All The Restaurants Turns 10: A Decade of Hand-Drawn Restaurant Prints

A Crazy and Impossible Idea

Early on I discovered that drawing makes me happy. A little later I realized that it is good for my overall health and the wellbeing of those I love. I sometimes feel that drawing saved my life, and I wrote about that for the NY Times a while ago.

When I first started this project ten years ago I was out of work and not sure what to do with myself. This was a very difficult time and drawing helped me calm down and realize that after decades of being an editor I had writing skills that could land me a job in grant writing. I worked as a grant writer for the first few years of this project.

Because I love drawing so much, I picked an inexhaustible subject.  I set out to draw every restaurant in New York City — something like 24,000 of them at the time. I knew this was slightly absurd. New York doesn't hold still long enough for anyone to finish counting it, let alone drawing it. Restaurants open, restaurants close, a beloved diner becomes a bank branch, a bank branch becomes a wine bar. I used to think the goal was to catch up to the city. But I've since made peace with the fact that I probably never will. The restaurant scene keeps moving, which means this project may never really be finished. It does have a start date, though, and I remember it well.

Where It Started: The Odeon

The first drawing I posted went up on January 1, 2017. It was of The Odeon Its red neon sign in Tribeca has been a fixture since the early 1980s. I picked it because I felt it to be the place where dining as we know it in NYC began. Of course, that’s not literally true, but for someone my generation (Gen X) it was the premier place for artists and celebrities and good food in a (then) strange neighborhood. I never went when I was young, but that was the idea (captured, of course, on the cover of jay McInerney’s "Bright Lights, Big City"). I couldn't have told you then that it would be the first of thousands. I simply knew that I wanted to draw it.

Why These Are Hand-Drawn Restaurant Prints, Not Anything Else

Given that I’ve completed more than 1,600 drawings, people sometimes (more often now) ask me if I use AI. The answer is no, and it's a no I feel strongly about. 

Every one of these Hand-Drawn Restaurant Prints starts with me standing or sitting in front of the actual restaurant, looking at the actual building, drawing it by hand. That process hasn't changed since The Odeon. It's slower than it needs to be, probably. But the slowness is the point. A restaurant that means something to you deserves a drawing that took real time and real attention, not an algorithm's best guess.

There's a particular kind of joy that only comes from making something with your own two hands, one line at a time, and I don't think that transfers to a machine. Every decision I make while I'm drawing — where a line goes, what I leave in, what I leave out — is where that joy lives. 

And I think that this joy travels. When someone hangs one of these prints in their kitchen or gives it to a parent for an anniversary, they're not just getting a picture of a building. They're getting the joy that went into making it, passed along to them. That's not something I'd want to hand off to an algorithm, even if it could get the windows right.

From New York to Everywhere

I never planned to expand beyond New York, but I got lucky and got a three-book deal that took me to Paris  and London. A few years ago I was invited to the Napa Valley for my first museum show. Last year (2025), I celebrated Philadelphia, a city I got to know in the past few years. My latest city is Montreal. I can’t wait to see where I’ll go next.

Each city has its own rhythm and its own architecture. Drawing them has been one of the real pleasures of the last ten years. But the instinct behind all of it is the same one I had on day one: restaurants are where a lot of life actually happens, and that's worth drawing.

What These Drawings Hold

I've heard from people who wanted a print of the restaurant where they had a first date, or a last meal with a parent, or a regular lunch spot they went to for years. I've heard from people whose restaurant closed a long time ago and who just wanted something to prove it was real. A drawing can do something a photograph sometimes can't: it slows a memory down enough to look at it properly. 

Over these ten years, these Hand-Drawn Restaurant Prints have ended up connected to neighborhoods, celebrations, ordinary weeknight routines, and the kind of memories people don't always have the right words for. That's been the best part of this whole project, by a wide margin.

Along the way, we've also used this work to support charitable causes, from CHOP and the Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation to NYC-based organizations like City Harvest and HDC. Because a project built on gratitude for restaurants, and the people who run them, should give something back.

Ten Years In, Still Drawing by Hand

Ten years and thousands of drawings later, All The Restaurants is still, at its core, just me with a sketchbook. Every restaurant we've drawn, in New York and everywhere since, has been drawn the same way: by hand, no AI, ever. That's not a marketing line. It's the whole reason this project has meant something to people for a decade.

If you want to help me celebrate, click here.