Upstate New York Food and Recipes

Some of the best food in Upstate New York can’t be ordered anymore. It lived in the corner bakery your grandmother stopped at every Friday, the diner where your parents lingered over coffee, the shop that closed its doors before a lot of us were old enough to miss it. That’s the food I chase here.

This is my collection of iconic Upstate New York regional dishes and the “lost” recipes from businesses that are no longer with us — recreated as faithfully as I can, one test batch at a time. Hands down, the recipes I’m asked for most are from Home Dairy. Every month my inbox fills with messages about their half moon cookies and hot cross buns, almost always wrapped in a story: afterschool walks to the bakery, lunch with mom, the smell of the place the moment you stepped inside. Those stories are half the reason I do this.

From Rochester to Buffalo, Utica to Syracuse, these are the flavors that make where we’re from taste like home. Some are church-supper staples, some are secret-recipe legends, and every one of them deserves to be cooked in somebody’s kitchen again.

If you remember a dish from a place that’s gone…a bakery, a diner, a family restaurant that closed for good, I’d love to hear about it. Tell me your memory in the comments, and I might just recreate the recipe next.

And if you’d like these lost Upstate recipes brought straight to your inbox as I bring them back to life, drop your email below.