Category

Over my twenty years of doing The Amateur Gourmet, I’ve been approached by fans a handful of times. Usually the exchange is quick and pleasant: I feel a thrill for being recognized and hopefully they feel a thrill for meeting their favorite nerdy, gay, old-school food blogger. However the exchange goes, I’m always on the…

|
The cookbook that I wrote almost fifteen years ago (!), Secrets of the Best Chefs, has a lentil soup in it so good, Smitten Kitchen wrote about it. That soup, which was taught to me by the late Gina DePalma, will live on in perpetuity as one of the great combinations of sausage, lentils, and…

There’s only one situation in which you’ll want to find yourself at Carbone in Greenwich Village and that’s a situation where someone else is paying. It’s one of the most preposterously expensive menus in New York. $34 for a small Caesar salad. $47 linguine with clams. Shrimp scampi that’s $42 a shrimp. But if you’re…

[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 4/11/24 newsletter] Let me tell you about our 18th anniversary dinner at Roman’s. Yes, it’s true, on April 8th, 2006, Craig and I went on first date to Lucien in the East Village. Now it’s 18 years later and we’re still going strong. We decided to celebrate that fact with lots of meat…

[From the 4/29/24 newsletter] On Friday, we joined Jenny Rosenstrach, who you all know and love from Dinner: A Love Story, her husband Andy, and Cup of Jo’s Jo for dinner at Popina. That’s Jenny and Jo at the table. Dinner at Popina was so good. We all shared olives and bread and strachiatella. I…

[From the May 2, 2024 newsletter] Before [Craig’s family] got here, I went with my friend Daniel to MisiPasta in Williamsburg. We ate many delicious things that night, but the highlights for me were: this cocktail which was like a Manhattan made with rhubarb liqueur. (Love rhubarb in the spring.) And the sausage sandwich —…

[From the 2/21/25 Amateur Gourmet Newsletter] On Wednesday night, we met up with my L.A. pals Ryan and Jonathan at another favorite NY restaurant, Ci Siamo. The food at Ci Siamo is so, so, good — it’s the Italian answer to Le V’eau d’Or. Loved having these two restaurants fight over me on my birthday.…

[From the 7/11/25 newsletter] Just like asparagus has a season, so does eating out at restaurants and that season is now. Sure, it’s lovely to walk into a little French bistro on a snowy day in the dead of winter, but it’s also lovely to cook soup at home in the dead of winter. Not…