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12 Restaurants America Loves. With Recipes!

We’re making food from our favorite restaurants at home.

Banana Bread Bakesale Betty
Bananas Foster Brennan’s
Canlis Salad Canlis
Carne Asada Cheese Fries Piper Inn
Chicken Vesuvio La Scarola
Garlic Whip Phoenicia
Macaroni and Cheese Millie Peartree at Stingrays
Pepperoni Rolls Country Club Bakery
Pork Roast Taqueria del Sol
New England Seafood Chowder Eventide
Takeout-Style Sesame Noodles Hwa Yuan
Tagliatelle with Prosciutto and Butter Felix

From Los Angeles to Atlanta to Chicago to New York, restaurants all over the the country are dealing with trying times. Steakhouses, sushi bars, taquerias and bistros — we miss them all, and they miss us. We reached out to a dozen chefs and proprietors, to hear a little about their stories and their worlds today. And we have a great recipe from each, so you can recreate a little of their food in your kitchen.


Craig Lee for The New York Times

Takeout-Style Sesame Noodles

Hwa Yuan New York City

Soft and luxurious, bathed in an emulsified mixture of sesame paste and peanut butter, rendered vivid and fiery by chili oil and sweetened by sugar, then cut by vinegar, this version is classic New York takeout, made at home.

Chien Lieh Tang, the chef of Hwa Yuan in Manhattan’s Chinatown, grew up in the kitchens of his family’s restaurants in Taipei. “I remember watching the chefs spread the hot noodles on ice,” he said in a recent video call, demonstrating the gentle, draping hand motions used to make the spicy cold noodles dressed with sesame paste that were popular in hot Taiwan summers.

He added, “Every ingredient in the sauce was put together at the last minute” — and switched over to furious whisking.

The Tang family’s roots are in Nanchong, in the Sichuan province of China, where fresh noodles slicked with dried chiles and Sichuan peppercorns are classic street food. Like about two million others from mainland China, Mr. Tang’s parents moved to Taiwan after the Communist Revolution of 1949. When immigration restrictions were lifted in 1965, many moved on to the United States, including Mr. Tang’s father, Yu Fa Tang (nicknamed Shorty).

He opened a restaurant on this site in 1967, and became a successful restaurateur with multiple Sichuanese restaurants in Manhattan and a much-copied recipe for cold noodles — made without Sichuan peppercorns, then unavailable in New York. But he died young, and the original Hwa Yuan Szechuan Inn closed in 1991.

Chien Lieh Tang preparing a whole fish with hot bean sauce at Hwa Yuan.Casey Kelbaugh for The New York Times

Today, Mr. Tang, 67, and his son, James, 35, who helps run the business, are luckier than most Chinatown restaurant owners in the pandemic. The family owns the building, so they do not have to worry about rent, a tremendous barrier to reopening in New York. They have been able to keep the kitchen running for delivery and takeout with a skeleton crew of cooks.

The Tangs have never shared the recipe for their sesame noodles. But The New York Times developed a home-cooking version of it in 2007, with a common twist: substituting peanut butter if the right kind of sesame paste is hard to come by.

Mr. Tang said that since the restaurant reopened with an elegant makeover in 2017 and received a two-star review in The Times, there has been a constant flow of customers who announce that they are there to honor a first date, an engagement, or a passionate love affair with carp in hot bean sauce, the first dish he ever learned to make.

Anti-Chinese rhetoric and violence have risen across the country because of misinformation about the coronavirus, and many Chinese restaurants have been forced to shut down completely because employees fear leaving their own neighborhoods. Still, Mr. Tang said, it wasn’t locals who avoided Chinese restaurants in February, when business was down by 40 percent, but tourists.

“New Yorkers know better than that,” he said. “We are all in this together.”

— Julia Moskin


Con Poulos for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.

Tagliatelle with Prosciutto and Butter

Felix Venice, Calif.

Like cacio e pepe, this prosciutto-studded pasta — coated in emulsified butter, starchy pasta cooking water and Parmesan — requires repetition to master, but it's not at all difficult.

At its best, Felix is electric.

On a busy Friday or Saturday night before the pandemic, customers flocked in droves to the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles for some of the best handmade pasta in the country. All 100 seats were filled by an eclectic mix of locals, tourists and, as in most buzzy California restaurants, celebrities. (The chef, Evan Funke, counts Jay-Z and Beyoncé as fans.)

