Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2025 i Food & Wine

2023 FORSTREITER GROONER GRÜNER VELTLINER ($15) What’s not to love about this feisty Austrian white? It smells of pears and nectarines, tingles very slightly on your tongue, and has flavors that last much longer than you’d expect from a white at this price. Plus, the screw-top closure makes it excellent for parties, anything outdoors, or people who just like to open things with their teeth. 2022 ECHOLANDS GRENACHE ($38) Echolands Winery was founded in 2018 by Brad Bergman and Doug Frost, who is both a Master Sommelier and a Master of Wine—one of four in the world to hold both credentials. It’s quickly become a Washington state star, on the strength of wines like this silky, wild strawberry–scented Grenache. This is one that disappears mysteriously from your glass. 2021 BUEHLER…

FOR OVER 20 YEARS, Diane Moua worked as a pastry chef at top restaurants across the Twin Cities. But when she wasn’t working, she preferred to cook savory food—the dishes that reminded her of her upbringing. “To me, going home and cooking Hmong food is my happy place,” she says. Moua grew up in central Wisconsin in a Hmong community. Her parents, like many in the Indigenous group from East and Southeast Asia, fled their country following the Vietnam War and the Refugee Act of 1980, settling in the Midwest. Moua spent her childhood on her family’s 120-acre farm, growing a wide range of crops, like beets, carrots, green onions, and flowers. Her home was a hub for the local Hmong community. “We took good care of people when they…

IN PORTLAND, MAINE, seaweed is everywhere—and not just the bay or the ocean. The Maine oysters at Fore Street are served with a seaweed mignonette. The country loaf at Bread & Friends comes with a side of cultured seaweed butter. At Norimoto Bakery, the focaccia hybrid is dressed with Maine seaweed puree before it’s baked. An entire store, Heritage Seaweed, is dedicated to seaweed-related goods like algae cooking oil and spicy kelp bitters, and there’s even a festival (Seaweed Week) that celebrates these aquatic vegetables in all their glory. Not only is seaweed a delicious, umami-packed ingredient, but it’s also nutrient-dense and incredibly sustainable—when farmed, it requires no land or freshwater, with minimal carbon emissions. The ingredient has always been common in Korean and Japanese cooking, but lately, restaurants of…

IN AN ERA WHEN UNCERTAINTY REIGNS, we seek stability. Some sort of reassurance that, while the world swirls around us, some things—some places—remain the same. In San Francisco, for legions of regulars, that’s the 176-year-old Tadich Grill. Blame it on our famously shaky fault lines or sky-high rents, but San Franciscans are not used to permanence. Not much, nor many, grows old here. Instead, this is a city of transience and transition. Fueled by booms and busts and booms again, San Francisco hurtles toward the future, as fast as the fog unfurls. But inside Tadich Grill, we feel something we too rarely do: the past. As if someone pressed pause and never resumed play. It’s a true time warp, where business deals are brokered in private booths, and a brass…

SOMEWHERE AROUND THE MID-2000S, cocktails got serious. This was the moment for the world’s would-be speakeasies, hidden behind unmarked doors, with house rules, specific attire for bartenders (remember waxed handlebar mustaches?), and a level of pretension that attracted some but definitely turned others off. The intense attention to detail certainly honed the “craft” in the craft cocktail industry, but it all became quite … earnest. Lately, though, bartenders and customers alike have started to wonder: Isn’t going out and having a drink supposed to be fun? And cocktail menus are reflecting this shift, embracing the carefree cheesiness of the 1980s, ’90s, and early aughts. A “guilty pleasure” drink? Why the guilt? I think I will have that sugar-dusted lemon drop, thank you very much. Drinks that were often the biggest…

