Kernels, January 2026
What I did last month feat. Bistrot Ha, Japanese paper films, tart potluck, and dancing on my own.
Kernels is my “life update” column, in which I share a bit of what I’ve been eating, watching, and otherwise doing in the past month. Everything is loosely written and nothing is meant to be taken seriously. It’s pretty long so either I’m oversharing or I’m just doing a lot. Sure, I could just keep a journal, but then no one else would read it and if no one reads it, what’s the point?
What I’m Looking Forward to in February
Let’s start with the future before recapping the past.
Olympics!! Especially hockey. In Women’s hockey I’m rooting for Team USA, but for Men’s Team Canada.
Hosting my annual Oscars dinner.
A joint bachelor/ette party in Phoenix/Scottsdale. Normally I’m loath to leave New York, but it’s been so cold that I’m looking forward to this. Due to a weird flight schedule I’ve got a day or so to kill so please send recommendations, especially if I can get there in a Lyft.
For the weather in New York to be warmer… please?
Dining Out
Regular readers know that these days, I rarely go out to eat—that is, I left the house primarily to go out to a restaurant. I only did this three times in January, and two of those were for my brother’s birthday.
Bistrot Ha w/ Frankie
How do you score the hottest table in town? You get a 10 PM reservation on January 2.
Ha’s Dac Biet does not make traditional Vietnamese food, nor is it really fusion, in the common sense of the term. This is Parisian bistro fare but better. The team remains unapologetic about their roots. As it says on their bio: “Everything has fish sauce.”
Bistrot Paul Bert is the obvious inspiration.
Frankie and I split five dishes; the menu changes often. These dishes were unusually hard to photograph well. It was all great though.
Fried yuba with shrimp & sweet nuoc mam (very spicy thanks to the Thai chilis)
“Char sui” beef heart (seems to have been marinated in fish sauce, and sliced onions and ngo gai balance out the irony meat)
Calf’s brain & crab soup (A riff on Clown Bar’s famous veal brain soup and canh chua ca. There’s lots of cilantro. Everyone asks what eating brain is like and you should just try it for yourself, I’ve done it many times, but when poached it’s soft and cloudy in texture. It tastes like you’d expect a brain to taste like.)
Tomato fried rice with escargot (Sweet and sour, XO sauce vibes. Wow.)
Lobster and monkfish liver vol au vent (Fried curry leaves bring this together, bringing an earthy grounding to the rich, spicy curry underneath the pastry.)
My half of the meal cost $128, including a glass of wine. I’m less price-sensitive than I used to be since I cut back on sit-down meals.
Pig & Khao (Brian’s birthday lunch)
When our server found out it was a birthday lunch he poured everyone a round of tequila. Because of the party size (ten people) we got a prix-fixe and ended up with a ton of leftovers. No complaints here, this was great, though the brunch side of the menu (ube croissants, ricotta calamansi pancakes) was incongruous with the very savory sisig and pan mee.
Sukh (Brian’s second birthday dinner)
Really good and the price wasn’t as high as I thought it would be. It’s a very cramped space though.
After dropping off food scraps at the Fort Greene Farmer’s Market I had some time to kill before heading into Manhattan and Los Burrito Juarez was around the corner. In warmer weather it would be perfect for fuelling a park picnic.
Flour tortillas are rolled out and cooked in full view, and as with any good burrito joint, you get your order quickly. Unlike the gut bombs I grew up on in California, these are snack-sized, which makes for a more scalable eating experience. I got two burritos, which cost $20. The Colorado (slow cooked pork) was great. The friojoles con queso, which was like an upgraded Taco Bell bean and cheese, not so much. You can definitely tell that the beans are meant to be a side note, not the main protein, so I wouldn’t suggest it unless you’re vegetarian.
Dining In
Cooking For Others
Thursday 1/1 - New Year’s Day Open House
Monday 1/5 - 8 people
Conservas, baguette, crackers, cheese
Aaron brought tinned sturgeon!
Braised beef cheeks served atop pomme purées laced with goat cheese
Wine pairing: Muga, Reserva 2020
Roasted broccolini and parsnips
Saturday 1/10 - Two different parties
My go-to cookie recipe, from the now-defunct Ochre in Detroit. The honey and ginger powder are subtle but secret ingredients. Made this for a birthday party and a separate sobriety anniversary party, which were on the same day. Turns out for the latter, she’s allergic to nuts. Oops.
