226: Chris Crowley

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0:32I don't understand what is like good hospitality or whatever. And I don't mean that in a restaurant sense. I just mean that as human beings about like not giving some sort of special treatment or attention or care to somebody who, you know, really like save money to come to this place and is never going to be able to come back.

0:52you're listening to the taste podcast i'm your host matt rodbard

0:59i've long admired chris crawley's reporting at grub street the food and drink arm of the great new york magazine so it was a real treat to have chris in to talk about his career in food media and the big stories unfolding right now in new york city we go over some of his favorite slept on restaurants before digging into the big questions in life, mainly, what is New York City's best slice? I hope you enjoy my talk with Chris Crowley.

1:31Chris Crowley, welcome to the Taste Podcast. Hey, Matt. Great to see you. I've been wanting to have you in for a minute. I've been reading your work for a while, maybe five, seven years, eight years. I hope so. Well, I started at Grub Street in 2015. Yeah. In May, which is the only office job I've ever had, and so the longest office job I've ever had. Yeah. But it feels like a much longer period of time than that. Well, you've covered New York dining and culture, which is, I believe, the strongest, most successful publication in the country. I love New York Magazine. I think it's obvious if you listen to the show and just read our newsletter.

2:10We link to you all the time. me too uh you know in that sense i always thought like i felt kind of lucky to uh get my first actual job that i wanted at a place that i looked up to but you know you always wonder where do you go after that i mean you don't have to go anywhere it seems like people stay there for a while because they like their jobs and are super into doing what you do i love that you can open a story on Grub Street with Falling Line. I first became aware of the scourge of fake Caesar salads at Kafar, Michael Salmonov's Middle Eastern Bakery and Cafe in Williamsburg. Like, what bugs you about this, like, Caesar salad imposter situation?

2:58So, I honestly, I went there, and I just thought it was bad, first of all. like it didn't like taste anything like the name that it said it was and i don't mean to be too serious like i think people shouldn't take this too seriously yeah or people online or uh readers or whatever else i think that you like it felt like the way we tried to do it felt like a sort of um like a tongue-in-cheek kind of way of going about it but you know like am i actually upset in the grand scheme of things about this being called a caesar salad when it's not well no but it bothered me that it when i had it that it was nothing like what it said it was and it basically just tasted like a teeny and it felt like uh like i was uh uh misled it was a tina salad it wasn't a caesar salad it should have been called something different and i love what you just said you have absolutely articulated the difference between online discourse and in real life discourse having fun and being snarky is part of online culture i i'm like kind of convinced that that places with uh strong food cultures there's a lot of like argumentation around yeah this kind of stuff like who does the better version of this and blah blah blah and and you know the conversations can come across as like serious and i guess i also think of sorry i should go back and say i also think of like the the sort of obsession over who invented you know noodles or pasta and whether it's spaghetti or noodles or whatever you know but i don't think that like i think that that is always a something that you see in in strong food cultures but um that it shouldn't be like taken too seriously or we shouldn't be taking those people too seriously but it's just kind of a way of engaging with the feelings that people have about this kind of stuff and you know i kind of joke to my friend that this is my ancestral culture ancestral cuisine because my dad grew up in the city right and yeah uh he grew his uncle had a uh italian-american restaurant and so i grew up eating a lot of this let's go back to that i'd like to get a little bit of your background i have so many questions to ask you like two pages of notes um because i love your work but you grew up around food culture new york city where did you start writing about food um where did i start writing about food that's a good question i like so my dad's uncle like i said had a restaurant and my older brother is a chef and i have a cousin who's a cook and i have a cousin who owned bars um and these are my mom's side of the family so it's on both sides of my family, people were involved in restaurants.

5:24And I think that because of that, and because of my dad cooking five days a week when I was younger and sort of always orienting anywhere he, any trip he took around food and things that you could see, it kind of made it a part of my life. And it may have not been a way that it was not for a lot of people that I was friends with as a child. And so I, when I was in college at Fordham, I, um, which was my first time living in New York, I grew up in around New Haven and I was living in the Bronx and I would kind of just go around and go find restaurants and just like walk around the place. And my first time where I was actually trying to write, like pursuing writing, I got an internship at back when Ed Levine was running Series E's.

