Lisa Ling on why Asian food in Los Angeles matters.
A black cod goes from the Pacific to Shibumi.
Keeping cool when the kitchen gets hot.
One restaurant’s many pandemic pivots.
Two different takes on Indian food.
Every day’s a hustle at Woon.
From Asian farms to Los Angeles restaurants.
Why in L.A. they’re not boring.
Three restaurants breaking boundaries.
Mastering values at Yang’s Kitchen.
Two chefs go behind the blade.
Omakase and ramen join the neighborhood.
The coronation of soju and makgeolli.
Three women open the bar they want to walk into.
Indonesian community through cuisine.
On working with Mom and Dad at Anajak Thai.
Los Angeles before sushi.
Inside the staff ritual of eating together.
Three Vietnamese restaurants expand the city’s palate.
One chef has some thoughts.
Waking up Los Angeles to Burmese cuisine.
The couple behind Shiku goes with the flow.
An ode to those who keep them going.
Michelle Bernstein embraces the competition.
One restaurant’s epic journey from debt to success.
The couple behind Boia De and Walrus Rodeo play by their own rules.
Vermouth gets a bar of its own.
On the business of BBQ in Miami.
Recipes for navigating an uncertain economy.
The secret to never getting old in a town obsessed with what’s new.
How two pioneers of omakase introduced Miami to a new way of dining out.
Chasing a childhood memory one arepa at a time.
Why Miami’s mainstays of Middle Eastern food aren’t phased by the influx of glossy newcomers.
David Foulquier on his shapeshifting ambitions.
The Black chefs behind a vegan movement in Miami.
Two Cuban sandwich masters talk shop.
A new generation’s take on the classic Jewish deli.
Miami’s mavericks of sustainable growing and dining.
An intimate glimpse inside restaurants after the last customer leaves.
Creating a culture where employees stick around.
A new kind of bottle service takes root in Miami.
The art of staying put in a changing city.
The city’s ventanitas created a culture all their own.
Philadelphia Magazine’s food critic on the irrepressible attitude that is the key ingredient of the city’s restaurants.
How one restaurant gave birth to many.
The cheesesteak may be the global mascot of Philly. But a contingent of pioneering chefs and restaurateurs have made the city a hub of vegetarian innovation.
The city’s Eritrean-Ethiopian restaurants serve up more—way more—than delicious food.
How Juan Carlos Aparicio baked his way to running a restaurant (that isn’t a bakery).
How Alex Tewfik went from being a food editor in Philly to owning one of the best restaurants in town.
Two restaurants that share a belief in how cooking can be force for change.
How Chutatip Suntaranon channeled her upbringing in Thailand—and life spent flying around the world—into one of Philly’s most singular restaurants.
Stopping by the warehouses in Kensington where artisan upstarts are breathing new life into the city’s food scene.
The Ongoing Evolution of Philly’s Classic Sandwiches.
Chloé Grigri, Amanda Shulman, and Ellen Yin on upending the rules of the game.
Mike Solomonov takes stock of his journey.
When a customer becomes a friend.
Ange Branca was forced to close her beloved restaurant in 2020. That was just the beginning.
How do you build a restaurant in a space that was never meant for a restaurant? In Philly, a city of Revolutionary Warera buildings and colonial row houses and ancient warehouses, it can be a bit like playing Tetris with Benjamin Franklin.
Three Philly couples get frank and intimate in sharing their recipes for romance.
Inside the world of homespun pop-ups and unexpected collaborations that have made Philly’s dining scene like nowhere else.
The classics are easy enough to master by anyone with fine liquor and a recipe.
The city has long been a vibrant hub of Vietnamese food. Today, a new generation is striking a balance all their own—between creativity and tradition, innovation and memory.
An ode to the unsung heroes of restaurant kitchens from a comedy writer who couldn’t take the heat.
A cell phone has been invented that allows you to send one text message to your younger self. What do you write?
New York-style pizza in Miami. Tokyo-style sushi in New York. David Foulquier has built his nascent restaurant empire by thinking outside the box.
While there is a long history of restaurateurs making a name in New York before opening up a flashy outpost in Miami, David Foulquier’s career is a case study in how this trajectory can be reverse engineered with swagger. Originally from Manhattan, he moved to Miami for school, and, in 2015, opened Fooq’s, where he translated his Persian-French heritage into an inventive menu and intimate vibe that breathed fresh life into Downtown’s once sleepy Arts & Entertainment District.
