Welcome to Broken Palate — where food and culture collide.

Branding by Rescue Vessel | Illustrations by Jeffrey Phillips

Our writers eat far and wide to bring you news you can use, profiles you’ll devour, interviews you’ll enjoy, and recipes you can trust. Based in NYC, we’re centered on our home city, layered with reporting from Miami, Los Angeles, and bucket-list travel destinations.

What’s different about this restaurant newsletter?

An offshoot of Tasting Table — the first generation restaurant newsletters founded in 2008 — we’ve delivered restaurant news, features, how-tos, recipes, and videos you’ve enjoyed for well over a decade.

Today, we’ve swapped a publication that required ad money for one that’s nurtured by community support on Substack. We feel it’s essential to help propel a restaurant revival, to walk readers through who’s doing what that we’re wowed by. We want to chronicle how restaurants continue to shape our communities — how we live, eat, travel, and navigate our neighborhoods, post-pandemic.

We want you to feel invested in and connected to this community of restaurants, chefs, makers, bartenders, and beyond. We will spotlight equitable workplaces, industry pioneers, and the internationalism that has always been a part of the food world. We’ll go beyond storytelling, narratives, and reporting through video, audio, and Substack’s online discussion within our community, often with special guests.

Why subscribe?

At the start, look for four packed newsletters a week for free subscribers, where we’ll feature interviews, profiles, breaking news, bucket-list travel tips, and more; this will evolve as we get feedback from you (You can drop us a line at info@brokenpalate.com.) A $50 membership includes an additional exclusive weekend roundup, plus:

  • Bi-weekly discussions on your favorite restaurants

  • Q&A access to chefs, sommeliers, restaurateurs, bakers, and authors

  • Subscriber-only video, audio, and transcripts

  • Unfettered access to recipes, interviews, and transcripts

  • On- and offline deals and discounts

Broken Palate is a growing community that cares about the food and restaurant industry. We want to support beloved places and new spots, from the scrappy corner dive bar to the burgeoning city restaurant group. It’s a place where we share who and what we love in our neighborhoods and travels, what inspires us, and what we value, through the lens of food, cooking, and hospitality.

That’s what you get when you join Broken Palate, where membership is $6 per month or $50 per year.

Consider becoming a VIP.

If you choose to become a VIP you’re going beyond supporting independent journalism and startup costs. We’re donating ten percent of payments $200 or more to nonprofits, starting with ROAR (Restaurants Organizing, Advocating & Rebuilding): a powerful voice for restaurant workers and the NYC independent restaurant community, providing health and wellness services to restaurant workers, and advocating for NYC’s independent restaurants and their employees. Learn more about ROAR here.

We’re choosing to be optimistic about the future. Thank you for reading and for your support.

Subscribe to Broken Palate

Where food and culture collide

People

Traveler, Adventurer, Runner, Writer, Actor, Cocktailer, Democrat, Dogmom. I don't like buzzwords. Fix me a good drink and I'll tell you a story.
Resident: Asbury Park and Jersey City. Editor: Eater NY. Formerly: Mark Bittman's Bittman Project, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Newsday, and Broward-Palm Beach New Times. Co-author "Bread and How to Eat It," May 2023, Knopf.
From founder, John McDonald, and editors, Melissa McCart and Laine Doss
I am in the restaurant, media and story telling business.