Jesikka

This reminds me of the time- not so long ago- when Mitch and another close friend and I, trying to cheer Barry up in light of the terrible news offered to have dinner anywhere he wanted. Toward the end of his life, Barry became extremely impatient with formal dining and very nostalgic about old school spots like Parkside and Randazzos. So Barry wants to go to Adrienne’s, which seemed to be chosen solely based on transportation inconvenience and a very very large veal serving. You know you love someone when you agree to go to the Rockaways on a work day weekday. Fwiw, Barry took the subway home. He was definitely a real NYer and man of the people, despite being extremely intellectual.

I was lucky enough to be the recipient of his entire vinyl collection, as well as a receiver and amp as a housewarming gift when I bought my current apartment (in MitchW’s bldg) during the pandemic.

For those that are curious to know him through his cd and book collection (cds highly pilfered in non classical categories):

I’ll definitely never recover from that night with Frank or ever drink that much again. That man has a hollow leg.

Posting on behalf of Nathan: This is Nathan. I have little to add to the above. It's all been said. I ate, and drank, with Barry literally hundreds of times when I lived in NY and at least another 30 times after. We first met at Wallse. He never changed and was truly extraordinary. A couple standouts: a prodigiously gluttonous meal at Cafe Gray when Gray Kunz did a final F-U to his investors (I think) as it was closing by basically putting all of the most expensive and rich mains on the menu into one prix fixe; the time that we introduced Frank Bruni to the Staggerac; the early days of Ssam Bar when it was truly something new. But most of all it was all the people we each met through Barry. He is irreplaceable.

MitchW is willing to gift Barry’s Beatles box set to you…

I’ll remember this for the memorial soundtrack. MitchW and I have also rehashed old music fights - like @Wilfrid being wrong about the Beatles - over box sets and a 10,000 cd collection as we organize and clean. True friendship is being trusted with the books and cds of someone as passionate as Barry. If anyone wants classical cds please let me know.

MitchW, Orik and I will host something. Stay tuned because we need a minute.

