The Longer This Cake Soaks, the Better It Is

Now this is a diner, where the pancakes puff into burnished domes and the syrup-to-pancake ratio is 1 to 1. (“The correct and nonnegotiable ratio,” the writer and editor Rohan Kamicheril says.) Sam Yoo, the chef and owner, called it Golden Diner when he opened it in 2019, in a corner of Chinatown where the Manhattan Bridge hulks at the end of the street. The tabletops are Formica, the windows are draped in lace and the time is always breakfast, whatever’s on the plate.

That might be a Reuben, although not quite as you know it. Gone are the bookends of rye; instead, you get tortillas, with Swiss cheese gone melty in the pan. The double-decker club, quartered and speared, is served on Japanese milk bread with chicken katsu tucked inside, fervent and juicy in its panko crust. Your choice of soups are matzo ball and kimchi tomato. There’s gochujang on the burger and lemongrass and galangal in the avocado toast, summoning sun, earth and pine.

Recipe: Thai Tea Tres Leches Cake

For Yoo, the menu represents “who I am as a native New Yorker,” he says. His mixings and musings are far from the so-called fusion cuisine of the 1980s, when ingredients from non-Western cultures started popping up at high-end restaurants across America. Back then, those elements were treated as exotica. To Yoo, they’re simply part of a city pantry, shared by neighbors with roots across the world.

Sometimes those neighbors find an unexpected connection, like a love of condensed milk: milk boiled down until it’s thick enough to cling to the spoon, with sugar added to make it last longer. The American publisher, land surveyor and inventor Gail Borden Jr. patented a process for making and canning it in 1856, inspired by preservation techniques he observed at a Shaker community in upstate New York. It proved essential for Union soldiers during the Civil War, because it could be kept for months without refrigeration. Its popularity has persisted in warm climates, where, as the food historian Rachel Laudan has written, “a can on the shelf is still more reliable than the ‘fresh’ milk hawked door to door on the back of a donkey or in a pickup truck.”