Grub Street Diet: Leon Neyfakh

"Alice came home with a vat of white rice from Hanco’s, and she let me eat her leftovers. Ordinarily a vat of rice wouldn’t taste like anything, but Alice dusted it with some nutritional yeast. I wish “nutritional yeast” had a name that made it sound less like hospital food; seems like with a rebrand it could easily be an American staple."

"For dinner, Alice and I sat at the bar at River Deli, an Italian bistro (not a deli) about a block from Brooklyn Bridge Park. We shared burrata — my favorite food, particularly when they don’t drown it in “balsamic glaze” — and then shared two pasta dishes, one with mushrooms, the other with tuna."

"For lunch I met up with Avery Trufelman, who is fresh off a run as the host of The Cut podcast. We sat outside at Happy Days in Brooklyn Heights, a pleasantly rundown diner with a halfhearted ’50s theme (glittery blue vinyl seats, photos of Frank Sinatra on the wall, etc)."

"I didn’t eat anything till lunch, at which point I ordered delivery from Aji Sushi, a restaurant that punches way above its weight. It’s priced more or less like cheap delivery sushi, but, as I discovered one night after randomly ordering it on Seamless, the quality is out of this freakin’ world."

"For actual dinner we ordered from Hadramout, an under-discussed Yemeni restaurant across from Sahadi’s. The food here is unlike any food I’ve ever eaten. I got my normal order of lamb ghallaba on a bed of hummus."

"[My friend Meg] told me to come to Bacaro in Chinatown, and that she’d be with her friend Chase, a documentary filmmaker. Meg and Chase were drinking martinis when I arrived, so I ordered one too, even though in my head I had been planning to go home after two beers. One martini turned into two, and two turned into three, which I couldn’t believe. Then we ordered dinner — I got ricotta cavatelli with duck ragu — and somehow I ended up with a fourth martini."

"After walking over to another bar nearby Meg ran into a friend of hers from Ohio who works at Online Ceramics, a thing I recognized from Instagram, and at 2 a.m. a group of us — including a shoe designer named Maggie — found ourselves in the lobby of the Bowery Hotel, splitting some kind of gelato."