Our Favorite Restaurants, in Recipes

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Con Poulos for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Donna Hay.

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

Our Favorite Restaurants, in Recipes

Sam Sifton

Good morning. Pete Wells has a fine reverie in The Times today about restaurants and our memories of them, of particular dishes at particular times at particular tables or seats at the bar.

It’s an essay to accompany a collection of recipes and stories we’ve gathered from restaurants across the United States, recipes, he writes, that are like postcards from another time: “The time before this, when you could just take a subway, a taxi, a ferry or a plane without thinking twice, and when you could arrive wherever you were going and walk down a street where the lights were on and the doors were open.”

Read that today, and then go traveling in your mind as you cook this evening: to Canlis, say, in Seattle, for the house salad; or to Eventide, in Portland, Maine, for chowder; to Brennan’s in New Orleans, for bananas Foster; to Phoenicia, in Birmingham, Mich., for toum.

You could revisit, or discover, the sesame noodles inspired by the Tang family recipe at Hwa Yuan in New York, or the carne asada cheese fries (above) from Piper Inn in Denver. You could try the cinnamon crunch banana bread from Bakesale Betty in Oakland, Calif., or make a fair approximation of the pepperoni rolls from Country Club Bakery in Fairmont, W.Va.

We’ve secured a recipe for the tagliatelle with prosciutto and butter from Felix Trattoria in Venice, Calif., and one for chicken Vesuvio from La Scarola in Chicago. You want to recall the pork roast with roasted jalapeño gravy from Taqueria del Sol in Atlanta? We’ve got that, as well, along with the Southern mac and cheese Millie Peartree is making at Stingrays in New York.

Not all our new recipes this week come from restaurants, of course. We’re also introducing Yewande Komolafe’s yam and plantain curry with crispy shallots, an adaptation of asaro, the Yoruba word for a dish of starchy root vegetables simmered in a seasoned tomato- and chile-based sauce. (Watch Yewande make the dish on our YouTube channel.) And have you seen Darun Kwak’s recipe for gilgeori toast?

There are thousands and thousands more recipes waiting for you on NYT Cooking. A lot more of them than usual are free for you to browse even if you aren’t yet a subscriber to our site and apps. I’ll ask you, though, to consider subscribing, all the same. Subscriptions are what allow us to continue doing this work.

And we do that work in many more places than just The Times. We’re on Facebook and Instagram. We’re on YouTube and Twitter. And you can find us in your email inbox as well. Write for help if you need it: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. (If not, or if you just want to vent, feel free to yell at me: foodeditor@nytimes.com. I read every letter sent.)

Now, it’s nothing to do with prawns or XO sauce, but I’ve been deep down the “Poldark” rabbit hole on Amazon Prime and maybe you ought to join me.

Ordinarily I’d wait for publication day to hail an important book, but, with the shipping delays we’re experiencing as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, it seems like you should get on the pre-order bandwagon: Skip Finley’s “Whaling Captains of Color: America’s First Meritocracy” is out on June 15 from the Naval Institute Press.

You should read Suzy Exposito in Rolling Stone, on Bad Bunny on lockdown in Puerto Rico. (And if you yourself are locked down? You should sign up for my At Home newsletter, which is filled with recommendations for what to do while you’re stuck at home.) Likewise, take a look at Sarah Hepola in Texas Monthly, on the vulnerability queen Brené Brown.

Finally, here’s Blue Mountain to play us off, “Mountain Girl,” from 1995. I’ll be back on Friday.