6:09And then through that, I eventually met Max Falkowitz, who, you know, had a big part in me actually like doing this. that's great that's cool that you mentioned max and somebody who it sounds like it's a bit of a mentor to you yeah it's kind of funny because we're the i don't even know how old max is but i've always think of us as somewhere between a year and a half to two years apart which i think is accurate but i've always also thought of him in in that capacity yeah um then you know because he has a very uh uh um he's a wise man yeah he's wise he's also so generous and kind he's a very kind human being.

6:43I've really enjoyed my time with Max. It's cool. Yeah, he opened up opportunities for me to write about stuff that I don't think that I necessarily would have otherwise I wrote. He let me write about restaurants in the Bronx on a weekly basis at one point. That's cool. I was doing because I went to Fordham. I don't know that I necessarily should have been the person doing that but he let me and I also discovered through doing work for him that my first real reporting I did was for him and a lot of that was about the impact of Hurricane Sandy on the restaurant industry. And that was kind of how I found out that I actually, reporting itself, like the reporting, not even just writing, is something that really interested me.

7:24Are you self-trained in the reporting? You didn't go to journalism school? No, I studied English sort of listlessly. Same. And yeah, I shouldn't say extremely listlessly. I had such a lack of direction in college that I ended up taking a minor in philosophy with this one professor, not because I meant to, but just because I liked her classes a lot. Her name is Jennifer Gossetti, and she's really – she also had a very big impression on me. And for a while I was really into aesthetics because of her. Yeah. But there was no training. I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know what I was doing in terms of reporting, how to report, how to write.

8:03So where did you get the training? I know Max played a role, and you were getting line edits for your dispatches in the Bronx, But were you mentored or did you work anywhere else before you landed at Grub Street? So the reporting on Hurricane Sandy kind of caught the eye of Hugh Merwin, who's another person who used to work at Grub Street in New York Magazine, who's a friend of mine. Yeah. And through him, I started freelancing. Oh, right now. And early on, I would say, like, I wasn't really, you know, I did a few freelance stories and then I got a job at Grub Street. and it was much more of a blog back then so I wasn't really reporting very much because I was writing like 30 to 50 blog posts a month and doing restaurant listings now I don't yeah I mean I wasn't reporting the way that I am now um I mean it really taps into how food writing in many ways and in some outlets is a real trade and you learn on the fly and it's about repetition and it's about getting line edits from different people, but also going out there and doing the work.

9:07Yeah. I think that there's like two separate things that come to mind. One of them is that writing that volume of blogs is a really good way of getting a lot of bad writing out of you and helping you, you know, it doesn't help you with much longer, longer form writing, but it, but short form writing, whatever you want to call it is really difficult in its own ways. And it, and it helps you and trains you a lot, especially because you're not necessarily writing about anything that's that's very important or that you care about yeah um and you have to find ways to make things interesting that you might not be that interested in i'll also add the level of who you're writing for you're not just writing for your own blog you're writing for your magazine real editorial standards you can't fuck up facts i mean you really gotta make sure your stuff is tight which i think makes great journalists come out of these places like like new york mag or new york times etc yeah that's an interesting point i think that like i certainly have made a a number of mistakes in my time and it's really like you kind of learn through that well one that that is not a fun process it kind of sucks it really sucks it really nothing is worse than getting the 9 10 a.m email or especially call from a angry person this does happen well it happens for a lot of reasons this happens because you did a great job too you know like i i like i said it started in 2015 and i i feel like the first i'm trying the first piece of reporting that i can remember doing off the top of my head i didn't go back and look sorry uh was about we got a tip from somebody about the um was it 2016 or 2017 it must have been 2017 um it was about the the coy restaurant in the trump soho closing because business had gone down so much and And we thought it was my I think my editor said at the time that he thought it was a quick three sentence thing.

