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1 week ago | 
ny.eater.com | Andrea Strong
When Bobby Kwak wakes up, the first thing he does is reach for his phone. He’s not reading headlines or catching up on texts: The owner of Michelin-starred Nōksu is checking to see how much money he has lost overnight. The first week of June, it was $600; a few days earlier it was $2,500. In the past year, he has lost tens of thousands of dollars. Kwak is one of a clutch of Michelin-starred restaurant owners reeling from astounding chargebacks on prepaid reservations made with stolen credit cards.
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1 week ago | 
startribune.com | Andrea Strong
Our story begins at the end. The end of my marriage. After 13 good years, and two amazing children, we split up. I have a lot of feelings about this rupture, none of them simple, but this is not a divorce story. This is the story of what happened after - when I started dating.
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2 weeks ago | 
ny.eater.com | Andrea Strong
When Michael Stillman checks his mailbox, he often finds a large yellow manilla envelope stuffed awkwardly inside the small slot. The 45-year-old CEO of Quality Branded — the restaurant group behind Quality Meats, Italian spots Bad Roman and Don Angie, and Asian fusion-y Twin Tails among others – knows who it’s from: Alan Stillman, his 88-year-old father and the founder of Smith & Wollensky.
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3 weeks ago | 
andreastrong.substack.com | Andrea Strong
That fried chicken has become something of a culinary starlet is nothing all that new. Since Dave Chang zhuzhed up the humble breast and turned it into the poultry equivalent of a dance rave at Fuku, and COQODAQ hijacked the pedestrian KFC bucket, pairing it with caviar and TikTokers, the fried bird has become something of a sensation; poultry’s Pedro Pascal if you will.
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3 weeks ago | 
ny.eater.com | Andrea Strong
Montague Street has long been the ugly duckling of Brooklyn Heights, a sad stretch of meh restaurants in one of the city’s most attractive neighborhoods.
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1 month ago | 
nextavenue.org | Andrea Strong
Our story begins at the end. The end of my marriage. After 13 good years, and two amazing children, we split up. I have a lot of feelings about this rupture, none of them simple, but this is not a divorce story. This is the story of what happened after — when I started dating.
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1 month ago | 
ny.eater.com | Andrea Strong
Daniel Humm was standing in the dining room in his pressed chef whites, tall as an NBA forward, recalling the height of the pandemic when he turned the now-vegan, three-Michelin-starred Eleven Madison Park into a community kitchen serving 3,000 meals a day. “It changed my life,” he says. Diners clapped, candlelight flickered, and dinner began with a parade of precious dishes made from plants. But Humm was not at EMP: He was standing in the intimate dining room of Service (116 W.
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1 month ago | 
ny.eater.com | Andrea Strong
Brooklyn Heights is having a bakery moment with Ferrane (57 Clark Street, at Henry Street) opening Wednesday, May 21, a Swedish bakery from one of the folks behind cult-favorite Lower East Side candy store BonBon. It follows croissant-cereal destination L’Appartment 4F that’s been drawing lines to the neighborhood since 2022.
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1 month ago | 
ny.eater.com | Andrea Strong
Photo by: Deb Cohn-Orbach/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Earlier this week, 250 street vendors, elected officials, restaurant owners, and advocates rallied in the pouring rain on the steps of City Hall ahead of a critical Council hearing to advance the Street Vendor Reform Package. The legislative reforms, which were first introduced in February 2024, are aimed at addressing vendors’ long-standing concerns about access to business permits and protection from police crackdowns.
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2 months ago | 
ny.eater.com | Andrea Strong
Brandon Hoy had a problem. It was 2007, and the restaurateur behind Foul Witch and Blanca was building the original Roberta’s in Bushwick when his plumber quit, leaving a graveyard of pipes and a pipe cutter behind. Hoy was pissed, but he had an epiphany. He needed to build the bases for bar stools, tables, and chairs. “I had this cutter. I am handy. I figured it out quickly,” he said, reflecting on how he repurposed his plumber’s abandoned pipes into restaurant furniture.
