A novel is an intensely private, solitary experience for many years, and then suddenly it becomes this public experience. It’s helpful to talk it through with a few friends first to get the hang of it.

I’m definitely feeling better today. On my walk with the dogs, I stop in at Apollo Bagels, where I go almost weekly. My dogs are known by name there. I get my favorite of the whole menu: a plain bagel, toasted, with smoked whitefish salad, mustard, pickled peppers, fresh cucumber and dill, and pepper on top. It’s open-faced. I eat it on the bench outside the shop and then walk the dogs home.

I also need to treat myself to some junk food. I’m feeling a bit down, so I buy myself a box of French Toast Crunch from the bodega. It’s absolutely delicious. I go to the Strand and pick up an opening-night gift for Brandon. Opening isn’t until the following Thursday, the 27th, but I hate scrambling at the last minute. I don’t have a predetermined gift in mind — I want to go and be inspired at the bookstore. As I’m walking to check out, I have two other books in my hand, both of which are gifts I probably would’ve gotten myself, which is never the right thing to do. Then I saw Life of M, by Rachel Cusk, face-up on the table, and I remembered he’d posted about wanting to read it and whether anyone had an advance copy. I think, Oh my God, here it is; it’s published already, I can just buy it for him. So I shelve the other two and get that one, plus a card and a bag. I also pick up a copy of Don Quixote for myself. If I’m going to spend a lot of time in bed, I need a big book.

I go to see a doctor at Callen-Lorde. She listens to my lungs and makes me take deep breaths. They are still pretty crackly. She prescribes me another ten-day course of antibiotics and makes me schedule a chest X-ray after that to make sure they work. She is not happy to hear about all these errands I’ve been running. “You’ve got to act like an old man. You’ve got to stay in bed.” I’m really very bad at just lying in bed all day, even if I have something to do. I get too antsy. But she really drives it home, and she was the one really insisting on more hot liquids and so forth. When I get home, I have some red grapes as a snack.

For dinner, Brandon prepares this incredible gochujang salmon — I think it’s from a New York Times “Cooking” recipe, or he modified it from one — which really makes up for the mystery salmon I had at the hospital earlier in the week.

Friday, August 21
Breakfast is the French Toast Crunch, which I’m still working my way through, ravenously. And coffee.

I take the dogs to the vet. You know how owners resemble their dogs and dogs resemble their owners? Charlie has been having this cough, almost like he’s trying to cough up a hairball. It’s like, Oh God, are we both stricken with the same pneumonia? So I take them both in and have the vet look. They say the coughing is nothing to worry about, but Charlie does have a very minor infection from a tick — the least worrisome of the possible infections he could have from a tick — and he is put on an oral antibiotic. We’re both on antibiotics, both sick from being in the woods.

For lunch, I pick up chicken green curry from Pranakohn, one of my local spots that I go to all the time. It’s this great Thai restaurant, and the green curry is just the thing I needed that day. I’m definitely guilty of intra-neighborhood deliveries, but I’m trying to get better at just going to the restaurant and picking it up. It genuinely is four blocks away. So I do that this time.

For dinner, I cook myself Italian sausage and broccoli rabe. I’ve been relying on my wonderful husband this week, but I do cook for myself sometimes and this is a go-to. Brandon is rehearsing at Little Island, and — really against doctor’s orders, I think — I have to take the dogs for their evening walk anyway, and I would love to just see how Marina is unfolding on the island. Brandon’s getting out really late, and he’s starving by the time he’s done, so I’m going to buy some snacks, things I know he likes, for the walk home. From Westside Market: tamari almonds, pepperettes, Gin Gin ginger chews, black-and-white cookies — one of his go-to desserts — and Diet Coke, which is his beverage of choice. I put it all in a bag, get the dogs, and walk across Manhattan, about half an hour, only to be told, unfortunately, no dogs allowed on the island. I really should have checked that one before I left with them.

So I just sit outside waiting for their dress rehearsal to finish, and honestly it’s lovely. I so seldom just go to a park, go to a bench at night, and sit and look at the water. And there are a lot of people doing that — couples, groups of friends, people by themselves, just sitting looking out at the Hudson, chatting, listening to music. I’m holding both dogs, who are probably a little confused, and listening to the fantastic new L’Rain album — Taja Cheek’s moniker, just beautiful — and eating the snacks I brought for Brandon. Then he comes out, and we hug.

I am defying my doctor’s orders a little bit here, but it’s nice to get out of the house. There are certain unexpected rewards from being forced to slow down and change your habits, and being sick really did change my dietary habits. I usually have a very, very active, busy calendar, and canceling plans felt almost exhilarating — to just read, draw a bath, and read in the bath. That had its own pleasures.

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It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to serve a dish like this, not least when it is one of only four entrée offerings, and a certain amount of finesse to pull it off. Somssi (pronounced SOHM-she), which opened on a stretch of MacDougal Street dominated by the alfresco aperitivo sippers at Dante, has both.

