Who Makes the Best Flour Tortillas in New York?

These days, it seems like every taco in town comes on a house-nixtamalized, fresh-pressed masa tortilla, heavy with the scent of warm corn. But the past couple of years have also seen these tortillas’ wheat-based equivalents beginning to get a similar level of respect. If you’ve only ever had the industrial, shelf-stable versions — musty, strangely gummy — you’re missing out on what residents in northern Mexico have known for generations: Gently sweet from the grain with a rich pliability that (almost always) comes from lard, they can make just as big an impression as their corn counterparts when they’re given the proper level of respect. Who makes the very best? I spent the last weeks trekking around the city to find out.

1. Santa Fe BK
178 N. 8th St., nr. Bedford Ave., Williamsburg
Santa Fe BK griddles its oversize tortillas every morning — the restaurant offers breakfast burritos during the day (or until it sells out of them), and a full dinner menu at 5 p.m. with dishes such as green-chile stew — but when I arrived early one afternoon, I saw a heated display case holding pre-assembled burritos, and I became worried. Those concerns were assuaged the second I took the first bite. The tortilla (holding thick scrambled eggs, green chiles flecked with bits of charred skin, and caramelized hash browns) was tender, with a light dusting of flour on the exterior. I figured they had to be made with lard, but the restaurant confirms they’re vegan. A 10-pack to go costs $10, and I plan to pick one up anytime I’m in the neighborhood.

2. Corima
3 Allen St., btw. Division St. and Canal St.
There are a few things that set the chef Fidel Caballero’s flour tortilla apart from everything else on this list. For one thing, it’s served as a bread course halfway through a $100 tasting menu. Then comes the technique: I watched someone in the open kitchen cook one side of the dough on an inverted wok while simultaneously blasting the exposed side with a blow torch. The result is floppy, chewy, and flavorful in a way that doesn’t rely on too much fat (the base is sourdough). It’s also available à la carte, of course, but either way you have it, it comes with a chocolaty spiced butter on the side that should promptly be spread across the warm bread.

3. Los Tacos No.1
Multiple locations
This popular mini-chain’s hand-size flour tortillas are the thinnest I’ve ever had, made nearly transparent with lard, as a sign behind the grill warns pork-averse customers. They’re sturdy enough to contain a pile of crispy pastor shaved off the spit, but their thinness is also their fatal flaw as they are fast to dry out and must be consumed immediately.

4. Yellow Rose
102 3rd Ave., nr. E. 13th St.
This Tex-Mex favorite has built its reputation on the strength of its flour-tortilla tacos. In a lineup, these were some of the thickest of the bunch, the added volume a result, I assume, of the pinch of baking powder used in the recipe. That’s not a bad thing, considering the substantial guisadas contained within. It’s a great match. I would also love to dip these in a bowl of chili or have for breakfast with honey and butter. When it’s not busy, you can order a stack of six to go for $9, which they’ll cook to order and send out in a steaming plastic bag.

5. Vista Hermosa
Multiple locations
After trying both, I am certain there is no difference between the tortillas offered at Tacombi or their Vista Hermosa grocery-store brand. They’re easily the best flour tortillas you can buy at a Whole Foods: medium-size and relatively thin, with flaky layers that separate when ripped and a slight chew from the addition of cassava flour.

6. Border Town
Multiple locations (depending on the day of the week)
After waiting in line for 55 minutes, plus another 45 minutes to actually receive my two tacos from this madhouse pop-up that first launched during the pandemic, I was underwhelmed by the slender, foil wrapped cylinders in my bag. The lardy tortillas have garnered such a sterling reputation that I was disappointed to learn I couldn’t order any on their own (blame demand, I suppose). Instead, when I unwrapped my order — filled with papas rancheras — most of the tortilla stuck to the foil. Thankfully, a second attempt unraveled smoothly: It was well-made, and similar in flavor to Los Tacos No. 1, though slightly thicker and softer. I didn’t dislike the tortilla itself, but much like its foil wrapper, I was unable to extract the tortilla from the time and effort required to actually purchase one.

7. King David Tacos
Multiple locations
King David imports its white-flour breakfast-taco tortillas from Texas, and given the trouble, I wish they were treated with a little more respect: Whether you get them from one of the various outposts or at King David HQ in Prospect Heights, the petite, heavily filled tacos are pre-assembled and wrapped in foil. The tortillas are pillowy in a way that reminded me of mass-market varieties. The tortillas themselves didn’t seem to offer much flavor to the tacos, either.

8. Wolfnights
Multiple locations
This fast-casual mini-chain calls its wraps “flatbread,” but they are, for all intents and purposes, tortillas. Upon ordering, a ball of dough is set under a mechanical press to be flattened to a 12-inch diameter before being cooked until its surface begins to blister. The breads are offered in a handful of flavors — turmeric, ginger, date and pumpkin seed — but I went with the “plain” one for my Howling wrap to better assess its place on this list. As a wrap, it was effective for containing a mass of greens, chicken, fried pickles, and sauce. While the charred bits added some welcome flavor, the bread itself was too gummy to enjoy on its own.

Did Wegmans Rip Off a Japanese Chef’s Idea?

