The Places Review

A literary newsletter featuring original travel writing, under the editorial direction of Eddie Huang.

I didn’t know anyone when I moved to New York in ’04, but it didn’t matter. Every five blocks there was someone on a blanket selling Dipset or G-Unit mixtapes. This was the era groups like D-Block would run up on Green Lantern’s In the Lab and drop a new song off the top of the dome. I’d cop a tape, put it in a COMPACT DISC PLAYER and take the closest train to the furthest stop.

When I got to the last stop on the L or 7 or Q train I’d get off and collect paper menus from the restaurants near the train figuring the best restaurants would be nearby since that was the prime real estate. The last stop on the Q at that time was Stillwell Ave in Coney Island and when I got out I’d see franchises like Subway Sandwiches or Nathan’s, but walking a few blocks opened a world to Georgian, Uzbek, and other restaurants from the Stans serving things like Rice Plov and pelmeni that reminded me of things my distant Muslim Chinese cousin would eat.

I collected menus from restaurants that looked interesting and started returning to each neighborhood. Once I’d explored Stillwell, I worked my way backwards. By the end of Spring, I was getting off at Neck Road doing all-u-can-eat blue crab at Clemente’s in Sheepshead Bay. I never felt alone in New York because I had places to go.

As the internet changed the world, I resented it. I had two drawers full of menus until 2009 when I relented and started to use message boards like Chowhound or sites like Yelp to find restaurants. I rented films from Kim’s Video on St. Mark’s until their closure in 2014, and I can honestly say nothing has ever been the same. Technology has been used to “maximize” culture in a way that kills the thing it purports to platform.

I don’t want to know what the hottest restaurant is. I don’t want to know where all the publicists are sending their clients to get pap’d. Chef Luigi Franzese invented spicy vodka sauce in the 70s, and while it’s fine with fusilli, I would survive if I never saw another one. For quite some time, I’ve been a curmudgeon participating in internet while resenting its displacement of the modus operandi I grew up with because the way we did things meant something to me.

I started spending time in LA around 2014 and tried to do things the old way pulling over on the side of the road when I saw an interesting place, meeting people at house parties, or backyard dinners, but it wasn’t the same. As more of my work moved to LA, I moved to Sunset Mesa where I was perhaps more likely to see a dolphin than a person and gave up on building community. I ate at the same two restaurants: The Reel Inn and Cholada Thai, which both burned down in the fires this year.

While I was never lonely in New York, I was completely lost in LA. I didn’t have my people or places but I was invited to be a beta member of Raya. I think the biblical way to explain this would be that Raya like Jesus said to its people like Simon: “Put out into the deep, and let down your nets for a catch.”

So I did.

Who am I to argue with technology and the New Testament?

The early years were a lot of fun. I personally really enjoyed seeing my homies posting photos with chain link necklaces and prayer hands or Timbs and the gas face set to Theophilus London.

Of course, after a few really fun years, I was jaded and alone which had nothing to do with the app and everything to do with myself. Staring at my 40th birthday on the horizon in July 2021, I had two failed engagements, a very regrettable neck tattoo, and still hadn’t found my person. After a particularly bad date, I called one of my best friends, Ray, and told him one morning, “I think I’m done. I don’t want to date anymore.”

He laughed, and a few hours later, I got a message from a woman named Shia Blanca who matched then curved me in 2019. She said, “What I’m going to do here is pretend like I didn’t ignore your messages for two years. How’s it going?”

There was one particularly witchy photo in her slideshow improperly holding a knife leaning against the corner of a kitchen island which got me very hot and bothered. I decided that I would ignore her for an appropriate amount of time considering I was curved for 2 years and lasted about 90 minutes before responding. We’ve never stopped talking since that day minus the day I got upset and threw fajitas on the ceiling, but that was unequivocally my fault and another story for another day.

Once we started dating, we discovered that we’d lived and worked on the same block for several years in New York beginning on 12th Street and 3rd Avenue, then again when the Vice Office moved to South 2nd, but we’d never met. We had a lot of mutuals. We absolutely might have perhaps lightly dated each others friends, but it was the internet that brought us together.

I would not have met the love of my life collecting menus on the train and I have Raya to thank for it. My wife would absolutely kill me if I still had a Raya account, so thankfully, there’s Places. Think of it as the app for those who’ve graduated from Raya, but still want recommendations and places from people they love and respect.

I got involved with Places because it’s not an app pushing you toward the hottest spots. There isn’t a sponsored icon screaming “2 seats left at 4:30pm” or “2 at 7pm if you have an extra $100”. It’s not waiting to pounce on your Amex Centurion or Diner’s Club card. With a 19-month-old that has me anchored to my Murray Hill apartment, I frequently lay on the floor with my son on my chest and look at all the places we could go if he didn’t just blow out a diaper.

But you should absolutely download Places and go to them before you have a 19-month-old Cleveland Steaming you on a random Tuesday afternoon. I’m sure standards and practices is going to delete that line but you and I know it was written.

Since Sam Sifton gave me a zero star review of Xiao Ye, I’ve been curious about food criticism. I enjoy reading it at times, but I’m judgmental enough about people that the last thing I should be judging are places as well. I want to read things like Hunter S. Thompson’s “The Proud Highway” or Joan Didion’s California in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and more recently Ottessa Moshfegh’s China in “Medicine”.

That’s what we’re going to do here: travel, food, and places writing from the perspective of the experience. We may never get Kim’s Video back, but I want to use the internet to present literary writing that feels like we are all on a train collecting menus together.

I’ll be doing a lot of the writing, but I will also be inviting some of my favorite writers as well.

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