10:57But I ended up finding various people, including a bus, a former bus boy who had, you know, recorded some video and posted on social media talking about Trump and his issues with Trump and so on. And we turned it into this little report talking to people. And I got like I remember getting a really good quote from that person where he said something along the lines of even the Kardashians stop coming. But that experience sort of helped me. It's your kickoff. I love that you could find it, you know, just by doing the actual reporting and hanging out with these people. Yeah, I think I was able to see through that.

11:30Also, you know, there was so much reporting that came out. I think that that was kind of on the early end of this about, you know, how Trump's presidency was affecting his business. And it was very negatively affecting it in liberal enclaves. But, you know, at the hotel in Washington, it was booming because everybody wanted to curry favor with him and in conservative areas. and that really played out over time and i mean that's still something you you can kind of you can take that and see things that are still going on um really taps into your reporting the the types of stories you do at grub street in your magazine because you do cover these broad topics of like how trump's presidency is affecting the restaurant industry in new york but you also write dispatches like what to eat it's like a bit of a it's called a header that you use how do you decide on what stories to write for that what to eat rubric yeah that's a good question i i the most recent one that i did and that's like a shared rubric right um but the most recent one i did was about this little nigerian place in in bed stye called akara house um and it just like i i just came across it and it looked interesting and um i thought that like you know the guy he makes he takes this this um fritter the akara and puts it in bread which is something that um someone of nigerian just i could tell you is not anything new he just kind of he he he kind of just adds a few things to it that people wouldn't otherwise or that might be um heresy like some pickles and some man he's having fun with it and being a little more creative in his own way yeah well it turns out he used to work at mcdonald's yeah that was his first job here and he sort of has applied this sort of american fast food approach to this other food and he just was a really interesting character but i think that if i see something that looks different from what i've seen covered recently otherwise and like the food could potentially be good and sometimes it's not um and then you have to scrap it right i mean because like the is there like a north star that like the food actually has to taste good or is it like this is like pretty good but there's a really nice narrative here and a nice person i want to write about that's a good question i think it depends on the story of course like i'm uh i talked to some co-workers about this and other people that it's like you know it really depends on the story but i'm not a critic so you know when i wrote about that place where i'll rip house whatever i feel about the food doesn't actually really matter even though i like the food um it was more about the people in the place and i think in this column it does matter that the food is actually at least like i think it's decent um but you want to find for me it's some trying to find something that has not otherwise been covered because you know there's so much uh information flowing into your inbox or just people who have resources um who are able to get exposure because of that and i think the usefulness of this column for me anyways is to try to point people to other things that they might otherwise not know about.

14:37Love to hear that. I think of that when I read that with what you're writing, what Tammy's writing or what others on your staff are writing. It's usually a little bit more of that Jonathan Goldian style of going out, not to use a bad reference, but just going out into the field. I don't want to talk about Jonathan Gold anymore in here. It's like going out into the boroughs and like finding cool shit that people should be reading about. Yeah. I think it's interesting you bring that up or that we're talking about this because, you know you would it was the whole thing about the internet and the democratization of information and social media like anyone can post and and anyone can share places and you know there's we all get i think maybe especially older millennials and gen xers and whatever you get this this um choice fatigue is that what they call it like choice paralysis you have so many options but i think with it just the overflow of information but i also think that despite this sort of overflow of opinions everyone's kind of talking about the same places over and over again it hasn't actually widened the conversation and the way that people might have hoped it would now i think there's also just a limited amount of interesting things even i would agree with that point i think that's what i think about i think and especially when you're committing a photo shoot to it you're committing space to it if it's like you really want to hit you have to be have some discerning tastes um i'm one of those cane curing geriatric millennials as well and i feel like choice fatigue is all about new york city right now and i'm like how the fuck do people keep up with it all you clearly are through your reporting i think i try i think it's impossible to keep up with everything though i think i talked to um another like another person about this recently that you know how do you even like i can't i can't understand how someone could possibly keep up with everything happening around the country i think it's hard enough to do it in one major city whether that's new york or los angeles or houston or chicago uh or san francisco like you know it does not even have to have to be as big as as new york city it could be you know much smaller place like yeah like pushpoon right elizer santa yeah yeah that's tough those are tough jobs those national restaurant beats are near impossible i have some like real nitty-gritty questions about grub street like tied to specific stories you've written and also some general questions but first i have to ask when eater and grub street merged what was that like because like i remember a time when eater and grub street were like bitter rivals and like fighting for scoops and i think you obviously both really fight for scoops as part of being a journalist be it food or politics or whatever how the fuck do you guys work together eater and grub street or do you not work together up until recently i would say we didn't work together i would say we still don't there was a couple um instance there were a couple instances at which um there were kind of collaborative processes and I'm forgetting off the top of my head what they were but it was kind of stuff about eating around the city and so on but I mean you know when the when Vox bought New York Magazine Amanda sent me a nice email and I'm have been friendly with various people who have worked there but I would say that like for me in particular maybe my my answer to about this leans far in one direction because of who I am but I don't really feel like we work together and I I think that's a good thing because there are so many fewer websites.

