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Sneakeater


paryzer

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It has come to my attention, from a close source, that our beloved Sneakeater has passed away😭Apparently he has been in hospice for the last couple of months (which is why we haven't heard from him for a while).

Rest in peace Barry🙏 You were one of a kind, and will be missed.

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What I will remember: reading his "Go Out" list during the pandemic (re-titled "Stay In" or maybe "Stay Home") for info about online musical performances to entertain me me while I was stuck in the house; chatting back and forth with him here late-ish at night, when we'd both had a few; reading his remembrances of his late wife, with whom he is now reunited, if you believe in that sort of thing.

I'm very sorry I never had the opportunity to meet him, but I'm grateful I to have "known" him, sort of. May his memory be a blessing.

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echoing stone. sneak was the heart and soul of mouthfuls for the last decade and a model of critical acumen and generosity. i’ll write more in a few days; been feeling quite devastated since i heard. 

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Wow.  I met him once. We had dinner at Musso & Frank in Hollywood. He was a swell guy.  I always assumed he'd come back this way and we'd have another meal. Whatever caused his demise it came way too soon. RIP.

I just checked my cell phone contacts and found his number was deleted from my contacts.

Edited by hollywood
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RIP, Sneak.  We had dinner within the last two months, at Torrisi.  He’d been sick for probably the last eight to ten months, or at least found out he was sick within that time frame.  He’d only entered hospice (or palliative care) in the last week or so, and I, along with two other friends, were set to visit him tomorrow morning. Not happening now.

His memory will certainly be a blessing.

Edited by MitchW
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When I got married, in lieu of a physical gift, Barry took Lisa and me to Carbone for a night of over-indulgence.  It was without question the best gift we received.  Almost all the other gifts are still in a box on a shelf in the closet.  But that one I think about frequently.

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The first member of this site Theresa met in real life (at a Cornelissen dinner @ Contra I think) where I had to explain to her my weird virtual food board friends.   When he stopped posting I suspected those posts in the fall that I had secretly hoped had been some of weird prank in their forthrightness around his terminal diagnosis hadn't been a prank. Which obviously made sense because that would have been wildly out of character for him. And that made me sad. Hardly a reason to check in here everyday without him posting 

It's easy to say folks are one of a kind so instead I'll say I've never met someone with so many interests seemingly opposed to one another  and that's what made him such a pleasure to engage with online and in person.

I'm going to find the most gimmicky back story wine in my cellar and drink it in his honor.  Don't think I have any Abe Schoener tho.

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1 hour ago, Steve R. said:

I am sorry he’s gone.  The world is now a duller place.  RIP Sneak.

This morning, over breakfast, Significant Eater and I were laughing and crying over some of the awesome times we'd had with Barry...one that came up was our mutual (mine and B's) hatred dislike of Joe Bastianich.  The 3 of us went to a newly opened seafood restaurant, helmed by April Bloomfield. Called, I believe, The John Dory Oyster Bar.  There the 3 of us were, standing at a high top, while Joe was spread out on a table, looking at his laptop.  God forbid that bastard got up to offer the 3 of us the table. After all, we were only customers.  Man, was Barry pissed off!

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This just sucks. He was such a major presence here. I met him only once - a group of us got together before @StephanieL moved west. Coincidentally, I was thinking about him last week and pulled up a file I created based on all the cocktail recipes he included in the "Staying In" email during Covid. I actually sourced kosher absinthe because of him and he definitely was one of the people who encouraged my exploration of craft cocktails.

We traded a couple of PMs over the last few months as I would check in to see how he was doing with his treatment. He introduced me to a couple of writers I was previously unfamiliar with I'm grateful for that.

I would like to believe the one plus is that he's reunited with his beloved wife. I know that was loss he never recovered from.

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11 minutes ago, bloviatrix said:

Was there any one particular bar that Sneak loved? Can I suggest that we figure out a time that we meet and have a toast to his memory? I think it's something he would have appreciated.

The bar he really loved closed...Pegu. In general, I don't think he was much of a bar person per se, though he sure loved cocktails and dining at the bars in various restaurants.  One of his faves was, and this may surprise some, Donohue's Steak House, on Lexington Avenue.  

 

Edited by MitchW
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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.

Edited by Jesikka
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36 minutes ago, bloviatrix said:

Was there any one particular bar that Sneak loved? Can I suggest that we figure out a time that we meet and have a toast to his memory? I think it's something he would have appreciated.

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

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9 minutes ago, Jesikka said:

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.

Lovely tribute.

Fittingly, during the pandemic when Jess, Barry and I were doing all that cooking alone together, Barry broke one of his main dining rules, and that was taking pictures of food when dining out.  We would both get pix of his finished dishes, set up at his dining table, along with his wine and accoutrements.  It was simply another special thing!

Edited by MitchW
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@Jesikka A bottle of white followed by a bottle of red. That was the routine. A bottle each in other words.

Barry was kind enough to attend my small NYC 25th anniversary get together at Sardi's. We had never been to Sardi's together before, but we had each been going for years and worshipped the great bartender Jose.

I have so many happy memories of times with him. Trying to focus on that.

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Seeing Nellie McKay at LPR together and bobbing along to her cover of "Hungry Freaks, Daddy."

Followed by dinner at noreetuh to get a bottle of white and a bottle of red from that insanely well-priced vintage list.

The tasting menu shared at Aska and both of us looking quizzically at the raw sprouts on the branch.

He took me to dinner at Le Coq Rico to discuss ideas for what eventually became GoOut!

A blind beer tasting at my apartment where he found it hilarious that my daughter (aged about 7?) was serving the unnamed beers and calling out the numbers ("Beer No. 3!").

I just remembered the first time I met him in person at Jimmy's Corner.

Of all his contributions here, the titanic  "Today I Played" thread.

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What a loss.  I was dreading this news.

@bloviatrix, I remember that dinner--it was at Cafe Katja.  Barry was really sad to see N and I leave New York.  As I posted on Jesikka's thread, he was really supportive to us, even treating us to dinner at Le Bernardin when N got her PhD (which I couldn't appreciate fully because we drank too much wine). 

 

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I am heartbroken.    I wondered why last week I kept hearing Pat Meheny’s “Last Train Home”, a track we both loved.   We never met but my life is richer for our minuscule but not insignificant friendship.  

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