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\n Past Grub Street Diet subjects. Top row: John Early, Ziwe, Sarah Jessica Parker. Second row: Monica Lewinsky, Anthony Bourdain, John Leguizamo. Third row: Tim Blake Nelson, Greta Lee, Katie Couric. Bottom row: Stephanie March, Zohran Mamdani, Marlon James.
\n Illustration: Margalit Cutler\n <\/p>\n
This article was featured in New York\u2019s One Great Story<\/a> newsletter. Sign up here<\/a>.<\/p>\n For 20 years, \u201cThe Grub Street Diet\u201d has tracked the daily eating habits of every kind of New Yorker. The famous actress whose equally famous husband is a Bean Guy<\/a>. The author who starts each day with a salad<\/a>. The would-be Mayor before he was a household name<\/a>. The chef who subsists mostly on Checkers<\/a>. Since the column began in September 2006, when the actress Stephanie March filed the first edition<\/a>, it has always reflected the ways this city eats and lives: We all have a different coffee routine; lunch is often missed; we have very specific thoughts on martinis; we can\u2019t resist steakhouses and late-night pizza; and we are all drinking a lot of smoothies. To mark the column\u2019s anniversary, we\u2019ve put together one singularly formidable day of eating and drinking, assembled from a tiny fraction of the more than 900 \u201cDiet\u201ds filed over the decades.<\/p>\n The day began, as every day of the year does, winter and summer, with black iced coffee. There is always a pot of it in the fridge. I really can\u2019t bear hot coffee unless it\u2019s essentially turned into a dessert with milk and sugar, and I\u2019ll just say it: I get really judgy, and tinged with a mild despair, about folks paying upwards of $4 a cup for something that is literally easier to make at home than it is to shower (David Rakoff, 2012).\u00a0Almost every morning, I eat the same simple breakfast because I like it so much. I\u202fwarm a small amount of olive oil in a nonstick pan over medium-low heat, then I crack two good eggs into the pan and cover it with a lid. After three or four minutes, I begin to peek underneath. The whites should be slightly crispy, and the yolks just beginning to cloud. Does this method have a name? I couldn\u2019t think of one, so emailed my old New York Times colleague Amanda Hesser. Being Amanda Hesser, she made up a name on the spot: smoggy-side up (Dwight Garner, 2023).<\/p>\n I think it would be very charitable of me to say I am a cook. All the meetings I\u2019m having now, since my election, are allowing me to justify spending a lot of money at bodegas and delis. Not enough people are talking about bodega smoothies. Let me be honest. I thought I was going to get canceled because of Palestine. Then I thought it was because of bike lanes. But really it\u2019s because I\u2019m ride or die on the blueberry smoothie at the bodegas New York City\u2013wide (Zohran Mamdani, 2020). I also ate a mango. The fruit here is awful. I go back to Jamaica and I bite into a banana and I\u2019m like, Holy shit, I forgot that this is what bananas taste like (Marlon James, 2019).<\/p>\n I love prosciutto with cantaloupe. Anything that combines savory and sweet is right up my alley. I discovered this meal when I went to Italy. Fun fact: In Italy, people frequently asked me if I\u202fwas Rihanna. I don\u2019t look anything like Rihanna, but I believe in my heart the people I was interacting with were only familiar with maybe three Black women (Ziwe, 2020).<\/p>\n I picked up some groceries and made lunch for my boyfriend and me: a baby-kale salad with sunflower seeds and a tahini, olive oil, and lemon dressing. I\u2019m so bad at \u201cworking with\u201d tahini. Why is it always so fucking chunky? The salad was still pretty good \u2014 the flavors were all there, gang! \u2014 and I\u202fserved it with scrambled eggs and grilled preserved artichokes (John Early, 2018). Once I\u2019ve had a salad, especially a big one, I do get a little too full of myself. I\u2019ll leave the house and see some cologne ad with a man who has no shirt and bulging muscles and think to myself, Yep, I\u2019ll be there in no time (Josh Johnson, 2024).<\/p>\n Later, I looked up all the Japanese restaurants in my vicinity that deliver a soup called yosenabe. It\u2019s a seafood soup with clear noodles. When I\u202fwas a kid, my parents\u2019 friends were Japanese, so when I was sick, I\u2019d always get it (Albert Hammond Jr., 2006). Soup is always good as leftovers. The first day, you don\u2019t let it cool down \u2014 you eat it, it\u2019s all hot, you burn your mouth. You don\u2019t really taste it. The second day, that\u2019s the soup (Janelle James, 2022). Reheat value is a real thing. We don\u2019t talk about it enough. Certain cuisines have much better reheat value: Chinese food has one of the best reheat values, but not dumplings and noodles; those are hard to reheat. Pastas have an okay reheat value. A piece of steak or salmon? That has no reheat value (Jimmy O. Yang, 2018).