The Dave Chang Show features Dave flying solo
Show notes from the Dave Chang Show. As far as I can tell, there’s no archive for these emails, so I’m creating one here.
The Year in New York Restaurants
Even though he’s been spending much of his time in Los Angeles, Dave takes a moment in the episode to reflect on some of his favorite meals of the past year and the trends he’s been watching in New York. In one fell swoop, he touches on sushi chefs looking for a new home, an obsessive-compulsive pizza maker, and his favorite chain restaurant group. Here’s some more context about the places and ideas he mentions.
New York will soon be the sushi capital of America, Dave says. Sorry, LA. There’s been an influx of super-expensive Tokyo-style omakase restaurants in Manhattan over the past couple years, adding to New York’s already impressive roster. Dave doesn’t recall the names of all the recently opened shops, but here are a few you might check out the next time your bank account is feeling full: Noda, Sushi Noz, Sushi Ishikawa, Satsuki, Uchu, Sushi Amano, Sushi Ginza Onodera, and Sushi Inoue.
Dave cites Sushi Nakazawa as the template for New York sushi restaurants opened by Japanese-born chefs who have grown tired of waiting for their turn in Tokyo. Nakazawa is the eponymous restaurant of Daisuke Nakazawa, whom some people will remember from the documentary, Jiro Dreams of Sushi. His big scene is when he confesses to breaking down in tears when his mentor — the legendary Jiro Ono — told him he’d finally made a satisfactory tamagoyaki (egg sushi) after hundreds of rejections. Nakazawa’s tireless pursuit speaks to one of the recurring ideas in the movie, namely that sushi chefs in Japan must bleed, sweat, and cry for years or even decades before getting a sniff at a chance to open their own restaurant. Hence, many chefs’ decision to move to the States instead.
While the movement toward uber-pricey, high-end counter dining means more great sushi for New York, Dave also worries what this means for mid-market restaurants like the ones opened by chefs Fabian Von Hauske and Jeremiah Lawrence. Lawrence (born in Maryland, formerly of Isa in Brooklyn and Rino in Paris) and Von Hauske (born in Mexico City, formerly of Noma in Denmark and Fäviken in Sweden) are the chef-proprietors of two Lower East Side restaurants, Wildair and Contra. Contra serves a lower-key tasting menu than some of the places these two guys have worked, and Wildair is something of a new model for wine-focused American restaurants.
The two of them are also partners in Dave’s favorite pizza restaurant of the moment, Una Pizza Napoletana. San Francisco’s loss was New York’s gain when the famously meticulous chef Anthony Mangieri decided to close up shop in the Bay Area to return to NYC. The new Una Pizza Napoletana offers more in the way of antipasti and desserts than previous incarnations where Mangieri’s menu was purposely restricted to pies.
In his roundup of New York restaurants you should be supporting, Dave also mentions two more Italian spots: King, a young SoHo restaurant with an ever-changing menu from British chefs Jess Shadbolt and Clare de Boer; and Jody Williams’s and Rita Sodi’s Florentine-inspired Via Carota in the West Village. For a guy who waged a war of words on Italian chefs in the “Dumpling” episode of Ugly Delicious, Dave still has a lot of love for their food…
On a slightly different note, Dave also gives a shout-out to his favorite national restaurant group: Hillstone. He’ll undoubtedly dig further into his appreciation for this chain and its founder, George Biel, in future episodes, but for now, if you’re looking for a place that’s reliably tasty and suitably impressive for business associates and visiting parents alike, Dave says you should look no further than your local Hillstone (or Houston’s).