I'm excited to share this collaboration with Dominic Jeong! Dominic is a senior math major at Duke who happens to be one of my major advisees, and he reached out to me about crossword construction after reading about my NYT debut in the Duke research blog. It was a real pleasure to work with him on constructing this tasty puzzle, and I'm excited to see more great puzzles from him in the future!
Theme explanation (Spoiler alert!)
The answers to the starred clues are names of Michelin-starred restaurants. The number of stars in the clue correspond to the number of stars the restaurant received.