In November, Mahira Rivers and Ryan Sutton — names likely familiar to in-the-know New York diners — started as contributing restaurant critics at The Times, writing brief reviews that award stars to New York City restaurants. Their work first appears on Tuesdays in the Where to Eat newsletter (subscribe here), and each month those reviews will be aggregated and published on nytimes.com and in the newspaper.
The contributing critics adhere to The Times’s ethics guidelines. And like our other critics, they do not give advance notice when visiting restaurants, they visit multiple times and they try to reserve tables anonymously. They pay for all their meals, and strive to have the same dining experience that any customer would.
In November, Mahira Rivers and Ryan Sutton — names likely familiar to in-the-know New York diners — started as contributing restaurant critics at The Times, writing brief reviews that award stars to New York City restaurants. Their work first appears on Tuesdays in the Where to Eat newsletter (subscribe here), and each month those reviews will be aggregated and published on nytimes.com and in the newspaper.
The contributing critics adhere to The Times’s ethics guidelines. And like our other critics, they do not give advance notice when visiting restaurants, they visit multiple times and they try to reserve tables anonymously. They pay for all their meals, and strive to have the same dining experience that any customer would.
In November, Mahira Rivers and Ryan Sutton — names likely familiar to in-the-know New York diners — started as contributing restaurant critics at The Times, writing brief reviews that award stars to New York City restaurants. Their work first appears on Tuesdays in the Where to Eat newsletter (subscribe here), and each month those reviews will be aggregated and published on nytimes.com and in the newspaper.
The contributing critics adhere to The Times’s ethics guidelines. And like our other critics, they do not give advance notice when visiting restaurants, they visit multiple times and they try to reserve tables anonymously. They pay for all their meals, and strive to have the same dining experience that any customer would.
Bánh Anh Em opened in March as part of a newer generation — going back to the punk-ish pioneers An Choi on the Lower East Side in 2009, and Bunker in Ridgewood, Queens, in 2013 — seeking to broaden understanding of Vietnamese cuisine. The chef, Nhu Ton, and her business partner, John Nguyen, met nearly a decade ago through his aunt, Anh-Tuyet Nguyen, who always kept an eye out for young Vietnamese immigrants “trying to find their place in America,” he told me. (She died in 2020.)
There’s some overlap with the menu at Bánh Vietnamese Shop House, their five-year-old restaurant on the Upper West Side. But Bánh Anh Em is more expansive and ambitious, with almost everything made in-house — bread for bánh mì, crackling then caving; ruốc tôm, shrimp boiled, oven-dried then worked by hand into a loose wool; chiles simmered into the rare hot sauces that prize flavor as much as heat.
That doesn’t mean it’s cozy or somewhere you want to linger. The scrappy spirit of street food prevails. Bánh Anh Em does not take reservations, and lines form at least a half-hour before service, so every seat gets filled at once, a slam that never lets up.
