How was your holiday season? I hope you ate plenty of pigs-in-blankets, and toasted to the end of the year. Mine was lovely, but I’ll admit that I overdid it with a few too many nights of “Let’s get dinner somewhere festive before we all leave town!” The antidote to a hedonistic season of life, for me, is recommitting to nights on my couch, cutting back on restaurant meals and cooking more often than not.
During months like these, the restaurants I do end up at need to meet a few qualifications: casual and easy to walk into, with food that feels more homey than restaurant-y. At the following restaurants, you won’t find any plating that requires tweezers or reservations being sold for hundreds of dollars — just comfortable, excellent food.
A restaurant that feel like someone’s apartment
Sunn’s opened in Chinatown just before the new year, and is a permanent home for the chef Sunny Lee’s cooking after her many popular pop-ups. It’s tiny, with only 24 seats including the bar, dimly candlelit and warm, basically how I want my home to feel all the time. The rotating spread of banchan (which, when I went, included cabbage kimchi, show-stealing potato salad, eggplant namul and acorn jelly), served with steamed rice, would be a perfect meal on its own. But it’s even better with whatever stew Sunny has roiling behind the bar (for me: hobak chigae rich with beef short rib), a meal guaranteed to nourish.
… Someone’s really, really fancy apartment
Welcome to Gem Home, a place that sells covetable $190 soap dispensers, minimalist table lamps and, in multihyphenate fashion, a rotating list of sandwiches and salads. Lunch here might be an herby smoked trout sandwich on thin slices of focaccia, a bowl of savory mushroom porridge, or a bright scoop of celery and citrus salad. And in the back is an oops-all-neutrals dining room that’s home to long communal tables, with exponentially more seating than the average NoLIta cafe, studded with dramatic taper candles and flanked by art you wish you could afford.
Plus, a lightning round of a few healthy-core dishes
One thing about me is that I love a hippy-dippy restaurant with mismatched décor, steamed vegetables and a very long list of smoothies. There used to be plenty in this genre (rest in peace to Angelica Kitchen, Jivamuktea Café, and the original Souen), but one that remains is Abracadabra Magic Diner in Ridgewood, Queens (recently relocated from Williamsburg). It’s an order-at-the-counter-and-seat-yourself situation with hand-muraled walls and a long menu, the highlight being a bowl of zaatar-marinated tofu with avocado, red pepper sauce and lots of seeds served over brown rice. Wholesome!
Another bowl of warm food that makes me feel warm, spiritually? The “power bowl” at Dimes, which I lovingly refer to as “my slop,” a bowl of black rice topped with stewy black beans, creamy salsa verde, sliced avocado and pumpkin seeds.
And, even in the weeks that restaurant burnout looms over me, the coconut curry soup with tofu and bouncy udon noodles at Lovely Day in NoLIta makes me remember that excellent food is often still worth leaving the house for.
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