Staying focused on the soups and pies wasn’t always easy this year.

There was the unexpected punch in the stomach of losing two major voices long before we were ready to let them go: Anthony Bourdain, who took his life at 61 in June, and Jonathan Gold, who died at 57 the following month after a fast and brutal round with pancreatic cancer. Both men, Mr. Bourdain in his books and television shows, Mr. Gold in his criticism of restaurants in Los Angeles and elsewhere, expanded our ideas about food and the people who keep us fed. Neither seemed anywhere close to running out of smart, original, perspective-shifting things to say.

At the same time, everybody who writes about restaurants was still trying to metabolize last year’s dismal revelations about the way some major chefs and proprietors are said to treat women in their establishments. We all know that we are in a new place, but its contours aren’t firm yet. Each new turn in those stories started a fresh round of questions about restaurant culture and what its future should look like. Simultaneously, incidents of overt racism, sexism and anti-immigrant animus in the national news made it seem more urgent to face those problems in the restaurant business, where they are often so deeply embedded that they’re taken for granted.

On some days, it could feel like a revolution was happening on my beat. And then I’d go to dinner, and remember that restaurants take a long time and a lot of money to open, and that a major sector of New York City’s economy is not going to change overnight. As Chris Christie said, Rome was not unbuilt in a day.

But after I’d complained in print that hoteliers and developers were handing too many plum projects to the same people who’ve always gotten them, I was glad that a major builder in Brooklyn gave Missy Robbins the chance to build Misi in the redevelopment of the Domino refinery site. I was thrilled that when the Life Hotel couldn’t make its new restaurant, Henry, work, it called in J.J. Johnson, a black chef with ambitious ideas about African food.