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This unanswerable question's answer is Calvin Trillin. A man who lures his daughter back from California with bagels, who enlists his wife's Chinese students to decipher the Chinatown menus, who refuses to ever dine at "le maison de la casa house", who taught us how to pack a proper airplane meal, is a man who deserves his place in the Pantheon. He discovered American cuisine while it was learning to crawl. Nothing has been the same since.

In a time when food writing is bursting with more talent than the '27 Yankees, we must honor the Ur-men: Ruth. Escoffier. Trillin.

In spite of both my foodie and former New Yorker / food industry-insider status, the NY Times restaurant reviews always made me feel like an outsider. So the hiring of Frank Bruni by the Times was long-overdue fresh air. He’s a fantastic, entertaining writer, though to me his success is because he writes like someone with a regular person's palate. He loves both high-end and low-end food. His words aren’t high-falutin, they’re real. As a reader, you sense he's one of us, not above us. As such, he's made fine dining suddenly accessible to all. That's why he rocks.

Nothing beats the Round Rock Doughnut from the Lone Star Bakery in Round Rock, TX. Now this may seem like a treck, but when people line up beginning at 3AM every single day just to try the freakishly yellow batter (organic eggs and tons of them in the batter), it says something.

mr. levine:

where did you learn about this georgie's donut?

keep on finding those new (york) eats for me.

love to the family and still remember your college jazzy friend who eats peas with a knife. and, we could have been contenders as "blood" managers.

kindest personal regards from a former new york resident with a son at your "graduate" alma mater, mr. fishel

It's not in nyc, but for my calories, the doughnuts in Woodbury, CT at Dottie's Diner (formerly known as Phillips) are the real deal. I was turned on to them by the "Road Food" folks. They are absolutely worth the trip - both chocolate frosted or cinnamon sugar. They are cake doughnuts. Fried to a nice deep mahogany and crisp, with a (somehow) creamy melt in your mouth quality. They use nice chocolate, too.

ed,

the donuts at babbo are to die for. i guess you can consider them kinda fancypants, but $9 for 3 i think with amazing dipping sauces (chocolate and two others), it's not too bad. and they're hot and delicious.

The New York Times - April 25, 1997

Doughnut Review; Ah, Those Nuances of Sugar and Grease

By RUTH REICHL

I like doughnuts as much as the next person, but eating eight or nine in a row is not my idea of a good time.

So here I am facing two huge boxes of Krispy Kreme doughnuts, a box of Dunkin' Donuts and two boxes of Georgie's. I stare at them, trying to figure out if the boxes can tell me anything. Oddly, they can: The Dunkins are sort of thrown into the box willy-nilly, but the Krispy Kremes come in long, flat boxes, each doughnut lying flat, not even touching. Georgie's, in their plain white box neatly tied with string, have an appealingly old-fashioned look.

Which shall I try first? The jelly doughnuts made by Georgie's look the most appealing, very plain, brown and round. I take one bite. It is so light, warm and delicious that I take another. And a third. Imagine, I think to myself, how great this would be if the doughnut were filled with really good jam instead of this clear red, insipid jelly.

On to the jelly doughnut made by Krispy Kreme. It looks totally different: It is smaller, rounder and covered with a thick dusting of powdered sugar. There is quite a lot of spiced blueberry jam inside, and it is not too sweet. Not bad, I think, but it would be better if the powdered sugar tasted less like chalk.

After those two the jelly doughnut made by Dunkin' Donuts is pretty hard to take. It looks different from the others: Larger, flatter and covered with a faint dusting of plain sugar. The dough is rather dense, the jelly more sweet than anything else. I take one bite and my mouth fills with the taste of grease. I am not tempted to take another.

Now for the glazed doughnuts. Georgie's is quite dark, with a crinkly coating of glaze. The dough is light and fluffy, filled with little pockets of air. It feels nice in the mouth and leaves behind a faint, pleasant taste of vanilla.

The Krispy Kreme glazed doughnut is a close second. Very round, it is slightly smaller and much lighter in color. The top is shiny with glaze. The dough is light and leaves a not unpleasant taste of oil.

The Dunkin' Donuts shop could not come up with any glazed doughnuts this morning, so we are making do with the vanilla one. It is big and quite dense, although I notice that when you remove the icing the doughnut itself is not very sweet. If this were the only doughnut around you might actually want to eat it, but in this company it is definitely an also-ran.

I am embarrassed to say that, even after eating all these doughnuts, I find it hard to resist taking one final bite of a Georgie's jelly doughnut. If these doughnuts were sold on corner coffee carts the people of New York would be a whole lot heavier.