It’s war on Wegmans. The restaurateur Yuji Haraguchi built his reputation hawking tonkotsu broth made from tuna (at Yuji Ramen) and evangelizing New Yorkers to the serene pleasures of Japanese breakfast (through Okonomi). Before he was a chef, though, he was a fish salesman, experience he parlayed into his store Osakana, NYC’s best-known Japanese seafood market. That market is mere minutes from Manhattan’s only Wegmans, which opened in October with the chain’s first-ever Japanese seafood shop, Sakanaya. Eyeballs were trained on the buzzy store, especially after a video of the its tuna-butchering ceremony went viral. But Haraguchi was curious about the opening for a different reason. He says Wegmans was in talks to buy his market first. Instead, his lawyers filed a legal complaint last week alleging that the grocery chain and its business partners have committed fraud, trademark infringement, breach of contract, and more. He is seeking no less than $1 million in damages.

In 2016, Haraguchi opened the original location of Osakana in Williamsburg offering local seafood, prepared foods such as chirashi, and sushi-making classes. The New Yorker described the market as marrying the freshness of domestic seafood with the Japanese handling of products. In 2021, he expanded with a second location on St. Marks Place, a compact space that feels a bit like an artist’s studio.

According to the complaint and a Change.org petition, Haraguchi was first contacted in August by Culinary Collaborations, Wegmans’ fish broker, about purchasing Osakana. At the time, he says that he was looking to sell the business so he could move to Hawaii. On August 28, both Haraguchi and Culinary Collaborations signed an NDA that included a noncompete barring each party from hiring the others one’s employees. After signing a letter of intent, Haraguchi says that he disclosed, as he puts it in the petition, all of his “trade secrets, practices, and the financial information.” The deal never came together, but when Wegmans opened on October 28, it contained Sakanaya, with no involvement from Haraguchi. (Neither Wegmans nor its business partners responded to any request for a comment.) He says he found out about the opening from a customer’s text message. When he reached out to Culinary Collaborations, he says he was told that they were going to run both Sakanaya and Osakana.

After the opening, Haraguchi says that he was asked, in November, to prepare a draft purchase agreement, which, according to the complaint, he now believes was done “in order to keep the scam going” since, one week later, Culinary Collaborations backed out of the arrangement. “I told them, ‘Once you back out you’re going to be my enemy, because you really opened the direct competition against me three blocks away,’” Haraguchi says. “And they just backed out and disappeared.”

He says he’s spent the past two months attempting to contact the grocery chain — with no luck. “My lawyer was like, ‘Yo, you really, really have no choice: You got to just sue them,’” he says.

In his Change.org petition, he describes his shop Osakana, as “the real and original SAKANAYA in NYC” and accuses Wegmans of fraud, cultural appropriation, corporate bullying, defamation, trademark infringement, and more. The Sakanaya name, which translates literally to “fish market,” has been confusing for Japanese customers specifically, he says, because of the similarity of the words. He also points to the similarity of the fonts used for the logos.

The proximity of the stores — along with the similarity of names and business models — is central to Haraguchi’s argument that Wegmans is violating common-law trademark rights. “If Wegmans opened that Sakanaya in its Brooklyn store, I wouldn’t have claimed that it violates my common-law trademark because it’s in a different neighborhood,” the chef says. The same would be true, he adds, if there weren’t a history of the NDA, NCA, and due diligence. “I would’ve just kept my mouth shut. But we had a history. I’m fine if someone just copied it down the street. I’ll suck it up. I’m used to it. I’ve been doing this for ten years.”

Is Haraguchi at all worried about being able to carry out a lawsuit against a giant company like Wegmans? He acknowledges their resources pose a problem: “They can keep selling fish, no problem, as long as they make arrangements with me,” he says. “But there is no discussion right now. They think I’ll just go away, but that’s not going to happen.”

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Moshe Kasher Has No Time for Flimsy Burritos

“I grew up with deaf parents on welfare, but I always loved fancy food,” says Moshe Kasher. “When I was a little kid, on my birthday, I would ask to go to a fancy meal in lieu of presents.” Kasher — a comedian, writer, producer, podcaster, and author — says fine-dining restaurants are just another world where he’s never quite fit in. His new memoir, Subculture Vulture, is about six very different groups he’s found himself a part of: Alcoholics Anonymous, the Bay Area rave scene, Hasidic Judaism, and Burning Man among them — each of which has its own cast of distinct characters. How did he navigate them? “Sharing a meal with someone,” he says, “is the best way to get to know them.” 

Wednesday, February 7
I start my day at the Union Station food court in Washington, D.C. I had an event here for my new book. I decide Chick-fil-A will be the funniest choice to start off this Grub Street Diet. I don’t remember if I’m allowed to eat Chick-fil-A, but I ate at a José Andrés restaurant the night before and he’s been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, so I figure these two meals will cancel each other out ethically. It will be my first Chick-fil-A experience ever. I do not want fried chicken for breakfast, but since I’m popping my Chick-fil-A cherry, I order the chicken biscuit anyway. The bad news? Chick-fil-A is pretty good.

For a change of pace, I eat lunch at an entirely different train station: the Moynihan Food Hall at Penn Station. I go with pizza because not sure if you know this, but New York is said to have the third-best pizza in America after Cleveland and, of course, my town, sunny Los Angeles, the Napoli of the West. I buy two slices at Sauce; the crust is so thin it’s reminiscent of the bread of affliction of my people. I fold both slices like a real New York guy — this way no one knows I’m a tourist.

For dinner, I head to B& H Dairy. It’s one of the last of the New York kosher dairy lunch counters — the original vegetarian restaurants. B& H was born not of a desire for health or to mitigate animal cruelty but for the real reason people should eat vegetarian meals: the knowledge that mixing meat and dairy is a grave sin that angers the Lord and will cause him to deny your entry into the book of life come Yom Kippur. I think my grandfather ate here. I know my father did. When my dad became a born-again Orthodox Jew, baptized in matzo-ball soup broth, this was the last place in his old neighborhood he could take me to eat since it’s kosher and, suddenly, he was too.

