Where to Eat Around New York Before Summer Ends
Where to Eat Around New York Before Summer Ends
We’ve asked one of our regular writers about her favorite bites of summer, yet we all have them. Plus, check out where the staff of Eater New York likes to eat and drink this season over on Substack.
It’s August, and despite being a middle-aged adult, the impending back-to-school dread still creeps in. Perhaps it’s because my kids have been away in sleepaway camp all summer and head home soon — I’ve missed them, but maybe they could stay another week? — but that’s just made me eager to make the most of these last days. So this roster of restaurants is my way of reminding myself (and you) that summer’s not over yet. There’s still time to catch a blazing sunset with a tower of shellfish, drink slushy daiquiris and play dice, dine on open-hearth campfire cooking, and hang out at an outdoor pizza patio during a hot night lit with fireflies.
Dinner
The Yacht Club
212 12th Avenue, between 26th and 27th streets, Chelsea
If you can’t get to your house on the East End (or if you’re like me and you don’t have a house there), the Yacht Club is a must. The place is transporting – a sprawling 20,000-square-foot, indoor-outdoor destination with sweeping views of the Hudson. Out on the Lido Deck (paging Julie McCoy), you can sip cold Champagne, white Negronis, juleps, and large-format tequila punches with juicy grapefruits and limes. Coming with a crowd? Reserve a breezy cabana, furnished with sofas, loungers, and your own Yeti cooler stocked with booze. For a break from the sun, head to the dining room that feels like a luxury schooner. Dinner could include oysters (such as its own Sailor Babys), steak tartare, and deviled eggs, or more ample plates like skate wing meuniere, tomahawk steak frites, and lobster rolls. It’s the kind of place I dream of being shipwrecked.
Wine
Lei
15-17 Doyers Street, between Bowery and Mott Street
Doyers Street winds its way through Chinatown, revealing beloved noodle shops and old-school dumpling houses, and now Lei, the new wine bar from King’s Annie Shi. Lit by long taper candles, with a darling window perch looking out onto the quaint pedestrian-only street, the bar feels like it has a history even though it just opened in June. Maybe that’s because it’s a labor of love; it’s named after Shi’s late sister and works as an ode to the Chinese cooking that the Queens native grew up with. Chef Patty Lee, an alum of Mission Chinese, turns out hand-rolled cat’s ear noodles in a lamb ragu that’s rich with tomatoes, cumin, and chiles. The dog days are made for the Couples’ Delight beef carpaccio, where ribbons of ruby red beef are wreathed in soft herbs, or the buttery Montauk scallop crudo garnished with ginger and lily buds. I’m not a wine nerd, but if you are, chatting with wine director and Heroes alum Matt Turner about his 25-page wine list — full of both legendary producers and youngins from Italy, Greece, and China — is the best way to figure out what to drink.
Happy Hour
Bar Kabawa
8 Extra Place, at East First Street, East Village
Paul Charmichael has won all sorts of awards and accolades for his island vibe restaurant Kabawa, and all the praise is justified: the experience is a fizzy, fun, rum-soaked dinner party. But it’s his more casual sibling, Bar Kabawa, that has my heart. Perhaps it’s the games of dice and dominoes laid out for playing? Maybe it’s the slushy rum-and-lime-soaked daiquiris, poured over hand-cranked shaved ice? Or Paul’s patties, stuffed with the likes of curry crab, short ribs with conch, pepperpot duck and foie, or the eggplant raclette (a sleeper hit). Actually, it’s all of it — the games, the patties, and the paper umbrellas cocktails. If I could put the energy of Bar Kabawa in a bottle and spray it around the city, I’d do it. Bar Kabawa is more than a restaurant; it’s a state of wonder.
Lunch
Fini Patio Bar
159 Bridge Park Drive, near Brooklyn Bridge Park Pier 5, Brooklyn Heights
My summer days in Brooklyn follow a similar rhythm: coffee, run, write, eat, drink, repeat. The running, which I often do in Brooklyn Bridge Park, has gotten way more interesting since Sean Feeney and Will Unseld, the former chef de cuisine of Misi, opened Fini Patio Bar in June. Their red-sauce restaurant serves more than just their out-of-this-world pizza, in both New York and deep-ish dish square styles, but also chicken Parms, sausage-stuffed peppers, and fried calamari. Finishing a run with the goal of lunch at Fini has really changed my pacing. (If I’m running on a Thursday, sometimes I get the insane babka pizza at Bread’s at Pier 1. Either way, my pace is down from a 12-minute mile to 11 minutes and 37 seconds.) Fini has more than just food going for it; it’s got the breeze off the water, and, if you have kids, it makes a perfect spot to eat and drink in peace while they play at the piers.
Out East
Léon 1909
29 West Neck Road, Shelter Island
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. Montauk surf clams are 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. Joseph dry-brines a chicken from upstate and roasts it on the hearth throughout the day so the fat slowly renders out. By supper time, the skin is as crisp as a kettle-cooked potato chip. 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.