17:58I think that Grub Street's identity is really tied to New York Magazine. It's just an extension of that. And so it's a different project than Eater, which is, you know, one, it's much smaller and it's just about New York. Yeah. And, you know, Eater is this huge network of websites and there's a lot of travel stuff that they've really leaned into. and there's a lot of sort of like maps and sort of a higher volume of service stuff, I would say. But I feel - What a well-prepped answer. Like you really, I feel like you broke down the digital strategy of these two brands in a very clear way. You're not the first person to ask me about that.

18:35I know. It's like clearly like your go-to, some speech about it. But I feel like reading you in the pages of New York Bank, when you actually subscribe to it, you see your name pop up in Tammy's name and all your other colleagues pop up in the pages. So you got to work on a print deadline, it seems quite often. Yeah. I mean, especially right now, I mean, there's like a few people to draw from on staff. There's two of us that are attached to the website. I mean, Tammy and then Alan also, but he's editing, so he writes a significant... Yeah, you guys don't have a huge staff. It's pretty impressive, I have to say.

19:07I mean, there's Alex who's doing the newsletter too. The URI in New York this year, so we have that. Yeah, right, of course. But there's not... No, it's only a couple people. It's cool. Keep it small, keep it lean, keep it keep it fighting i think you know it was nice when there are a couple more people obviously robin robin left last year and adam is still around but he's sort of doing a variety of things and yeah being a restaurant critic but um i think it does like when you have like a a smaller group of people maybe it does allow for that sort of identity to be shaped more easily yeah it's presented more easily all right so you've been on the superiority burger from day one and i i it's a bit like i've literally talked about every show but i think it's always funny to to talk about a very very covered uh rightly rightfully so restaurant but you had a really early look in and and you clearly have a relation with brooks headley the chef but i'd like to get your take and i'm gonna get into some specific questions about new york but just to kick it off what is happening here at the former odessa avenue a how do you mean like is is it like it seems pretty dope to me i haven't been i'm gonna go soon but you you've been on the story though since last year i mean you've been which i love i love when you stick with stories you wrote a follow-up recently as well i'll link to in the show notes yeah so i um i got into the friends and family through a friend i didn't get an invite um but i was able to go because of that and you wrote something well before that well so we did this big profile yeah that's the thing i'm thinking like before you wrote a large profile all right let me start over yeah um yeah so the question kept coming up when is this place going to open again um it was very much on a normal timeline but it has a very uh devoted group like of of fans uh customers i i'd realized recently that i have gone the restaurant i've gone to the most is great new york new york town yeah the restaurant that i have been to the most with one person is superior burger and i always go with my friend gabby who works at gq or i've gone most with her um and like i we would just go once a month and there people were wondering and i think it was in december that it sort of it kept seeming like he was gonna open it up and it would happen every two months or whatever so um i reached out to him december and we talked on the phone a little bit and um eventually i got you know got around to getting him to uh letting us do this profile of him we wanted to write a story that was a little bit more about who he was as a person yeah who he is as a person um and that's hard to do with brooks headley why do you say that i think it's hard to pin him down what kind i mean he's got so many um he's got a mystique around him you know he's he doesn't do a ton of press and he feels like there was i mean i love the guy i love his food he's a very generous guy and i i think he's a very kind person i just feel like profile is challenging with him yeah no i was just curious what you thought i don't think you're totally wrong and i don't think he's always inclined to do it um in fact i think he might say he's disinclined yeah um and he is this sort of um magnetic he has a magnetic personality i think and is also just like has an enormous amount of energy and is very obsessive and can just start talking he's the kind of person that um you can ask him a question and you're kind of expecting two sentences and he'll he'll give you like 800 words worth of an answer but i think that also you know with regards to trying to explain a little bit more about trying