Since I’m about to sublet my apartment until next summer, I’ve been doing a ruthless decluttering of my apartment, throwing out pretty much everything or giving it away. Tossing things out, ripping them up, hurling them into trash bins: It’s fantastic therapy. Highly recommended. As I wade through closetfuls of junk, I’ve been making a few observations about myself, like my tendency to collect “Best Of NYC” restaurant issues—annual tomes put out by New York Magazine, Time Out NY (my alma mater), and various other publications. I rarely refer back to the issues, but somehow they still pile up year after year. New York Mag’s Where to Eat 2004 issue caught my eye, and I scanned the restaurant Hot List from that year. Whoa—dozens of the so-called “Hot List” restaurants from ‘04 don’t even exist anymore. Felt like I was walking through a graveyard. I counted up the corpses: 40 restaurants on that Hot List—that’s more than a third of the 115 places listed—are now closed. Dead, gone. What does this all mean?

What is Salmaland? It’s a place where you can, quickly and painlessly, find answers to the eternal question, “Where should I eat?” To the left, you’ll find my current short-lists of where to eat in NYC; click on a neighborhood, or use the search tool to the right to look up a cuisine or restaurant [...]

Photo by Dwight Eschliman for The New York Times

Right about now, smack in sweltering late-July, I don’t so much want to eat ice cream as wear it, bathe in it, BE it. But I also want to eat it, lots of it—hence the five pints currently jammed into my freezer. And just in time, [...]

Salumé is one of those ultra-boxy, shiny, clean-lined spaces that look suspiciously sleek at first—too sleek to be turning out soulful Italian sandwiches, not to mention sandwiches you’ll want to pay double-digits for. What finally got me inside, a few weeks after the place opened on West Broadway near Grand Street earlier this summer, was the [...]

Too fried from the August-in-June heat to figure out what you want to do this weekend? Hit the NYC Food Film Festival, where all you have to do is show up, lounge around, watch short films about food, then eat the stuff on screen. I went to one of the events last night, Brad Farmerie’s [...]

Ed Mitchell's pulled pork sandwich

There’s something to be said for massive rainstorms that crash down on a jammed outdoor event. I decided to show up at the weekend-long Big Apple BBQ Block Party in Madison Square Park yesterday (Sunday) rather than Saturday, and it turned out to be totally the wrong day weatherwise. But [...]

You should probably be doing something else right now, shouldn’t you? But here you are, browsing through Salmaland (for which I thank you), looking for new food thrills to chase down. Might you suffer from a disorder — say, Restaurant A.D.D.? Until the condition makes it into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, [...]

Todd English

Foodwise, there aren’t too many things NYC doesn’t have. Sounds arrogant, but it’s true. One thing our food-tastic city didn’t really have until now: a glorious food hall like the ones in Tokyo—a gigantic gleaming space outfitted with all manner of shiny stations selling everything from gorgeous cheeses to freshly shucked oysters to [...]

The Daniels (Humm, left, and Boulud, right). Pic via Metromix.com.

Here’s a shoutout to the Salmaland favorites that won big awards this past week at the James Beard Foundation Awards, which the restaurant industry likes to call “the Oscars of the food world.” Red carpet, ballgowns, long speeches: check, check, check. Yours truly didn’t rock [...]

Kenmare pic via Gothamist.com

Because I keep getting the question, “What’s a sceney new restaurant where I can take my hip client/my friends from out of town/the model who consented to go out with me,” here’s a short-list of Sceney New Places in NYC. I’m not necessarily ready to vouch for any or all of [...]