My eulogy below: Barry Okun 1957-2025 I lost one of my dearest friends - my New York family - yesterday, although many of you know that I’ve been losing him for weeks and months. Barry Okun lost his battle with cancer yesterday afternoon. I met Barry when I was 23 years old. We met on an online food board, back in the days where every niche interest had an entire community participating in an online message board. The early days of egullet were crazy, with now famous chefs participating in highly contentious conversations about the best taco in NY, the best way to roast a chicken, and where to find a mythical possibly imaginary arepa lady under a bridge in queens. Even among a group of talented, opinionated and highly vocal people, Barry’s voice and incredible writing stood out. Eventually we met in person, at WD-50, where we had our first of thousands of meals together. I learned that Barry was an autodidact, a brilliant lawyer (who truly hated that job), a wearer of fedoras, and equally knowledgeable about theater, history, literature, music, NY, and pretty much everything as he was about food. He was also a widower who had lost his soulmate in Judy Fell and was trying desperately to find any path forward without her. From that night forward, in 2003 or so, Barry sheparded me through life in NY. He taught me to know and understand wine and booze, and we were part of an extraordinary emergence of the cocktail scene in NY. Barry was a proper diner, who started every meal with a cocktail and followed with an appetizer, main course and dessert, with a bottle of white, followed by a bottle of red. The bottles were always extraordinary and generally old world except for Pinot and a lot of Abe Schoener’s early wine experiments. On we went, eating at restaurants, writing about them, traveling the world and learning about food. Barry guided my knowledge, and despite having 24 years on me, he was always up for an outer borough trek and a conversation on any topic (I was finishing law school and he could speak about any legal topic with brilliance). We knew and wrote about chefs as they emerged: Wylie Dufresne, David Chang, Dan Barber, Suvir Saran, Dave Santos to name a few. These chefs knew us by our screen names and loved us or hated us and sent us dishes to try and give feedback on. It was a time that can never be recreated, that is hard to describe, and that Barry would do far more justice to write about. Decades passed in which we traveled to Philly and Piedmont and Kansas City, saw hundreds of plays - all of them weird as he preferred it and referencing things I didn’t yet know, covered every topic from esoteric Jewish doctrine to wine education, and became truly the closest of friends. Barry mingled into my friend group with ease because he knew a phd level amount about everything, but especially about music, literature, food, and drink. He was ornery, opinionated, and often difficult. He introduced me to Jeanie, who is one of my closest friends, because we were “two outspoken women who need to know each other.” Barry and I spoke every day from the time I was 23 to earlier this week when his last words to me were “can you come back later.” For the last few weeks, I sat by his bedside in the truly miraculous place that is Mount Sinai palliative care reading to him from Dante’s Purgatorio, which was the last book he was reading and not quite finished with. I think he knew how it ended. During the pandemic, we cooked virtually together every day, along with our friend Mitch, inspiring each other and trying to stay sane but mostly failing to overcome our neuroses, especially in combination. The meals we made were beautiful. Our sourcing was featured by Pete Wells in the New York Times. No topic was off limits and since 2020 we have sent thousands of texts on every topic. Nothing hurt more than when Barry stopped texting. I am heartbroken for so many reasons, but I will miss tapping into his endless intellect and knowledge the most. Losing Barry is like losing Ratners and Lespinasse and the original Second Avenue Deli, knowledgeable cab drivers that don’t use GPS, the old Essex market, the right to own our own bodies, quality journalism, and rule of law. We will never be the same. Those who did not know Barry will hardly believe this mythical creature might have existed. He wanted nothing to do with religion (no shiva for sure), but he was as Jewish as they come; one of many unresolved contradictions that were Barry. His bookshelves are filled with Spinoza and Maimonides, resting comfortably near Das Kapital (the new translation by Paul Reitter that he was desperate to live to read), art books from all the latest shows, Superman comics, and a perfect box set of Jane Austen. He was raised on Long Island a d spent most of his adulthood in Prospect Heights, but he knew every corner of New York City and all its history and culture. He saw a play or music almost every night of the last two decades, although he was critical of much of what was produced and everything commercial. Although he dated many a beautiful (very) young woman, he loved Judy with all his heart and spoke of her always with reverence. In recent months he watched me fall in love, and made room in his often cynical heart to celebrate that. We loved to say that we met on the internet and nothing more, but there is so much more to be said. For me, for him, please raise a glass of extraordinary wine to the extraordinary man. There will never be another like Barry Okun and we shall never be the same.