to figure out a little bit more about who he is and um you know one of the things that that had sort of occurred to me or bothered me i guess was i really don't like the way that people describe him as a punk rock chef and i was never in a band i was never as deep into it as him but i like grew up listening to a lot of that music and we you know sometimes i would share songs with him and stuff and we would talk about that i think that he is someone who maybe has done a little bit um more with his light i mean the del posto work i mean he won james beard award as a del posto he was like the top industry chef in america i mean it was no joke that was an accident the guy worked really hard at his craft and he excelled yeah and it comes across as like i think because he um you know there's this whole thing in basketball where it's like oh you know the guy you discover the the the amazing player who's uh or the amazing player who's just discovered on a pickup court somewhere it's like that doesn't really exist but i think brooks's lack of formal training and the fact that he sort of just fell into it made him very identifiable to a lot of people because it wasn't like oh i'm um you know a 16 year old and I know what I want to do with my life and I think also like especially in media you do have a lot of career people like that who did know that they wanted to be a writer or something when they were 17 and they're like oh this is so cool this guy just ended up uh he just fell into this and he's one of the the like best people it's uh at what he does there's a scene in fancy desserts his first cookbook where he's literally jumping a fence carrying the cookbooks that he is taking from the restaurant he was fired from I'm super paraphrasing I know it's fire but he's like there's just like a lot of like self-drivenness for him towards his career in food and it wasn't he like really is self-made in that way i think yeah i mean this ties into this that i had thought about you know well i don't think anyone had tried to answer the question of why is this why is he so obsessive um because he is a very obsessive person right i mean that in a very complimentary way because it you know it's resulted in this incredibly interesting place that I don't really feel like is in like anywhere else in New York.

24:30But, you know, when you were one of the interviews, I can't remember off the top of my head if it was, you know, we went to a diner in Chelsea and hung out there and I went to the original Superior Burger and then we went to the new one before it was finished. At some point he said this quote to me that we have in the story about just, you know, once the restaurant opens, he just wants to work there and die, work there and fucking die. I'm like, oh, that's a great quote. But it's interesting because, you know, Now, I would joke to other people that, you know, if someone said that in 2021, they'd get they get canceled during the quiet quitting era.

25:02Yeah. But he's sort of just someone who he clearly is like obsessed with the place and cares a lot about it and is sort of dedicated to. But in a way that that I don't know, I mean, I don't want to project my ideas onto him, but it seems to me that he was invigorated by the fact that he was actually around people at this place at the original one. and then now versus being back in a kitchen um yeah playing more like restaurateur than chef and it seems like he's front of house more yeah i mean i don't i i i feel that that he strikes me as someone who cares a lot about people um in his life and i think that that is like like doing this sort of work can be it's obviously incredibly exhausting work when you're um running a restaurant like a small restaurant like he was um but i you know and regardless of of of that impact on you it can also be really rewarding to um to do this sort of work when you are someone who cares a lot about people so who's a chef who you've absolutely loved to write about and it maybe isn't like you love the person as a person but you just loved profiling them and writing about them brooks would be the most recent example because i got to spend a bunch of time with somebody um and talk to him and try to figure out a little bit about his place and his thing and what's going on.

26:16But I also, when you ask that question, I think about people I've written about who otherwise weren't covered. There was this couple in Queens who started a sort of Instagram bakery that's not operating right now, but they were sort of just trying to like figure out what it looked like for them to run their own business. And I just discovered them randomly because I I think that like another cook I know had told me about it or something like that. I wrote a story about this cook who worked at Momofuku and a bunch of other restaurants named Courtney Kennedy who left restaurants to work in a hospital and cook for cancer patients.

