Meet the Park Slope Artist Who’s Drawing All the Restaurants in New York
From fine dining establishments to greasy spoons, John Donohue wants to draw them all!
k Slope artist John Donohue has set himself an impossible goal — to draw every restaurant in New York City! Launched in 2017, his project, All the Restaurants, was inspired by the late Jason Polan’s Every Person in New York and James Gulliver Hancock’s All the Buildings in New York. Donohue says he “just wanted to find a subject to draw that would be inexhaustible so I could keep drawing forever.”
In 2015, Donohue left his position as an editor at The New Yorker, a job he’d held for 22 years. “I didn’t know what I was going to do when I left The New Yorker and I was kind of panicked. That’s when I discovered that drawing really calmed me down,” he recalled on a recent afternoon at his office in Gowanus. “Through this practice of drawing, which I still do every day, I managed to realize that I have this skill set that I can apply to this whole other field.”
While at The New Yorker, Donohue had five cartoons published in the magazine and he edited a best-selling cooking anthology, Man with a Pan, released in 2011. He merged his passion for drawing and food with his experience in publishing for his next chapter.
Originally from northern Westchester, Donohue majored in English and minored in Economics at Union College in Schenectady. After a stint at a weekly newspaper in Block Island to collect writing clips, he moved to New York City in 1992 hoping to become a journalist. He found an entry-level job at a business reference library and a place in the Village. “I had a room on Waverly Place, a fantastic location, but at that time, it was too much money for me,” he says. “I quickly realized I had no disposable income.”
After hearing that Park Slope was more affordable, he took the F train out to explore the neighborhood. He responded to an ad for a roommate he saw on 7th Avenue and soon made the move to Brooklyn. “I was much happier here than I was in Manhattan. When you come out of the subway it’s like a relief. You can exhale. The buildings are shorter. There’s more sky. There are fewer people.”
He started working at The New Yorker in 1993 and met his wife, Sarah, a filmmaker, in 1998. He started drawing in 2001, shortly after getting married and before having two daughters. He took drawing lessons at The Arts Students League. “I was experimenting with different mediums trying to figure out what I wanted to do,” he says. During his commutes to work he practiced drawing people sleeping on the subway — before riders were preoccupied with cellphones.
He developed the idea for Man with a Pan, a collection of recipes and essays about fathers cooking meals for their families, after having kids. “A lot of my friends who were new dads were also writers, so I started with them,” he explains of the book. Thanks to his job at The New Yorker, he also had access to prominent authors and figures in the food industry, including Stephen King, Mark Bittman, Mark Kurlansky, Jim Harrison, and more. Donohue also featured men working in other fields, such as a guidance counselor, a firefighter, and a bond trader. Along with the introduction, Donohue contributed spot drawings in the book.
After leaving The New Yorker in 2015, Donohue found work in grant writing. It was around this time that he came upon the “happy discovery” that drawing made him calm. When his daughters were younger, to deal with the stress of getting them ready for school in the morning, Donohue drew “quick sketches of a wooden chair or the radiator or whatever [wa]s in front of me,” he wrote in a 2016 essay. Being the primary cook in the family, Donohue spends lots of time in the kitchen, so he began drawing the dish rack daily, providing a “calmness that I didn’t know I could achieve,” he wrote. The ever-changing dish rack is “an automatic still-life. No two dish racks are ever the same.” Donohue continues to draw the rack — every morning and evening — and has amassed more than 7,000 renderings.
In 2016, he started drawing the exteriors of restaurants around the city. “I saw that Man with a Pan hit the best-seller list, so I’d had a sense of how insatiable the food media world could be, and I thought, ‘let me see what happens if I draw restaurants,’” he says. He Iaunched All the Restaurants online on January 1, 2017 with a drawing of The Odeon, kicking the series off “with the iconic places.”
Donohue draws in front of the restaurant he’s selected using ink on paper. “The experience of drawing from life is so much more fun and rewarding,” he says. The process typically takes him twenty minutes, allowing him to do several in a day. He draws in ink, so he can’t erase or fix mistakes, and accepts the works as they are. “That’s what’s kind of thrilling for me,” he says. He adds a single color to each drawing later using Photoshop and sells the drawings as limited edition giclée prints.
