Fire Week
Photographs: Young Skeletons for Time Out New York
Photographs: Young Skeletons for Time Out New York

NYC’s top flaming food and drinks to heat up this Valentine’s Day and beyond

They’ll start a fire in your belly (and your heart).

Amber Sutherland-Namako
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Flames leaping from a charcoal grill. A flickering candlestick at a table for two. Lightning on the Aegean Sea. Fire fascinates. A malleable metaphor for love, lust, passion, or fury, it’s ever-evocative. And, although we first learned to contain it an almost inconceivable number of years ago, control over this once untamed element is still cause for applause. 

New York City has been setting drinks and plates alight for slightly fewer millennia. Whether behind the bar, tableside or close in an open kitchen, its flash never fails to snap attention.

This edition of Time Out New York’s digital cover celebrates combustion in its culinary forms, and these are five menu items with a blaze you can bask in right now. 

NYC’s top flaming food and drinks

  • Drinking

Of all the speakeasy-themed bars that opened last year, The Woo Woo was among the most committed to the bit. Visitors must ring the buzzer, provide the password and pass a faux sex shop to enter. Its 80s-style interior is dimly illuminated with neon, disco lights and The Guilty Pleasure: a vodka based cocktail with apple, cinnamon and heat you can see.

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  • Chinese
  • Midtown East

Huge, sparklingly beautiful Hutong opened in the crescent of a glassy highrise on 58th Street between Lexington and Third Avenue in 2019. The crisply elegant Northern Chinese restaurant introduced the flaming Peking duck served at its other locations around the world two years later. A 36-hour, air-dried bird is prepared with housemade chili paste, Sichuan green chilis, star anise and ground black pepper, roasted, and ignited with an accelerant of wine and rum before it’s sliced tableside. Only five are available to order in advance and only Monday through Thursday.  

  • Downtown Brooklyn
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended

Stunning Gage & Tollner was about as successful as a revival can be when it reopened two years ago after a long tenure as “the most famous restaurant in Brooklyn” from 1879 to 2004. Its marvelous second act was included among our best restaurants of 2021 for its undeniable aesthetic appeal, wonderful food and drinks and romantic energy. It sets not only hearts, but confections aflame. The sticky toffee ginger cake is flambéed with dark rum at the table and extinguished with orange-cardamom crème anglaise.

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  • Flatiron
  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended

This address on Park Avenue South was made famous by Anthony Bourdain as Brasserie Les Halles before it closed in 2016. It was reimagined as La Brasserie last year with some lovely new and returning design elements and a show stopping, head-turning, room-quieting côte de bœuf to share. It’s finished with a brandy flourish before it’s engulfed in flames. It’s an easy way to get all eyes on you—or at least your beef.

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