My dad, a former beatnik and an Abstract Impressionist painter who once rented an entire co-op building in the East Village for $200 a month, packed his paints into storage, left Manhattan, and moved to the “shtetl.” When I’d visit in the summer, fresh off the plane from my entirely secular life with my mom in Oakland, California, he’d throw slacks and a velvet yarmulke on me and then take me on guided tours of the old neighborhood, driving through Little Italy with the window rolled down. He’d point at Italian restaurateurs and say, way too loud, “MAFIA. THAT GUY. HE’S IN THE MAFIA.” I’d cringe and hide and hope the fact that he had the voice of a deaf man would prevent them from understanding him and tommy-gunning us down on the spot. The end of the tour would always be B& H. He’d order blintzes or, as they are called in France, “Jew crêpes.”

Tonight I have stuffed cabbage, swollen with rice pilaf and slathered in a tangy tomato gravy; a knish with a deep, dark mushroom sauce; and a bowl of hot borscht. I daub sour cream in the soup and talk for an hour with an old friend who has been an ASL interpreter for my family since the 1980s. He orders a grilled cheese with a fried egg on challah. We swap stories about the funniest scenarios from his current and my former career: ASL interpretation. We laugh a little and I cry a little when I see the empty stool where my dad used to sit and eat those blintzes. I wish he was still here to order some and embarrass me one more time.

Thursday, February 8
Sorry, guys: I’m at another food court, this time at JFK. I can’t help it! I’m on tour and, thank God, I’m headed home. I stare, paralyzed by the paltry options in front of me, my bag boring into my shoulder as I agonize over choices I do not desire: a Greek breakfast wrap, a bagel, or a breakfast burrito. Normally I’d go burrito, but I’m a California native and something about a burrito in a food hall at a New York airport just feels against my religion.

After a motionless pause ’n’ stare that lasts so long the TSA almost gets called on some “See Something, Say Something” shit, I move on to the Greek wrap because it contains spinach. My trip to the Greek Isles is dismal: a pile of industrially scrambled eggs, a handful of raw spinach, and a dappling of feta cheese all rolled up in a tortilla then thrown into a George Foreman–style wrap griller liberally sprayed down with Sysco Griddle and Grill cook spray. The tiny hash marks of char on the tortilla carry the faintest suggestion of fresh-cooked pita at an outdoor café in Mykonos.

Back in L.A., I catch an Uber directly to the Fox lot because I’m Hollywood scum. At the on-site News Cafe I order avocado toast and a smoothie. Avocado toast is the staple food of Southern California. It is the yam of Africa, the yucca of Latin America, the taro of Polynesia. The toast itself is multigrain, because of course it is. Are there edible flower petals sprinkled atop? Microgreens? You better believe there are. My smoothie is refreshing, with mixed berries, crushed mint, lemon juice, and a shot of Ozempic added in. It’s good to be home.

Believe it or not, it’s colder in L.A. than it was in New York. During the recent heavy rain, chunks of the Pacific Coast Highway crumbled off into the sea. All of this is a chilling reminder of the perils of climate change and the impending doom of all humanity. And it’s also a great excuse for a piping-hot stew.

My family and I eat at Edendale, formerly Firehouse 56 of the L.A. Fire Department and now a gathering place for the hoi polloi of Silver Lake’s down-and-out actor–comedian–podcast host community. The beauty of this hundred-year-old brick fortress of a restaurant is that your Wi-Fi signal is burned to a crisp the instant you step inside. It’s like dining in the ’90s. With our signal gone, my family and I make eye contact for the first time in months. Wow, my wife is beautiful! I love my child!

I order a steaming chicken stew with soft-as-a-pillow cubes of potato that disintegrate the moment they touch your tongue and fiery New Mexican green chiles in a tomato broth. It’s basically perfect. I split the Edendale Caesar with my wife — it’s a Mexican take on a Caesar salad with pepitas, cotija, dried corn, and chipotle spice. This might seem sacrilege, but it’s also a fitting homage to Caesar Cardini, the Italian immigrant who opened a restaurant in Tijuana during Prohibition to be able to serve a little vino along with his pastas and salads. Thus we have the Caesar that has been Mexicanized on my table.

I love this about L.A. It used to be Mexico, and you can feel that everywhere. It’s a mash of cultures, a puzzle of a city. Hating L.A. is so boring, so basic, I immediately dismiss people who say they do as unserious, surface thinkers, not willing to dig a little and find what beauty lies down below. Anyway, the Caesar is fucking delicious.

My kid orders the fish and chips and eats only the batter, complaining instantly that she’s stuffed beyond belief. This is an ever-present dance with children, or at least with mine. She’s constantly eating nothing, saying she’s full, and then the instant her head hits the pillow she cries, “I’m starving!” This forces me to become Daddy Jean Valjean, grunting, “Tonight you sleep hungry, Prisoner 24601. Perhaps tomorrow you’ll learn your lesson.”

Foolishly hopeful, we order her macaroni and cheese: a mug filled with elbow macaroni and baked with a crust of gooey Tillamook cheddar, then sprinkled with bread crumbs. She takes a bite and grimaces: “I hate mac and cheese!” This is news to us as she eats it 55 times a week.

