First Licks
Wintertime, and the eating is varied and vibrant. The Top 5 favorites of the two weeks just past prove that without question.
Hot Potato Salad
Partner roasted spuds with a mustard vinaigrette fortified by rosemary and have a dish fit for an indoor picnic you’ll fondly recall in July.
Community Café
It’s a warm-hearted gathering place born of the disparate, yet like-minded cultural sensibilities possessed by a collective of women who love to nurture their neighbors with food and drink. Good eats? Yes. But more that’s also important.
Roper’s Way Farm Jams
Jarad Roper crafts preserves with an edgy appeal from the fruits he grows on his family’s farm. His goal: to make each more than a spread for breadstuffs.
With a Little Bit of Luxe
Happy New Year! Let’s start it off by ogling something that’s utterly, divinely sensuous and unlikely to be made at home by any of us mortals. Can this dish of riches offset the rigors of winter?
Resolutions for 2025
What can diners and restaurant owners and chefs do to strengthen our culinary community? Make a resolution that works to that end. We offer several for both populaces – and hope y’all come up with some of your own to show mutual support for those at table and those working behind the scenes.
Curry Leaf-Coconut Halibut Stew
An aromatic accent bringing depth of flavor to animal, vegetable and mineral proves a taste that can bind a bowl of disparate and warming elements.
Brandon Heim, Buoy’s
The newest inductee into TPW’s chef-picks-chef society of top toques claims “food is the only thing” he thinks about. That devotion manifests itself on his menu at Buoy’s in Manasquan, where reservations to his fixed-priced dinners are claimed in a matter of minutes. Ed Sherry profiles this rising star on the Shore scene.
A Baker’s Dozen from 2024
Only 13? Three times that number initially rose from the roughly 1,000 dishes eaten and considered for this annual list of restaurant favorites from the year coming to a close. Several times that number could have made the final cut; it was a very, very good year of eating. That makes these 13 all the more winning.
The First Day: An Argument for Lobster
Fit for a New Year’s Day supper (and amenable as well to a New Year’s Eve tete-a-tete far from those madding crowds) is the granddaddy of malacostraca, which is at its flavor peak now.
On New Year’s Eve, ’24
For those who most enjoy going out and reveling the night and early morning away in the company of both intimates and not-so-intimates, there’s a place to convene with food that will be worth the effort and even the expense. Today, some suggestions to consider, with fair warning: Don’t tarry a minute more in making a reservation.
The Fab 5 of ’24
Selecting the best eats every other week involves excruciating editing that too often leaves very-much-loved foods not making a most unkind cut. To follow that formula to come up with a Final 5 from a year’s worth of F5s can sting. (Though it’s made reasonably bearable by eliminating F5’s favorite restaurant dishes of 2024, which will get their own due this Friday, Dec. 27.) So without any further ado: The quintet of this year’s super winners!