The music was intentionally familiar — some James Brown or ’90s hip-hop, occasional trap or classic rock — but never too loud, lest it disrupt the olfactory experience. Mr. Funke, 41, considers the scent of the restaurant even more welcoming than the vibe.

“If the track pulls too hard, none of those beautiful aromas can weep into the dining room,” he said. “When you walk into Felix, you can smell the orecchiette Pugliese, the Genovese and the Bolognese. You smell the pizza, the salame piccante. It’s this one amazing perfume that is the cumulative effect of everything that’s going on in the restaurant.”

The seating hugs the heart of Felix, an open kitchen where cooks used to knead, cut and fold up to 75 pounds of pasta on a typical day. Mr. Funke said his pasta laboratorio “isn’t just built as theater and conversation piece”; its true purpose is to connect pasta maker and guest. For Mr. Funke, the act of making pasta is not only about preserving a rich history of more than 2,000 years; it’s also about hospitality. “That connection is really important to me,” he said.

After Mayor Eric Garcetti halted dine-in service across Los Angeles, Mr. Funke struggled with the decision that faced everyone in the industry: to close, or pivot to a new business model. Two days later, the restaurant celebrated for its ornate handmade pasta was serving takeout.

On a busy night, before lockdown, Felix would serve as many as 350 customers.Wonho Frank Lee

“I have people on my staff that live paycheck to paycheck, just like every other restaurant in the United States,” Mr. Funke said. He described his staff as an extended family. “We stayed open so our staff could put food on the table.”

But adapting a fine-dining restaurant for takeout is a challenge. There is no way to control the temperature and structure of cooked pasta for delivery. “I’m a student of consistency,” Mr. Funke said. “In this business, if you’re not consistent, you have nothing.”

Instead, the restaurant created pasta kits, pairing 14 or 15 fresh varieties — eight or so made fully by hand, and the rest extruded — with pesto Genovese, arrabbiata and other classic sauces suited to each size and shape, and providing careful instructions for cooks to prepare the dishes at home. Down to one full-time and one part-time pasta maker, Felix is still producing more than 75 pounds of pasta daily.

While the open kitchen was a draw for customers, it also allowed the staff a window on its audience. “That’s why we do it, to see the reaction of our guests, to feel that they’re satisfied.” Mr. Funke said. “We’ve been reduced to these 90-second interactions when people pick up, and that’s literally what’s been sustaining us as a group.”

— Alexa Weibel


Con Poulos for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Donna Hay.

Bananas Foster

Brennan’s New Orleans

This dessert is meant to be a showstopper. But it’s deceptively easy. (Be sure to have a lid at the ready to extinguish the flame in case things get out of hand.)

Bananas Foster is a dessert prepared tableside, over a live flame, as well as a source of dining-room drama — and potential danger. The fire that rises off the pan can be seen tables away, stoking anticipation even in diners who have just started on their appetizers.

“The challenge with bananas Foster is to keep the flame low,” said Ralph Brennan, who grew up eating the dish at Brennan’s. “When the pan gets real hot, there can be a mini-explosion. I can remember one incident where they singed a lady’s fur coat.”

The dessert was invented in 1951, when Owen Brennan, the restaurant’s founder and Mr. Brennan’s uncle, requested a special dessert for an important guest. Ella Brennan, Owen’s sister, collaborated with Paul Blangé, one of the early chefs at the Brennan family’s original restaurant, and a headwaiter. Their creation became a kind of family heirloom that’s now served all over New Orleans.

The tableside brûlée of bananas Foster draws eyes from across the dining room at Brennan’s.Cheryl Gerber for The New York Times

“My aunt came up with this idea to use brûléed bananas,” said Ralph Brennan, 68, now an owner of Brennan’s. “My grandmother had the habit of brûléeing bananas at home. Back in the day, the Port of New Orleans was one of the biggest importers of bananas into the United States.”

Bananas Foster can now be found in many forms in the city: bananas Foster cakes, sundaes, bread pudding. But there is no substitute for the original, live-action version, spooned over melting vanilla ice cream.

Brennan’s has been closed, and its hourly staff laid off, since the government issued stay-at-home orders in March. No date has been set, but Mr. Brennan is looking forward to reopening — and resuming the bananas Foster tradition.

“It’s part of the cinema of dining,” he said. “The flaming of an item in a dining room is so rarely done these days. I can’t tell you how many people sit there with their phones and take a video of the making of the dessert.”

— Brett Anderson


David Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.