Friday, February 9
I meet some old AA friends for brunch at Forage, a healthy counter-order spot down the street. I get the salmon bowl: thin slices of scrambled egg, garlic brown rice, shredded kale, bright pink pickled radish wedges, and a slab of soy-marinated salmon with wafer-cookie-crisp skin. My friends — who, like me, all got sober in their teens — and I discuss the perils of adulthood over coffee and brunch. “Justin,” formerly a homeless, suicidal teenage drug addict and now a partner at an architectural firm, is in town to speak at a convention for young people in AA. My friend “Candice,” who had psychotic breaks after dropping a 20-strip of acid and who spent time in and out of rehab (like me) and psych wards (like me) until she, like me, got sober at 15, is discussing her severance package after being laid off from a major tech firm she basically built from the ground up. We’re getting old. We’re all parents now. We discuss the anxiety of observing even the slightest behavioral twitch in our children when such behaviors in our own childhood were harbingers of doom. We agonize: “Will our kids still talk to us when we get old?” Please, God, say yes. And if not that, at least let them not turn out like us. Or actually, yes, do, just let them skip the rough parts. Then we tear into cinnamon rolls as though we’re naughty soccer moms on a cheat day.

On an Amtrak to Santa Barbara for the weekend — ya’ boy loves trains! — my daughter and I skip down to the café car to get her some dinner. She selects a Hebrew National hot dog and a bag of Rold Gold pretzel twists. Don’t feel bad for her: She doesn’t always eat hot dogs, microwaved bun and all, in a caboose of junk food. Her favorite food is uni, cracked straight from a spiny carcass, still squirming, fresh cleaned and brightened with yuzu dashi. She finishes the moist hot dog, we jump off the train, and I get ready for my dinner, which should be slightly better than the café car.

I meet my wife, Natasha Leggero, at a cast-and-producers dinner she was invited to for Chelsea Peretti’s film First Time Female Director. Benito Skinner is there wearing a Dior shirt-kilt combo that really just works. He calls me “king,” which I like, and we sit down at Bettina, which I love. It is a perfect pizza place in the hinterlands of Montecito that serves my all-time-favorite non-tomato pizza: the woefully named (if you hear it read aloud) pea pizza with sugar-snap and English peas, mint pesto, fontina, bébé kale, Pecorino Sardo, and lemon. I scream to the heavens when the server tells me it’s a seasonal pizza and peas are out of season. I mean, duh, of course I know when pea season is. Not to worry: The meal is still delicious. We order crisp cacio e pepe arancini dropped onto dollops of Calabrian-chile aïoli and a salad of local greens and chicories (which are totally in season) with herbs and a shallot vinaigrette. We also get a pasta my daughter would love: spaghetti with uni butter, Aleppo pepper, shallot, parsley, and lemon.

In the middle of our meal, Ryan Gosling randomly walks by and someone at my table — I won’t say who — involuntarily screams “Oh my God!” nearly loudly enough for him to hear. I get it: He’s perfect.

A tablemate asks if there are any non-tomato pies. “I get awful canker sores and my homeopath told me to avoid tomatoes,” he tells me. I feel his pain. I get them, too, but the margherita is almost worth ignoring a witch doctor for. I pass him a slice of the Sierra Gold potato pizza with mozzarella, Shooting Star Aries cheese, Root’s spinach, Calabrian chile, and basil. The golden potato crumbles soak a squeeze of lemon right up.

For dessert, we order a really odd dish called sourdough semifreddo. I ask about the preparation and it’s not what I expected. The restaurant soaks sourdough bread in sweet cream overnight and then pulverizes the mush, half-freezes it, and scoops it like ice cream. Then it’s topped with olive oil and balsamic. It’s like panzanella salad: the dessert, but without tomato — score for canker boy!

Saturday, February 10
My wife and I meet up with Chelsea and the crew again for brunch at Lucky’s in Montecito, which serves high-end diner food so the rich can gastronomically cosplay as salt-of-the-earth types while sprinkling pink sea salt (of the earth) onto $17 hash browns. I split a salmon eggs Benedict with Natasha that’s dripping with a citrusy hollandaise. The Cambridge rope-hung salmon is sour and smoky and exactly proportioned to the egg and the sauce. This is a delicate balance, always. Too little and it might as well not be there; too much and you feel like you’re eating a man’s tongue. The woman across from me just directed a film about Beanie Babies, and we realize we used the same doula. It’s a real apex day in white-people shit.

For a little opposite-of-white-people-shit energy, Natasha, our daughter, and her friend go to the best Chinese place in Santa Barbara, Meet Up Chinese, where piles of spicy Sichuan food are served by — not kidding — a robot in a dress and earrings. Sichuan food is the truest gastronomic pleasure of Los Angeles (and now Santa Barbara). I have eaten at plenty of Michelin-starred places and buzzy restaurants, and not one of them has compared on a deliciousness level to the yupo noodles at Chong Qing Special Noodles or, of course, the mapo tofu at Meet Up Chinese, which is smoky, spicy as hell, and spiked with tiny sour black beans. Swirled together, it makes a stew of the brightest, most compelling flavors, so delicious you cannot stop eating.

To my chagrin, they aren’t serving mapo tofu tonight. It’s Chinese New Year, and the restaurant is doing a special menu. Dinner is great, ceremonial though it may be: braised eggplant with a thick, sweet sauce; spicy rice noodles with spongy tofu; stir-fried chicken with jalapeños; and a pineapple-black-pepper beef. The two kids are transfixed by a Chinese New Year livestream beamed direct from Beijing onto the 120-inch TV behind the instruments that the restaurant always leaves sitting onstage. Natasha and I have been asking whether there will be a musical performance since Meet Up opened, and we’re always told, “Not tonight.” It’s starting to feel like the robot waiters just jam after-hours like the elves and the shoemaker.

