Robert Sietsema Will Never Stop Eating

I meet Robert Sietsema on a sunny afternoon at Veeray da Dhaba, a narrow restaurant in the East Village that he declares serves some of the best Punjabi food in the city. Sietsema should know: For over 35 years now, primarily for the Village Voice and Eater and now on his own Substack, he's covered New York City's forever-expanding universe of ethnic cuisines—from Uzbek in Rego Park to Sichuan in Hell's Kitchen, from Guatemalan in Mott Haven to Uyghur in Brighton Beach—with an inexhaustible drive and pure, total glee.

It's a beat that he's called by turns "cheap immigrant food," "ethnic food," "food you can afford," or just "vernacular food." For me, he defines it as "anything that's not too expensive, usually made by immigrants and their children, reflecting a yearning to have food from back home." 

Tall and smiley, and looking sporty in khaki shorts and bright orange Hokas, the 73-year-old Sietsema is as animated as you'd expect from reading his geeked-up writing, which often is full of superlatives. (He recently described a dumpling restaurant, a new outpost of a Chinese chain, as "astonishing.") Throughout our chat, he breaks out into riffs on the old Transcontinental Railroad crew cooks who largely invented Chinese American food, the Ecuadorean women selling homemade lunches out of wheeled coolers on 14th Street, and the annoying dominance of certain grains ("Everyone's like, 'Oh, basmati rice,' and it's like, fuck that! I’ve had probably 10 other kinds of rice from India and they were all more interesting!"). We’re the only diners in the place and Sietsema's voice happily booms over the sound of clattering steel dishes and the banging '80s Bollywood. 

When Sietsema first started writing, food criticism hadn't yet been democratized. Writing about the kielbaza at Pyza like you did Le Cirque's white truffle fettuccine? It just wasn't done. Decades later, thanks to the internet and social media, anyone can gush about any little hole-in-the-wall. And yet, still, no one does it better than Robert Sietsema. Says his friend Gary He, the James Beard Award-winning author and photographer, "Robert has the most extensive knowledge of this city and he's not piecing it together from Google searches when writing—all of that history is already in his brain."