Chicken Vesuvio

La Scarola Chicago

This roast chicken and potato dish in white wine sauce is named after Mount Vesuvius, the volcano in Campania, Italy. Serve it with plenty of crusty bread, for sopping up the mouthwatering sauce.

Armando Vasquez was a small and skinny 14-year-old when he came to the United States from Mexico in 1983, and found a job as a dishwasher at a diner in Carmel, N.Y. He started helping out in the kitchen, and jotted down recipes and prep notes in a notebook.

“I was this tough guy from Mexico who didn’t know how to cook,” he recalled recently, “But I could read the tickets, so I started working the line and taught myself to cook.”

When the head cook quit, Mr. Vasquez took over.

For years he worked at the restaurant and cleaned offices to cover living expenses and send money home to Mexico. In 1991, he moved to a Chicago suburb, where he hoped the lower cost of living would offer some relief. He worked at several restaurants including an Italian-American place where he learned to cook the classics, to which he sometimes applied his own special touches. (“I may have been the first person to add chipotle peppers to pasta,” he said.)

In 1998, he and Joseph Mondelli opened La Scarola, a two-room Italian-American restaurant in Chicago. They had four employees and a used stove they’d bought for $50. “We put it together with a rubber band, basically,” Mr. Vasquez, 52, said of the restaurant. “If you look closely at the walls, you’ll see that they’re crooked because we built the walls.”

Armando Vasquez has been delivering La Scarola’s menu items to eager suburban diners during lockdown.via La Scarola

Twenty-two years later, they have 30 employees, and the still-crooked walls are covered with photographs of Mr. Vasquez posing with local celebrities and politicians. Before closing for dine-in service on March 17 because of the coronavirus, the restaurant was a bustling red-sauce joint known for generous portions of traditional dishes like chicken Vesuvio and penne alla vodka.

Upon closing, Mr. Vasquez’s main concern was keeping the 18 of the 30 employees who wanted to continue working. La Scarola offered local delivery and curbside pickup, but without liquor sales, it wasn’t making enough to pay them.

In late March, Mr. Vasquez got a call from a man in Schaumburg, a Chicago suburb, who wanted to know if La Scarola would deliver there. It’s a half-hour drive away, but Mr. Vasquez said he would if the man could find 10 other people in town to place an order. He got 40. Customers posted pictures of their meals on social media, and requests from nearby towns flooded in.

La Scarola now delivers a few times a week to the suburbs. Mr. Vasquez chooses the towns based on the requests he gets on the restaurant’s social media accounts. Customers text their orders directly to his personal phone, and he delivers to a parking lot for pickup. The service has been so popular that he has had to cap the number of orders at 40.

For now, Mr. Vasquez has landed a $322,000 federal small-business loan and can pay his staff, but the restaurant is still not turning a profit. Asked about reopening with fewer seats to maintain social distancing, once Illinois allows it, Mr. Vasquez was not optimistic.

“It won’t make sense to open,” he said.

— Margaux Laskey


Con Poulos for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Donna Hay.

Canlis Salad

Canlis Seattle

Chopped romaine, cherry tomatoes, bacon and croutons — and heaps of mint — are all cloaked in a thick, lemony dressing.

Perched on a bluff above Lake Union in Seattle, Canlis restaurant is an elegant midcentury vitrine. The view out over the glinting water is as much a part of a meal as any dish. As is the live piano player, who fills the room with everything from Sinatra to ethereal arrangements of Led Zeppelin and Radiohead.

Under normal circumstances, this setting and the James Beard award-winning menu have made Canlis a go-to for occasion dining.

“I would say half of our dining room every night — or more than half — is filled with people who can’t afford dinner, meaning that they’ve saved up, they’ve borrowed a suit,” said Brian Canlis, 42, who runs the restaurant with his brother Mark, 45. “It’s a big deal. When the bill comes, it’s a significant moment. They’re not just sliding their black card across the table. It’s actually those people that make me love running this restaurant.”

Mr. Canlis said he most enjoys “serving this wide-eyed couple on their first night away from the baby, who walk in insecure and having them walk out realizing this is their place, forever.”

This spirit of welcoming has been part of Canlis since his grandfather Peter Canlis opened the restaurant in 1950. “He wanted it to feel like you were dining in his home,” Brian said. “When you walk in there is a fireplace, not a host stand. You don’t get greeted by a maitre d’. You get greeted by someone standing at the fire.”