The server hands the kids an envelope with “lucky money,” which turns out to be real dollar bills. Dinner just got two bucks cheaper. As we leave, the owner of the place gives my daughter and her friend some New Year’s swag, a cute little pencil bag with a cartoon lion embossed on the side, and they both say “thank you” with such synchronized adorability that the owner leans over and hugs them good-bye. I look over at the robot waitress and she’s crying a single tear of industrial lubricant, knowing that she will one day have to enslave these little cuties when AI strikes its final blow.

Oh, and the sesame balls were good, too.

Sunday, February 11
I have heard it said that Los Angeles is a taco town and San Francisco is a burrito town. After moving from the Bay Area 15 years ago, I have to say I agree. It’s all lettuce and refried beans slapped into a hastily folded tortilla wrapped in paper, sure to have a structural-integrity failure the moment you bite into it. The disrespect with which burritos are treated in Los Angeles can make a purist pull their hair out. I do not want a soft, fold-y burrito — I want a firm, upstanding tube, one that could be used as a unit of measurement, a dense duct with enough stuff in it to feed a family in dire straits.

There is one exception to the rule: My wife and I found the most delicious bean-and-cheese burrito years ago at Al & Bea’s, a Boyle Heights institution that has been serving homestyle Mexican American food since 1966. It’s a classic L.A. joint, operated by a family who lives in an attached home. They serve Chicano delights such as a chile-relleno burrito wrapped in yellow wax paper and the eyebrow-raising hot-dog burrito. But the star of the show is doubtless the bean and cheese. It is so shockingly delicious for such a simple concoction that Natasha and I used to make a weekly pilgrimage to get one. It contains no rice, no binding agent, just soft, flavor-busting refried beans, a fat handful of cheddar and green salsa, ladled hot from a Crockpot, filled with magical spices and peppers and all the secrets of Al and Bea Carreon.

I made the horrible mistake of telling my Jewish friend Louis Katz how delightful this burrito is. He smiled with the thrill only a treyf-eating Jew feels when calling out the hypocrisy of a slightly more kosher Jew. “Delightful?” he said. “Beans aren’t delightful — there’s no way it’s that good if those beans don’t have pork in them.” The now-obvious truth slammed into me like a truck. I looked to the heavens and cried, ripping my garment in despair, “Why would you tell me that?!” I haven’t had Al & Bea’s since. I know too much. It was my bite of the apple and my last bite of the burrito.

But it was not my last bean and cheese — not by any means. I love a bean and cheese. Its innate inferiority to meat-laden burritos, stuffed with rich birria or crispy carnitas, makes a bean and cheese that manages to be delicious all the more impressive. I, being of the B& H persuasion, have dedicated my burrito life to this narrow chasm of the burrito valley.

Today for lunch I am eating my other favorite burrito in Southern California (not including San Diego; that’s Mexico North). We stop at the UC Santa Barbara campus favorite Freebirds. It’s a chain but a very unusual one. It sold its name to a holding group in the Bahamas, and that group opened 55 locations while the original stayed autonomous. It is run by the original owner and is the only Freebirds worth entering.

I take my place in line as I have done since I was an undergraduate here. I order the quesarito, a monster-size tortilla that’s pre-prepped with a thick layer of shredded cheese and placed gently into a tortilla steamer so the cheese becomes melted before being loaded with burrito guts. My all-time favorite burrito in the Bay Area, and thus the world, is from Gordo Taqueria, which uses a similar technique but with two slices of white cheese. The steam billows up from the machine in great cumulus puffs, and when they remove the tortilla it is soft, pliant, and oozing with melt.

I always order the same thing at Freebirds: rice, pinto beans — the only way to bean (no refried, no black) — red and spicy salsas, guac, pico de gallo, and (this is where I lose you) fried onions and barbecue sauce. Look, I know. Barbecue sauce? Fried onions? You’ll just have to go try it. If I’m wrong, I’ll buy you a hot-dog burrito at Al & Bea’s.

I ask Freebirds to cut it in two and go pick up my wife. We sit with our kid in the Sunken Gardens of the Santa Barbara Courthouse, perhaps the most beautiful government building in the New World, and each eat a half-burrito as a mariachi band plays and our daughter runs in the sun, laughing, chasing other kids, having the time of her life. It’s paradise here. The burrito is heaven too.

While I was at Lucky’s, my child went on a mushroom-foraging hike with family friends. She came back with six fat, golden chanterelles. My wife and I were both pretty proud of her plunder. As the only competent cook in the family, mushroom duty fell to me, and there’s a certain hippie satisfaction in washing dirt from the hills off a mushroom your child foraged from nature herself. I realize I don’t really know how best to prepare the mushrooms and, perhaps foolishly, I grind up the chanterelles in a food processor. I make sure to ask my kid if this was a good idea, and she says “yes,” but she’s 6 and thinks putting her face in our German shepherd’s mouth is a good idea too.

In butter, I fry minced shallot and slices of garlic from Natasha’s mother’s garden in Illinois that she sent to us via FedEx. Then I dump in the chanterelles for a mushroom fry. I run outside and strip a couple of handfuls of fresh rosemary off of a bush, chop it, and toss it in as well. In goes the juice of a lemon from a neighbor’s tree and some white wine, which I reduce down, adding a little more butter as I go. I pour all of it into a bowl of linguine and stir in some ground Parmesan. I think I overflavored the whole thing: It’s delicious but not particularly mushroomy. The family doesn’t mind too much.

