May 22, 2020
Restaurants reclaim the frozen dinner
(The New Yorker)
At a moment when the future feels precarious, there is one thing that reliably brings me a sense of stability. Whenever the mood strikes, and with minimal effort, I can enjoy any of the following: steaming, slippery-skinned xiao long bao, also known as soup dumplings, from Nan Xiang Xiao Long Bao, a Flushing restaurant that makes some of the best in the city; warm, craggy butter-crunch cookies from the Good Batch, a Brooklyn bakery known for its ice-cream sandwiches; flaky, coiled burek (a pastry popular in the Balkans, Turkey, and Israel) stuffed with cheese or ground beef, hand-rolled by Balkan Bites, a two-woman outfit that normally sells them at coffee shops and the Queens Night Market.