Endo Kazutoshi was on the train to Paris when he heard about the fire that had destroyed his restaurant, Endo at the Rotunda, located on the eighth floor of the Helios building. The fire had started on a terrace and quickly spread, affecting the dining room and kitchen, built mostly from 200-year-old hinoki wood.
Chef Aarón Sánchez stated, "It's actually something that's super inaccurate ... I think it's the destruction of humanity," referring to fried tortilla bowls and their lack of authenticity.
At Dim The Way in Ingleside, every table has one thing in common: at least one plate of cheung fun. Cooks are turning these slippery rice noodle rolls out of the open kitchen nonstop, and they're easily the best thing on the dim sum menu here.
Oversized burritos are more of a north-of-the-border staple. In Mexico, even in northern regions where burritos originate, they're practical and proportionate. This is owed to the differences between traditional Mexican cuisine and its American-adapted counterpart.
Hiroshi Hiraoka, one of the most respected ramen chefs in Japan and the chef-owner behind Sapporo's Japanese Ramen Noodle Lab Q, is heading to New York City this month for a series of limited-time pop-ups at two Manhattan restaurants. The events will bring his refined "tanrei" style ramen, rarely experienced outside Japan, to diners at Towa in Flatiron and nonono in NoMad.
Living in Japan in the early 2000s, Fralick fell in love with an Italian restaurant in the city of Shizuoka, where he ate Italian food, but with Japanese influences, like pastas made with uni and the fermented soybeans known as natto. "It really reminded me of home," says Fralick, who grew up in upstate New York and started his cooking career in Italian fine dining.
Though they were only serving in town for one night, the chefs and staff behind the Mexico City supernova Masala y Maíz managed to cause what felt like a temporary ripple in L.A. dining during their pop-up last week. It reminded this diner that despite the era's current dedication to culinary and cultural boundaries - you should only cook what you know, write what you know - a spirit of mixture and melding can actually lead to something extraordinary, and not cringey, in practice.
What once began as a shared meal in Tokyo during the pandemic has become a cultural exchange. This is a dialogue between Tokyo and New York told through dough, fire, and simplicity. Long before the residency was even announced, the foundation for it had already begun in Tokyo.
Fall's scarlet and gold was fading from the mountains around Sapporo as I sat with a small group around a heavy wood table with a charcoal grill in the center. We watched a chef cook channel rockfish over the coals. This northern Japanese delicacy is cherished for its meltingly sweet flesh, which takes on a light pink color because of the species' shrimp-heavy diet.
Pizza toast is a throwback snack popularized in Japan's classic kissaten coffee shops. The first kissaten to serve pizza toast - milk bread topped with tomato sauce, mozzarella and pizza toppings, toasted until the cheese is melted and bubbling - is reportedly Cafe Benisica in Tokyo, in 1964, which is still operating. The key to this version is to first make toasty garlic bread, and I use marinara instead of the yoshoku ("Western-style food") tradition of making a ketchup-based tomato sauce.
When it opened in 2021, Brixton Market's Temaki quickly became a hit with the city's sushi aficionados. The restaurant, which was London's first dedicated to handroll sushi, received a Time Out reviewer's praise for its 'triple whammy of expertise, exceptional produce and classy execution'. Alas, the south London Temaki wasn't to last. The California-style sushi joint shut its Brixton outpost last summer. Now, however, Temaki has announced a grand return to the city - this time in central London. A new location will open on Mayfair's Maddox Street
I remember standing in rapt attention at the edge of the stovetop as my mom tossed fresh, thinly sliced beef into an oiled pan set on maximum heat. The steak hissed and leaped in a dramatic dance as flames licked the pan from underneath. My mom turned to me and said, "This is why it's called lomo saltado: the lomo is the steak, and watch how it's saltando - jumping."
The restaurant group behind Goodman, Beast, Pinna, Chelsea Grill and Wild Tavern, has added a Japanese izakaya to its roster with the opening of Wild Izakaya in the City. Inspired by the establishments found all over Tokyo, Wild Izakaya features an open kitchen with counter seating, larger tables for groups, classic Japanese films on a projector, and a drinks list including Japanese beers, sake and cocktails.
New York's pop-up pizza calendar just got a serious international upgrade. From February 24 through February 28, cult-favorite Tokyo pizzeria Seirinkan will temporarily swap Shibuya for the Bowery, taking over the kitchen at modern Japanese restaurant Sake No Hana for a five-night residency that blends neo-Neapolitan pizza with Lower Manhattan energy. If you're deep in the pizza rabbit hole, the name Susumu Kakinuma probably rings a bell.