26:57And this was at the beginning of COVID. And I think that, you know, when I think about what I want to write about profiles, it's some combination of those two things. I either want to try to like, you know, be able to spend a bunch of time with somebody in the way that I did with Brooks to sort of write something about them that is maybe different than what other people have. Or I just want to spend, I mean, I'm like, this goes back to that idea of looking for things that people aren't otherwise talking about or wouldn't otherwise talk about. I mean, this, the cook Courtney who works at the hospital, I can't tell you how I found her.

27:33I don't remember. I think that I had been thinking about looking for people who left the restaurant industry. This was in 2021. And, um, I was looking for people who had, who had left and gotten new jobs just to talk to them. And I just sort of in that process stumbled upon her. Um, and it was just really interesting because I, for me, because I, I, you know, she's just continuing to live a normal life completely outside of restaurants, completely outside of the press. It's not like, you know, I don't I don't like imagine that that anything else will be written about her. Yeah, but it's it's the reason we do the work is because we get to enter these worlds and get to meet people who are doing something that's so far out of our like small little world that we live in.

28:18And it's just like it's absolutely refreshing. Right. It gives you like life to like find a Courtney and be able to figure out how she's been able to parlay this back of house cooking job into something that seems extremely meaningful. Yeah. I mean, I think I realized in the course of reporting that I mostly I just like talking to people. Yeah, right on. And learning about what's going on in their lives and why they're doing the things they're doing, because, you know, I think a lot of people wouldn't have made that switch that she made when she made it, which was that she this was at the beginning of COVID and she went to work in a hospital.

28:50And I think a lot of people would have been like, ah, understandably, they would have, like, you know, stayed on unemployment or something for whatever their reasons were, you know, or they just didn't want to go work in a hospital. But this is like, you know, other people have talked about this, the, you know, the importance or the lack of attention we give to food in these sort of spaces like hospitals and, you know, retirement homes and assisted care facilities and stuff and the people doing that work. It's just it's tough to make the audience care, the reader care. It's part of your job. It's like the real challenge is to write a piece that actually will actually get some pickup and people will give a shit about when, in fact, Grub Street is there to serve people who want to eat out and dine out.

29:36Right. Yeah. I mean, I think that's the there's a conflict that a lot of people come up against. I don't want to say who said this to me, but because I this was a private conversation. but somebody else said something to me about feeling that you know some writers like are sort of don't necessarily actually want to write about restaurants they want to write about other things but they end up writing about restaurants yeah um and i don't know it's you can want to cover certain kinds of things but you're right that ultimately like this website is um a website about like restaurants and the restaurant industry and stuff and i i don't see that as a limitation at all absolutely not i mean that's not what i'm saying because i think you know have a real skill at bringing both voices to your your your pages and your coverage i yeah i mean i think that when i say that the i'm going to repeat something i've said to other people which is that again it this is just something that occurred to me over the last few years i guess um during covid or or or whatever um which is that i think restaurants are are like a great way in which to write about cities and to do city reporting.

30:44Because like I take the example of that neighborhood in the Bronx, little Yemen, I started going there. After like a year after college, I would just go eat there. And there was a mosque, there were three Yemeni restaurants, a Palestinian restaurant, a few stores, it was a pretty small community. That's not where you see the Yemeni American community, whether new immigrants or long established people whose families have been here for 100 plus years. But over the last handful of years, it has grown into a much bigger neighborhood. And the reason why is because of the war and the, you know, the US backed Saudi war in Yemen and what's happening there and what the Saudis are doing to Yemen and the drought and the famine.

31:26And so people are bringing family over and the neighborhood has grown enormously as a result of that. And I think that like, understandably, I don't mean this as a criticism, because I think the same thing. It's like you're in New York and wow, look at all the food that I can eat. This is so amazing. You know, I can have tacos one day and sushi another day and arancini the other day. But the reality is – The combination of dishes, by the way. I'm into that. Put them all together. Yeah, they're pretty good on a plate. Yeah, I'm into that. But the reason why there's such diversity in New York is not always – the reasons aren't always good.