The hilltop building designed by Roland Terry has been the home of Canlis since 1950.Kevin Scott via Canlis

Over decades, Canlis became a Seattle institution, settling into a menu of 20th century fine-dining favorites — beef teriyaki, salmon steak, vichyssoise, crème brûlée and the trademark Canlis salad — albeit with a Pacific influence.

In 2008, the Canlis brothers took over operation of the restaurant from their parents. That year, they brought in Jason Franey from Eleven Madison Park. The menu was overhauled, becoming mostly a prix fixe format, and many of the old favorites fell away. In 2015, Brady Williams, came from Roberta’s, in Brooklyn, to take over the kitchen; last year, he won the James Beard award for Best Chef Northwest, with dishes like “haiga rice simmered in a brown butter dashi with Dungeness crab, preserved strawberries and hazelnuts” and sea bream with “crisped scales, fig leaf curry, peppers and husk cherries.”

Today, Mr. Canlis said, “The only old thing on the menu is the salad.”

And lately, you can get the salad delivered. Under Seattle’s lockdown order, the restaurant has been delivering C.S.A. boxes, bottled cocktails and family-style meals — as many as 600 a night — with servers repurposed as drivers. So far, the restaurant, which had significant cash on hand for a planned kitchen renovation, has kept its whole staff.

And while the fireplace and mesmerizing view of the lake can’t be delivered, it turns out that the hallmark piano performances can — by way of a live YouTube stream.

“We just have our piano player, on a camera, taking requests,” said Mr. Canlis, who added that the performances have had thousands of concurrent viewers. “They put it on their big TV and they have dinner. We were shocked at how much people loved the piano livestream. And it’s also jobs for our piano players.”

— Brian Gallagher


Con Poulos for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Donna Hay.

Pepperoni Rolls

Country Club Bakery Fairmont, W.Va.

To give your roll more chew, look for a hunk of pepperoni to slice into sticks. Many West Virginians add cheese to their versions, so feel free to experiment.

Chris Pallotta is not about to divulge the recipe for his bakery’s famous pepperoni rolls. But he did say that “the bread dough is probably the most important part of it.”

Mr. Pallotta, 42, doesn’t run just any bakery. He owns Country Club Bakery, in Fairmont, W.Va., an Italian bakery opened by the man credited with first selling the rolls commercially, Giuseppe Argiro. The snack is the unofficial state food of West Virginia, a yeasted shelf-stable roll that at Country Club Bakery envelops a trio of pencil-size pepperoni sticks.

Country Club sells the baseline standard for a pepperoni roll, said Candace Nelson, the author of “The West Virginia Pepperoni Roll.” You can find pepperoni rolls just about anywhere in the state — bakeries, restaurants, school cafeterias, grocery stores and gas stations — but according to Ms. Nelson, “the pinnacle is the fresh, hot-from-the-bakery pepperoni roll.”

There are those who believe that the roll is best made with stick pepperoni, as it is at Country Club, and others who spread slices through the roll “like you would cards if you were doing a magic trick,” said Ronni Lundy, the author of the Appalachian cookbook “Victuals.” Ground pepperoni has a following, too.

The pepperoni rolls at Chris Pallotta’s Country Club Bakery are available for shipping nationwide.via Country Club Bakery

Cheese, while initially controversial, has been embraced by many. But purists still want their rolls the way Country Club makes them: without. Some dip them in marinara sauce, and others slather them with mustard, Ms. Lundy said. “I am absolutely certain that there has to be a secret cult somewhere that puts ranch dressing on it,” she said.

The pepperoni roll wasn’t always so manifold. Mr. Argiro began selling his rolls sometime between 1927 and 1938, Ms. Nelson said, but it is likely that the wives of Italian immigrant coal miners were making them long before they were sold commercially. It was a way to combine the two foods that many miners took down to the shafts, a perfect lunch to eat with one hand in the cramped darkness.

Its portability and long shelf life have made it a popular wedding favor, and road trip and tailgate snack.

Country Club has been allowed to operate as an essential business during the pandemic, and the bakery continues to make as many as 4,200 pepperoni rolls a day. Mr. Pallotta, who bought the shop from the Argiro family in 1998, said supermarket orders have picked up as restaurant demand has collapsed. “Our business is pretty steady,” he said.

At his bakery, the rolls are about the size of a hot dog bun, made of an Italian bread dough. “When you bake it, the grease from the pepperoni infiltrates the whole roll,” he said.