COMADRE PANADERÍA Austin NOSTALGIA RUNS DEEP at Comadre Panadería, Mariela Camacho’s Mexican American bakery in East Austin. The pastry case is an ode to the pan dulce of her childhood, reimagined and modernized: There are pillowy conchas with a crackly raspberry-chile topping; delicate, heirloom corn–infused pink cakes topped with prickly pear buttercream; tender, crumbly mesquite pecan polvorones (Mexican wedding cookies); airy sourdough focaccia drizzled with salsa macha; and showstopping viennoiserie, like shatteringly crisp croissants stuffed with confit oyster mushrooms and her mother’s mole rojo. Originally from Los Angeles, Camacho is the oldest daughter of Mexican immigrant parents. Her entire family worked in restaurants, something that helped instill her serious work ethic. She got her first restaurant job at the age of 15. But it was working at a bakery that…

MR. TUNA Portland, Maine JORDAN RUBIN DIDN’T HAVE A PLAN, so he did what any hungry, enterprising teenager might do: He signed up for culinary school. “I thought that I would be eating great … and living like a king,” he says. “But obviously it’s the opposite. You eat over a garbage can at 1 in the morning.” His first job out of school was working the salad station at 10 Prime Steak & Sushi in Providence. You know how this story goes. One day, the chef’s assistant at the sushi bar didn’t show up for work, and Rubin volunteered. “I was terrible,” he says. But he kept at it, working at sushi restaurants all over New England, and eventually landed in Portland, Maine, where he launched his own sushi…

GRAMERCY TAVERN New York City TO HEAR ARETAH ETTARH TELL IT, she’s just one bud on the vine that wends through Gramercy Tavern’s 31-year history: rarely “I,” almost always “we.” But query anyone else in that ecosystem, and they’ll tell you that Gramercy’s chef de cuisine is one of the dual suns toward whom everything and everyone turns for nourishment, guidance, and growth. When the New Jersey native sat in Gramercy’s flower-decked dining room 11 years ago to treat herself to her first-ever fine-dining experience, she was hours away from transplanting her entire life across the country to study at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone in Napa Valley. 2002 F&W Best New Chef Michael Anthony’s tasting menu—including dishes like duck breast with corn, peaches, and okra—was a Gramercy…

JOODOOBOO Oakland, California IN THE HEART OF OAKLAND’S VIBRANT FOOD SCENE, Steve Joo has quietly cultivated something profound: a small, cheerful banchan shop that hums with playfulness, intentionality, and a deep respect for ingredients. At his tofu-centric restaurant, Joodooboo, Joo interprets Korean food and flavors through a California lens, an approach shaped by his training at restaurants like Chez Panisse and sharpened during a transformative year spent in Korea in 2014: While seeking to better understand Korean food through the eyes of rural cooks, Joo tasted a tofu so remarkable it redirected his life, leading to an apprenticeship where he learned to make dooboo (the Korean word for tofu). Making tofu became Joo’s meditation practice and the foundation of Joodooboo. His process is still evolving. “We still have some curiosity…

Year of the Horsemen “THE SECOND I WALKED into that tiny dining room in the Passage des Panoramas, I knew it was where we needed to be,” Justin Chearno wrote in The Four Horsemen cookbook, of his first visit to the celebrated wine bar Racines in Paris with his friend James Murphy. I felt the same way when I visited The Four Horsemen, their 38-seat Brooklyn restaurant inspired by Racines that Chearno, who died last year, created with Randy Moon, Murphy, and Murphy’s wife, Christina Topsøe. I’d avoided it for a decade because I thought it would be too cool for school for me. But the cookbook—released last fall and full of simple, deceptively innovative recipes—made me question my preconceptions. I finally went on a February night, straight from the…

PERHAPS THEY’RE POURING you the perfect glass of wine. Maybe they’re the friendly face you see when you open the door, swiftly guiding you to your table. Or maybe they’re working efficiently in the dish pit, helping the entire restaurant run more smoothly. Whether you see them or not, there are dozens of individuals who play a role in elevating a restaurant from good to extraordinary. The inaugural F&W Hospitality Heroes accolade recognizes those individuals who go above and beyond—the restaurant workers in the front and back of house who embody the spirit of hospitality in every way. Selected from nominations from all over the country, these seven individuals are essential in making their restaurants a more joyful, successful operation for their coworkers and guests alike. AMANDA PEDRICK Server Moon…

