Robert Sietsema's New York

2 days ago | robertsietsema.substack.com | Robert Sietsema

Some restaurants have been running into trouble lately, due to spiraling rents, rising labor and utility costs, scarcity of trained staff, and ballooning ingredient expenses, all intensified by the pandemic. These pressures caused some restaurants to change the way they operate, curtailing amenities, reducing comfort level, installing reservations systems that make it difficult to actually get one, and sometimes treating customers in rude ways.

3 days ago | robertsietsema.substack.com | Robert Sietsema

For decades, our comrades in Los Angeles have been turning out untraditional dishes utilizing pastrami — big smoky hunks of it, principally in burritos, but also in things like burgers, shakshuka, tacos, and quesadillas. In the meantime, most Big Apple restaurants and delis stick to sandwiches, with the pink cured meat appearing occasionally in other creative contexts — such as the gargantuan pastrami rib at Tatiana, and, sprinkled with pickled mustard seeds in a taco at Empellon Taqueria.

1 week ago | robertsietsema.substack.com | Robert Sietsema

Twenty years ago, there were a half dozen Romanian restaurants in Sunnyside, including vampire-themed disco Transilvania, and a lively corner bar with a soundtrack of romantic Italian American ballads called Harmony — both now closed. In fact, only a pair of places remain, Romanian Garden (basically, a Romanian steakhouse) and Danubius. On a recently weekday evening, two friends and I visited Danubius, located in a backwater south of Queens Boulevard at 47-57 41st Street.

1 week ago | robertsietsema.substack.com | Robert Sietsema

You won’t be surprised to learn that everything I eat doesn’t make it into a review, round-up, or trend piece. In fact, many of the best things occur in random meals in places I dashed into on a whim. Here are best things I’ve eaten since the last edition of this column. Sunn’s, which presents homestyle Korean dishes in an intimate and relaxed atmosphere, has become the darling of Dimes Square — and the area’s toughest reservation. It began as a pop-up with the intent of spotlighting banchan.

1 week ago | robertsietsema.substack.com | Robert Sietsema

Few Vietnamese restaurants have stirred such a hubbub as Mắm, at 70 Forsyth Street on the eastern edge of Chinatown. Located in the narrowest of storefronts, it has undergone an array of pop-ups and reconfigurations since opening in 2022 in the old Bep Ga space, eventually adding adjacent storefronts and a wine bar. Now, the place occupies half of a city block facing Sara D. Roosevelt Park, with limited reservable space inside, but with walk-in tables in profusion spread on the sidewalk.