What We’re Cooking, Eating, and Watching: October 28, 2026

Apple cake has quietly taken the fall dessert slot that pumpkin spice held for a decade, and Sally McKenney’s version is the one I keep seeing people actually bake. It is a 9×13 sheet of a cake, loaded with chopped fresh apples, built on vegetable oil and a cup of unsweetened applesauce rather than butter. That matters. Oil cakes stay moist for days on the counter, which makes this the rare dessert that tastes better on day two than it does out of the oven.

The detail worth paying attention to is the two tablespoons of orange juice. You will not taste orange. What you get is acid that wakes up the apple and keeps the whole thing from tasting flat and sweet. Use a firm, tart apple like Granny Smith or Honeycrisp so the pieces hold their shape, and do not swap the oil for melted butter. Sally warns against it, and she is right: the crumb goes dry.

Photo: Ekaterina Bolovtsova / Pexels

Food trend watchers have started calling it freezer fine dining, which is a fancy name for something line cooks have done forever: taking a great frozen product and treating it with respect. The bag of frozen potstickers is having a real moment, showing up in bakes, casseroles, and especially soups. The potsticker soup at Gimme Some Oven is the most cited version for good reason. It is a weeknight dinner that takes about as long as boiling water.

The technique is simple. Build a gingery, garlicky broth, drop the dumplings in straight from frozen, and pull the pot off the heat the moment they are cooked through. The biggest mistake is a hard boil, which splits the wrappers and clouds the broth with filling. Keep it at a gentle simmer, add greens like bok choy or spinach in the last minute, and finish with chili crisp at the table so everyone can choose their own heat.

Photo: Cats Coming / Pexels

After two years of everyone counting grams of protein, the internet has moved on to fiber, and the term people are using is fiber-maxxing. That is good news for lentils. Melissa Clark’s red lentil soup at NYT Cooking has been a quiet classic for years, and it is exactly the kind of recipe this trend should be built on: cheap, fast, and genuinely delicious rather than virtuous.

Red lentils are the key, because they collapse as they cook and give you a creamy soup with no cream. Bloom your spices in the oil before the lentils go in, and do not skip the lemon at the end. That squeeze of acid is the difference between a soup that tastes like health food and one that tastes like something you would order. If you like texture, puree only part of the pot and leave the rest rustic.

Photo: Alesia Kozik / Pexels

This one started as the so-called Japanese yogurt cheesecake on TikTok, which is really just thick Greek yogurt and Biscoff cookies left in the fridge until the cookies soften into something cakey. It has since spun off into a yogurt tiramisu version, with the cookies dipped in espresso and the top dusted with cocoa. Is it actually cheesecake? No. Is it a smart, low-effort dessert that people are making on repeat? Absolutely.

The whole trick is time. A few hours in the fridge gives you wet cookies in yogurt. Overnight, the cookies absorb moisture and turn into a soft, sliceable layer, so plan for at least twelve hours. Use full-fat Greek yogurt, because low-fat versions weep and go watery. If you are making the tiramisu riff, let the espresso cool completely before dipping and keep the dunk to a second or two per cookie.

Photo: Homemade Heather

Daniel Humm’s namesake restaurant opened October 10 at 435 Hudson Street in the West Village, in the former EN Japanese Brasserie space. This is the Eleven Madison Park chef doing something deliberately looser: an a la carte modern American menu instead of a tasting, built around a towering wood-fired oven and a charcoal grill. Executive chef Dmitri Magi, who has cooked alongside Humm for fifteen years, runs the kitchen. The dish people will talk about is the whole roast chicken for two, a nod to Humm’s mother’s cooking, stuffed under the skin and served with brioche stuffing.

Why it matters: this is one of the most decorated chefs in the country choosing to cook the kind of food you can eat more than once a year. There is a roving martini cart, artwork from Francesco Clemente and Rashid Johnson, and interiors by Pierre Yovanovitch, so it is still a spectacle. Reservations drop on Resy three weeks out at noon, with some walk-in space at the bar.

Photo: Jovani Demetrie, courtesy of Humm / Resy

Booth’s Extra Fine opened October 6 at 62 South 2nd Street in Williamsburg, and it is a vintage-inspired steakhouse in the best sense. The menu is broiled steaks, chilled seafood, and ice-cold martinis. The name comes from one of the owner’s grandfathers, a car salesman in Milwaukee, which tells you a lot about the mood: Midwestern supper club warmth dropped into one of Brooklyn’s most competitive dining neighborhoods.

New York has no shortage of steakhouses, but most new ones lean either corporate or theatrical. A neighborhood steakhouse with a sense of humor and a strong martini program fills a gap, especially in Williamsburg, where the dining scene skews small plates and natural wine. Book through Resy and order the dry-aged ribeye.