PUNCH UP PASTA NIGHT COLBY GARRELTS, RYE, KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI 2005 F&W BEST NEW CHEF “AT MY RESTAURANT, we make our own pork sausage for this pasta, but for weeknights, your favorite store-bought mild or spicy Italian works just as well. While this version features seasonal mushrooms like shiitake and oyster, you can swap in morels in spring or chanterelles in late summer and fall. Make sure to blend and strain the sauce for the most velvety finish.” Bucatini with Shiitake Cream Sauce TOTAL 45 MIN; SERVES 6 A double dose of mushrooms—blended into the creamy sauce and sautéed with the sausage—intensifies the umami in this comforting dish. While we like the way the sauce clings to bucatini, feel free to use any long, thin pasta you have on hand,…

A PLUMP SCALLOP IS PLACED IN FRONT OF ME at the table, set in a puree of arugula, spinach, parsley, and okra and topped with verdant greens, evoking summertime on a plate. It’s so beautiful I feel a touch guilty digging into it, a feeling I quickly suppress as I marvel at the most tender scallop I’ve ever tasted. It’s one of many exquisite bites served on the tasting menu at Blue Bay Marcel Ravin, a Michelin two-star restaurant in Monte Carlo. “We poach the scallops for 30 seconds in milk and then roast them in curry butter,” says chef Marcel Ravin, describing how he created the dish. Combined with a consommé of burnt bread and red mullet with tamarind, the dining experience adds up to one of the fanciest…

CORDELIA Cleveland THERE’S A MOMENT THAT HITS YOU early in your meal at Cleveland’s Cordelia, when you reach across the table for a dollop of fried chicken rillettes to smear on a buttery fried saltine or drag your fork through a plate of Lamburger Helper. As you lean over the table, you are embracing a moment focused on both the food and the friends you have there with you. If Vinnie Cimino, the chef and co-owner of Cordelia, is near your table, he might hug you right back. Cordelia is both a restaurant and Cimino’s heart on his sleeve, an unabashed homage to the Midwest and the people who make the region so special. When Cimino opened Cordelia in 2022 with his business partner, Andrew Watts, they designed the restaurant…

LOM WONG Phoenix YOTAKA AND ALEX MARTIN don’t want their story to fit into a typical restaurant narrative. “Making food is not a career; food is just a way of life,” says Yotaka, a self-taught chef from a farming community in the province of Chiang Rai, Thailand. Nor do they want their restaurant, Lom Wong in Phoenix, to resemble other Thai restaurants in America. Don’t expect a roll call of familiar hits like pad thai and massaman curry. Instead, the menu explodes with flavorful firecrackers, dishes from the three Thai regions where the couple have lived and worked: Chiang Rai in the north; Kanchanaburi, near the Myanmar border; and Phang Nga on the southwest coast. Take, for example, a crunchy, creamy green mango salad with shrimp, coconut cream, and lime…

THREE INGREDIENTS—rum, lime juice, and sugar—make up one of the most famous cocktails ever created: the daiquiri. But like its sour cousin, the margarita, this cocktail has gone through some bumpy, blended phases. The classic daiquiri originated in Cuba in the late 1800s, and early iterations were made with brown sugar and served over ice. When the drink made its way to the United States after the turn of the 20th century, brown sugar was switched to more mellow white sugar, and the drink was served “up” in a coupe glass instead of on the rocks. By the 1970s, however, the frozen daiquiri—gigantic, overly sweet, and often of the strawberry variety—was the most recognized interpretation of the drink. But lately, the classic daiquiri, in all its sippable glory, is making…

