Letter of Recommendation New York
M. Wells, a Singularly Special, Gonzo Sensation of a Restaurant, Bids Adieu
M. Wells is closing its doors on Dec. 31, 2024.
By the time they’d dropped the venison in blood sauce, my friends and I were already hurting. We’d had the apps and the starters, probably an entree, too. But what still sticks in my mind 14 years later was the size of the platter of deer and the exhortation from our server to be careful: You’re gonna want to watch out for buck shot in that. After all, this animal had just been brought down, field dressed and delivered to the weirdest little diner in Queens, a place that was quickly becoming the only restaurant I cared about.
I’d written to my friend a few weeks prior to that meal, an email from Dec. 8, 2010 that still lives in my archive: “I am telling you that this will be the blowout feast of the holiday season and food that you literally cannot find anywhere else on the planet,” I wrote. “Example: They are butchering the deer today, in the walk-in at the restaurant. It was given to them by a friend.”
He wrote back the same day: “RSVP. I will find a way.”
By the night of the Hunter’s Feast of the Decade, as they’d billed it, the legend of M. Wells was already growing.
It started that summer, when the diner first opened. Eater New York called it “the Wacky Diner Giving LIC Foodie Cred” in a post from July 2010: “At the very least it’s interesting, and with any luck, it will be good.” Grub Street called M. Wells the latest salvo in “the wholesale Québécois invasion of New York.”
A year later, the New York Times said it was “located right at the intersection of hippie idealism and punk-rock cool.” Sam Sifton’s review, published the same day, awarded two stars in spite of the “smoke coming out of the ventilation ducts.”
Around this time, I had been working at a magazine in Times Square, where I was trying, often unsuccessfully, to get the rest of the staff to understand digital publishing. I was low enough on the masthead that nobody really cared if I took off for a two-hour lunch and they certainly didn’t care if I spent it shuttling over to Queens to eat in a hastily rehabbed diner. Queens! Can you even imagine?
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But the city was still shell shocked from the financial collapse of its own making and malaise was the word. Nobody was doing much of anything. Mike Bloomberg was the mayor and technocrat in chief, and what seemed to pass for innovation in restaurants was the opening of The Breslin.
So, the opportunity to do something new had to happen in Queens, if not on the wrong side of the tracks, then next to them, overlooking the Sunnyside Yards. Sarah Obraitis and Hugue Dufour spun up their little shop with ideas so bizarre they had to be imported from Montreal, the world capital of outré.
A selection from the lunch menu on Aug. 17, 2010:
- Cretons: Quebecois pork terrine, $5
- Chicken fried chicken skins, mayonnaise dip, $9
- Foie gras and egg souffle, $18
- Hamburger, beef and lamb, onion glaze, harissa mayo, $8
- Blood sausage hash, apple mustard, potatoes, $10
It’s so unbearably cliché to call M. Wells like nothing else and yet that’s what it was; the place was gonzo. The food was hyper seasonal yet the kitchen was obsessed with classical technique, everything served on diner crockery but alongside a wine list that, if memory serves, had picks from the Jura, a decade before your favorite somm’s favorite somm would whisper about how edgy the region is.
Soon, people rediscovered the 7 train, made the trip, filled the booths and lined up down the trash strewn block. Obraitis and Dufour pressed everyone’s buttons. They would start serving horse tartare, Dufour famously said, before taking that back. They would sell rabbit pelts, Obraitis told the Times. They were planning to build a “Polynesian-style catamaran” to serve as a floating oyster bar, according to one article. They were gonna open a steakhouse and have a tank full of live trout from which they’d pluck your fish à la minute. (That last one turned out to be true.) Obraitis would send out stream-of-consciousness emails announcing specials or merch drops or celebratory dinners.