<\/p>\n Bono once gave me a bottle of Petrus in France. It gets you so stoned in a really opiated way, like you\u2019ve just taken a Vicodin. A month later, I found out it cost $12,000! (Courtney Love, 2012) I have these really cheap, really shitty wine fridges that get full because they\u2019re not big. And I get excited about new things as they come in, so I\u202fneed to purge the old. I\u2019ll have a culling party, where I\u2019ll invite friends over and they\u2019re not supposed to bring wine. The idea is that they bring bread and snacks and real food. Then we just hang out and drink wine and chat and see each other (James Murphy, 2013). We went through five bottles of 1990 Musigny I\u2019ve been cellaring for about 20 years (Tim Blake Nelson, 2021).<\/p>\n A friend from my Esquire days, Ryan D\u2019Agostino, called me. He was at Gallaghers with another member of the old team, the menschy John Kenney. \u201cGallaghers<\/a>?\u201d I said. \u201cIsn\u2019t that a chain? Like TGI Gallaghers, or something?\u201d \u201cCome on, man. It\u2019s Gallaghers on 52nd Street. Your dad probably went there.\u201d I went and I have to admit the great hanging slabs of beef gathering mold in the locker at the entrance were impressive. Ryan and John were at the bar. I ordered a Maker\u2019s Mark on the rocks and the Shining\u2013adjacent bartender in a vaguely surgical white jacket said, \u201cThat\u2019s my second favorite drink to make. You know what\u2019s my favorite? Maker\u2019s neat\u201d (Tom Junod, 2026).<\/p>\n My friend Martin texted me \u201cWalter\u2019s<\/a> later?\u201d I was so happy, because I\u2019d been sitting around feeling like a loser all day. I ordered my favorite meal: a salad with fries. I like this salad a lot because it has celery and fennel in it. My other favorite meal is black licorice, and fennel tastes anise-y, so I\u2019m basically in salad-fries heaven. I surprised myself by ordering a regular Coke, which I decided was the most glamorous thing in the world. Drinking a regular Coke at 8 p.m.? What am I, a supermodel? (Sarah Sherman, 2025)<\/p>\n I used to be a raging Diet Coke\u2013head \u2014 I had my own dedicated Diet Coke fridge at one point \u2014 but I have only two or three a month these days. Any D.C. fan knows that LaCroix, the methadone of carbonated beverages, is never going to be an adequate substitute for our silver mistress (Diablo Cody, 2014).<\/p>\n I went to meet some friends at Marie\u2019s Crisis<\/a>. Have you been to Marie\u2019s Crisis? If you said \u201cno,\u201d please go there tonight. It is the best dive bar in the world because it is not only a dive bar but a dive bar where everyone sings Broadway show tunes together. It is a brilliant place. I had 5 billion whiskeys and one Stella Artois (Rich Sommer, 2013). And then I sincerely regret to say that we went to Sing Sing<\/a> and fully did karaoke for six hours until 2 a.m. Six hours of karaoke on a weeknight: It was objectively upsetting, and so was consuming large quantities of Fireball at the age of 30 (Jia Tolentino, 2019). Nothing helps hangovers anymore; it used to be a nice cold Coke, a joint, and as soon as my appetite would come back, maybe some leftover kung pao chicken \u2014 spicy Chinese food helps (Anthony Bourdain, 2010). I\u2019m going to be a chowhound, so tomorrow it\u2019ll be raisins and cigarettes again (Stephanie March, 2006).<\/p>\n Read All of the Diets Featured in This Story<\/p>\n David Rakoff, 2012<\/a> | Dwight Garner, 2023<\/a> | Zohran Mamdani, 2020<\/a> | Marlon James, 2019<\/a> | Ziwe, 2020<\/a> | John Early, 2018<\/a> | Josh Johnson, 2024<\/a> | Albert Hammond Jr., 2006<\/a> | Janelle James, 2022<\/a> | Jimmy O. Yang, 2018<\/a> | Courtney Love, 2012<\/a> | James Murphy, 2013<\/a> | Tim Blake Nelson, 2021<\/a> | Tom Junod, 2026<\/a> | Sarah Sherman, 2025<\/a> | Diablo Cody, 2014<\/a> | Rich Sommer, 2013<\/a> | Jia Tolentino, 2019<\/a> | Anthony Bourdain, 2010<\/a> | Stephanie March, 2006<\/a><\/p>\n Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism.
\n If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the September 21, 2026, issue of
\n New York\u00a0Magazine.<\/p>\n