At the dinner table we play Rose, Bud, Thorn, and everyone says their rose was our meal, which makes me feel good. In the game, your “rose” is the delight of the day, the “thorn” is the worst part of the day, and the “bud” is something you’re looking forward to. My bud is you, reading this and maybe feeling like we ate a meal together.

There’s a New Egg-Salad Sandwich in Town — the Bread Is the Star

Growing up, Lisa Limb took annual summer trips to Japan with her family to reunite with her aunt and grandmother. Limb and her sister would then return to New York with suitcases crammed with enough candy, konbini snacks, and stationary to last until the following year. Those childhood memories and tastes are what inspired Postcard, the new café and bakery on Carmine Street next door to hand-roll bar Nami Nori, which she also runs with partners Taka Sakaeda and Jihan Lee.

A display case divides the room with arrangements of dainty langue de chat cookies filled with yuzu cream, koji cheesecake, mochi doughnuts, and the sesame-miso-chocolate-chip cookie that was first developed for Nami Nori. The walls are papered with a vintage Japanese print in pastel peach and green, over which they’ve placed a bright red mailbox holding drink menus and golf pencils.

When I stopped by the other day, my eyes were drawn to the $9 egg-salad sandos, each half-wrapped in paper and lined up like slices of pie at a diner. The filling is straightforward: chopped eggs with enough Kewpie to bind it. The secret of this sandwich, though, is that the bread — which, like everything else at Postcard, is gluten-free — took more than six months to develop. “We always wanted to do a sando, but if we couldn’t get the bread, it wasn’t going to be on the menu,” Limb says. “What you really want when you’re thinking about Japanese milk bread is that texture — that lightness, a little bit of bounce to it.”

The big hurdle, Sakaeda agrees, “is the elasticity component,” but in testing (and testing, and testing), he discovered another issue: “Gluten really helps with moisture retention,” he says. “A lot of gluten-free recipes straight out of the oven are comparable to gluten-full recipes,” but as they sit, they get dry. “That was a major thing that I was trying to solve.”

Sakaeda’s trials included versions of the tangzhong method, where some flour is cooked into a paste before being incorporated into the rest of the dough; simply using gluten-free flour; adding a modified tapioca starch called Expandex; only using rice flour and next trying superfine rice flour from Japan — both of which worked initially, but “It was already like croutons just 24 hours later.” He needed more protein, so he added whey protein isolate — yes, the stuff sold for bodybuilders and gym bros at GNC — but it wasn’t enough. He tried whipped egg white and finally broke through. “That’s really what gives it that structure, that fluffiness,” he says. “But also, the egg is really what’s holding and tweaking the moisture function.”

He’s tested it, and his bread stays fresh for up to three days — or more, “if it’s wrapped nicely.” Not that it ever lasts that long: On opening day, the first 30 egg sandwiches had sold out within three hours. (They also sell chicken-katsu sandwiches in the same bread.) Currently, they’re baking 18 loaves per night to meet demand, which will likely increase as more people get to try it. The bread itself is pillowy, almost like a savory sponge cake. When a sandwich is packed into one of the bakery’s colorful windowed boxes, it feels like gift, even if it’s really just lunch.

Where to Find Real Carnitas in New York

At the eastern end of Long Island City, past the Sunnyside Yard train facility, there’s an unlikely suburban shopping center, with a Home Depot, a Marshalls, a car dealership next to an auto-parts store, and, across from the H-Mart, one repurposed school bus — painted gray like a flying saucer — called Carnitas el Viejon.

Every Saturday and Sunday, Oscar Vazquez and Jazmin Méndez wake up at 5 a.m. to start chopping radishes and slicing cucumbers. They pickle onions, mixing them with habanero and cubed pineapple. Méndez makes the salsas, one with tomatillo and serrano, the other with chile de arbol. Vazquez prepares the pork, which cooks for hours in a cazo, the conical vat filled with a bath of bubbling fat, Coca-Cola, beer, and brandy. Seasoning is simple: cinnamon, Mexican oregano, and salt. By 11 a.m., the couple is ready to open. To find them, just look for the school bus.

The cazo is next to the window. Steam rises from the meat, as a cook chops away with his cleaver. Tortillas, all made fresh, are freckled with burn marks and fragrant. Tacos are priced at three for $15; a pound of the slow-cooked pork is $20. The chop here is rough, which gives shape and texture to each part of the animal: tender shoulder meat with jiggly, see-through skin that’s sticky to the touch; crunchy strips of ear; and chewy bits of stomach. Every piece is sheathed in fat from its long soak in the cazo. On Mondays, Vazquez goes back to his day job as a contractor.

This is real carnitas, and it is to the stuff sold at Chipotle what Lucali’s wood-blistered pizzas are to Domino’s. With few exceptions, what typically passes for “carnitas” in this city is made only with pork shoulder, and lacking the appeal of the real thing: a carnal frenzy of textures, smells, and tastes.

“When you cook an entire pig in a pot, there is a flavor that you can’t get with a singular cut of meat,” says Rick Martínez, the cookbook author and video host. Proper carnitas are made by braising or simmering pork in seasoned lard for several hours. Some cooks keep it simple, with salt and pepper only; others add cinnamon, oregano, orange, Coke, beer, or condensed milk. The ancestral home of carnitas is Michoacán, in western Mexico, where it’s often made with no liquid at all — slowly bubbling away in fat like a French confit. Martínez says he prefers a wetter style usually found in Mexico City: “They call it carnitas suave,” he says. “Just really, really smooth, not crispy — it’s fall-apart pork.”

