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When asked to choose her favorite restaurant in New York City, which has some 23,000 diners, delis and other dining establishments, Becky Hughes has clear favorites: Grand Central Oyster Bar in Midtown Manhattan, Sunn’s in Chinatown and Rolo’s in Ridgewood.
“They have these wood-fired polenta breads as appetizers,” Ms. Hughes, an editor for the Food section of The New York Times, said of Rolo’s. “There’s one with Calabrian chili butter that I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about.”
When Ms. Hughes and other editors and reporters on the Food section were tasked this spring with selecting moments that have influenced New York City’s food scene over the last 25 years, the answers weren’t so obvious. Which chef or restaurant has influenced the culinary scene more than all the rest? Are food trends like the Cronut, rainbow bagels and Pinkberry’s frozen yogurt really worth including?
The team published the work this month, serving up an interactive timeline of restaurants, trends, dishes and moments that have changed how New Yorkers eat, like the debut of Resy and the proliferation of pandemic-era dining sheds.
In an interview, Ms. Hughes, who lives in Lower Manhattan, discussed the process of capturing 25 years in one article and the moments she wishes had made the cut. These are edited excerpts.
How did this project start?
In January, the Food section was brainstorming articles we should work on this year. I wanted to do something that marked the end of the first quarter of the century. We talked about doing a project focused on 25 restaurants that changed New York over the past 25 years, but we ultimately decided on an approach that could capture both small and big moments, and go beyond just pivotal restaurant openings.
How did you narrow down 25 years into a single article?
It was definitely hard, and I’m still thinking of moments that I wish made the article. Obviously, if we had included everything we wanted, it would be 25 years’ worth of scrolling. So we made some compromises.
We put a call out to the entire Food desk, and had everyone think of moments over the last 25 years — any trend, restaurant, chef, dish — and went from there. We categorized things by year and narrowed down the things that we felt were most important in each year. We wanted to have 12 restaurant moments, specific to openings or closings, and have them written by contributors. So we reached out to contributors across the newsroom and pitched them all on writing an excerpt.
What moment surprised you most when looking back at New York’s food scene?
When I was looking into this, I was like, OK, there’s got to be a moment about kale. When did New York get into kale? I found a story from Melissa Clark, who, in 2007, wrote about the kale salad at Franny’s in Brooklyn. She wrote about how putting raw kale in a salad was so unusual at the time that the chef had to know what they were doing. It would be bizarre not to see a kale salad on a menu now.
You mentioned moments that you wish made the article. What were those?
In 2002, Britney Spears opened a restaurant, Nyla, in New York that was short-lived. It was right when she and Justin Timberlake broke up. The restaurant didn’t really have any significance in New York, so it didn’t make the cut, but I loved that it captured the early aughts in pop culture dovetailing with New York’s restaurant scene.
When finding moments, did you find that some years were harder than others?
Some years there was just endless stuff. For some reason, 2015 was huge — there was Four Horsemen, Pizza Rat, all of these delivery apps, Queens Night Market.
For 2001, it was obvious that we had to figure out 9/11’s effects on restaurants in the city. And 2002 was tough because the city was recovering.
Finding the more recent moments was the most difficult part. When you’re so close to the food-trend cycle and restaurants, it feels impossible to pull yourself out of it, and figure out which of these trends is going to be lasting and significant long-term.
How did you decide which had staying power?
Some were obvious enough — like Dimes Square as a so-called microneighborhood named after a restaurant, or the advent of TikTok and its effect on restaurants. We talked about all of these things ad nauseam and trusted one another’s gut feelings about what mattered and what didn’t.
What else would you have included in 2025 if given the chance?
So many restaurateurs and bar owners whom I talked to are concerned about alcohol falling off in New York, and they’re noticing it in really stark ways. I think that the moment would have something to do with low-A.B.V. drinks or zero-proof cocktails on menus at all the zeitgeisty places.
How did you develop an interest in cooking and food?
I was a picky eater growing up, and that’s actually what led me to learning to cook. When I went to college in New York, I was so excited about the food. To me, bakeries, restaurants, food shopping — all of those things became my framework for learning the city.
What were you picky about?
My parents joked that I would change my mind every day about what I liked. Like, I would love peas, and then one day my dad would serve peas, and I’d say, “I’ve always hated peas.” I was just unpredictable like that. Learning how to cook gave me some semblance of control over my whims at the time.
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