Sunday 1/11 - 3 people
Impromptu after Brian’s birthday lunch and we passed by a farmer’s market on the UWS. Picked up scallops and squid and just did a simple sauté. Amanda made fried rice with Pig & Khao leftovers.
Thursday 1/15 - Film Club (Scarface 1932)
Salsa di Noci (Walnut Sauce Pasta)
Apparently Al Calpone’s favorite pasta dish so it felt an appropriate pairing with the Howard Hawks Scarface. It is very simple and it doesn’t look like much but tastes incredible. Very easy to make ahead and scale up. It’s basically a pesto without the herbs.
Wine pairing: Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi “Loretello”, Politi 2023
Friday 1/16 & Sunday 1/18 - Tarty2
The solidified fat is straight out of the fridge. I never got a picture of it after it came to temperature. For her birthday, Annie throws a “tarty.” It’s a potluck where everyone has to bring something that is either a tart (e.g. fruit tart) or is tart (e.g. orange wine). Pastry is the one realm I dare not venture into, but this David Lebovitz recipe uses crushed graham crackers as the crust. Technically still a tart but it’s a total sweet-tart (pun intended). Another friend had a housewarming party the day before which was a good opportunity to give this recipe a test run. It was a big hit; someone gave it the perfect description: Ferrero Rocher in pie form.
I riffed a bit and topped the tart with candied citrus peels made from yuzu and hyuganatsu I smuggled back from Japan. Great addition for flavor, to counterbalance the intense richness of the bittersweet chocolate, but they look like translucent worms.
And here are some of the other tarts from the tarty!
Monday 1/19 - 10 people
Cheese and jamón ibérico (the last pack my brother brought me from his Spain trip)
Braised Oxtail Stew (I did 50/50 oxtail and short rib for cost control)
A fusion of the Jamaican classic and Vietnamese bo kho. Because I was doubling the recipe I did a side by side: one pot had the typical Jamaican spices, the other Vietnamese. I am honestly not sure if anyone could tell the difference but I put a lot of chilis in both braises. The beef is still the star of the show.
Wine pairing: Aslina “Umsasane” Red Blend - 2021 though we drank a bunch of other bottles too.
Served with rice and peas, roasted cabbage with Royal Corona beans, watercress & grapefruit & nuoc cham salad, and bread. Olivia made a carrot cake for dessert!
Karaoke afters
Friday 1/23 - Film Club (Scarface 1983)
Ropa vieja was an obvious food pairing.
The meat looked so damn dry after the braise that I thought it’d be inedible, but shredding it up turned it from leather into something… really good.
Wine pairing: Field Recordings, Fiction Red 2023
Served with black beans and rice. Derek and Han made tostones 🙂
Thursday 1/29 - 3 people
Spanish-style Baked Butter Beans (Rancho Gordo Bean Club recipe, used Yellow Eye beans instead of giant limas because it’s what I had.)
Roasted broccolini and brussels sprouts
Great Things I Cooked For Myself
Charred Cabbage and Lentil Soup
Added roasted Mexican chorizo links to round it out some but would work perfectly fine without. Great for meal prep.
Red Curry Lentils With Sweet Potatoes and Spinach
I make this once every winter, a terrific meal prep dish. Essential to eat with rice, parathas, or both.
Added mushrooms. I made this on the day of The Big Snow. While I regret not going outside that morning to enjoy all the sledding and good vibes, I don’t regret hunkering down for the rest of it.
Theater
Once again I call on theaters (of the stage and movie variety) to place coat racks in every hallway! Broadway seats are uncomfortable enough without having to press your back against a smushed up puffer jacket. (I stuff mine under my seat when I can.)
Sure, some places have coat checks. But as Sidney Falco sneers in Sweet Smell of Success, that would mean leaving “a tip in every hat-check room in town.” Plus, have you seen the lines to retrieve belongings after a show?
Tuesday 1/6 - Bug
Bug/onia - the play predates the film considerably but they tread the same thematic terrain. Perhaps the material here is showing its age but it didn’t do much for me. Carrie Coon is great, but we need a moratorium on stage actors attempting southern accents.
