We're entering the Year of the Dragon. Last night was the beginning of the new lunar year, which makes today what we call Chinese New Year (and what they call in China, New Year). It may seem pat to take this occasion to discuss our relationship with Chinese food, and the relative expense of it over time, but it's not meant to be. At feasts all over the world today, dumplings will be eaten for prosperity and noodles for long life. And while Americans use a different metric for determining what year it is, Chinese food is as mainstream in this country as French fries and buffalo wings (both of which are, as it happens, available at your nearest Chinese take-out). READ MORE

"Per Se actually has a list of people who aren’t allowed to go back. There’s a range of behavior that’s appropriate. We can accommodate wacky people, and for the most part, 95 percent of the guests are well behaved. Then you have the couple that goes and has sex in the bathroom—that happens quite a lot. You have people who throw up—they throw up a lot. There was one woman—it was a VIP tasting menu, I remember this: She just threw up on the table, in the middle of an extended tasting menu. They cleaned it up, and she 'boot-and-rallied.' She finished the meal." READ MORE

"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 go out to eat meat, I like to be reminded of that.” At Marlene, Vincent and Ruth's behest, let's talk about the steak dinner—specifically, the steak dinner in New York. READ MORE

David Roth: Let's talk about how Adam Gopnik feels about French food. READ MORE

They call me “Two Soups.” Sometimes. And by “they,” I mostly mean one person. "They" call me this because I sometimes order two soups for lunch. Like, instead of “soup and a sandwich,” or “soup and a salad,” I’ll have soup and another soup. A different soup. I like soup that much. (I could perhaps marry Jennifer Coolidge in Best In Show and sit with her and eat soup and talk or not talk. She’d prefer the latter, I would bet.) READ MORE

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1. Naming baby girls "Layla," "Leila" or "Lila." READ MORE

If you're going to make a great restaurant completely unavailable to eat at ever again, this is how you do it: with Times restaurant critic Sam Sifton blowing off the roof. Goodbye, Roberta's! Now begins the 5 p.m. dinner line-up and the 10:45 a.m. brunch line. You're worth it though! You deserve it! <3 you! READ MORE

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 totally in its element in this corner of Brooklyn; another piece of patchwork in the quilt, like the corrugated cardboard company, like the depots for the Chinatown buses, like Central American food tents at the soccer fields, like Defonte's Sandwich Shop. READ MORE