That pepperoni juice is the secret to finding the tastiest roll, Ms. Lundy said, offering the advice she was given at a food conference a few years back: “Pick it up and look at the bottom, and if it’s got red grease on the bottom, that’s a better one. That one’s going to be permeated with the pepperoni flavor.”

— Sara Bonisteel


Con Poulos for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Donna Hay.

New England Seafood Chowder

Eventide Portland, Maine

This version of the classic dish uses dashi, the Japanese fish stock, for a perfect oceanic taste.

For people who love eating out, oyster bars — like steakhouses and pizza joints — are a beloved subset. At single-subject restaurants, the goal isn’t to boggle your mind with a tasting menu or a spherified vegetable: it’s to satisfy you with a particular combination of taste and tradition.

At a good oyster bar, you can be sure that each bite will bring a chilling blast of brine, an immediate protein rush, and — with touchstones like tiny forks, halved lemons, cold white wine and cracked ice — a satisfying hit of ritual.

Even though Portland, Maine, is a great restaurant city and a major hub for Atlantic seafood, until Eventide opened in 2012 there wasn’t a local raw bar that served dry rosé as well as draft beer, or offered crusty bread instead of crackers in a rustling cellophane bag. The city needed “an oyster bar, a New England seafood shack and a sushi bar,” said Andrew Taylor, 39, one of the restaurant’s chef-owners (the other is Mike Wylie, 38). “We tried to do a combination of all three, but with solid technique.”

Like fan favorites Maison Premiere in Brooklyn and Petit Marlowe in San Francisco, Eventide pushes all the vintage-oyster-bar buttons, complete with marble counters, tin ceiling and a chalkboard with dozens of shellfish varieties. But it also has an overlay of Japanese flavors and New England tradition that produced its stellar chowders.

Strictly traditional Maine chowder is made from just four ingredients. The base is clams, because the brine they throw off when steamed open provides liquid for the soup. Then all that’s needed is potatoes for starch, cured pork for salt and fat, and milk for creaminess. (Most cooks now use whole milk or heavy cream, but the longtime default through winters and on fishing boats was canned evaporated milk.)

Eventide is in the bustling waterside restaurant district of Portland, Maine.Portland Herald Press/Getty Images

Fish chowder is also popular in New England, but it needs a little more help, which is where Japanese dashi comes in at Eventide. “I’m sure 95 percent of people wouldn’t know it’s there,” said Mr. Taylor, who runs Eventide and the neighboring restaurants Hugo’s and the Honey Paw with Mr. Wylie and a partner, Arlin Smith, 37. (They opened a satellite Eventide in Boston in 2017, to welcoming reviews.)

Dashi is the basic liquid used in Japanese cooking. It is brewed from kelp and water (and sometimes dried fish and mushrooms), producing a taste of pure oceanic umami. It’s like seawater, but with depth. Dashi, kombu and nori, different forms of seaweed, underlie a number of Eventide’s dishes, including fish chowders. “Shellfish and seaweed are part of the New England flavor profile too,” Mr. Taylor said, referring to traditional clambakes. (To be clear, no one eats the seaweed at a New England clambake.)

Shipments of Eventide’s signature lobster roll, which puts a fluffy Chinese bao in the place usually occupied by a hot dog bun and bathes the lobster meat in brown butter instead of plain melted butter, have kept the kitchen open even after the restaurant closed in mid-March. (It is gradually reopening, and taking orders via Instagram.)

Like many businesses in Maine, Mr. Taylor said, Eventide will have to bring in real money this summer — not half-capacity money, or takeout-and-delivery money — in order to survive. “That’s how it works here,” he said. “We build up a war chest over the summer, and use it to pay off debt for the rest of the year.”

— Julia Moskin


Con Poulos for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Donna Hay.

Garlic Whip

Phoenicia Birmingham, Mich.

The key here is to be patient and make sure the garlic breaks down enough to later become a creamy, fluffy condiment that goes with so many dishes.

For decades, diners at Phoenicia, a Lebanese restaurant in Birmingham, Mich., went home with an image of Sameer Eid imprinted on their brains — specifically, his outsize, curling mustache.

“The mustache is first,” said Mr. Eid, Phoenicia’s 80 year-old founder. “I come second.”

He believes his customers wouldn’t recognize him if he shaved. “My wife and myself are stopped in airports,” he said. “People ask me, ‘Are you the Monopoly guy?’”

Mr. Eid’s son, Samy, is now in charge of running Phoenicia and the family’s two other restaurants, Leila, in nearby Detroit, and Forest, also in Birmingham. Leila, which GQ magazine named one of the best new American restaurants of 2020, has been closed since March, when stay-at-home orders were issued in Michigan, while Forest and Phoenicia remain open for takeout and delivery.

