Months ago, I let a rich guy with an expensive haircut persuade me to let him cut open my abdomen in four places. Sure, this was for legitimate "medical reasons" that made me vastly safer in the long term, but agreeing to schedule this event the week before Thanksgiving was… dumb. Walking around with enough stitches to cosplay as an NFL football sucks under any circumstance, but it's especially shortsighted just before American citizens play Build-a-Blimp with their belly areas.

Since I couldn't heave big baking pans or screw around with the barbecue pit without agony, this led the family members who came down to visit me to take me [...]

Here is the iPhone app that lets you see (iTunes link) the Department of Health sanitation ratings around you, or in your neighborhood, or by name. The City, in announcing their app, very carefully suggests some data in praise of the grades—salmonella is down! Eating out is up!—but doesn't go so far as to suggest causation. As you can't. But yay! Total information awareness nannystate! FEAR THE B GRADES, ALL THOSE EGGS ARE SLIGHTLY WARM.

Times restaurant critic Sam Sifton goes to London and what is there to eat at the hottest places in town? DISHES OF HORROR MOSTLY. A textural nightmare. A heart-stopping pile of Englishisms.

• "a plate of 'rice and flesh'… a kind of buttery risotto Milanese, heady with saffron and studded here and there with tiny nuggets of meat taken from a calf’s tail."

• "What you are served appears simply to be a Mandarin orange…. Cut through the dimpled skin of the fruit, however, and a mousse is revealed: an interior of whipped chicken liver with a flavor that is beautifully enhanced by the taste of its bright [...]

I texted my sister: I'm realizing I need to invest in a food processor with a shredder wheel. This is pioneer cooking kugel, and she replied, hahah well it will bring you closer to your ancestors who made kugel the same way.

This all comes after I've asked her if she wants the kugel to be from both of us, and if so, if she can kick in a few bucks for my train ticket to Long Island tomorrow, because I've just dropped, like, twelve bucks at Whole Foods on these yams. The farmers market yesterday had none, and the produce at the supermarket by me is… well, I [...]

Also! In other things That Should Be Read, here is an extensive exit interview with outgoing Times food critic Frank Bruni. It took place at Babbo-and, most telling about our current time, the meal's waiter wrote his own account of the meal. I'm sure the busboy has a Twitter account somewhere.

Remember back in early 2011, when we warned you that Hakkasan was coming to New York City and that it would be crazy-expensive and full of the snootiest weirdos and serve very good food in general but less so in the specific? It's always gratifying being right: "Nothing I tasted at Hakkasan was unpleasant, but when the check easily surpassed $100 a person, it was hard not to feel cheated," writes the Times restaurant critic. Boom, one star.

"Marlene Dietrich once said that if she heard an American man rave about a meal, she knew he must have eaten a steak," says A Treasury of Great Recipes. Published in 1965, the book was written by Vincent and Mary Price (yes, that Vincent Price, or that one, maybe you remember). Price drops the quote in a section on great New York restaurants. And it’s not just the American men who thought this (though more on that below): restaurant critic Ruth Reichl in a 1994 steakhouse round-up wrote, “But there is one thing I have no doubt about: steak is a New York tradition, and when I [...]

Yesterday was just another day in which I felt so sad for straight people! What a terrible story to hear about how it is to dine out with the straights. The young, unmated heterosexual people are so often locked in a struggle of resentment and desire and jealousy and insecurity and misunderstanding. Then you put money and status-seeking and sexual conquest (all of that mostly on the mens' side!) on top of those inflamed and engorged feelings, and blammo, the whole powderkeg goes up in flames and next thing you know, someone's being called a douche and someone's being called a whore. And that is why straight people [...]

This brief review of Colicchio and Sons (where Craftsteak was up until the banker expense accounts all died, under the High Line, next to the DEA building) in the New Yorker stresses an important fact: the pastry chef is unbelievable. Stephen Collucci, who does desserts across the Craft mini-empire, is really the best thing going. We heartily recommend hitting the front bar room at Colicchio for dessert after your dinner anywhere (although sometimes you have to look at Ed Westwick which I personally never enjoy but your mileage may vary).

"My boyfriend's father is staying with us in our Williamsburg apartment for a weekend or so. He's from a very rural area, but has traveled all over the world, and he has little interest in exploring New York or anything it has to offer. His greatest enjoyment comes from getting cheap food in otherwise expensive cities."

If the three most important things about opening a new business are location, location, location, then the location that brought Philly Pinoy, a new Brooklyn restaurant, into being is the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, where a couple of cruise liners pick up and discharge passengers headed for the Caribbean or a trans-Atlantic passage. Sit at one of the tables arrayed on the sidewalk in front of Philly Pinoy, you can look down the street and see the ship in port. If it's the Queen Mary 2, she's hard to miss, as she is as big as a skyscraper lying on her side. Philly Pinoy is both out of place and [...]

The more you run, the more it's gonna chase you. And odds are you look pretty ugly when you run. So quit being afraid of wine!

Remember Franzia? Night Train? Boone's "What Exactly Grows on This" Farm? Remember the winos in your back alley? There's a reason they were called that. They drank more wine than anybody. The stuff that the guy who thought his trucker hat was a salt shaker slurped with the leftover Italian beef you gave him twice a week for lunch. Seemed like he had all the answers. So what happened to you?

Mary HK Choi: Really quick background question: were you prompted to eat Domino's because of their new ad campaign? David Cho: Oh for sure, I'd been watching those commercials for the last couple of weeks. Mary: Me too. David: They make a really compelling argument! Mary: Agreed. There's something about contrition that makes me want to throw money at it. Mary: Was the line "When they said our sauce tasted like ketchup it broke my heart" what got you? Mary: Because it definitely did me. David: Not to mention the guarantee. David: What percentage of people ever actually follow through with something like that, to go to the trouble of [...]