Tuesday 1/27 - Marjorie Prime w/ David, Sam
In contrast, Marjorie Prime has only become more potent with time. The world has caught up to this play about AI companions, which premiered 12 years ago and its sci-fi future has become our present. But the overall explorations of grief, memory, and what we withhold from them are evergreen. This particular production is tightly structured and features strong performances by all, but I’m mostly in awe of June Squibb doing eight shows a week at the age of 96.
Movies
You can follow me on Letterboxd for more movie scribblings that don’t make it into this newsletter.
The first movie I saw at home: The Apartment (1960), in my apartment, as is my tradition.
The first movie I saw in a theater: Ella McCay (2025) at AMC Empire, which is not so much a “bad movie” as it was an incompetent one.
The last movie I saw at home: Dust Bunny (2025), which, as someone for whom Pushing Daisies and Hannibal were extremely formative television shows, was a very disappointing foray into filmmaking from Bryan Fuller.
The last movie I saw in a theater: Rain (1932) at MoMA, a rather stiff early talkie with two brilliant scenes with Joan Fontaine.
Also notable:
Train Dreams (2025) at home. Not to scoop my Best of 2025 list (coming… this week, hopefully) but it’s been so long since a movie made me cry this much.
One Of Them Days (2025) at home. Palmer and SZA’s characters invented the “Hot Cheetos Martini” when they were kids but had never actually tried it until the very end of this film. The glasses are rimmed with crushed Cheetos then vodka is free-poured. It looks gross. Even grosser is Empirical’s infamous Doritos spirit. It is literally vacuum distilled Doritos (Nacho Cheese flavor) and really does taste like those chips... and alcohol. As a shot it’s hella gross but it works pretty well in certain cocktails. Try a margarita and replace half the tequila with this.
Orphans at MoMA: At Play—Amateurs, Animators, and Avant-Gardes
An incredible program at To Save and Project. There was a really long standby line which is very unusual, but rare 16mm projections and live musical accompaniment are going to be a big draw in this town.
Got weirdly emotional while watching The Little Farmers of Reynoldsburg, Ohio (1936), the earliest surviving Filipino-American documentary. Immigrant and amateur filmmaker Nicholas Viernes recorded the lives of a family farm in Ohio. Their labor is unremarkable, but the family is not: a Filipino man, a white woman, and their child, living in open defiance of anti-miscegenation laws that were on the books in many states. (It was legal in Ohio.) Typewritten intertitles are descriptive rather than contextual, so we are only left to wonder about their interior lives. It was quite something to see this seemingly peaceful existence, the ideal vision of the American pastoral that draws so many to migrate to this country to begin with. Maybe it wasn’t that weird to feel emotional.
For obvious reasons I only snapped a pic as the musicians warmed up. | Film strip of The Battle of Monkey and Crab from the Toy Film Museum collection The program capped off with a compilation of Japanese paper films. This will go down as the coolest thing I’ll see all year, especially thanks to live musical accompaniment on koto and cello. Developed in the 1930s as an at-home projection system where the images are printed directly to a paper reel, it’s as fragile as you might expect and efforts to locate the few existing prints and digitize them was quite impressive to hear about. I hope they get a home release someday. You can read more about Bucknell’s Japanese Paper Film Project on their website and see some clips on Bluesky, and Shelby Shaw’s essay for Screenslate is good further reading.
Movies coming out in February that I’ve already seen:
2/6
Scarlet
Feels like watching someone play a JRPG based on Shakespeare fanfiction. Conceptually rad but executionally a drag, and even ugly at times due to ill-advised 3D elements. The first of Mamoru Hosoda’s works was a complete dud for me, but I can’t bring myself to hate something so earnestly open-hearted about wanting to leave a more peaceful world for future generations. In a way, it’s the same moral as One Battle After Another.
If you wear a fitness tracker and you see this in theater, please send me your heart rate graph.
2/14
Both longtime fans and viewers unfamiliar with this independent KPop band will be inspired by their resilience and moved by their vulnerability.
Miscellaneous Events & Scribblings
My friend published her first novel! The publisher describes Just Watch Me as “Fleabag meets Big Swiss.” I’m familiar with neither but that seems to be hooking people. It’s about a woman who livestreams herself eating really spicy foods to raise money for her comatose sister. That sounds perfect for a dinner menu, so I’ll need to take notes while reading the book. After the launch event we all went to a nearby bar to celebrate. At The Black Bull you can add a shot to your beer order for just $4, a deal I availed myself to a couple times. (This wasn’t the best idea on an empty stomach.) I got to see some of the first friends I made in New York for the first time in years and it was really nice to catch up. When it came time to head home, Lior gave me the last two slices of pizza that were left; I ate both while walking to the train station.