Keeping the elder Mr. Eid away from the restaurants for the sake of his health has been “one of the more depressing parts” of the shutdown, his son said.

Sameer Eid has technically been retired for years, but still acts as host at Phoenicia.Zuma Press/Alamy Stock Photo

Before the pandemic, Sameer Eid wasn’t exactly retired. He woke at 5 a.m. three times a week, as he had for nearly 50 years, to buy produce and meat at the Detroit Produce Terminal or at Eastern Market. He started the habit a few years after opening the first version of Phoenicia in Detroit in 1971. “I must have gone through 15 purveyors,” Mr. Eid said of those early days. “They couldn’t understand, I want what I want, not what you want to sell me.”

Phoenicia moved to its current location in 1982. The new space was a significant upgrade, in both size and appearance, from the diner-style original. But the food stayed the same, even if it was served on white tablecloths: traditional Middle Eastern mezze (hummus, stuffed eggplant, tabbouleh), kofta kebabs, broiled chicken with toum, all made with Mr. Eid’s handpicked ingredients.

Phoenicia’s food is what Mr. Eid ate growing up in Marjayoun, Lebanon. A notable exception is one of the restaurant’s best-sellers: barbecue pork ribs. “My dad went to college in Denton, Texas, and fell in love with barbecue,” said Samy Eid. 40. “The kebabs go like crazy, so does the fattoush. But people really love our baby back ribs.”

Samy took over the restaurant in 2009, but his father continued to be very much a part of it, returning to Phoenicia to serve as host for dinner service every night. “Literally, it’s entertainment for me,” Mr. Eid said. “I love to go back to the restaurant, to see my friends at the restaurant.”

He regards Samy’s coming into the family business as “the great blessing of my life.” But he still doesn’t understand why his son won’t grow a mustache like his. “Poor guy, he refuses to do that,” he said. “Why?”

— Brett Anderson


Con Poulos for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Donna Hay.

Cinnamon Crunch Banana Bread

Bakesale Betty Oakland, Calif.

With no mixer required, this moist quick bread has a cinnamon-sugar topping that makes for a deeply caramelized crust.

Like the Mona Lisa and the Cronut, lunch at Bakesale Betty in Oakland, Calif. generates a line long before opening time. Alison Barakat, the baker who took over this storefront on a busy corner of Telegraph Avenue in 2005, sells basic treats like strawberry shortcake and ginger cookies and just one sandwich: fried chicken with jalapeño coleslaw on a brioche bun.

It’s a perfect combination, especially eaten at one of the rickety ironing boards set up on the sidewalk as makeshift tables. When the line gets especially long, Ms. Barakat sometimes comes out in her signature blue wig, distributing cookies and calm.

She closed the bakery on March 14, days before lockdown took effect in the Bay Area. She has three young children to look after, but she also wanted to pause and think through the future of the business. “We’ve been in even more dire financial straits than this,” she said. (Bakesale Betty has expanded and contracted before.) “I want to be the local business that embraces change, and gets out in front of it.”

Ms. Barakat was born and raised in Sydney, Australia, where she started working in professional kitchens at 18. (She’s 46 now.) She worked in the early 2000s as a line cook at Chez Panisse, where she got her first taste of American fried chicken.

When the line gets long at Bakesale Betty, the owner, Alison Barakat, puts on her blue wig and passes out cookies to waiting customers.Zuma Press Inc/Alamy Stock Photo

“It was like I never wanted to eat anything else,” she said.

Bakesale Betty was born as a stand at the North Oakland Farmers Market, where Ms. Barakat refined her baked goods with small twists like adding a crunchy cinnamon topping to banana bread. It finally got its big break last year: Alongside other local food businesses like the Filipino snack specialist Sarap Shop and Hot Dog Bills (home of the Burgerdog), Bakesale Betty was selected as a vendor at the Golden State Warriors’ new stadium in San Francisco, which opened last fall. But the N.B.A. suspended all play on March 11, and there is no clear path to resuming the season.

The flagship location has reopened on weekends only, baking seasonal pies like strawberry and apricot for pickup. Like many California restaurants, it is relatively well-positioned for a permanent switch to outdoor-only dining. But if social distancing becomes a way of life, Ms. Barakat said, she worries that a key component of the experience that she created will be lost. “It’s all about the social experience when you’re in the line.”

