2025 Recounted in Groupings of 3
(mostly) food, music, movies, books, knicks games
This is a list of things I either ate, made, listened to, watched, or read in the past year, categorized into groups of three. It’s mostly food. I’m not sure why I chose three, but that feels like the lowest number that can satisfy the criteria for a “list”. Thank you to everyone who’s engaged with my writing this past year.
CLAMS
The incurious mind doesn’t dare to order raw clams because lamestream media has taught them that oysters reign supreme in matters of raw consumables, and while I tend to agree, I made an exception for Randazzo’s cherrystone clams in a month without the letter R in it. They were plump and briny and responsive to the lemon juice and horseradish we threw on top, whetting the appetite after a full day at the beach in preparation for all the fried seafood that was to come. We followed it up with a delicious bowl of Manhattan clam chowder, a similarly underrated dish that stands in the shadow of its viscous and egg-shell colored “big bro” from New England. In matters like this, context is everything, and the last thing you want when you can still feel the sway of the waves from the day is slime in your guts.
Annual Bay Head Clam Bake
In 2021, I attended the Bay Head Clam Bake down the Jersey Shore at the local firehouse and encountered New Jersey’s White Whale, Chris Christie, sporting a tucked in polo shirt that emphasized a FUPA for the ages as he shook hands with his constituents. I followed him around out of curiosity, and tried several times without success to take a picture of him in the midst of biting down on a glizzy, giving up once I started to draw his attention. In the heat of my pursuit, I forgot to eat enough clams to justify the fifty dollar price of entry. This past summer, I vowed to rectify that, Christie cameo be damned. I pulled the old trick of lining up for clams right after receiving your batch, slurping them down while on line. After putting down about thirty or so, I began to come down with a case of the seafood spins, a phenomenon I believe to be real and not a result of eating clams and drinking beer in the hot sun. The freshly shucked clams outshone the steamed ones, and the firefighters made very good fiery hot sauces. Go figure.
I’m always a tad skeptical of old school red-sauce joints in decidedly blue voting districts, but Bamonte’s has stood the test of time and resisted the shifting tides of gentrification for a reason. While still very good, they didn’t quite compare to the ones at Don Peppe. Maybe there was less parsley? Stale breadcrumbs? Not enough garlic? Maybe the clams at Don Peppe aren’t buried in accoutrements, allowing the meat to shine, because a place that runs through thousands of them a day has no fears about standing on business. The likely reality was that I was delirious and hungover from the night before, where I kept saying yes to free Guinness and shots because it was my birthday, and allowed said delirium and hunger to cloud my judgment.
CRUSTACEANS
This was a messy affair in tight quarters, and the flavors were so intense they came close to overkill, but maybe that’s what made it memorable. An attack on one’s senses that is so frontal you gotta respect it, with so much sauce and what I think was roe stir-fried with various aromatics that the rice turned to savory gruel. Wish I could eat one of these in open air by the beach with a shirt that I could care less about dirtying.
On a rainy drive back to New York, we stopped for lobster rolls and other fried eats at a shack right over a bridge. The bun was overstuffed with lobster meat, and I gave up on trying to protect myself from the rain, staring out onto the train tracks and the bridge in the distance as I picked out meat from the bun to dip into melted butter. Just two days prior, on an island off the coast of Maine, I purchased live lobsters that had just come in that afternoon — the last catch of the season, the seller told me. I took this to be of some cosmic significance when we killed and steamed them that evening, the coincidences necessary to have the last catch of the season line up with the exact night we decided to have lobsters for dinner during our weeklong stay. Consciously tracing their journey from sea to plate made them taste that much better in the moment, but the Red’s lobster roll tasted just as good though I had no idea who this bugger was or where he came from, spurring me to wonder if ritual meant anything at all.
Christmas Dungeness Crabs
My cousin brought these for Christmas dinner. They were plump and fleshy, with the option of muối tiêu chanh or a homemade creamy jalapeño sauce to dip into. My inexperience with dismantling a crab showed, as I was still working on the legs when everyone else was wrapping up with the body. Once I realized I could crack open the shells with my bare hands, my pace ramped up significantly.
