The last feature I wrote for City Pages before it shuttered in 2020—the very last cover story the magazine would ever run, in fact—was about why the hell anyone would open a restaurant during the Covid era. This moment feels really similar: Who can focus on recipe development or menu design while a paramilitary unit blitzes through town trying to kidnap your family members or employees?
But while there’s not a lot of new news about openings and closings in this January’s Racket Restaurant Roundup, there has been plenty of food news in the first month of 2026. We spoke with restaurants about becoming hubs of solidarity during the ongoing invasion, and we spoke with the everyday folks using mutual aid to feed neighbors in need while supporting immigrant-owned restaurants and grocers. We spoke with bars and restaurants about closing during the general strike, a difficult but important thing for those in the industry to do on a Friday night.
A contributor filed this dispatch from The Copper Hen Cakery & Kitchen, the Eat Street brunch restaurant that became an ad hoc field hospital after Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents, and we swung by Modern Times, which is now Post Modern Times, to talk about how they’re serving free food from now until the end of the occupation…