Somssi is the newest restaurant from the Na:Eun Hospitality group, which includes J.P. and Ellia Park’s Atomix, the every-award-winning tasting counter; the couple’s original restaurant, the prix fixe Atoboy; and Naro in Rockefeller Center. Somssi’s proprietress is Ahris Kim, Na:Eun’s former director of operations, but it represents a group effort. J.P. is listed as its “culinary director,” consulting on the menu with Yoonsoo Park of Atoboy and Naro; former Atomix chef Daniel Gronert is in the kitchen. The Parks are the majority owners and leased Kim the space (it previously housed another Atomix outcropping, Acru). These back-office dealings aren’t of especial interest to most diners, and I recommend treating Somssi as what it effectively is, a sparky little sibling to a by-now very august elder. I was dutifully wowed by my meal at Atomix when I finally managed to crack a reservation, but it’s neither feasible nor cost-effective to eat there on a regular basis.

Somssi has, if not a chip on its shoulder, then a spring in its step. It would be shabby to recommend it as a way to get your Park fix on a (relative) budget, but more to the point, it wouldn’t be quite accurate. I found myself thinking of it as a school-play production to Atomix’s grand opera, starting with the haunted-farmhouse interiors with their mismatched chairs, fraying lace curtains, and homely still lifes, through to the frankness of Jenny Eagleton’s wine list, with its chatty marginalia (“Vineyard est. 1130” “Maybe it’s a rosé, maybe it’s a red, who knows”). And this is all before Somssi slips you the tongue.

It’s served like a steak, tender but with a non-soft chew, a little reminiscent of uncured pastrami. It’s glazed in a sweetened sake-and-soy tare that reminded me of Nobu’s famous black cod with miso, pricked up by a pat of wasabi. Despite a thoroughgoing incorporation of Korean and Japanese ingredients and flavors, Somssi doesn’t feel overtly “Korean,” even while spiking the beef-and-pork ragù on its linguine with mustard-green kimchee. Instead, the restaurant feels both playful and smart. There are the broad strokes of the neo-bistro playbook here — a few crudi, a lone pasta, a couple larger cuts of meat, the requisite branzino — but Somssi, which means, roughly, “skill developed through experience,” makes good on its goal to goad diners a little farther from their comfort zones. What could’ve been just another lamb chop is a bigger, gamier mutton chop, two bones bisected down their peppered equator to reveal the red meat within, dressed in a cumin-rich sauce for a chophouse take on Sichuan cumin lamb. Schnitzel is threaded through with shrimp farce before being fried in both bread crumbs and sesame seeds, for a schnitzel à la shrimp toast.

Somssi’s cozy room is a showcase for technically precise cooking, such as an ornate potato presentation with caviar and raw scallops with strawberries and Thai basil. Hugo Yu.

Somssi’s cozy room is a showcase for technically precise cooking, such as an ornate potato presentation with caviar and raw scallops with strawberries… more Somssi’s cozy room is a showcase for technically precise cooking, such as an ornate potato presentation with caviar and raw scallops with strawberries and Thai basil. Hugo Yu.

Not every dish rises to the same level, and on a small menu, misses can feel magnified — a not-especially-interesting fennel salad, a dessert course (olive oil cake, fig-leaf custard and granita, or a scoop of popcorn-flavored ice cream) that didn’t do much for me whichever way I played it. But I found the little-sister energy of Somssi more winning than any of its stumbles. “Want me to shake it?” a host-cum-server, one of a pair of wisecracking guardians at Somssi’s door, asked, seasoning a brown-paper lunch bag of French fries with furikake or kimchee-cheddar seasoning (the better option). Then, cackling, he broke into a little dance.

A few blocks away, another little-sibling restaurant is shaking, too. Noury is the second restaurant from the team behind Kiko, a Japanese-y bistro I admired in Hudson Square. Husband-and-wife team Alex Chang and Lina Goujjane (he cooks, she somms) own Noury, too, but the restaurant is as much a showcase for chef de cuisine Joji Miwa. If Kiko was Japanese-y, Noury is izakaya-ish, a rotating selection of small plates in a more casual, compact, one-room setting. (Kiko, as I wrote last year, is ryokan-chalet — I’ll be glad to see its barroom roaring fire again when the weather cools.) Miwa, who cooked in Japan before returning to his native U.S., Greenmarkets up the izakaya standards: on one of my visits, shira-ae, a creamy dressing made of silken tofu, blanketed red cherries, and sugar snaps; on a later-summer follow-up, fat figs. Jimmy Nardello peppers and hunks of nectarine (by the time you read this, their season will be nearly over) make a beautiful salad, heated by ginger ponzu and a delicate snowfall of dried bonito flakes. I particularly enjoyed hand rolls of eel brushed with ankimo (monkfish liver) before being grilled, and long, skewered chicken tsukune (meatballs), loose and crumbly and ready to sop up a pool of ready egg yolk.

Izakayas are drinking dens, and while the ambience at Noury is more neighborhood restaurant than dim watering hole, Goujjane and her drinks team offer a nicely chosen wine list and a number of sakes (seven of them by the glass), as well as a few menu items seemingly designed to soak them up. (The prawn-and-onion kakiage, a server joked, is more or less a non-trademarked Bloomin’ Onion.) I also wouldn’t skip sweets. Miwa’s Zerbinati melon parfait, a tall soda-shop glass layered with ice cream, tapioca, melon jelly, and a salty sake-lees sabayon, makes dreamy use of the season’s sweetest, sunniest cantaloupes, a thin slice of which crowns the top like a bright-orange grin.

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