PIZZAS
Long hail the slice. Of course. But in our veneration of the slice and its representation of the “New York Experience,” we have allowed the art of the pie to fall to the wayside. Anyone can operate a gas oven and put their dough through a 48 hour cold ferment to optimize for thinness and integrity so the fat piece of burrata on your heroin-chic slice doesn’t fall onto the pavement before you can snap a picture, but it takes a real deal pizzaiolo to operate a coal-fired oven, to understand what different temperature spots in your oven can do for you, and to conduct the shuffling of pies day in and day out like a maestro. Campania is a Staten Island institution that does more than pizza, but when in Rome… It’s got a nice thick crust you can hold onto, and a million different toppings (the way it should be).
A panel of trusted experts put me onto this newer spot as I rode the train up to New Haven for a weekend, calculating that I maybe had time for two different New Haven pie shops. There was much debate over Frank Peppe’s, Sally’s, Modern, whether Frank’s was the real deal or a tourist trap, so on and so forth. Though this spot started out in L.A, and was just an outpost in a food hall, I decided to venture into the unknown. These babies were nuked to a crisp, the way good apizza should be, and when I came up for air I felt unwell, realizing I had put down six slices without a break.
Recently I overheard someone talk about the sauce not really mattering when it came to slices and cringed at the thought of such ignorance. In a world that cares more about how food looks than how it tastes, I fear this person is not alone. I’m not gonna tell you how to make your sauce, but if you think you can just pour crushed tomatoes into a pot with a dusting of oregano for vibes, go back to the drawing board. At a place like Amore, the sauce is a touch sweet, and there’s no reliance on gimmicks like thick pepperoni cups that cut the roof of your mouth. The homie Beau astutely pointed out that you can tell when a pie shop cooks the pie first, then throws on toppings during the reheating process, possessing the foresight to realize not all pies are consumed on first bake.
NOODLE SOUPS
Daesung Noodle
After a day putzing around Flushing and Whitestone, looking out onto the Throgs Neck Bridge from Fort Totten, Nina and I stopped at Daesung Noodle for dinner. We got a seafood Kalgukksu with bouncy noodles topped with a mountain of littleneck clams, and a cold Kong-Guksu to balance out the heat. One would think the mixture of liquids and acids of varying temperatures, spice levels, and flavor profiles would be a recipe for disaster, but I ended up feeling fine for the rest of the night.
Pho at Mắm
I’m always being told it’s hard to find good Pho in New York. Despite the recent flourishing of Vietnamese restaurants all around the city (a flourishing, mind you, that my father was a part of in the 80s and 90s), one must still intentionally seek out good noodles instead of happening upon it on unexplored city blocks. But when it’s this good, I don’t mind. The piles of green onions cut into various shapes on the bowl of Pho at Mắm are not to mask an absence of flavor, given the soup lights up the back of your mind the way a good broth does. Maybe they religiously watch and skim the pot as it simmers for twenty-four hours, maybe their bones and meat are well-sourced, maybe they play with time and temperature in secret ways that will never and should never be revealed to the public, who knows? I’m just glad they’re continuing their program through the winter.
Maxi’s Noodle
Whenever I find myself back in Flushing, I like to stop in here for a bowl of egg noodles with shrimp wontons. They typically seat me next to another solo diner, and I’m in and out in under thirty minutes — an optimal dining experience.
MEALS
Artie’s Steak and Seafood Restaurant
Went here back in September for Joey’s birthday. They dropped my pork chop in the kitchen, their last pork chop of the night, so the apologetic waiter offered me anything else on the menu free of charge. I went for linguini with clam sauce, portioned for three by the look of it. The chocolate cake was far and away the best I’ve ever had in my life. Spongy yet moist, not overly sweet but not in the way that Asian desserts tend to be. The waiter promised to get us the recipe before we left, but never did, and Artie’s permanently closed later that week.