I’m doing my best to disconnect from braindead Oscars discourse. Stanning is a mental illness and we’re all trapped in their asylum.
Williamsburgers yearn to go country, if the nightly lines outside Desert 5 Spot are any indication. Inside you’ll find patrons sipping on domestic lagers while bopping to a rock cover band. It successfully replicates the Broadway barhopping experience in Nashville, only more expensive, more cramped, and less diverse. With all the dress-up going on, my first impulse was feeling like I walked into an anime convention for closet Confederates.
The MoMA hosted an “Artist Party” for Arthur Jafa, in conjunction with the exhibit he curated for the museum. Before the party was a talk with the man himself, which was entertaining and insightful. Dan was going to come with me but had to bail at the last minute due to work obligations. I don’t really like going to parties alone (who does?) so I thought about heading home, but I was literally at the venue already. As I looked at art and people watched, I realized a lot of people were also here by themselves. The DJ Crystallmess did a set in the second floor atrium, where puffer jackets piled up in front of the booth. Most people stood and bopped their heads to the avant-garde techno music, but there was more proper dancing in the center of the floor. There were people dancing with their friends, lovers, what have you, but also quite a few dancing on their own. I closed my eyes and joined them, letting the bass obliterate my intrusive thoughts.
Good Things I Read
Why one small American town won’t stop stoning its residents to death by Charlotte_Stant, AO3
Probably the only time I’ll ever link to AO3. Isaac Chotiner speaks to one of the town leaders of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. If you understand that last sentence, you’ll love this pitch perfect parody.
What a “Melania” Cinematographer Hoped to Accomplish by Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker
Classic Chotiner interview in which he gives the subject enough rope to hang themself with, but Dante Spinotti is absolutely clueless that he’s on the gallows. Usually these get a lot more contentious.
‘I once ate a fly thinking it was crispy carbonised meat’: On Ratting by Luke Turner, Vittles
needle drops that made my heart stop - Aftersun: What’s In a Memory?, The Sovereign Audite
Unfortunately I can never get enough essays about the ending of Aftersun.
Grain of Terror: Why is the Western world so afraid of reheating rice? by Joe Zadeh, Vittles
Genuinely didn’t know there were cultures that don’t reheat their rice??
January Grog Log
The theme of this month’s Wine Time gathering was “A Book by Its Cover,” which came from guest host Chris. The prompt: “go to your usual shop and grab a wine that you’ve never heard of before. This usually means you pick based on the label. Maybe it’s beautiful, or it’s intriguing in its simplicity. Either way, this is a bottle that pulled you to it, not the other way around.”
This was probably the strongest overall selection of the Wine Times so far, and for the first time there were barely any French wines. It was interesting to see how people chose bottles solely based on looks: did the label feature a nice illustration, something arty and hip, or was it classically styled?
And here’s the first alcoholic drink I consumed each day of January, and where. I drank on 17 of 31 days.
Guinness at home
Mugwort Margarita at Bistrot Ha
Nothing
Nothing
Vispra Viola Pinot Nero 2021 at home
Nothing
Nothing
Nothing
Whisky shot and high life at Desert Five Spot ($25!!)
Baby Vamp at Bonnie Vee
Tequila shot at Pig and Khao
3 Floyds Zombie Dust IPA at Franklin Park
Simon Smash at The Transcript
Nothing
Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi “Loretello”, Politi 2023 at home
Manojo Mezcal at Snow’s Housewarming Party
Ispahan at Experimental Cocktail Club
Mansus Sivi Pinot at Annie’s
In Sheep’s Clothing Cabernet Sauvignon 2023 at home
Nothing
Other Half 4EVER IPA and whiskey shot at The Black Bull
Nothing
Angostura Sour at home
Nothing
Nothing
Nothing
Nothing
Nothing
Nothing
Niepoort Drink Me Nat Cool Branco 2024 at Chris M’s (Wine Time)
Hervé Villemade Bovin 2024 at Yang’s Housewarming Party