When he drew Junior’s in Downtown Brooklyn, he stood on the traffic median in the middle of busy Flatbush Avenue. “It was so much fun. It gave me a great vantage. I get into this kind of flow state where I’m not really aware of my surroundings, so I always have to be near a piece of street furniture, like next to a pole or a bus stop. On the traffic median I felt totally safe because there was nobody walking by,” he recalls.
Weather is also a factor in his work. “If it’s above 50 degrees, I can draw,” he says. “Because of climate change now, I can draw pretty late into the season. There was a day right before the new year, that was about 50 degrees. There were places that were closing…so I wanted to get these places before they closed. I spent the whole afternoon doing that.” The restaurants included Tommaso in Dyker Heights, Ugly Baby in Carroll Gardens, and Gran Electrica in DUMBO. “I love the archival nature of the project,” Donohue notes. Other restaurants the artist has immortalized over the years that have since shuttered include Cornelia Street Café in the Village, Dizzy’s in Park Slope, and a slew in Gowanus including Freek’s Mill, Lavender Lake, Little Neck, and Pig Beach.
Not long after launching All the Restaurants, Donohue ran into Suzanne Power of Powerhouse Books while he was drawing Sushi Katsuei in Park Slope. The two knew each other from the Park Slope Food Coop. She offered to exhibit his drawings at Powerhouse on 8th. That 2017 show received “a bit of attention” in the press, according to Donohue, which led him to put together another book proposal. While he pitched only one book of New York restaurants, Abrams published it as a three-book collection – adding editions for Paris and London. All the Restaurants in New York was released in 2019; A Table in Paris in 2021; and A Taste of London in 2023. Each features a selection of 100 of Donohue’s enchanting drawings of iconic eateries from each locale.
The European editions were a challenge for the artist since he doesn’t live in either of the cities and was not familiar with their dining scenes. Donohue reached out to local foodies and food writers in each city for suggestions. After compiling their recommendations, he took two three-week trips to each city to document their dining destinations. “It was amazing. It was like a mid-life term abroad,” he says.
His online shop currently has over 1,300, drawings from eight cities available. Along with New York, Paris, and London, Donohue has drawn establishments in Block Island, Chicago, Washington DC, Philadelphia, and Napa Valley. The artist regularly donates proceeds from sales of his prints to charity. When restaurants were struggling during the pandemic, he donated to the Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation. In 2022, Donohue gave a percentage of the sales from his Napa Valley series to the Napa Valley Museum to support their arts education program. The museum will begin selling his prints in their gift shop later this year. With an exhibit opening in Philadelphia in April, Donohue plans to donate proceeds from print sales there to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “I’m interested in building virtuous cycles,” he says. “Drawing is very good for me. It’s good for the people who buy the prints because it brings them happy memories. I like to give back.”
Donohue thinks people are drawn to his work because they often have “an emotional connection” with a restaurant, whether they met their spouse, had their first date, or got engaged there. “Our lives don’t happen in our apartments,” he notes. “They happen in public spaces, and in restaurants in particular.” The first print of his that sold out depicted Balthazar, the Soho institution. Gramercy Tavern is another popular seller.
Donohue admits that he doesn’t actually eat out often himself. He enjoys cooking and prefers dining at home. “Fonda is an old favorite of ours,” he says when his family does dine out. The Mexican restaurant was the first Park Slope business the artist rendered. Other local favorites include Haenyeo and Lore. Local establishments that he hasn’t had a chance to draw yet include Masalawala & Sons, Convivium Osteria, and Fausto, though he has drawn its predecessor, Franny’s.
Looking ahead, Donohue would like to branch out to other mediums, such as Procreate, a digital painting app. He’d also like to branch out in terms of subjects and “draw other series of things, like houseplants or coffee paraphernalia,” simple, everyday objects. “The nice thing for me about drawing is that it just takes the regular world and turns it into something really spectacular.”
Learn more about Donohue and his work at alltherestaurants.com.
You can also see more of his drawings of Park Slope businesses here.
Pam Wong is a Brooklyn-based writer and curator who loves contemporary art and sharing community stories. Follow her on Instagram at @arthagnyc. To read more of her writing, visit arthagnyc.substack.com.