Here’s an example from Aug. 26, 2011, detailing the “TinTin et Le Temple du Soleil” theme night:
“We’ve fed on Peking Duck, and massive Quebec-style meat pies, Russian blinis and Swiss raclette …. finally PERU is in the house tonight. Chef Hugue fell head over heels for Peruvian food when Sarah took him to Lima to see her family years ago. Plus, TinTin et Le Temple du Soleil happens to be his favorite piece of literature. We might have to skip the hallucinations and the kidnappings but when the Pisco sours kick in, the black mint wafts from the pork loin and the anticucho starts sizzles, you will be transported to a fairyland pueblo in the Andes.”
For all its ambition — and, make no mistake, they have plenty — the restaurant was never a place to stand on ceremony. There were no plates built for Instagram, which had launched in 2010. No dress code. It was a meritocracy not just for flavors but for the guests.
Soon enough, the neighbors took note and M. Wells got the call. Can you open inside MoMA PS1? They could, yes. The space, inside the old schoolhouse that still houses the art museum, wasn’t rigged for gas, so induction burners would have to do. What about more from the larder? Some sandwiches? Or something cassoulet-ish, batched for quick service. You would eat at little desks, wedged in like a student, with the flatware stuffed in a drawer, looking at a green chalkboard filled with the menu scrawl. Or perhaps they’d hand you a composition notebook, in which the specials were handwritten in looping script:
- Foie gras torchon, matsutake mushrooms, balsamic, $24
- Slice of meat pie with one side, $15
- Hawaiian Spam and beans, $9
By the time the Dinette had hit its stride, I’d moved to Queens not because of M. Wells, of course, though it being in the neighborhood definitely helped. For all its ambition — and, make no mistake, they have plenty — the restaurant was never a place to stand on ceremony. There were no plates built for Instagram, which had launched in 2010. No dress code. It was a meritocracy not just for flavors but for the guests. There were regulars, real ones, and for a time I got to be one. The move from diner to dinette forced the vision to evolve. In 2013, they opened the steakhouse but what they had already created was a community of bon vivants. You would see it when people lined up at Smorgasburg to spend $35 on a frozen meat pie and a screen-printed T-shirt to memorialize banquets gone by.
The first time I pulled up for steak at the rehabbed auto shop, the cab driver thought we were lost. This … is it? There were hockey skates hanging in the bathroom, trinkets everywhere, a wood-fired grill, and a heaving raw bar. This was, most definitely, it: Tomahawks and off cuts, the cement trout tank we were promised, a proper wine program. Unlike before, when the prices were shockingly low, here you could really run up a tab. (The original one-star Pete Wells review, from 2014, is full of hand wringing over the prices, though the critic does concede that “I have eaten whole tasting menus that were less filling than the appetizers at M. Wells Steakhouse.”)
There was a dessert trolley, stuffed with cakes and pies, and I remember one night, already obliterated by butter and foie gras and slabs of beef — I sadly never did order the “stack of pork chops” — but Sarah decided to wrap up one of everything for my wife and I to take home, a pile of eight kraft boxes in a brown paper bag that must’ve weighed 10 pounds. Soigné, but to go.
The original iteration of M. Wells opened as a diner in 2010.
Photo courtesy of Sarah Obraitis/M. Wells
The original M. Wells diner in 2010.
Photo courtesy of Paul Brady
Tuna confit, egg, and potato hash from the original diner menu.
Photo courtesy of Paul Brady
By 2012, M. Wells moved into MoMA PS1 and became M. Wells Dinette.
Photo by Jesse Winter, courtesy of Sarah Obraitis/M. Wells
The dinette was housed in an old classroom but still kept the diner aesthetic.
Photo by Jesse Winter, courtesy of Sarah Obraitis/M. Wells
And it was always pretty packed with a diverse crowd of diners.
Photo courtesy of Sarah Obraitis/M. Wells
Hugue Dufour & Sarah Obraitis.
Photo courtesy of Sarah Obraitis/M. Wells
Holidays with the M. Wells crew, circa 2012.
Photo courtesy of Sarah Obraitis/M. Wells
In November 2013, M. Wells moved to a new space in Long Island City.
The space was a former auto-body shop.
Photo courtesy of Sarah Obraitis/M. Wells
And it had an open kitchen.
Photo courtesy of Sarah Obraitis/M. Wells
There are many quirky design touches to be found throughout M. Wells, the hockey skates in the bathroom being one of them.