Photo: Julian Braero / Booth’s Extra Fine via The Infatuation

Jeremy Fox closed the original Birdie G’s at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica at the end of 2025, and on October 26 it came back as the flagship restaurant of the Fairmont Century Plaza at 2025 Avenue of the Stars in Century City. The new version is an all-day American brasserie: an espresso bar opens at 6 a.m., followed by breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with weekend brunch.

Fans of the original can relax. The Pickle Chick, the matzo ball soup, and the stained-glass rose petal pie are all reported to be back, alongside new dishes made for the hotel. Fox’s cooking has always turned nostalgic family food into something personal and technical at the same time. Giving that an all-day stage inside one of the city’s landmark hotels makes Century City a lot more interesting to eat in.

Photo: Birdie G’s

London’s Berenjak, the Persian kabab house that earned a Michelin Bib Gourmand the year after it opened in Soho in 2018, opened in early October on the ground floor of Soho House Chicago at 113-125 North Green Street in Fulton Market. It is open to the public, not just members. Chef-founder Kian Samyani built the restaurant around the neighborhood kabab houses of Tehran and his grandmother’s kitchen table.

Go for the charcoal-grilled koobideh and jujeh kababs, the kashk e bademjoon (coal-cooked eggplant), and the breads, especially the naturally fermented sangak baked on hot stones. Chicago also gets cocktails that were previously only served in the UK, including an Olive Leaf Martini served with torshi pickles. Persian food is badly underrepresented in American fine-casual dining, and this is a serious version of it. Reservations go through the Soho House app.

Photo: Soho House

Bar Ena opened October 11 at 305 Mildred Shute Avenue in Chestnut Hill, near Wedgewood-Houston, from the team behind cafe babu. Owner Shivani Darsinos named it after Ena, her hometown in Gujarat, and built the entire cocktail list around the masala dabbo, the Indian spice box. Each drink focuses on a single spice or blend: the Lesson In Kama works gin with bay leaf and fenugreek, while the Golden Temple pairs saffron, cardamom, lemon, and honey.

This is the kind of bar that pushes a city’s drinking culture forward. Spice-led cocktails are often a gimmick, but treating the dabba as an organizing principle gives the menu real discipline. The 1,000-square-foot room has a red travertine bar, Gujarati-inspired mirror work, and a DJ booth for late nights, with small plates to share. It is open Tuesday through Sunday from 5 p.m. to midnight.

Photo: Bar Ena via Nashville Guru

The second season of Apple TV’s Michelin docuseries premiered September 25, and new episodes drop every Friday through November 6. Hosted by Jesse Burgess and executive produced by Gordon Ramsay, this run follows 16 restaurants across Europe, the United States, and Brazil at very different points in the chase for a star.

What makes it worth your time is the range of stakes. One chef and his family try to put a tiny island on Michelin’s map. Two chefs voluntarily give up their star to open a new restaurant and have 52 days to win it back. A sandwich shop turns into a fine dining room every night. Anyone who has worked a line will recognize the anxiety, and anyone who has not will finally understand why chefs care this much.

Photo: cottonbro studio / Pexels

Food Samurai arrived on Disney+ in the United States on September 30. The six-episode series follows Mory Sacko, the Michelin-starred French chef, on his first trip to Japan as he tries to master a cuisine he has admired since childhood. The goal is deceptively humble: create the perfect bento, ending in Osaka with an original box for one of the city’s busiest streets.

The bento framing is what makes this smarter than the average chef travelogue. A bento is a lesson in restraint, balance, and temperature, and watching a chef trained in French technique wrestle with that is fascinating. Pastry chef Theo Segretin, Pierre Gagnaire, actor Omar Sy, and writer Chihiro Masui all appear. Director Eric Nebot has said the show is about going beyond what we think we know about Japanese food, and it mostly delivers.

Photo: Quang Anh Ha Nguyen / Pexels

Not every pick has to be new to be essential. Beryl Shereshewsky has been building one of the most generous food channels on YouTube since 2020, and it is my standing recommendation for anyone who wants to cook outside their comfort zone. Her format is simple: she takes a theme, often a dish or an ingredient, and cooks versions of it sent in by viewers from around the world.

What I love is that it is home cooking, not restaurant cooking. You see how families in different countries actually use the same pantry staples, which is far more useful on a Tuesday night than another chef demo. In a season when everyone is rethinking what to do with lentils, rice, and frozen dumplings, her channel is a library of ideas.

Photo: Ethan Sarkar / Pexels