By the time our porterhouse arrived I was two martinis and two glasses of wine deep, but good meat in a good atmosphere can shake you lucid. Being really into Manhattan steakhouses is one of grotesque masculine qualities that I usually associate with guys from the outer boroughs and suburbs of New York who are afraid to take the subway, but I understand the appeal of such an institution on occasion. After all, balling out on red meat should not be an activity reserved for the MAGA Right.
After a full day at Asbury Park, we stopped in Fort Lee for grilled eel at this barebones spot. Apparently eel is good for your brain, something to do with the high level of omega 3s. Maybe if I ate more of it, I’d stop making so many stupid decisions.
HONORABLE MENTION: Sami’s Kebab
I told Sami that I voted for Zohran that day and he gave our table a round of free dumplings.
DISHES I MADE
Roasted Duck
Joey came over and I roasted a duck I bought at the farmer’s market the day before. 250 degrees for a few hours, brushing the skin with honey every so often. Red wine pan sauce and mashed potatoes made with so much butter that I’m surprised I’m still standing.
Pop-up Tres Leches
For a pop-up me and the friends at TBDFoods did back in May, I made a Tres Leches with rose water cake, cardamom milk, and pistachio cream topped with dates and chopped pistachios. I grossly underestimated how long this would take, beginning the process at midnight before the day of the event, shelling and peeling the skin off of pistachios for about thirty slices of cake, watching Michael Mann’s THE INSIDER on my computer to stay awake.
Spam Musubi
In June, my friends and I spent a morning packing Spam Musubis for lunch before trekking out to a remote island off of the remote island we were staying at in Maine. We kayaked through ocean waters and docked on sturdy-looking rocks while Marcus collected mussels off of the ocean floor for dinner that evening. We saw goats roaming free and taking shelter in the abandoned fog signal station, and ate our Musubi at the island’s peak while our guide repaired a walking bridge that had been damaged and unattended to since COVID. Earlier that day, I met an elderly woman on one of the trails who carried an easel on her back to find a lookout point to finish a landscape she’d been working on for some time. Her ancestors were Japanese farmers who landed in Hawaii in the 1800s, and she told me that the integration of the Japanese into the community there helped save them from the worst of internment. She worked as a psychiatrist teaching medical students in Massachusetts, but spent summers taking painting classes here, and was gearing up to teach one in just a few days. She told me to take a picture of the island we were on from the perspective of the island we were about to enter, because everyone has pictures of one, but very few have pictures from the other side.
SONGS (2025)
LIKE WEEZY - Playboi Carti
Running this up all year gave me the closest high I’ve felt listening to a Carti song since Long Time. Victory lap music, even if the lap is unearned. Swamp Izzo ad-libs ring in the back of my ears while I go about my life.
Easter Pink - Fakemink
While I don’t think this is Mr. Mink’s best song, it’s the one that made his music click for me. The kids yearn for Gen Z Drake, anxious and insecure in their Hedi Slimane-era Celine jeans, posting esoteric memes and deep frying their fit pics.
Max Potential - Nourished by Time
When I was sixteen, I waded through three minutes and five seconds of Dance Yrself Clean for a kind of catharsis that Marcus Brown gets at in forty seconds to the same grand effect.
SONGS (NOT RELEASED IN 2025)
Atlantic City - The Band (Cover)
I recently came across this song’s opening lyrics and thought for a split second that it was Warren Zevon before remembering it was Bruce Springsteen. I then swore to myself that Zevon recorded a cover of this song somewhere, which wouldn’t be too out of character for him, given the song’s story about desperate characters for whom death might be around the corner. I then found this live cover he did in the year 2000, over the strums of a single guitar. This would’ve been right after he released Life’ll Kill Ya, an album all about death. I listened for any weakness in his voice, wondering if the lung cancer that killed him just a few years later had taken hold at that point. This cover by the Band came out in 1993, which was years after the departure of Robbie Robertson, and a few years after the passing of Richard Manuel.