IN SOMMELIER LAND, Chenin Blanc is a name to conjure with, a must-have for any of-the-moment wine list. But head past those borders into the world of regular U.S. wine drinkers, and this white variety remains one of the least familiar great wine grapes of the world. Chenin was popular in the U.S., once upon a time. In 1988, there were over 36,000 acres of it planted in California; today, there are a little over 4,000. Yet the winds of wine change might be blowing. Those winemakers who do have a passion for Chenin often sell out their wines swiftly. Admittedly, some of these are made in minuscule quantities—Palisades Canyon in Napa Valley makes one of the best U.S. Chenins I’ve ever had, but it makes under 100 cases of…

Mariela Camacho COMADRE PANADERÍA, AUSTIN Vinnie Cimino CORDELIA, CLEVELAND Telly Justice HAGS, NEW YORK CITY Jordan Rubin MR. TUNA, PORTLAND, MAINE Yotaka Martin LOM WONG, PHOENIX Phila Lorn MAWN, PHILADELPHIA Aretah Ettarh GRAMERCY TAVERN, NEW YORK CITY Colby Rasavong BAD IDEA, NASHVILLE Kelly Jacques AYU BAKEHOUSE, NEW ORLEANS Steve Joo JOODOOBOO, OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA THIS YEAR, AS THE EDITORS of Food & Wine traveled the nation, scouting restaurants in search of the 37th class of F&W Best New Chefs, the word that kept coming up was autobiographical. Across the country, menus read like memoirs. This generationof chefs is crafting joyful food that draws deeply on family roots, captures childhood memories, and channels hometown nostalgia. The result is an emerging American cuisine that’s far richer than fusion. It’s food that’s fully, fearlessly personal. In East Austin, Mariela Camacho’s Comadre Panadería is a…

HAGS New York City TELLY JUSTICE IS SO PUNK ROCK, she can put glitteron a pink, vegan cinnamon bun at Sunday brunch and make it feel like an act of sweet rebellion. As she was growing up in the Philadelphia suburbs, her parents amplified her dreams of being a drummer by plugging themselves into the social power grid that surrounded their kid. “They’d come to the shows, run the door, and buy pizza for the kids at the show,” she says. “That’s where I get my hospitality, from this feeling of fostering space.” There may be no more hospitable place in America than the 18-seat HAGS in Manhattan’s East Village. Justice and her business and life partner, the restaurant’s beverage director Camille Lindsley, met while working at Kimball House restaurant…

MAWN Philadelphia WHEN PHILA LORN AND HIS WIFE, Rachel, first opened Mawn in 2023, they called it a “noodle house with no rules.” And indeed, there are neither limits nor borders on the freewheeling menu, which merges the flavors of Southeast Asia with the foodways of Philadelphia and beyond. Each dish is intentionally eclectic; Lorn and his chefs constantly ask themselves, “How do you make that Mawn?” Take, for example, the dizzying khao soi, a northern Thai curry noodle soup. Lorn’s version improvises freely, incorporating a local ramen shop’s housemade noodles (prepared two ways, fresh and fried) into a chicken curry inspired by one his mother used to make, or, in one special iteration of the dish, injecting a classic Italian American Philly element: deeply savory, briny crab gravy. Then…

AYU BAKEHOUSE New Orleans “WE REFER TO AYU AS a modern New Orleans bakery,” Kelly Jacques says. “We like to pull in local flavors as much as we can, but we’re not necessarily going to hit all the expected things, because we don’t want to.” At her buzzing bakery in the French Quarter, Jacques turns out some of the Crescent City’s flakiest croissants, along with lavish chocolate babka knots, lacy muffuletta breadsticks, and multiple kinds of king cakes, including the Croissant City Classic King Cake, which was voted best in New Orleans in the 2024 Times-Picayune king cake bracket. Located on bustling Frenchmen Street, a hub of live music, Ayu reflects the energy of its surroundings. “We thought, ‘Y’all show us your live performance down the street, and we’re going…