31:58In fact, a lot of the time it's like, you know, people are here for bad reasons, whether it's war, fleeing persecution, society-wide or individual drought, famine. And I think that, you know, that story felt to me like a way of like acknowledging the growth of the neighborhood and talking about it. As opposed to like writing about, for example, like the best Fatouche sandwich if you're going to write about that location. Yeah, as opposed to just doing a service guide. Like you can point people to the restaurants and also talk about why the neighborhood exists. And I think that's so much more interesting than just being like, here are the 10 things you should eat.

32:36It's your tight editing, though. It's a real skill. I mean, you could definitely be long-winded about some of this stuff. But I think keeping it really brisk and covering these important topics while also giving service is the joy of reading your magazine. I want to transition and talk about this article you wrote. The best pizza in the world. I'm just emphasizing it. The best pizza in the world can be found in one square mile of Williamsburg. Wow. North Brooklyn is where the best pizza is in New York. Wow. I love it. Let's talk about that. I think it's a great piece. It was, you shined light on a lot of cool places, but what, what, what got you into that thinking?

33:12So I should think about how to say this because I don't want to, I don't want to talk shit about anyone I work with. I didn't write the headline. Well, yeah. Yeah, I mean, listen, it's an issue that will be forever part of media and food writing. The writer, don't kill the writer for the editor's deed. You got to get people's attention. I think that, you know, that wasn't my idea, even though it should have been because I should be paying enough attention to notice this. That came from Alan and then was done through the print editors who were working on the reasons to love issue. And it would include Corey and Ryu.

33:48the it was just sort of an observation that like all of a sudden over the last few years there was such a concentration of high quality places in that neighborhood and it started right with like best pizza yeah of course and then Williamsburg pizza and then has grown and I think kind of like look I I go around the city uh to like southern Brooklyn and Staten Island I would I think that I probably I feel pretty confident saying I've spent more time on Staten Island than like anyone else who writes about um like restaurants in new york who doesn't live there or isn't from there um but it's sort of like you go to staten island there's a ton of great pizza but it's all spread across this huge borough yeah i don't think there's anywhere else in the city i think pat's is pretty good pat's yeah oh joe and pat's yeah joe and pat's i think joe and pat's is one of my it's still one of my five favorite places me too i don't think it's gotten any worse no um it's gotten better it's great yeah that place is awesome um and it's you know that's real italian american culture yeah yeah you're gonna see some characters in there words you don't see in these places in williamsburg so much although i think it's cool that a few of the places were opened up by guys who are from this sort of like uh you know the the where like the pizza culture is strongest in new york like you know a couple of them are from i think one of them's from graves end i forget where the other one's from um but you have this sort of actual connection to the like that sort of preserved Defara land, L &B Spumani land part of New York pizza culture.

35:11That's my number one on the record I've said it many times. Defara or L &B? No, definitely not L &B. Definitely not Defara. Are you a Defara hater? I edited a piece that Katie Parler wrote in 2014. Oh, right, right. That was my piece with Katie that I edited and she got death threats for that. That's actually not a joke. She listened to my interview with Rick Easton. I don't know if it's going to be before or after you, but Rick and I get into that story a little bit. I bet she did I uh Beatrice from is that her name the Gustiamo founder was pretty I think excited about that she was like fuck this place yeah there's a whole yeah I mean I have a friend who grew up going there because he uh he's around my age so he's 33 32 I forget and um yeah he would go there all the time as a kid and I think that like I think Adam Adam Kuban is that his last name Yeah, Kubin.

35:57Yeah, sorry. He sort of, I think, said it best to me, which is that – I think he said it best to me, which is that, like, it kind of – the rise of that place coincided with the rise of blogs and also, like, the shrinking number of really high-quality places. And so it sort of carried this whole mystique around it. I think, like, with the guy, you know, the guy, R.I.P., you know, doing the slices and doing the olive oil shower for every customer had something to do with it, too. Yeah, right. I think there's such an obsession in our culture. It's like at the same time as we have everything's a cheesecake factory menu.