Barry Okun 1957-2025 I lost one of my dearest friends - my New York family - yesterday, although many of you know that I’ve been losing him for weeks and months. Barry Okun lost his battle with cancer yesterday afternoon. I met Barry when I was 23 years old. We met on an online food board, back in the days where every niche interest had an entire community participating in an online message board. The early days of egullet were crazy, with now famous chefs participating in highly contentious conversations about the best taco in NY, the best way to roast a chicken, and where to find a mythical possibly imaginary arepa lady under a bridge in queens. Even among a group of talented, opinionated and highly vocal people, Barry’s voice and incredible writing stood out. Eventually we met in person, at WD-50, where we had our first of thousands of meals together. I learned that Barry was an autodidact, a brilliant lawyer (who truly hated that job), a wearer of fedoras, and equally knowledgeable about theater, history, literature, music, NY, and pretty much everything as he was about food. He was also a widower who had lost his soulmate in Judy Fell and was trying desperately to find any path forward without her. From that night forward, in 2003 or so, Barry sheparded me through life in NY. He taught me to know and understand wine and booze, and we were part of an extraordinary emergence of the cocktail scene in NY. Barry was a proper diner, who started every meal with a cocktail and followed with an appetizer, main course and dessert, with a bottle of white, followed by a bottle of red. The bottles were always extraordinary and generally old world except for Pinot and a lot of Abe Schoener’s early wine experiments. On we went, eating at restaurants, writing about them, traveling the world and learning about food. Barry guided my knowledge, and despite having 24 years on me, he was always up for an outer borough trek and a conversation on any topic (I was finishing law school and he could speak about any legal topic with brilliance). We knew and wrote about chefs as they emerged: Wylie Dufresne, David Chang, Dan Barber, Suvir Saran, Dave Santos to name a few. These chefs knew us by our screen names and loved us or hated us and sent us dishes to try and give feedback on. It was a time that can never be recreated, that is hard to describe, and that Barry would do far more justice to write about. Decades passed in which we traveled to Philly and Piedmont and Kansas City, saw hundreds of plays - all of them weird as he preferred it and referencing things I didn’t yet know, covered every topic from esoteric Jewish doctrine to wine education, and became truly the closest of friends. Barry mingled into my friend group with ease because he knew a phd level amount about everything, but especially about music, literature, food, and drink. He was ornery, opinionated, and often difficult. He introduced me to Jeanie, who is one of my closest friends, because we were “two outspoken women who need to know each other.” Barry and I spoke every day from the time I was 23 to earlier this week when his last words to me were “can you come back later.” For the last few weeks, I sat by his bedside in the truly miraculous place that is Mount Sinai palliative care reading to him from Dante’s Purgatorio, which was the last book he was reading and not quite finished with. I think he knew how it ended. During the pandemic, we cooked virtually together every day, along with our friend Mitch, inspiring each other and trying to stay sane but mostly failing to overcome our neuroses, especially in combination. The meals we made were beautiful. Our sourcing was featured by Pete Wells in the New York Times. No topic was off limits and since 2020 we have sent thousands of texts on every topic. Nothing hurt more than when Barry stopped texting. I am heartbroken for so many reasons, but I will miss tapping into his endless intellect and knowledge the most. Losing Barry is like losing Ratners and Lespinasse and the original Second Avenue Deli, knowledgeable cab drivers that don’t use GPS, the old Essex market, the right to own our own bodies, quality journalism, and rule of law. We will never be the same. Those who did not know Barry will hardly believe this mythical creature might have existed. He wanted nothing to do with religion (no shiva for sure), but he was as Jewish as they come; one of many unresolved contradictions that were Barry. His bookshelves are filled with Spinoza and Maimonides, resting comfortably near Das Kapital (the new translation by Paul Reitter that he was desperate to live to read), art books from all the latest shows, Superman comics, and a perfect box set of Jane Austen. He was raised on Long Island a d spent most of his adulthood in Prospect Heights, but he knew every corner of New York City and all its history and culture. He saw a play or music almost every night of the last two decades, although he was critical of much of what was produced and everything commercial. Although he dated many a beautiful (very) young woman, he loved Judy with all his heart and spoke of her always with reverence. In recent months he watched me fall in love, and made room in his often cynical heart to celebrate that. We loved to say that we met on the internet and nothing more, but there is so much more to be said. For me, for him, please raise a glass of extraordinary wine to the extraordinary man. There will never be another like Barry Okun and we shall never be the same.

To be fair it sounds awful in English.

I don’t see a thread for Penny yet but I’m so annoyed by the team here that I feel compelled to complain although perhaps now as a restaurateur @Orikwill tell me I’m in the wrong. I ate ate Penny the other night (Tuesday). Food was good- basically same as Claud. Over $300 for two people who ate a raw bar platter, shared a piece of fish, and drank a bottle plus a glass. After the meal my friend who is a foodie but not a reservations guru asked them to book her on Friday at 9 or 930 bc she thought her husband would like the restaurant. They told her they couldn’t do it bc they (incoherently) only mostly do walk ins (they offered her a 5 pm). I set a notify on resy bc I saw that they’ve been dropping reservations there frequently despite my friend being told no and of course it popped up on notify today for 945 pm. I grabbed it for her but she checked with her husband and they decided not to take the res. I canceled it 15 minutes later. Tonight i received a $100 charge from Am Ex for the res I canceled after 15 minutes, which technically was in the 24 hour window. My mistake I suppose, but it’s a nice way to make an enemy out of a fan, especially as I know they’re lines out the door busy and there’s zero chance that seat went empty. Meanwhile I guess it’s cheaper than going, but not by much.

If anyone is wondering this place is really good

Wait how do you know this?

My recommendation would be not to go especially now that taco Maria closed but I would say Hue Oi and Brodard are both better Vietnamese than you can get in NY (Brodard is practically a factory). Others worth visiting in OC include Chaak, Knife Pleat, lots and lots of sushi. I like omakase by Gino. If you’re traveling to LA there’s a ton to eat and I can make other recos like Sushi Inaba and Kin Kan.