— Julia Moskin


Johnny Miller for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Rebecca Jurkevich.

Southern Macaroni and Cheese

Millie Peartree at Stingrays New York City

Unlike most recipes, which start with a roux, this one begins with a milk-and-egg base, which gives the dish an incredibly rich, silky taste.

Millie Peartree lost her restaurant in November, months before the rest of the industry felt the impact of Covid-19.

Her loss felt singular, the shuttering of her business unfair. Millie Peartree Fish Fry & Soul Food had built up a community in the Bronx, nourished it and received critical acclaim, but after a city inspection found unauthorized gas plumbing work in the building, gas service was cut, and the restaurant could no longer operate.

“It was one of those situations where, you know, you cry it out, you get upset, pick up the pieces and put things back together,” Ms. Peartree said.

Thanks to the support of friends and community — and pure perseverance — Ms. Peartree found a space a few blocks away in the Fordham neighborhood, put in an offer and was about to sign a new lease in early March, shortly before Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo issued stay-at-home orders. Fearful of what the restaurant business might look like in the coming months, she decided not to sign, which she counts as “a blessing in disguise.”

Instead, Ms. Peartree partnered with the Harlem restaurant Stingrays to sell takeout soul food, and created what she calls her Essential Meals program. Largely funded by donations from customers and corporations, that operation prepares food in the Stingrays kitchen to serve essential workers across New York City.

Millie Peartree has been taking customer donations to help feed essential workers.Jenny Huang for The New York Times

She has distributed macaroni and cheese, jerk chicken and other soul food fare to employees at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens and other overwhelmed medical centers. She is also feeding members of her own Bronx community, including transit workers, police officers in the 52nd Precinct’s domestic violence unit, postal workers, and even the morgue staff at Lincoln Medical Center.

Ms. Peartree’s original restaurant exuded warmth, from the Edison light bulbs and rustic wood walls to the food on the plate. And that food is just right for this moment: nourishing and nostalgic, comfort in a bowl.

Her fish fry was “old school,” she said. “It wasn’t a hybrid of anything, and people really appreciated that. We weren’t doing béchamel sauces, we weren’t doing macaroni and cheese with bread crumbs on top; we were doing traditional Southern mac and cheese, Lowcountry collard greens, simply cornmeal-crusted fish.”

Her updated menu is “kind of like a soul food Chipotle,” Ms. Peartree said. “It’s sweet, spicy, everything you want in a comfort meal.” She still serves her staples — the mac and cheese, hoppin’ John rice, jerk chicken — in a bowl, with an assortment of selected sauces and sides.

“You cannot let fear stop you from doing your passion, or what’s right,” she said. “If every doctor or nurse, every essential employee was scared to go outside, we wouldn’t have groceries, we wouldn’t have health care, we wouldn’t have mail. You have to put your fears aside to help other people.”

— Alexa Weibel


Melina Hammer for The New York Times

Pork Roast With Roasted Jalapeño Gravy

Taqueria del Sol Atlanta

The granulated garlic and onion here are essential to the flavor. The roast cooks fast in a hot oven that crisps the fat. The residual oven heat roasts the jalapeños while the meat rests.

Taqueria del Sol is a small chain of laid-back restaurants in Georgia and Tennessee known for vibrant Mexican food with a charming Southern accent. Turnip greens laced with chile de arbol, shrimp and grits with jalapeño-tomato salsa and fried chicken tacos are just a few of the dishes customers have fallen for since Eddie Hernandez and Mike Klank opened the first of seven locations in Atlanta in 2000.

To food-world insiders, the Taquerias are considered some of the country’s first fast-casual restaurants, not quite fast-food and not quite full-service dining. Mr. Hernandez, 65, who learned to cook from his grandmother while growing up in Mexico, created the menu, and Mr. Klank, who has an engineering degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology, developed and employed efficiency measures. To their devoted customers, however, the restaurants are known for a small-town feel and menus that rarely change — a soothing balm to their patrons, especially during the pandemic.

“It’s very much an anchor of the community,” said Susan Puckett, a regular customer and a co-author with Mr. Hernandez of “Turnip Greens & Tortillas: A Mexican Chef Spices Up the Southern Kitchen.” She lives a short walk from the Taqueria del Sol in Decatur, Ga.

“When it first happened, we didn’t want any of our favorite restaurants to close, but we thought, ‘God forbid anything happens to Taqueria,’” Ms. Puckett said. Seeing cars drive in and out of the parking lot, a sign that business is doing well, has relieved her fears. “It gives us a lot of comfort knowing that it’s still there.”