36:29People are also obsessed with like the lone guy who's like devoted his life to the business. And it's just his identity is tied up with it. And he's just like hobbling around there. And, you know, if you went there, you could track, you know, getting worse over time. Or the fires, sorry, the pizza's like, you know, getting cooked a little too long in certain places. Yeah. But it's hard. I mean, consistency is impossible. I mean, with labor costs and just the way restaurants operate in such a small margin to be that perfect experience every time for these fast casual style restaurants. People will say that to me too.

37:05They'll be like, well, I went there once and I didn't like it. Like, well, then don't go back. But it doesn't mean it's bad. Definitely don't burn down a restaurant because of one visit. I think it's sort of, yeah. Like for fast casual. I mean, if it's a fine dining and it's a multi-course tasting, maybe that is met valid. Yeah, sure. look if you're paying like four which i have not but like if you're paying like four hundred dollars or five hundred dollars or whatever to go to la bernadine you know that's especially if you're a normal person like us like or anyone else like i don't know anyone not making three hundred thousand dollars a year are you really able to do that more than once in your life so yeah i mean that's why i like that review that pete wells did years ago about the danielle where he wrote about it his own experience and kind of pulled the old school trick and sent somebody else there and it's like it really matters like how that regular person is is treated at a place like that to me because i don't understand what is like uh good hospitality or whatever and i don't mean that in a restaurant sense i just mean that as human beings about like not giving some sort of special treatment or attention or care to somebody who you know really like like save money to come to this place and is never going to be able to come back and then you're just not treating them as well as someone else who is vip and can come back that doesn't that's that doesn't feel like the right way of running a business to me chris let me ask you is there a particular neighborhood that you feel yourself leaning into a little bit more and you just mentioned staten island which is not a neighborhood but a borough and are you like particularly aware of like a brooklyn bias in the writing for grub street that's a good question i don't think that i have a particular neighborhood at the moment i'm trying to like find i think i'm probably going through another process trying to find some place like that i mean i think there's a lot of stories going on in chinatown right now um because of just the ongoing development and you know changes in downtown manhattan and not dime square no well dime square is part of that jason's part of the conversation i wanted to ask about dime square but like i feel the chinatown conversation you have to mention dime square it's in the same quadrant yeah well yeah that's a i i was trying to i mean it's canal street i mean Jesus, that's like, that is Manhattan Chinatown.

39:15So. I mean, I would always go down there at first to go to, was it Lam Jou? The old dumpling place. I don't, I'm forgetting if I'm messing up the name, but. On East Broadway? Yeah, that was one of my favorite places. I love that place. So I would go down there all the time. I can't remember the name of it. And like hang out there. Because it was, I would go with a friend who I worked in a restaurant with and it was so cheap and that was like all I could afford at the time. But sorry to jump back to your other question about Brooklyn. I mean, I think there's a, yeah, there's a bias towards, what do we call it now?

39:47People used to call it Brownstone Brooklyn. I don't think that's what they call it anymore. Gentrified Brooklyn, whatever you want to call it. I mean, all of Brooklyn North is gentrified in some way. Brooklyn North of Park Slope. Yeah. Or not Park Slope, Prospect Park. Yeah. I think that there's like a bias towards that in Manhattan in all coverage because those are places where you're going to find people who actually have resources to hire PR, to get attention. I mean, I was, I felt like people would be like, Sunset Park has the best Mexican food in New York. And it's because all the writers who are, you know, 15 years older than me all like live nearby.

40:19People will talk about the places that are near them. And I don't, it's like, you know, you have kids or you just have a life that you got to live or whatever. I don't know. This goes back to something we were talking about before, which is just looking for stuff outside of that. Like, you know that you're going to get bombarded with, you know, like press releases and stuff about restaurants that are opening up in Williamsburg or the Lower East Side. or the Flatiron or whatever. But also that those places are going to more easily gain your attention because, you know, a lot of people you know who are young are living there and so, like, you might get fed them on Instagram.