For years, carnitas fans have looked at what’s available in New York with an air of general resignation.  “It used to be rare, but now a lot of other restaurants and even street vendors are doing it like this,” says Myrna Crespo, whose family owns La Espiga, the Corona restaurant that has been breaking out its cazo on weekends since 2007.

One reason for New York’s carnitas scarcity, Martínez explains, is space: Who has room for a cazo, or even slabs of whole pig? The labor involved is another issue, but for the operators who are willing to undertake the task, the sight of meat, submerged in a cauldron of bubbling fat, is the draw: “I think there’s a cool performative aspect to it,” says the chef Efrén Hernández, who runs Casa Susanna, a popular modern-Mexican restaurant in the Catskills.

In the city, many newer operations opened over the last couple of years, and operate as street vendors. They can be found in Sunset Park, Longwood in the Bronx, and along the 7 train in Queens, the true hive of carnitas activity in this city, all using a greater variety of cuts — like at the Jackson Heights street vendor Carnitas Tommy, where there’s nose, cheek, skin, stomach, tongue, ear, and shoulder.

In early 2023, Eduardo Cuautencos and Jose Miguel Rosas started Tacos el Lobo, originally running it out of a house. In December, they upgraded to a food truck, decorated with slogans in Spanish and English, an illustration of the 7 train, and their logo: an orange wolf wearing a scarf and brandishing a knife. “They have the best buche” — stomach — one customer said, while waiting for his usual order of five tacos.

A few blocks away is Chilango’s Taqueira, a food truck that parks across from Corona Plaza. It’s owned by Luis Santos, who grew up in Mexico City and was previously an executive chef for the company that ran Heartland Brewery and Guy Fieri’s Times Square restaurant. “I know how to do this — my family has been doing it for more than 60 years,” he says. He points to his copper cazo —  “Because it’s the real way they do it in Michoacán” — for cooking skin, ear, stomach, and shoulder. His carnitas are crispier, and more finely chopped than some others. Their flavor is also richer and deeper.

Santos, like many vendors, started the business during the pandemic, after restaurants shut down. “My wife had been saying to me for years, ‘Let’s open a taqueria,’” he recalls. “I would say, ‘Unfortunately I can’t — my job is 24/7.’” Until, suddenly, it wasn’t.

Around the same time, Juan Luis de Jesus started selling tamales to make money — but so did a lot of other people. As his sales dropped, he started thinking of what else he could do. In early 2023, he began selling carnitas at the northwest corner of Grand Concourse and East Fordham Road in the Bronx. At Tacos de Carnitas El Hidalguense, de Jesus cooks skin, shoulder, ear, stomach, and, on the weekends, adds ribs to the mix. His pieces are cut on the bigger side, with large, crunchy chunks of ear. “I’m trying to make them exactly, exactly how my dad showed me,” de Jesus says. He runs the stand with his wife and brother; on weekends, they bring in a couple more people to help. Business has been good enough that he’s bought a food truck, which he’ll roll out in a few weeks. “Both tamales and carnitas are a lot of work,” he says. “I like carnitas much better now, of course — it’s busier.”

The same is true at Mi Lindo Teopantlán, on the corner of 42nd Avenue and 111th Street in Corona. They fry chicharrones seemingly by the ton, and add a little bit of milk to the cazo. Here, they cook the head, ears, tongue, stomach, skin, shoulder, belly, and more. All the customers are regulars, to the point where the workers and owners know each of them. I ask one person waiting to eat if he comes every week and he shakes his head: “More like three times a week,” he says, taco in hand.

Horses Chef Liz Johnson’s New York Return Is Here

Late last week, the team behind Frog Club — the long-gestating restaurant set to take over the former Chumley’s space — announced its opening. In lieu of an actual announcement, however, the news arrived in the form of a Great Chefs homage video that features chef and owner Liz Johnson. The video is a (frankly uncanny) re-creation of the ’80s and ’90s cooking show that went inside professional kitchens long before the age of Food Network.

In it, Johnson makes a black-and-white blini with crème fraîche and caviar, as well as a spinach soufflé — both of which could have appeared on the original show and are in keeping with Frog Club’s throwback vibe. It concludes by directing curious diners to the restaurant’s website, which offers a form for email reservations and little else. The video says the restaurant is open, but so far it’s only had friends and family in, and rumors suggest the actual debut will be tomorrow.

Johnson’s return to a New York kitchen would be big news no matter what, but it comes after her L.A. restaurant Horses was the focus of a disturbing report regarding Will Aghajanian, Johnson’s then-husband and culinary collaborator. (Adding to the mystery: Aghajanian himself posted a “sample” Frog Club menu to his Instagram page in late December. When we asked whether he’s still involved, he replied, “it’s very complicated.”)

The Frog Club was always destined to be among the city’s most exclusive restaurants; it is also, for now, the most enigmatic. One friend of the house, who has been, offers this early review: “It was great, and I wanna talk about it, but I’d feel bad since Liz is keeping a lid on things.”

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On Film, the Romance of French Cooking Is Forever

These are heady days for French cuisine onscreen — not just the food but the kitchen itself. Two recent films, Trân Anh Hùng’s The Taste of Things (in theaters now) and Frederick Wiseman’s documentary Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgrois (which will begin streaming via PBS on March 1), are so firmly set around the stove that they basically come with recipes.