Beep - Bobby Valentino ft. Yung Joc
I’m hard pressed to find anyone else who held R&B down during the back half of the 2000s harder than Bobby Valentino. There’s no doubt he’d be even bigger if he could dance like Usher. There’s something very spiritually Filipino about him. I still haven’t put my finger on it, but a dozen more listens might help me get closer to figuring it out.
Jon B - Abhi//Dijon
While it’s great that Dijon has ascended from POLLEN playlist all-star to widely popular critical darling, I keep finding myself going back to those early Abhi/Dijon tapes. The track is effortlessly cool, of its time while being timeless. I should mention that I don’t need Dijon to go back to this kind of music, because this music already exists.
ALBUMS (2025)
choke enough - Oklou
The album for everything. The way “endless” takes you in makes this an ideal waking up album, an ideal album to play on a walk home at night, during the spring, summer, winter, no matter. Pleasant enough to leave on, complex enough to make paying attention worth your while.
MUSIC - Playboi Carti
Was there another rap album whose release this year felt like a seismic event? Is there another rapper of this popularity willing to make music that’s still interesting? Of course the album is bloated, of course most of the government-mandated features, from Ty Dolla $ign to Lil Uzi Vert to Travis Scott, are trite and middling, and of course I’m worried a sixteen year old who lives in a three-story-home in the suburbs is going to jump me during the drop on “EVIL JORDAN” and call me out for not using “trim” correctly. We endure these valid critiques in the name of chasing the highs, which are some of Carti’s highest. Now I can’t get “COCAINE NOISE” out of my head when I listen to “Only U” by Ashanti. That’s the Carti effect.
Oi! - YT
It’s nice to have an album from the underground that you can play at the function without scaring people off or attracting unbridled male rage. Some bars are stupid, some are fun, and the best are stupid fun, flexing about worldwide shorties in Toronto and Bath, partying on the Lower East Side, and going Muslim when the racks hit. YT is the newest member of distinguished Exeter College alumni, a cohort that includes J.R.R Tolkien, Martin Amis, and Roger Bannister, the first person to run a mile in under four minutes.
ALBUMS (NOT FROM 2025)
Born to Run - Bruce Springsteen
New York had Billy Joel, New Jersey had Bruce Springsteen. Though many tracks made it to the other side, this was how I understood things to be as a child. I now have the rest of my life to enjoy Springsteen albums in full for the first time, and will probably come to see him as one of America’s greatest songwriters when I’m done.
(What’s the Story) Morning Glory? - Oasis
This is peak dumb guy rock music that you can sing at the top of your lungs with your lads at the pub with your Arc’teryx or Stone Island jacket zipped all the way up Liam Gallagher style. The lack of modesty is refreshing in an era where indie rock musicians affect demure attitudes and all the jokes they make on stage are mired by irony, whereas any quips from the Gallaghers are derived from the fact that they are brash, arrogant assholes, and they rock because of it. Their comeback is healthy for the music ecosystem.
How I’m Feeling Now - Charli xcx
Obviously I ran this up in 2020, but revisiting this, I’ve come to see it as her best work. The last time she made this kind of musical leap was with the Vroom Vroom EP, and everything that’s come since is derived from this. Who says music made from your bedroom can’t sound this cracked out?
FILMS (2025)
Marty Supreme - dir. Josh Safdie
Many have correctly pointed out that Marty Mauser is going to become Jordan Belfort for iPad kids, but it would be very un-Marty like to allow the haters to influence your opinion of the film. It’s beautiful that Josh Safdie used a 70 million dollar budget to refine the textures of the film, from its stellar production design to top-tier casting of real deal looking New York characters, just to shoot everything with the anxious claustrophobia of Uncut Gems. Whether you think Marty ultimately wins, loses, is redeemed, is punished, is a sad sack or a representative of the American impulse to dream big says more about yourself than the film’s shortcomings, because Hollywood’s goal is to be whatever you want it be, a chameleonic fantasyland that only cares that your ass is watching. For the second time in his career, Timothée Chalamet has made a face at the end of a movie that has left people discussing for days on end about what it could mean.
