Best New York Restaurants for the End of Summer | Eater NY

"I’m more for glamping than camping, but if I were ever to brave the woods, I would try to enlist Armond Joseph to come with me — a chef who cooks magnificent meals on a fire-breathing hearth every night at Léon 1909. Joseph, formerly of Wildair, leans into relationships with Island Time and Treiber farms, even on the cocktail list, where sweet roasted corn garnishes a pineapple and tequila cocktail. About a third of the menu comes from the conventional kitchen, including teeny-tiny spearing fish (usually baitfish), battered with lemon and aioli, which elevates them from trash to treasure, and Montauk surf clams turned into a ceviche-adjacent dish with coriander vinegar and pickled aji dulce in nasturtium leaves grown in the restaurant’s garden. The real razzle-dazzle comes from fire: he dry-brines a chicken from upstate and roasts it on the hearth throughout the day so the fat slowly renders out, leaving skin as crisp as a kettle-cooked potato chip by supper time, and his Happy Valley 75-day dry-aged rib-eye has a glorious crust, saturated with the flavor of the hearth’s embers and its shio-koji marinade. There’s a bewitching quality to food cooked over fire; it’s elemental, and Joseph mastered its magic." - Andrea Strong