Welcome to Where to Eat, the restaurant newsletter that charges a 20 percent service fee for parties of six or more. Here’s what we’ve got for you today:
THE WHERE TO EAT QUESTIONNAIRE Nigel Sylvester’s bagel order is as extreme as his bike ridingIf you’ve ridden the New York City subway enough times, you’ve probably encountered the public service announcement about the dangers of subway surfing featuring the professional BMX rider Nigel Sylvester. (Never mind that he made his name by jumping a subway track in Harlem — do as he says, not as he did.) More than a decade later, the Laurelton, Queens, native is still riding 15 to 20 miles a day, crossing over from Brooklyn into Manhattan and eating his way through the city. “Thank God for bike riding and what it did for me, because it allowed me to see the world from a unique perspective,” said Sylvester, who has pulled off BMX tricks around the world. “And food has been a big part of that, going to different cities around the world and trying new foods.” Ahead of his Go Ride community biking initiative this week in Houston and Culver City, Calif., he discussed why Golden Krust is New York City’s most underrated restaurant, the food tour he would take in the extremely unlikely event that he leaves the city forever, and how a trip to Mexico completely changed his relationship with avocados. Read the interview →
THE BRIEF REVIEW Demo★★ | Critic’s Pick Wouldn’t it be fascinating if restaurants had family trees, linking the chefs with their predecessors, to illustrate how culinary influences spread, grow and evolve? For example, the chefs at Demo in the West Village, Quang Nguyen and Dina Fan, used to cook at Wildair, a gutsy, irreverent natural wine bar in the Lower East Side that flipped a tired style of small-plates dining into the zeitgeist-y phenomenon of serving ambitious food, and grower-focused wines, in a deceptively unserious setting. If Paris has its neo-bistros, New York has places like Wildair and Demo, brimming with youthful sophistication and, above all, a devotion to deliciousness. The menu at Demo is full of buzzy ingredients — caperberries, tahini, scallops — but the composite dishes are anything but predictable. Take the thinly sliced beef tongue set over a silky tuna sauce in the style of vitello tonnato. Or the arroz a la plancha, an omelet-like roll of rice bound by caramelized fontina and Mahón cheeses. The lobster au poivre, a signature dish, is similarly remarkable. Its white miso sauce thrums with the fruit and spice of four different peppercorn varieties, and makes a mean dip for the side of frites. You might pair that with a chilled glass of biodynamic California chardonnay from the concise, well-priced natural wine list, though the food tends to speak for itself. Mr. Nguyen and Ms. Fan recently branched out with a second restaurant, Bufón, which runs with the same alluring insouciance as Demo, even if it doesn’t quite capture the same culinary magic. Because at Demo, every turn of the menu, from the Ritz cracker crab casino to za’atar-dusted radicchio salad, is a delight. Address: 34 Carmine Street (Bleecker Street), West Village; no phone; demowestvillage.com Recommended dishes: Lengua tonnata, marinated squid, crab casino, chopped radicchio, arroz a la plancha, fluke, half chicken, lobster au poivre, strawberry tart Price: Bread and shareable small plates, $7 to $34; entrees, $34 to $84; dessert, $14. Wheelchair Access: The restaurant and bathroom are wheelchair accessible.
FROM OUR CHIEF CRITICS If you can manage to get into Ambassador’s Clubhouse — you’ll love itRaj kachori, king of snacks, comes to the table at Ambassadors Clubhouse as a grand, taut puff, a balloon in soul, coaxed down to earth. The semolina shell is inflated in hot oil and draped in coolly sweet beetroot yogurt with stripes of chutneys — sour tamarind, chile-blitzed mint — under crunchy kinks of aloo sev. In India, this is street food, complex and ornate, the mess half the fun. Here, it starts off tidier and more composed, but the principle still holds. Go ahead, crack into it. Inside, the splendor keeps going: layers of earthiness (potatoes, chickpeas), juiciness (mung bean sprouts), smoke (beets charred from the tandoor), melt (little dal dumplings) and zing (chaat masala with puckery green mango powder), and then the toppings spilling in. Read the review →
RESTAURANT AT HOME Sullivan Street Bakery’s Banana Chocolate Chip CakeWhat could possibly be better than banana bread? How about banana chocolate chip cake that’s heavy on the dark brown sugar, molasses and warm spices? Back in 2017, Melissa Clark got this five-star recipe from Jim Lahey, the owner of Sullivan Street Bakery in Manhattan — proof that Mr. Lahey’s skills extend far beyond his world-famous no-knead bread. See the recipe → Need to know where to eat across the United States? Check out our guides to Atlanta, Austin Boston, Chicago, D.C., Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Portland, Ore., San Francisco and Seattle. Follow NYT Food on TikTok and NYT Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Pinterest.
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