Caught By The Tides - dir. Jia Zhangke
I don’t know how Jia Zhangke pulled off something this big and this intimate, telling a story about chasing after someone for all these years across a changing China. Beautiful ending.
By The Stream - dir. Hong Sang-Soo
There’s a moment in the film when Kim Min-Hee begins playing with autumn leaves in the dark and Hong Sang-Soo’s sparse score begins to play. It felt like a textbook Hong ending, and I would’ve loved it as a way to cap off one of the best scenes he’s ever done, a dinner sequence where a theater director played by Kwon Hae-Hyo goes around the table with his actors, asking each of them what their hopes and dreams are. Somehow, the film goes further, extending the story and returning it to the rivers and streams that interest Kim’s character throughout the film. It is a common accusation that Hong makes the same film over and over again. In some sense he does, and in some sense he doesn’t, and to identify the minor differences and how they matter in this seemingly repetitive oeuvre is part of the joy of diving into his work. In By The Stream, one can see how sympathetic he’s become towards all of his characters. There are less adulterers and crash-outs, less drunken yelling, less cynicism all around, and what’s taken its place is something softer and searching. His characters have long dealt with an inability to communicate, and yet now there are often times where they’re clear as day, even if it’s not obvious to us. When the actors in the play talk about their lives, or Sieon talks about his past, their grand ideas feel like they’re coming from somewhere spiritual.
FILMS (NOT 2025)
Rachel Getting Married (2008) - dir. Jonathan Demme
There was so much love for everyone on screen. I’m still not sure why the wedding was Indian-themed, but that was all part of the charm.
Some Like It Hot (1959) - dir. Billy Wilder
Billy Wilder had the juice, given I found myself laughing harder at jokes from this movie made over fifty years ago than ran-through memes from last week.
Certified Copy (2010) - dir. Abbas Kiarostami
After I watched this, I was afraid I had read the movie completely wrong. I thought the game between Juliette Binoche and William Shimell’s characters began long before the film’s pivotal moment in the coffee shop. I know some people who think the game began right then and there. As time went on, I began to care less about when that moment occurs and what KiarostAmi does by drawing attention to the artifice of their relationship. Their playfulness and banter highlights the emotional distance between them, and whether or not it’s all a game doesn’t detract from the sense that it all feels real, playing out the ideas Shimell’s character presents on authenticity at the beginning of the film.
BOOKS
Music of Chance - Paul Auster
Came because I thought this would be like Rounders in book form, stayed because it became something much weirder and far more compelling. Very Protestant in the way that Jim Nashe believes that long days of physical labor will be good for him. Very Catholic in the way that no matter what he does, he will never absolve himself of the guilt from ruining the lives of everyone he’s crossed paths with.
Stoner - John Williams
I’ve said everything I could say about Stoner here.
The Romance of American Communism - Vivian Gornick
Reading Gornick interview so many former American Communists about their compulsion to be a part of something greater than themselves and what that did for them provided me with hope for a future rooted in the “warmth of collectivism.” It’s easy to feel despair alone in your room, but even commiserating with one person can make you feel better. Commiserate with tons of them and suddenly you have the power to do something about said despair.
KNICKS PLAYOFF MOMENTS
Aaron Nesmith receiving the Mandate of Heaven during Knicks Pacers Game 1
It was the kind of game that leaves you in no state to even say bye to your friends when you leave the bar.
Mikal Bridges Game-Winning Block against the Celtics
Vindicated his entire contract in a single, crunch-time play.
Jalen Brunson’s Crossover Three to end the Pistons
In a city where the trains never run on time, your super never shows up, and your deli man is always charging you a different price for a chopped cheese, you can count on Captain Clutch to deliver a bucket when you need him to.
You're a fantastic writer