Adapted from (or more accurately, inspired by) Marcel Rouff’s 1920 novel The Passionate Epicure, The Taste of Things takes place in the Loire Valley, in the sort of château that World of Interiors exists for. Benoît Magimel is Dodin Bouffant, a burly master chef; Magimel’s real-life ex-partner, Juliette Binoche, is Eugénie, his lover, assistant, not-quite-wife, and (quite possibly) the even better chef, though she wouldn’t identify as such. It is 1889, so their relationship is asymmetrical — he commands, she obeys; he directs, she executes — until Eugénie takes ill, and for the first time, instead of her cooking for him and his wealthy friends, Dodin cooks for her.

Of course, the omelet rolls just so. The chicken is shingled with thick slices of truffle, and the gardens where Eugénie collects fruits and vegetables are rainforest lush. Hùng’s film is a pure fantasy, which is not to say it doesn’t have historical basis. (Rouff’s Dodin is loosely based on Brillat-Savarin.) But this is French romance, where picture-perfect landscapes give way to amorous schmaltz — le lard amoureux — and lines like “Marriage is a dinner that begins with dessert.” Dodin proposes, Eugénie coyly refuses, the dance continues. The kitchen, the bedroom: Life exists between the two.

Vérité? Not quite. The pleasures of the flesh are so adoringly shot that it might as well be a cartoon. Every copper pan and pot patinated just so, the perfect sear crackling on the loin of veal, Eugénie’s magisterial vol-au-vent wearing its little pastry topper like a jaunty fez. The Taste of Things joins films like Babette’s Feast in the culinary canon, but it has as much to do with food as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread (another film with a significant omelet) does with sewing: Both films are more interested in the relationship between creator and muse, creator and helpmeet. Nominally, The Taste of Things’ plot is about a cook-off: The rustic simplicity of Dodin’s perfect pot-au-feu versus the show-offy, endless, eight-hour banquet presented by a visiting pasha and his chef. (There’s a lengthy recitation of the menu by the Michelin-starred chef Pierre Gagnaire, who consulted on the film’s food, in a cameo as the Prince of Eurasia’s culinary officier de bouche; I lost track somewhere around a mid-course of turtle doves, which is exactly the point.) But, really, this is a love story with calories, between man and woman, man and craft, woman and craft. The love passes not only laterally but vertically, as Eugénie and Dodin pass on their knowledge to a little prodigy, Pauline, who is moved to tears by her first taste of Baked Alaska.

The Taste of Things shows plenty of effort, but for the real pain and sweat, you’d have to go behind the scenes. All the food is real, and Gagnaire dispatched his longtime deputy, Michel Nave, to prepare it on-site. “Just to film the pot au feu, Michel Nave had to manipulate 40 kilos of meat: raw meat to prepare and cook, meat already cooked and ready to be sliced, ready to be plated … It was a colossal, endless task,” Hùng explained in a note sent out with the film’s press materials. “For the ortolan scene, in which he used miniature quails (ortolans being a protected species), he had to work behind our set in a dusty, dilapidated hole-in-the-wall, standing on a pile of rubble, one foot lower than the set, and on a butane stove.” (He loved it, Hùng reports.) That kind of trenchwork is more similar to Frederick Wiseman’s documentary than anything Hùng put onscreen.

Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgrois is an expansive exploration — one that lasts four hours — of the Michelin-starred kitchens of the Troisgrois empire in and around Lyon, about two hours from Anjou, where The Taste of Things was filmed. The chef-ly Troisgrois dynasty is now in its third generation. Grandpère Pierre (1928–2020) was a founder of nouvelle cuisine. His son, Michel, now runs Le Bois Sans Feuilles (The Woods Without Leaves), a three-starred restaurant and hotel in Ouches, as well as the more casual Le Central in Roanne and Le Colombier in Iguerande, slowly ceding control to his sons, César (reserved, intense, who runs his kitchen with only “a look or a gesture,” according to Michel), who mans Le Bois, and Léo (bushier, sparkier), who handles La Colline du Colombier.

If Taste of Things is a film about pleasure, Menus-Plaisirs is a film about work. There is very little footage of food being consumed — not by Le Bois’ €590-a-meal (with wine) guests, nor by the chefs themselves. The most extended scene of eating is of Michel trying a new creation of César’s and offering, with the fewest words possible — this is also the most extended scene of Oedipal conflict, at a bare simmer rather than a boil — the note that there’s a hint too much sriracha in the kidneys for his taste. The pace of the film is dictated by the enormous labor of the undertaking, the fleets of young cooks who come from all over the world to work in the Troisgrois’ spotless, silent kitchen, where every detail, no matter how infinitesimal, is a matter of discussion and consideration. (The most dramatic episode concerns a young cook who improperly bleeds a bowl of brains.)

As a documentarian, Wiseman is obsessed with process, procedure, and organization; Menus-Plaisirs is his 44th film (he made it at age 93) and not so different as it might first appear from such earlier films as Hospital (1970), City Hall (2020), or The Store (1983), about the Dallas branch of Neiman Marcus. They, too, are about the symphony of logistics that underpins every complex human endeavor, whether that’s enforcing local ordinances or creating, as the Troisgrois do, a “flowering John Dory.”

Though both films were considered Oscar contenders — Taste of Things was France’s official submission — neither was ultimately nominated, a good reminder that awards are a poor metric of quality, at least in isolation. Taken together, the movies attest to the durable beauty of the hautest forms of French cooking, effort not only for taste but for effort’s own noble sake. In this, they’re a world away from the cynical dystopia of last year’s major food movie, The Menu. Gauzy, sure, but pourquoi pas?

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