Just 24 at the time, Foulquier went on to start We All Gotta Eat, a restaurant group run with his brother Josh, and in 2018 they unveiled a drastically different concept in New York: Sushi Noz, a hushed temple of high-end sushi, which won a Michelin star, and in 2021 expanded into Noz 17.
Back in Miami, meanwhile, he has remained as restless as ever. When the pandemic put a kibosh on shoulder-to-shoulder dining, he shuttered Fooq’s, reinventing the space as Eleventh Street Pizza, a fast-casual spot specializing in New York-style pies, which will soon open a second outpost in the Downtown Dadeland development.
Here Foulquier talks about his balancing act between cities and cuisines, Miami’s evolving culinary culture, and reviving the spot that started it all.
Walk us through how you got started in the restaurant industry.
I got into this business with a love for food and a love for hospitality—with my Persian and French roots guiding me on how to host people and feed people. I started cooking very young, with my grandparents on both sides of the family, and then took cooking classes in high school to learn the basics. I went to the University of Miami, but ended up transferring to FIU (Florida International University) for hospitality. I recommend anybody who’s thinking about opening a restaurant to go to hospitality school; it wasn’t a waste of my time.
How so, exactly?
Working in the kitchen I was able to learn a lot, but I also got to do different kinds of studies, the business side of things. Everything from accounting to legal to marketing to understanding food costs, labor costs, knowing the food chain. It’s important to do your homework when opening a restaurant. We have to make money and also be able to put food on our tables and be able to survive mentally. A lot of that is just putting yourself in good positions: not signing bad deals, not working on concepts that are a waste of your time, not taking on partners that aren’t good for you.
How did those lessons play into you opening Fooq’s?
We were lucky to come across the space where I didn’t have to put up a big crazy security deposit. So it was obviously still a risk, but it wasn’t like it was going to be a career-ender if it didn’t work out, which was super important. I remember when I read Danny Meyer’s book, Setting the Table, he said to start small with one location, get that right, and then start to expand. I always knew that I wanted to make this my career—and I had big aspirations—but we spent three years exclusively working on Fooq’s before we opened up Sushi Noz.
Do you think some people in this city open without doing their homework?
Miami used to be a market where, historically, you were able to come in at a lower level in terms of rent, responsibilities, and aggressive landlords. But now Miami is also filled with sharks, so that filters out the people who are maybe not doing as good of a job. I’m definitely proud of Miami’s food scene. I can recommend dozens of places to people and not be worried about what they’re going to find.
And that wasn’t always the case?
Not even in the last five years. The pandemic kicked us into gear. We inherited a lot of passionate industry workers, people from the major cities who were fed up with being overworked and underpaid and living in places that really were not that great for their mental health.
“We have to make money and also be able to put food on our tables and be able to survive mentally.”
But the pandemic also forced you to close Fooq’s, your baby, and turn it into Eleventh Street Pizza. Now you’re about to open a second location. Did you ever imagine yourself as a pizza shop owner?
Being a New York City kid, pizza is such a part of your life, but that pizza culture didn’t really exist in Miami. So I taught myself how to make great pizza with sourdough, a trial and error situation that cost me a lot of weight gain. There was a point where I was eating 20 to 30 slices a day. It’s opened my eyes to the whole world of baking and breads. I hope to open more pizza joints and incorporate bread making into our restaurants.
To an outsider, there seems to be little connection between grabbing a slice of pizza on the fly and sitting down to an epic sushi feast. What’s the link between them to you?
We just want to be the best. That’s our mission statement as a restaurant group—it doesn’t matter what it is that we’re doing, whether it’s a fast casual pizza shop or a $500 per person omakase in the hardest city in the world, we want it to be the best.
Would you ever open a Sushi Noz here in Miami?
The big fear in Miami has always been: Are you going to get people to spend the big bucks in the slow months? Now it’s more of a 365-days-a-year business model. While we don’t have any direct plans at the moment—our next location is in L.A.—one day there will be a Sushi Noz here.
And what about Fooq’s? I understand it’s coming back.
It’s in the works! It’s definitely different from the little bistro it was—we’re expanding to a larger space and we’re excited to be able to express ourselves culinary-wise. We’ll have a proper liquor license so now we can serve cocktails. But there are a whole host of other costs that come with building a 200-plus seat restaurant, which is what I’m learning now.
One day you’ll write your own book of hospitality hacks.
Once the pizza stops tasting as good to me, maybe I’ll start writing.
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