Twenty years of ecstatic highs, bilious lows, and plenty of dyspeptic heartburn in between. I’m lucky that my time on the job has coincided with all sorts of revolutions in the formerly quirky, backwater world food and restaurants. If the pandemic has proved anything, it’s that restaurants are more at the center of our culture as a city, as a country, and as a world than ever before.

I loved a long-ago piece about taking my daughter’s raucous kindergarten class to dine among the horrified swells at Le Cirque. More recently, I thought my story on the death of the old diner culture around the city turned out pretty well. Among pandemic pieces, I’m fond of my ode to the horrors of eating viral bean recipes every night during lockdown, and also of the review of a restaurant called Ernesto’s, which was the last place I dined when the city shut down in mid-March, and one of the first I returned to when we began to open up in the summer.

Long naps, long walks, an evening gin-and-tonic now and then. I also have a stack of cookbooks and travel volumes on my desk, which I like to flip through on gray, wintery afternoons when I get tired of staring at the brick wall outside my office window.

I love ramen, and ham-and-cheese sandwiches made at my local deli, and a giant bag of plain Lay’s potato chips now and then. But for pure old-fashioned comfort, nothing beats a steamy bowl of pork-and-chive dumplings.