Photo courtesy of Paul Brady
A handwritten menu from 2014.
Photo courtesy of Paul Brady
Chef Hugue Dufour (left) and the restaurant’s much-loved dessert trolley.
Photo courtesy of Sarah Obraitis/M.Wells
The dessert trolley in all its glory.
Photo courtesy of Sarah Obraitis/M. Wells
M. Wells garnered a reputation for its excellent pies.
Photo courtesy of Sarah Obraitis/M. Wells
And the restaurant has played host to a number of themed parties over the years, too.
Photo courtesy of Sarah Obraitis/M. Wells
The pandemic ushered in the era of pick-up.
Photo courtesy of Sarah Obraitis/M. Wells
An outdoor meal during COVID times in the restaurant’s patio.
Photo courtesy of Paul Brady
Staff family meal at M. Wells.
Photo courtesy of Sarah Obraitis/M. Wells
The private dining room, known as The Ostrich Room, complete with Ren Fair tapestries.
Photo courtesy of Sarah Obraitis/M. Wells
Tête de porcelet — an entire half of a pig’s head — is featured on the current menu.
Photo courtesy of Sarah Obraitis/M. Wells
It’s highly doubtful there will be another restaurant quite like M. Wells. Its last day of service will be on Dec. 31, 2024.
Photo courtesy of Sarah Obraitis/M. Wells
Of course, takeout soon became the thing. I thought about hitting the steakhouse on March 15, 2020, for one last ribeye. It’s probably best that I didn’t. Soon enough, we all learned that the “M.” stood for “magasin,” as in “pantry,” as they batched up favorites and sold to-go cocktails. Sarah sent out a survey, her usual email-writing verve depleted because of the insanity of what was happening all around us, particularly in Queens.
June 12, 2020:
“During these unusual times, we want our food and service and the overall M. Wells experience to be meaningful, helpful and well-received. We appreciate your feedback and look forward to continuing to be there for each other.”
I kept buying tourtieres and take-home stuff, like the prepped-for-your-oven “lasagna” with hunks of mortadella stuffed between crepes. But as things mellowed, the steakhouse became something less than a deranged carnivore fantasy and more of a gathering place, for flea markets and social events that felt OK with the roll-doors up and the breeze blowing through. There were, slowly, and then all at once, a lot of strollers.
I felt older, too. When my wife fell ill in early 2022, and spent two months in the hospital, I sought an evening of solace at the restaurant after visiting hours ended. A half-dozen oysters, some ruby reds, a bit of cocktail sauce made with aji amarillo. A salad of hydroponic greens from Brooklyn Grange. A petit hanger steak, with root vegetables. What would have been indulgent anywhere else here felt almost restrained, pared back, stripped to the essentials. I didn’t realize it at the time — I had a lot on my mind — but hidden in that meal was a sign of things to come.
This spring, my wife and I had lunch in the Ostrich Room, the sometimes private dining room with Ren Fair tapestries on the walls. We wanted to chat with Sarah about a little celebration we were planning, since I’d just published a big story. She stopped by the table, and, as we were talking, let slip that, soon enough, they’d be closing up shop. The time had come to try something new, or at least stop doing what had become stale. I can’t say I was surprised. It’s been the move since day one.
M. Wells is open for dinner Wednesday through Saturday starting at 5 p.m., and on Sundays (walk-ins only) from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. for brunch. Its last day of service will be on Dec. 31, 2024. Read all of M. Wells’ newsletters from over the years here.
Paul Brady is the news director at Travel + Leisure, where he tracks the trends shaping the future of the global travel industry. The first and only time he’s ever seen somebody make an omelet by cracking eggs into a quart container, whisking and then chucking the whole thing in the microwave was at the original M. Wells Diner. Follow him on Instagram.
Janice Chang is a Los Angeles-born illustrator now based in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her work spans across editorial, animation, and commercial projects, as well as large-scale murals, usually featuring bold colors and expressive characters. Follow her on Instagram. Follow Resy, too.
