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Sometimes you need a fast, reasonably priced place to eat in Union Square; sometimes that place serves Udon. On Friday, I met up with my pal Diana at TsuruTonTan on 16th Street at 11:30 AM and we pretty much had the place to ourselves. Spoiler alert: the portions are huge! We each ordered the Sukiyaki…

[From the 8/28/23 newsletter] On Saturday night, we went to a hot new restaurant, Cafe Mars, in Gowanus with our pals Mark and Diana. I first heard about Café Mars when Helen Rosner wrote about it in The New Yorker. The dish that got me hooked was this starter of Negroni jello shots with a…

[From the 9/18/23 newsletter] I met my friend Diana for lunch on Friday at La Mercerie in SoHo, a chic/store restaurant where Ina Garten is said to eat lunch. We sat outside on a perfect fall day and ate daintily and exquisitely, like the ladies that we are. Diana had the quiche (would you believe…

[From the 1/27/25 newsletter] I just had breakfast with my friend Diana at Gjelina NY, which is soft-opening right now in NoHo. We each had the Moroccan baked eggs and I scorched the roof of my mouth by piling the eggs on the bread and the taking a big bite before realizing how hot they…

Recently I became friends with an Amateur Gourmet reader named Peggy who works in T.V. out here in L.A. and who comes from a Taiwanese family. Over the course of our first lunch at Pizzeria Mozza, she casually mentioned that her family frequents the San Gabriel Valley (home of some of America’s best and most…

It’s one thing to ask a friend for a recipe, it’s another thing to pilfer their signature dish. For the past few years, my friend Diana has dazzled dinner guests with her take on Suzanne Goin’s Slow-Roasted Salmon with Cucumber Yogurt; a recipe that you won’t find in any of Goin’s cookbooks but, rather weirdly,…

Sometimes there’s a salad that you like, but don’t love, and then you change a few things about it and suddenly it’s your new favorite salad. That’s what happened with this salad, a familiar combination of apples and fennel and walnuts and golden raisins and arugula. It’s one you can probably find in my archives…

I had a reason for not wanting to go to Paris, this trip, and it was both very stupid and very sweet. Namely, I love Paris so much, I didn’t want to go there again without Craig. Lest you forget, we’d gone together to the Edinburgh Film Festival, he left that Sunday for the Nantucket…

Taking someone out to lunch on their birthday is always a treat because, when you really think about it, you’re taking yourself out to lunch too. So, a few weeks ago, on my friend Diana’s birthday, I told her to meet me at Coffee Commissary on Fairfax at 12 PM on the dot. From there,…

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A few weeks ago, for the Golden Globes, I did something I’d never done before: I served health food to a crowd. Now when I say “health food,” I don’t mean the punishing kind that makes you weep with displeasure (tofu on a bed of undressed arugula or something like that); I mean the kind…