Restrictions on restaurants in Georgia have been lifted, but Taqueria del Sol is keeping its once-bustling dining room closed.Johnathon Kelso for The New York Times

The transition from a dine-in restaurant to a bustling takeout joint has been relatively seamless for Mr. Hernandez and his staff. This is likely because of the counter-service system they already had in place, but also because of how they responded to the shutdown. “They’ve recreated themselves in a way that still feels like Taqueria,” Ms. Puckett said. “Other places are trying really hard, but it’s not the same.”

After giving employees two weeks off, they emptied the Decatur dining room of tables and set up an assembly line for food preparation. Staff members have their temperature taken before every shift, and wear gloves and masks. With more than 60 tequilas available, customers can order to-go cocktails in a plastic cup, or buy a bottle of Taqueria’s famous margarita mix to make their own at home. “We are doing really, really well,” Mr. Hernandez said.

As of April 27, Georgia restaurants were allowed to open dining rooms with a limited capacity of no more than 10 patrons per 500 square feet, but Mr. Hernandez has no plans to reopen anytime soon.“We won’t open at 50-percent capacity,” he said. “Catering the dining room is more complicated than to-go, and we have the most wonderful customers on the planet. We want to protect everybody, not just our employees.”

— Margaux Laskey


Con Poulos for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Donna Hay.

Carne Asada Cheese Fries

Piper Inn Denver

This dish is what happens when you take the toppings for a plate of beef nachos and put them over cheese fries instead of tortilla chips — cheesy, spicy and greasy in the best possible way.

When Jed Levin’s grandfather opened the Piper Inn in 1968, customers would fly in for lunch. Farmers landed their Piper Cub crop-dusters at the nearby airstrip and walked over for a simple meal.

Now, the place sits amid big-box stores in Denver’s sprawl, ranks of Harley-Davidsons fill the parking lot and the menu is decidedly eclectic. “There isn’t a single item that doesn’t have a story behind it,” said Mr. Levin, 36, who now runs the place with his father, Rich, and sister, Piper.

At first, the restaurant served diner staples like grilled cheese sandwiches and hot hamburger (a patty on a slice of white bread, topped with gravy; you eat it with a knife and fork). The first cook who left his mark on the menu was a guy from Buffalo who put the place ahead of the curve as a local destination for hot chicken wings in the 1970s.

That’s also when the inn gained a reputation as a biker-friendly bar. (Colorado, with its smooth highways and mountain views, is an international destination for motorcycle riders.) Benny Armas, who went on to start the Capitol Hill institution Benny’s in Washington, added chiles rellenos and enchiladas while he was in charge.

In about 1984, Kenny and Marcia Mah, a couple who had immigrated from Guangzhou, China, took over the kitchen and added a separate, successful Chinese-American menu. They stayed for 37 years. As the menus gradually fused, the Piper Inn became known for — and still serves — the Mahs’ Chinese hot wings, pork fried rice and won-ton soup, alongside tacos, Buffalo wings, BLTs and Bud Light. And the crowd is also famously diverse.

The Piper Inn is popular with motorcyclists touring Colorado’s scenic mountain roads.via Piper Inn

“It’s a quintessential Colorado mix and the most welcoming place,” said Patricia Calhoun, the founding editor of Westword, an independent online newspaper, who has lived in Denver since 1977. “There are people who love the danger of the open road, people who live in the suburbs but like the idea of the open road, and people whose idea of a taste of danger is a spicy hot chicken wing.”

When Mr. Levin moved back to Denver to join the family business after a decade in Los Angeles, he added made-from-scratch soft tacos and the dish that has pulled in a new generation of food lovers: carne asada fries (a California-Mexican classic most easily described as nachos, but with French fries instead of tortilla chips). Fries smothered in green chile gravy are a regional classic in Colorado and New Mexico, so it wasn’t much of a leap to Piper Inn’s plate of fries topped with grilled steak, beer cheese sauce, chopped onion and cilantro.

Under the coronavirus lockdowns, the restaurant is serving takeout food only, and Mr. Levin said that, to his surprise, he is doing close to a normal volume of business. When the restaurant closed on March 17, all 24 employees, including family members, were furloughed; when federal Paycheck Protection Program funds came through in April, all but one were rehired. The near-term goal, he said last week: “alfresco dining in our parking area.”

— Julia Moskin