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!
Park 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.