Let’s eat with our mouthy mouths.
(And then … Let’s wax on about it.)
I love to both cook and eat - mine and everybody else’s food - more than I can tell you, friends. I ate a lot of good food in 2025. These are the three meals I’m still thinking about.
🏆 Lobster Roll
Broad Street Oyster Co.
Grand Central Market — Los Angeles
https://www.broadstreetoyster.com
https://www.instagram.com/broadstreetoysterco
This was, without question, the best lobster roll I’ve ever had. Studded with uni and caviar, because apparently we were not here to be subtle. Sweet lobster, briny depth, richness layered on richness — indulgent in a way that felt intentional, and perhaps even a little ridiculous, in the best way.
I remember thinking, mid-bite, that this wasn’t excess for the sake of spectacle. This was precision luxury — and that, friend? That is something to which I can certainly aspire.
Truth is —
I’d eat it again tomorrow.
I’d plan a trip around it.
Hell.
I already kind of have.
🏅 Everything. Every. Last. Thing.
Herb & Omni
Whitefish, Montana
https://www.herbandomni.com
https://www.instagram.com/herb.and.omni
There are dinners you remember because of where they happen. Then there are the ones you remember because of how they make you feel — just after the caviar chip and right before you dive, ever so delicately, into the most beautiful beet salad in all of creation.
I try to get to Whitefish for at least a coupla days each year. This time around, in early November, I went to celebrate the finished first draft of my first book. With that necessary toast — or set of them — in mind, a restaurant I’d heard about but never visited felt like exactly the right choice.
Herb & Omni is tucked into Whitefish’s beautifully restored 101 Central building. The menu is seasonal and locally sourced, executed by a chef with a storyteller’s sensibility, and served with equal wryness and skill in rooms as warm and intimate as a friend’s living room — just with better lighting. And waaaaaay better food, of course.
Chef Earl?
This man knows some shit.
Run.
Don’t walk.
🌟 Bubbles. Brine. Boy. Oh. Boy.
Taylor Shellfish
Taylor Shellfish
Multiple Locations — Seattle, WA
https://www.taylorshellfishfarms.com
https://www.instagram.com/taylorshellfish
Taylor Shellfish isn’t about novelty. Best I can tell, it’s about simple things done so shockingly well they transcend. A couple of Seattle-based colleagues suggested their Melrose location years ago, and since then — I can’t stop going.
Taylor Shellfish has been family-owned and operated since the 1890s, harvesting and growing sustainable shellfish in the Pacific Northwest. It all started, it seems, with some dear great-great-grandfather and a fledgling oyster operation in the Puget Sound.
Bless that bless-ed man.
And bless his successors.
Now five generations in.
While oysters are always obligatory here, Taylor also does this other thing — another suggestion from those same colleagues — fresh Dungeness crab served with what I’m told is a crab-fat aioli.
Dude.
Duuuuuuuuuuuude.
A few years,
A few dozen oysters,
A few bottles of good champs,
And a few aioli-ed crabs in …
You.
Must.
Go.