Sweet City

The cheery yellow cover of Asako Yuzuki’s Butter,stained with streaky blood-red fingerprints, wasn’t the first thing that drew me in. It was the title. And, okay, a very me-coded blurb: “An exuberant, indulgent romp of a novel…Butter is a full-fat, Michelin-starred treat.” I picked up the book earlier this summer from Yu & Me Books, a bookstore in Chinatown specializing in Asian lit.

I wasn’t planning on sending a newsletter out today, but the Times just published a list of the city’s greatest ice cream shops (and gelaterias and ice cream windows) picked by yours truly and what kind of dessert newsletter writer would I be if I didn’t share it here with you? Between you and me, I had over 100 spots to try on my list, of which I made it to about 76. I have more than 700 photos on my iPhone and a Word doc with over 15,000 words of notes.

Hello! Summer is picking up speed where I am. We’re not quite past the midpoint of my daughter’s summer holidays, which means there’s plenty more warm weather ahead, and thank goodness for that. I am not a winter person. I hate when the sun sets before I’ve had a chance to eat dinner and I really hate the cold. But summer is cool. Sunshine makes me happy. I have a fun project coming out soon, something to help max out the season, but I’ll share more on that later.

In late 2023, Emily Wilson launched a Substack about the Los Angeles food scene called The Angel. It’s hard to picture it now, but three years ago, Substack was still a relatively new and niche platform. Much of the food world was curiously eyeing this direct-to-inbox form of media to see if it would work. Emily was one of its earliest adopters. Over the last few years, The Angel has grown in scope and significance to become one of the top sources for bi-coastal food news online.

It’s hard to believe that this is my third cycle of roundups for Sweet City, which in a way just serves as a reminder that this newsletter has been chugging along like Thomas the Tank Engine for over two years. Crazy! I enjoy the bi-annual pause to reflect on all the good eating I’ve done over the last six-or-so months, but the big difference this year is that there are more restaurant meals in my photo album—including some great restaurant desserts.

I was naturalized as an American citizen on June 8th, 2018. The day, though significant, is hazy in my memory, sandwiched between trips to D.C. and Chicago for work. There was a brief court ceremony in the morning during which I recall sitting in a room full of similarly relieved and joyful people, all of us betting our futures on this great American project. I wish I could go back in time and ask some of those people to share their stories. How had they gotten to that point?

Hello, hello, and happy Wednesday. This week, I’m returning to your inbox with some thoughts that have been building up in my Notes app. I’ve got a constant stream of food-related observations and half-baked hypotheses running through my head, so it’s nice to move some of that from my drafts into this forum. First off, though, I want to congratulate my NYT co-critic Ryan Sutton on his Beard Award win in Chicago.

I first met Cathy Erway in 2019. I was a newbie freelance writer, fresh off my corporate job at Michelin with very little understanding of the road ahead of me. The most frequent advice I received back then from my husband, who was acting as my career coach, was to talk to people in the industry to understand what they do and how (and why) they do it. So, I took note of the writers who were covering topics I cared about, writing with an informed perspective and a compelling voice.

Park Slope and the abutting sliver of a neighborhood called Prospect Heights in Brooklyn are teeming with good restaurants and great desserts. But this wasn’t always true. When I moved to New York in 2008, my first shared apartment was on Prospect Place in Prospect Heights, which back then was an exceedingly ordinary residential neighborhood on the fringes of a fast-gentrifying Park Slope.

A taste for texture is driving our obsession with dessert. So you’ve heard about the bakery boom. And the little treat economy. If you’re a Sweet City regular, you might recall my missive on how we’re living in a pastry paradise. Even if you don’t have the lingo, you must know that there’s a sweet treat renaissance underway in which dessert is enjoying a main character moment.